The Blogs

In the “Hope springs eternal” department, few topics of public discourse display a wider chasm between hopes and reality than the so-called Israel-Palestinian peace process. For eighty-six years, diplomats have invested their hopes in a “two-state” solution to the conflict, with many now still clinging to the hope [...]

On May 11, I found myself in the unlikely position of testifying before a congressional committee on a topic that most Americans would likely assume was totally irrelevant to that committee, and largely concerning the actions of a sub-agency under that committee’s jurisdiction that most Americans have likely [...]

In a statement that crystallized the spirit of his era, Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola declared in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) that the free will granted to us by God allows us either to descend to the level of brutes or to aspire [...]

In the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and with authorities rushing to intervene and calm financial markets, a perhaps unexpected subplot emerged. On a Zoom call consisting of congressmen, their staffers, and officials representing the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on the [...]

If you are married with kids, during the COVID lockdown you may have, like many other millions of American parents, discovered that your local school boards are teaching your children an ideology that is at odds with your most cherished beliefs and practices. This new curriculum teaches that [...]

Let’s face it, the American university as we had known it since World War II lies in ruins. The buildings still stand. But the Ivory Tower of the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s (when it was indeed possible to get a good liberal arts education there) has been [...]

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. [...]