Jewish Political Thought

In a thorough Azure essay in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, Israeli ethicist Asa Kasher inquired into the principles of “Just War” theory and the reality of the 2008-2009 operation in Gaza. There are obviously differences between…

It has been a great ambition of modern political thought to bring about a world without enemies. But Hamas’s ruthless quest to slaughter Israeli civilians and to reap the public-relations boon of Palestinian deaths is a reminder that…

As part of the advanced institute on "Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews," Tikvah hosted the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz has been a partisan of the left, the right, and, most of all, the Jews. In…

During our Advanced Institute, The Future of the Israeli Economy, we were honored to have Ambassador Ron Demer join us. Dermer, a close adviser for many years to Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the Prime Minister's role in enacting free…

Lord Acton famously proposed that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse provides an analysis of Jewish history that suggests the exact opposite. Join us at 5:30PM to reconsider…

Nineteenth century political emancipation brought citizenship rights to European Jews. In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky explores how this new political reality affected Jewish philosophy and the Jewish people. The prospect of…

Americans marked the birthday of the Sixteenth President of the United States yesterday, Abraham Lincoln. In honor of this, we share here a recent scholarly article by Matthew Holbreich of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought…

A dilemma: What do you do when the categories in which you are accustomed to think already commit you to certain conclusions - conclusions  that, when stated explicitly, you are inclined to resist? Such a dilemma is at…

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…

A Jewish thinker is normally someone devoted to the study and interpretation of Jewish texts, Jewish history, Jewish issues, Jewish ideas. The late Irving Kristol (1920–2009) was, for the most part, something else: a consummate American intellectual. Founding…

You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always had an unusually keen…