Omar Dajani, a former envoy to the UN and a professor at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law, recently spoke to us about the fallout over Israel’s raid on a flotilla bringing aid to the Gaza Strip.

New York is facing a 3 billion dollar budget deficit, second only to California. But in the middle of the legislative session at the end of November, longtime Brooklyn assemblyman Dov Hikind led a group of American Jews to Israel to check out real estate in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We headed up to Assemblyman Hikind’s district of Borough Park to find out how the trip went – and his favorite Christmas song.