America, Israel, and the Middle East

One winter after an unusually heavy run of funerals, the rabbi of our Montreal synagogue reminded the congregation that in traditional Judaism, dying was only a minhag (custom); it was not a mitzva. I would like to extend…

The novelist Saul Bellow is fond of recalling a political incident from his youth. Saul, then an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, was, like so many of us in the 1930s, powerfully attracted to the ideologies of…

“Two states, living side by side in peace and security.” This, in the words of President Barack Obama, is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Washington is fully and…

By Asa Kasher | Originally published in Azure, Summer 2009   Editor’s Note: On Saturday, December 27, 2008, after eight years of continuing rocket attacks on its territory by Islamic terrorist organizations, Israel launched a full-scale military operation…

Review by Yechiel M. Leiter | Originally published in Azure, Autumn 2006 Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by Matthew Levitt Yale University Press, 2006, 336 pages.   Before the…