The Blogs

Why didn’t Sigmund Freud leave Vienna any sooner? He, who pioneered and/or popularized the idea that humanity was ruled by a capacity for love (eros) and an equal capacity for aggression, cruelty, murder, even genocide (thanatos); he, who knew what had been happening to his Jewish colleagues in [...]

Confucius Institutes – central nodes in China’s soft power campaign – have almost disappeared from the West. There are 16 in the United States, down from 118. Sweden has eradicated Confucius Institutes. Germany has been trying to do the same, as are conservatives in the U.K. Australia cracked [...]

A University of California Davis researcher, Garen J. Wintemute, recently announced that a survey of 8,620 Americans found that slightly more than half agreed that “in the next several years, there will be civil war in the United States.” It is an arresting claim, and one that made [...]

It would not be exaggerating to claim that the Zionist leader for whom the most city streets across Israel are named is Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, a fact that should astound anyone familiar with the conjectured perception of Jabotinsky as Zionism’s enfant terrible, a man who symbolized divisive contentiousness. [...]

“Ironically, and contrary to so many professed good intentions, Jews do most to advance the liberal idea when they stand up to their enemies on their own behalf, and least when they assume excessive guilt in the hope of political absolution, or camouflage the defense of Jews as [...]

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for War. – George Washington During the January [...]

I’ve been struggling to understand a troubling phenomenon manifesting itself in American public life. For the life of me, I haven’t been able to understand why many progressive Jews in America express shame over the actions of Israel, while so many young Arabs and Muslims in the United [...]

Chance encounters generate perfect plot points. One does not have to look far to find these accidental points of contact in great works of literature: Pip’s childhood meeting with Magwitch, in a graveyard from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations; Chekhov’s fondness for placing characters at dinner parties emphatically emblemized [...]

One hundred forty-two years after the first modern settlement of Jews in the Land of Israel was founded at Petah Tikvah (recollecting, of course, the Four Holy Cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Tsfat to which Jews emigrated and dwelled for many hundreds of years); 124 years after [...]

Ruth Wisse is clearly a national treasure—that’s not in question—but of which nation? The subtitle of her important new book, Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, insinuates the quandary. Only someone for whom public and private are deeply felt—and passionately lived—as conjoined, in profound, [...]