What happens when, once a year, the urge to accommodate every consumer fashion meets massive Jewish cultural illiteracy?
A brief history of Jewish history-writing reveals an abundance of partial and competing narratives, all too often missing a key ingredient.
Long-festering strains between the world’s two largest communities jeopardize the prospects of a shared Jewish future. Here’s a way forward.
Raḥel will be read, sung, and recited long after many excellent Hebrew poets of her age, men and women alike, have been confined within classroom walls.
Birthrates are falling across the world, especially in developed nations—except in one. How did mainstream, middle-class Israelis start having children again, and what does it mean?
A long-accepted wisdom has it that just days before the state’s birth, its founders settled two burning issues in a pair of closely decided votes. The wisdom is half-wrong.
In play again are bitterly contested questions about the Catholic Church, about religion and politics, and—inevitably—about Christianity’s relation to Judaism and the Jews.
Cracks are increasingly discernible in the famous “special relationship.” Can they be repaired? If not, could Israel’s national security survive the loss of American military aid?
Critics accuse it of threatening the separation of church and state; in truth, Washington’s new museum makes an invaluable contribution to American (and Jewish) cultural literacy.
Born obscurely in turbulent times, the notorious text describing a Jewish conspiracy to enslave humanity lives on even today. Why?
The usual answer is Truman—but it could just as easily be Stalin. In fact, thanks to Zionist diplomacy, it was both; and therein lies a lesson for the Jewish state today.
In 1942 a band of Algerian Jews risked all to help the Allies invade North Africa. Then Washington betrayed them. Thus was born modern American Middle East policy.
The policies of the Obama administration led to carnage in Syria, regional chaos, and the rise of Iran and its alliance with Russia. Can the momentum be reversed—without going to war?
Modern medicine, psychology, and behavioral science can help some addicts. But for the underlying spiritual condition, an older set of tools—like Judaism’s—has more to offer.