Digital Library

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…

The Christmas season is an annual reminder that American Jews are a small minority in a largely Christian country. It has also become occasion…

By the time Eliezer Berkovits wrote “Jewish Education in a World Adrift” in 1970, the “value system” that had sustained the West had collapsed. Relativism, nihilism, boredom, and permissiveness characterized the age–and the education of the young. Here…

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How should the Shabbat be observed in a Jewish and democratic state? In this 1992 essay, the political theorist Daniel Elazar considers the question, balancing majority will, individual conscience, consent of the governed, and subsidiarity. In considering the…

In Mosaic this month, Martin Kramer honors Bernard Lewis’s centennial by explaining the enduring significance of Lewis’s legendary 1976 essay, “The Return of Islam.” The assumption in those days was that secularization was irresistible, that Arab nationalism was here to…

Few Jewish doctrines sound as strange to modern ears as that of “matrilineal descent,” the notion that membership in the Jewish people is passed on through the mother even as other specific qualities of Jewishness (like whether one is a…