Digital Library

Does religious life benefit from studying the secular liberal arts? In this 2012 essay, Yeshiva University professor Shalom Carmy argues that literature, history, and philosophy enrich an education grounded in the halachic tradition. The study of humanities sheds light…

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In this meditation on religion and state in Israel, Naomi G. Cohen analyzes the proper role for religious law in the policies, procedures, and rulings of the Jewish State. One might think that government implementation of Jewish law…

In this essay, the second of a two-part series on Abraham, Leon Kass reads the stories of God’s promise to Abraham, the birth and banishment of Ishmael, Sodom and Gomorrah, Isaac’s circumcision, and the sacrifice of Isaac in a…

The Tikvah Fund is pleased to republish—for the first time online—one of the great ethicists and philosophers Hans Jonas’s forgotten forays into Jewish thought. Jonas argues that Judaism and scientism, the ideological faith in science as…

In the 1990’s, as the Republican Party swept into a House majority with their own “Contract with America,” Jack Wertheimer took to Commentary to look at the…

Why have Jewish men and women succeeded in capitalist economies? How is it that Jews have come to be identified with both capitalism and with anti-capitalist movements like Bolshevism? Has capitalism been good to the Jews?…

As recently as the Cold War, the center-right and the center-left overcame their differences on other issues to oppose the enemies of the open society. In a lecture to alumni and guests of the Tikvah Fund, Standpoint editor…

Despite liberalization and modernization around the world, anti-Semitism endures and, in some places, seems to be getting more toxic. Herzl’s solution to the problem of anti-Semitism, Zionism, has not been a salve either; now some argue that Israel…

Biblical history is the fount of the Jewish people’s collective memory, and the editors and redactors of the Hebrew Bible strategically deployed this history for a distinctly political purpose. In the pages of Azure, biblical scholar Jacob Wright…

As Catholic theologian, social critic, and First Things editor R.R. Reno sat in the synagogue pews one Saturday morning, watching his daughter assume her place in the people of Israel as a bat mitzvah, he was provoked to…

How a nation understands its founding shapes its aims and ideals decades after its founding. For Israel, that means interpretations of the thought of Theodor Herzl speak to fundamental questions of national life. By the year 2000, the Israeli…