The Blogs

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, [...]

It’s Your Country, but Leave It Alone On March 1, 1899, a Muslim Arab leader in Jerusalem, Yusuf al-Khalidi, wrote a letter to the chief rabbi of France, who opposed the Zionist project: In theory, the Zionist idea is completely natural, fine and just. Who can challenge the [...]

On the cusp of the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama memorably told a crowd at Missouri University that “we are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” This notion that the incoming administration intended to burn down the old, flawed America, so that a [...]

Decades of trained fire from high-profile insiders who span a wide range on the political continuum have failed to stanch the drip-by-drip decline of higher education in the United States.   The litany of complaint includes soaring costs, curricular incoherence and emptiness, politicization of classrooms, thickening bureaucracies, grade [...]

On April 24, 2021, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.  What was this genocide about, and what is its significance for today? The Genocide Education Project offers a summary of that tragic event that transpired during World War I, specifically [...]

Under the Constitution, the federal government has the responsibility to provide for the national security of the United States. Congress has the power to raise and fund armies and navies, to declare war, and to make laws regarding such non-state foreign threats as piracy. The president has the [...]

In August 2020, more than 600 Jewish organizations signed an open letter in The New York Times endorsing the radical political movement Black Lives Matter (BLM).  This is cause for serious concern. BLM’s stance is that Israel is an occupying/colonizing force that oppresses the Palestinian people. That was [...]

In the 21st century, an ominous paradox developed: on the one hand, progressives increasingly demanded the banishing of hate speech, in some cases down to micro-aggressions. And yet within this increasingly severe approach, Islam became a double exception to the rule. Islamist hate speech did not count; negative [...]