With Rosh Hashana here, and Yom Kippur approaching, leaders of Jewish congregations are divided on how — or whether — to broach a controversy over a proposed Islamic Center near ground zero.

State campaign finance records show Long Island real estate developer and philanthropist Lawrence Kadish and his wife, Susan, contributed $75,000 to Lazio’s campaign beginning July 26.

It has been argued that this is an issue of judging and discriminating against an entire religious group due to the sociopathic actions of a select few, who were more politically motivated than anything else. If we put this “religious issue” in historical perspective, it changes the context. Hitler, a self-professed practicing Christian, committed atrocities on a much greater scale.

Oh yeah, that last one is still happening. But one day, I promise you, we will be as ashamed of the way American Muslims are viewed and treated in 2010 as we are of Japanese internment and Jim Crow. America’s promise is meant for everyone or we are not America.

Ugliness abounds. It is to be somewhat expected given these trying times. Americans are struggling, and those struggles have added a sense of edginess to our public life. It doesn’t feel like politics as usual.

Leaders of astroturf groups opposing the Not-At-Ground-Zero-Muslim-Center can’t seem to decide on an argument. They have thrown everything and the kitchen sink at us in the way of fabricated reasons.

In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, a rumor swept through Ventura, on the California coast, that the Japanese were lurking in submarines just off the shoreline. As my mother Joan, who was just a girl at the time, recalls, “The stories spread from mouth to mouth.

Mr. Gingrich, 67, says it is analogous to allowing the Nazis to put a sign next to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; the New York imam leading the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Mr. Gingrich charges, is a “radical Islamist.”

William Dalrymple (“The Muslims in the middle,” Views, Aug. 18) is quite right to draw our attention to the progressive nature of Sufism within Islam. This issue goes beyond the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York.

Faced with withering Republican criticism of his defense of the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near ground zero, President Obama quickly recalibrated his remarks on Saturday, a sign that he has waded into even more treacherous political waters than the White House had at first realized.