Rael Jean Isaac, a prescient author who wrote frequently on topics related to Israel and Jewish affairs, died on June 25. She was 93 years old.

Isaac wrote half a dozen public policy books and hundreds of articles for periodicals, such as Reader’s Digest, The American Spectator, Atlantic, Midstream, Commentary and The New Republic.

In 1970, she co-founded, together with her husband, Erich Isaac, and former Knesset member Shmuel Katz, Americans for A Safe Israel (AFSI). Meant to be an American counterpart to the Land of Israel Movement, AFSI argued that Israel should keep the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.

With the announcement of the 1993 Oslo Accords, AFSI stood virtually alone against the euphoric belief sweeping the Jewish world that peace was at hand. While American Jewish leaders dared not criticize the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Isaac described it as the “peace of Chelm,” referring to that imaginary Polish village popular in Jewish folklore.

“The follies of the villagers of Chelm were laugh-provoking. … But it is no laughing matter when the men of Chelm determine the future of the Jewish people,” she wrote in “Outpost,” AFSI’s monthly newsletter, which she edited for decades.

Of Isaac’s articles, none made more of an impact than “Breira: Counsel for Judaism,” a 1977 monograph published by AFSI. Breira was an organization of American Jews founded in 1973. Its name means “alternative” in Hebrew. The alternative it offered was the establishment of a state run by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was heresy at the time. The group, which attracted prominent intellectuals and many rabbis, gained national attention.

Isaac revealed that the group’s leadership came from CONAME, the Committee on New Alternatives in the Middle East (originally a front group for the Socialist Workers’ Party). Time magazine called CONAME one of the foremost pro-Arab organizations in the United States. It had lobbied against sending arms to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The monograph caused a major stir within the pro-Israel community. Most of the Breira membership was not anti-Israel, just naive and unaware of the leadership’s radicalism. Breira dissolved due to the subsequent infighting.

In 1979, a new group was created by former Breira members to fill the gap: The New Jewish Agenda. NJA was more careful than Breira and succeeded to a degree in infiltrating organized Jewry, though its ideas were just as radical as Breira’s (Isaac would write a monograph exposing NJA and its cooperation with anti-Israel groups).

More than a decade later, Isaac noted how organized American Jewry had decayed further since the days of Breira. In the 1970s, Jewish groups banded together against the group. Later, in 1993, the leadership of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations rushed to bring Peace Now—a group that was even more insidious than Breira—into the fold, contravening several of its own bylaws to do so.

A more light-hearted AFSI project, but one that brought Isaac great satisfaction, was “Shimon Says,” a 1996 collection of the pontifications of Israeli politician Shimon Peres, whose book The New Middle East, Isaac described as “terrifying proof that Israel’s foreign policy is directed by a man totally out of touch with reality.”

As Peres vied with Moshe Katsav to become Israel’s president in 2000, a Hebrew version of “Shimon Says” was distributed to Knesset members by the deputy mayor of Netanya, Yitzhak Ben-Gad. It was credited with shifting MK support away from Peres, initially ahead 2-1, to give Katsav the victory. (Memory being short, Peres would win the next time he ran for the office.)

‘Do you Know Where Your Church Offerings Go?’

Isaac wrote on many topics besides Israel—from the homeless mentally ill to global warming to the persecution of small American farmers by the Legal Services Corporation. She also wrote about cultural phenomena, such as the child sex-abuse craze of the 1980s, in which children accused their parents or day-care center owners of horrific acts based on “repressed” (i.e., invented) memories, on whose basis many innocent people were sent to prison for decades.

In a 1980 article for Midstream, “The Institute for Policy Studies: Empire on the Left,” Isaac exposed the activities of a prominent Washington, D.C.-based think tank—the Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS.

The fellows at IPS believed that America was an evil, violent and racist society bent on world hegemony. Third World terrorists and revolutionary movements could do no wrong. Their writings consistently portrayed the United States as the aggressor in U.S.-Soviet relations as they worked to undercut relations between Washington and its allies, including Israel. Naturally, they supported the PLO.

The strength of IPS was less in its ideas than in its methods. Even as IPS sought to stymie the activities of the Defense Department and U.S. intelligence operations, it employed the same techniques to advance its agenda. Isaac described IPS as “an enormous intelligence operation practicing both covert action and subversion.”

The group had a major impact on weakening America’s intelligence capabilities.

In 1983, Isaac wrote a Reader’s Digest article on the National Council of Churches (NCC), an umbrella group of various church denominations, titled “Do You Know Where Your Church Offerings Go?”

The NCC had been overtaken by radicals. Fearing the exposé would damage them, they tried unsuccessfully to stop the article’s publication. The group worried, rightly, that lay churchgoers would react with disbelief if they knew that their offerings were going to fund revolutionary movements in the United States and abroad.

Isaac’s article became the second most-requested reprint in Reader’s Digest history, with more than 150,000 requests. Four weeks after it appeared, CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a two-part series on the subject.

In one particularly desperate attack, a writer for an NCC journal claimed that the whole thing was a joke and that the author of the article didn’t exist, pointing as evidence to her last name, “Isaac,” which in Hebrew means “laughter.”

Two other books that Isaac spoke proudly of—not because they had an impact, but because they were prescient—were Israel Divided: Ideological Politics in the Jewish State and Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World.

Published in 1976, Israel Divided predicted that the future schism in Israeli politics would center around the territories captured in 1967. Two movements sprang up: the Land of Israel Movement, which sought to incorporate all the territories into Israel’s boundaries; and the Peace Movement, which opposed annexation, seeing the territories as a bargaining chip to conciliate Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Isaac’s conclusion that the Land of Israel Movement and Peace Movement “will guide—and divide—Israel’s policy makers in the foreseeable future” wasn’t so obvious at the time. Most assumed that the split in Israeli society would be along ethnic lines between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim.

In Roosters of the Apocalypse, Isaac posited that the “climate change” movement wasn’t scientific at all, but rather an apocalyptic millenarian movement.

In 2012, the time of publication, only a handful of conservatives spoke out against global warming, among them, The Heartland Institute, which published the book. Isaac later said the Russia-Ukraine war did more than anything to shift the conversation. Europeans now talk less about zero emissions and more about dependence on Russian oil and gas.

Warned of the demise of American Jewry

Isaac cooperated on many projects with her husband, a professor of geography at the City College of New York.

In 1983, the Isaacs co-wrote The Coercive Utopians, bringing to the public’s attention the emergence of a “new class” that had turned against America and no longer appreciated the freedoms it offered.

The title referred to a term borrowed from scientist-journalist Peter Metzger. It described a new elite entrenched in mainline churches, environmental and peace movements, universities and radical think tanks.

What made them “coercive,” the Isaacs wrote, was “in their zeal for attaining an ideal order” they sought to “impose their blueprints in ways that go beyond legitimate persuasion.”

Isaac considered her best book, Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill. She co-wrote it with Virginia Armat, her former editor at Reader’s Digest.

It identified the “social and political delusions” that led to the abandonment of the mentally ill as misguided notions that mental illness didn’t really exist became the fashion.

The book highlighted the key role of the law in fomenting the disaster. Young lawyers who saw themselves fighting for the oppressed, yet who tended to know very little about mental illness, adopted a 1960s-style civil-rights approach to such social problems. In “liberating” the mentally ill from state mental hospitals (which were incompatible with the principles of a free society, they claimed), they, along with misguided politicians and medical health theorists, prevented them from gaining access to effective treatment.

In her later years, Isaac warned of the demise of American Jewry. Writing in The Algemeiner in 2015, she predicted a rise in antisemitism, physical attacks on Jews and universities becoming unwelcoming for Jewish students.

She bemoaned the fact that Jews were helping bring Muslims into the United States. “Jews, in their time-honored pattern of countering their own most basic interests, are in the forefront of celebrating—and urging on—their self-destruction,” she wrote.

In her final days, she told her children, “I’m glad I won’t be alive to see what’s coming.”

Isaac was predeceased by her husband, who died in 2021, also at the age of 93. She is survived by their sons, Gamaliel, Gideon, Raphael and David; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.