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“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, [...]

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 [...]