Digital Library

Is there reason for optimism in the Middle East? One of the common reasons for optimism after Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas returned the region to the less-than-ideal status quo antebellum is that the conflict between Hamas and Israel…

As part of Tikvah’s Summer Fellowship, participants were treated to a discussion on how to read and how to think about rabbinic literature. The two interlocutors approach rabbinic literature from different points of view and from different intellectual…

Tikvah advanced institute alumnus Haviv Rettig Gur has a characteristically incisive and original analysis of the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge for The Times of Israel. Netanyahu has achieved his military objectives, Gur argues, but they…

Tikvah advanced institute alumnus David Bernstein has a thoughtful post on the spate of hand-wringing articles about how hard it has become for self-described liberal Zionists to remain both liberal and Zionist. Writing on the Volokh Conspiracy blog,…

The shtetls were not farming villages; they were merchant towns. Nor were the shtetls Jewish ghettos. Rather, Jews made up half the population. The popular image derived in large part from “Fiddler on the Roof” is romanticized and…

One of the routines of Israeli political life is the postbellum tug-of-war over Israel’s efforts at Hasbara, literally “explanation.” Where did Israel succeed at explaining itself? Where did it fail? Why? Amid this debate, Avi Woolf takes…

What is the proper relationship between Jews and political power? To what extent should Jews eschew worldly power for the sake of piety? How Machiavellian can Jews allow themselves to be? Two of the Jewish world’s most esteemed…

Israel’s best friends in the Middle East face barbarians at the doorsteps. Guy Maayan of Mida interviewed some Kurdish fighters to learn about the Islamic State’s brutal way of war and how the Kurds view Israel: “They’re monsters,…

Why did Secretary of State John Kerry originally present a cease-fire plan that acceded to some of Hamas’s demands and none of Israel’s? Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution tried to answer that question in a Mosaic…

Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has authored this month’s Mosaic essay, an overview of the unique vitality of and bubbling tension in Modern Orthodoxy. Though 3% of American Jewry,…

What can we tell about Israel in seeing how the country has handled the current war with Hamas? What have we learned about civil society in Israel during these tumultuous last few weeks?…

There is now an Israeli consensus on the Palestinians, a coalition comprising everyone except the very radical left. Ran Baratz, the editor of Mida, recently looked at why consensus has formed in the historically contentious world of…