Posts

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…

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a resolution condemning Israel for, among other libels, “the targeting of civilians.” The resolution never once mentioned “Hamas.” As is so often the case with absurd resolutions against Israel,…

George Mason University’s Jeremy Rabkin reviewed Hoover Institution Scholar Peter Berkowitz’s Israel and the Struggle Over the International Laws of War in The Jewish Review of Books‘s Summer 2012 issue. Rabkin praises Berkowitz for his cogent defense of Israel…

In an English article in Mida, Seth Frantzman went in depth on the origins of a troubling meme going around the press: that Hamas was not responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer,…