"Spirituality," a key phrase of our time, suggests a yearning for contact with an ungraspable realm beyond earthly experience. Yet for most of history, the spiritual realm was deemed eminently graspable indeed—as is evidenced by a fascinating exhibit now in Jerusalem.

In 1882, there were 24,000 Jews in the land of Israel, a tenth as many as in the United States at the time and a mere 0.3 percent of the world Jewish population.  Today, a decade into the 21st century, Israel is solidifying its place as the cultural and demographic hub of Jewish life. Out of 13 million Jews worldwide, 5.7 million live in Israel, as opposed to an estimated 5.5 million in the U.S.

Roughly 60 percent of Jewish Israelis are now native-born; fifty years ago, the same percentage was foreign-born. Despite an average monthly wage of but $2,100.00, most Israelis own their own homes, travel abroad regularly, are connected to the Internet, and own at least one car. Religiously, 50 percent identify themselves as either Orthodox (12 percent), observant (13 percent), or traditional (25 percent), with ultra-Orthodox (haredi) Jews at 8 percent and climbing; self-identified secular Jews come in at 42 percent. The median age of Israeli brides is twenty-four.

The figures for American Jewry tell a different story, beginning with an average monthly income four times the Israeli figure. Religiously, the majority of American Jews goes under one or another non-Orthodox description—Reform 34 (percent); Conservative (26 percent);  Reconstructionist (2 percent); or "just Jewish" (25 percent)—while the Orthodox make up only 13 percent. Yet the non-Orthodox American Jewish majority is graying. Its young people are marrying non-Jews at the rate of 50 percent, and its women tend to marry much later and to have fewer children (1.86, below the replacement rate) than their Israeli counterparts (2.88). In sum, Israel's Jewish population is younger and growing while Jewish America is older and essentially shrinking.

Statistical comparisons can, of course, take one only so far. They do, however, hint at the need for both of the world's largest Jewish populations to think hard about how best to further their common heritage and solidify the links between two communities whose fates are intertwined.

At precisely 11 A.M. tomorrow, May 26, the sirens of war will echo throughout Israel. The army is conducting its annual week-long series of home-front drills to prepare the police, hospitals, emergency services, volunteer agencies, and civilians to cope with the possibility of an unprecedented onslaught of rockets or missiles laden with high explosives or chemical warheads.

Authorities are presenting the exercise as routine.  Although civilians who can do so have been instructed to enter a protected area like a communal bomb shelter or private reinforced-concrete room, those for whom participation in the drill would cause "unreasonable disruption" have been advised to go about their normal business. Meanwhile, Israelis have been retrieving their gas masks.

Ever since Hizballah in Lebanon began receiving Iranian missiles capable of striking as far south as the Dimona nuclear facility, rumors have circulated of a war igniting this summer. Hizballah itself continues to mobilize, both militarily and politically. In Gaza, Hamas may soon possess the capability of striking Ben-Gurion airport.  Along the Gaza frontier, Islamist gunmen press their attempts to penetrate into Israel. Over in the West Bank, Fatah leaders have announced (again) that they may resort to "armed struggle" if the objectives they seek cannot be attained via the current U.S.-mediated negotiations.  All these tensions are in addition to the overarching existential menace of a nuclear-armed Iran.

With enemy capabilities mounting, Israeli officials expect the next conflict to see the bombardment of troop staging areas, air-force bases, and power plants, and the possibility of a cyber attack to cripple Internet services. The IDF has two—not yet operational—Iron Dome batteries intended to provide partial coverage against short-range rockets, but there is no nation-wide anti-missile system to cope with thousands of incoming projectiles. Presumably, the state-of-the-art Patriot system will be held in reserve for the most lethal dangers. But how to manage the masses of ordinary Israelis expected to self-evacuate from metropolitan Tel Aviv or other urban areas should they come under incessant bombing? What to do with those left behind?

Outside Israel, the country's relentless security predicaments tend to be disregarded or denigrated. Within the country, things look normal; tourist hotels are full, and no one is canceling summer plans. This is the image that Israel prefers to project, and it is more than merely an image. As Dan Schueftan of Haifa University has shown, Israel's population demonstrated astonishing resiliency during both the suicide terror attacks of the second intifada and the missile attacks of the second Lebanon war in 1996.

No other Western-oriented country is quite in Israel's shoes; none faces such an array of imminent dangers. If, today as yesterday, there is no panic, this is no doubt because, in the Israeli context, the present, charged environment is, basically, normal. Still, the pressures take a psychological toll, visible, among other ways, in the fact that nine percent of Israelis suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, three times the level in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Can even sympathetic non-Israelis ever be fully in tune with the psyche of those who live the Israeli reality 24/7?  The question might be expected to give pause to anyone poised to proffer advice that could have life-or-death consequences. 

Later this year, a milestone in contemporary Jewish learning will be reached with the completion of the Steinsaltz translation of the Talmud from its rabbinic Hebrew-and-Aramaic original into modern Hebrew. First begun in 1965, this project has had a transforming effect on non-Orthodox Israeli culture. 

The work is the brainchild of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. Born in 1937 to secular parents who nevertheless saw to his education in Jewish classics, he studied math, physics, chemistry, and sociology before turning to religion, publishing books on the Bible and Jewish mysticism, and creating a network of high schools offering a rare blend of Talmud, neo-Hasidism, and bohemia. But it is on his 45-volume edition of the Talmud, initiated in his late twenties, that his fame in Israel rests.

The edition offers the traditional texts, with (in a departure from standard practice) punctuation and vocalization clearly marked; Steinsaltz's Hebrew rendering alongside paraphrases of classic commentaries; capsule summaries of legal decisions emerging from the texts; and, in a nod to academic scholarship, lists of variant readings, linguistic notes, and illustrations of the material culture of ancient times. All are laid out in a contemporary Hebrew design.

In 1989, an English version of the Steinsaltz Talmud was launched, with much fanfare, by Random House.  The enterprise was eventually discontinued both for monetary reasons and because of the serious competition presented by another English Talmud. This one, brought out by the ultra-Orthodox ArtScroll publishing house and known (after its funder) as the Schottenstein edition, is marked not only by friendlier typography but by a textual ambience welcoming to Orthodox as well as non-Orthodox users and, in its notes and glosses, by a fuller flavor of traditional scholarship.

Also in 1989, all of Steinsaltz's writings were placed under a religious ban by Israel's ultra-Orthodox authorities. The chief charge was that in certain of his books Steinsaltz had treated such biblical figures as the patriarchs and King David with a lack of reverence. As for his Talmud, it was censured for dispelling the work's sanctity, both in the way he presented it and by the very act of making it available to a reading public of non-Orthodox Jews.

The rabbis may have had a point. In a network of "alternative" institutions that have emerged in Israel in recent years, secular and religious Jews gather together to study classic texts as if in a traditional "beit midrash"—one, however, where discussion is conducted in a deliberately pluralistic and open-ended manner.  The participants in these circles increasingly write, sing, and lecture about traditional texts out of their own understandings. While the future shape and cultural implications of this phenomenon remain unclear, none of it would have been conceivable without the Steinsaltz Talmud.

Since its creation in 1976, the Orthodox publishing empire known as ArtScroll has brought out hundreds of titles: English translations of classic texts like the Bible, the siddur (prayer book), the Talmud, and others as well as self-help books, histories, biographies, fiction, and even cookbooks.  All are marked by traditional scholarship, decent English, handsome and often innovative typography and graphics—and an unabashedly ultra-Orthodox (haredi) viewpoint. Advertised and marketed with acumen and zeal, ArtScroll has swept the English-speaking Orthodox world and made surprising inroads among non-Orthodox readers as well. 

A newly published study, Orthodox by Design, provides the first scholarly investigation of the ArtScroll phenomenon and what it has to tell us about contemporary Judaism. According to the author, Jeremy Stolow, ArtScroll's success lies in its distinctive mix of authority, perceived authenticity, and accessibility. This is achieved not only through the volumes' content but through their user-friendly "design," in both the verbal and the visual sense. By making accessible to a wider public what are usually closed books, notably the siddur and, even more so, the Talmud, ArtsScroll has lowered the formidable barriers, social and linguistic, to identification with ultra-Orthodox Judaism; analogously, its biographies, histories, and self-help books have succeeded in reworking popular contemporary genres to fit ultra-Orthodox principles. 

In keeping with its editors' views, ArtScroll simply ignores the existence of other versions of Orthodoxy, let alone of other religious  denominations or of Zionism. Its history and biography series, which Stolow barely mentions, not only sanitizes the rabbinic past (often to the point of vapidity) but explicitly rewrites and censors the words of even unimpeachable authorities whose writings are out of step with contemporary haredi ideology.

Yet that ideology itself is far suppler than is often imagined. As Stolow argues, the very success of ArtScroll demonstrates that ultra-Orthodoxy, far from being an enclave subculture fighting a doomed, rearguard action against modernity, is a coherent worldview with the ability not only to absorb contemporary techniques of aesthetics, marketing, and production but, by means of these techniques, to offer religiously meaningful experiences to people living well outside the ambit of haredi life.

ArtScroll's success is of a piece with traditional Judaism's so-called "swing to the right" of recent years, and the corresponding decline in the authority and organizational power of the more avowedly modern Orthodox. Perhaps the most intriguing analysis of this development is that of the historian Haym Soloveitchik, who in a now-classic 1994 essay argued that modernity's fierce ruptures blasted away most of traditional society's amalgam of study, belief, folkways, and communal intimacy. Amid the ruins, the texts remained, yielding a formalist religion firmly in the sway of authoritarian talmudists whose stringencies offer a haven from the relentless instability of contemporary life. 

The example of ArtScroll rings interesting changes on this idea.  Yes, contemporary Orthodoxy is markedly book-centered; but a book is more than just the sum of its words. Presentation and style, physical heft and presence, the ways in which books are bought, displayed, chanted, or read, are all very much a part of the life and power of texts, sacred texts above all.  Even, or precisely, in this disembodied digital age, the printed book still projects a distinctive aura and wields a distinctive influence.

On April 5, 2009, speaking before throngs of supporters in a Prague square, President Barack Obama declared America's commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. With this as an apparent impetus, the Arab world has pressed for greater international attention to . . . Israel's nuclear activities. It did so most recently at a Washington conference devoted to keeping nuclear materials out of terrorist hands, and at a subsequent review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at UN headquarters in New York.

Under Arab prodding, the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the U.S., issued a statement calling for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. Its clear target was Israel, the only country in the area considered to be already in possession of such weapons, thus further sidetracking the irresolute international effort to block Iran from building them. The Arabs are also lobbying to put Israel on the agenda when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meets next month in Vienna.  

What is Israel's nuclear posture? The Jewish state insists it will not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the region. Its leaders have signaled, however, that the country has a weapon of last resort should the state be about to fall. Historically, the argument advanced by Israeli doves was that the country's presumed nuclear capacity had forced the Arabs to come to terms with the permanence of the Jewish state, and, by obviating the need for strategic territorial depth, made a withdrawal to roughly the 1967 borders into a viable option. In an exquisite irony, Israel today is being simultaneously pressed to go ahead with the withdrawal, to abjure its nuclear deterrent, and to reconcile itself to the fact that even its most moderate Arab interlocutors do not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.  

To some Israeli strategists, nevertheless, the time has arrived to jettison nuclear ambiguity and to allow IAEA inspections of the Dimona reactor. But the more prevalent view is that, with Iran on the cusp of a bomb, an abrupt, forced abandonment of nuclear ambiguity will make deterrence less credible, intensify the pressure to disarm entirely, and render the Middle East even less stable than it is.  

Israel's policy makers have repeatedly stressed that they would welcome a region free of all weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological arms, not to mention a considerable reduction of conventional forces. This goal, however, can only be achieved in the context of a freely arrived at and comprehensive peace settlement. That happy day is, unfortunately, a distant dream, and it will surely never arrive without first removing the risk of atomic weapons in the hands of Iran's bellicose and fanatical leaders. The question is how vigorously the world's civilized nations are determined not only to prevent Tehran's weaponization but to derail those in the Middle East and elsewhere who would cynically manipulate the cause of disarmament in pursuit of their vendetta against Israel.

The biblical book of Ruth, read later this week on the holiday of Shavuot, works in brief, gentle strokes to limn a powerful story of loss, recovery, and redemption. The story takes place in harvest season, in a prosaic world in which the actions of divine providence are coterminous with the yield of human goodness. "This scroll speaks neither of impurity nor purity, neither of forbidden nor permitted," says a famous midrash. "And why was it written? To teach you how great is the reward of those who mete out lovingkindness" (Midrash Ruth Rabbah 2:16).

The theme asserts itself in the book's opening. A truncated family of three widows, an older woman and her two daughters-in-law, has traveled from Moab to the outskirts of Bethlehem. Naomi, the older woman, urges the younger ones, Orpah and Ruth, to turn back and start their own lives. Orpah goes, but Ruth delivers a stunning declaration: "Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will follow; wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried" (1:16–17).

This speech of Ruth's has become the fundamental template of conversion to Judaism: the act of casting one's lot with the community of Israel in its bodily existence and its spiritual journeys, in life and death. Whenever the book was written—scholarly opinions differ—its depiction of King David's great-grandmother as a daughter of Moab, one of ancient Israel's bitterest enemies, is breathtaking. As the contemporary interpreter Avivah Zornberg points out, these simple, daring words, uttered by a young woman who boldly proceeds to act on them, shatter what until then had been an impermeable barrier of Israelite law, thus reshaping the law and Jewish history at once.

As for Orpah, the daughter-in-law who turned away, Jewish tradition was unforgiving, portraying her as a harlot and worse, and as the mother of none other than Goliath. In 1934, the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, watching the world scene darken, gathered together a group of Orpah legends in a brief, savage text, "The Scroll of Orpah," asserting an eternal divide between virtuous and evil Gentiles.  In recent years, some feminist interpreters have attempted to find a place for this seemingly wayward daughter.

And why is Ruth read on Shavuot? The 13th-century Sefer Hamanhig, a treasury of law and custom, offers two reasons. Shavuot is, after all, a celebration of the spring harvest, when the story is set. But Shavuot also commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. Just as Ruth was a convert, so were all the Israelites present at that event: "indeed, Israel underwent conversion on receiving the Torah." And that experience of conversion, like the receipt of the Torah itself, was not a one-time event. Each generation and each individual must renew the covenant with Jewish fate and destiny—the same covenant clasped by the young Moabite woman who entered and regenerated the community through sheer goodness and courage.

But the writer, even in his four walls, is a public.

Rupture and renewal, victimization and resistance, annihilation and rebirth:  few writers voiced the hard antinomies of Jewish life and death in the 20th century as did Abba Kovner (1918-1987).  The first major biography of him, by the Israeli historian Dina Porat, recently appeared in English and has won the National Jewish Book Award. Encountering Kovner in its pages makes for bracing reading.

The mass conversion to Judaism of the Khazars, a Turkic people from the North Caucaus, in the mid-8th century has fired imaginations for centuries.  Medieval travelers told tantalizing stories of the Jewish kingdom beyond the mountains. In the 12th century, the great Spanish-Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi framed his philosophical masterpiece, The Kuzari, around this story.

A very different use of the same story was made by racial theorists in the 19th century, by Arthur Koestler in the 20th century, and by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand in the 21st. Asserting that Ashkenazi Jewry as a whole descended not from ancient Israel but from the converted Khazars, these and others have argued that any claimed connection between modern-day Jews and the Israelites of old, or the land of Israel, is a myth, a figment of modern Zionist propaganda.

Such arguments have been amply refuted on their own terms. But what if the Khazars were never Jews in the first place? What if the conversion story is itself a myth? This is the thesis of a powerful article just published in the Hebrew-language scholarly journal Tziyon by Moshe Gil, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and a leading historian of the early Islamic centuries.  

Since the Khazars left no records of their own, evidence of their existence must be sought in the work of more or less contemporaneous Arabic historians. It turns out that, of those who mention or discuss the Khazars, almost none says anything about them or their king having converted to Judaism. As for the few who do cite the Khazars' alleged Jewishness, all draw on a single late chronicler, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who was the Caliph's emissary to the region from 921 to 923. According to ibn Fadlan, the viceroy of the Bulgars, a vassal state to the Khazars, told him that "the Khazars and their king are Jews and the Sakaliba [i.e., Slavs] and all the others are subservient to him and he seeks to make them his slaves and they will have to submit to him."

But what does the term "Jew" mean in this context?  Clearly, Gil writes, it was intended as a slur—and one that would curry favor with the Caliph. (The Bulgars had recently been converted to Islam.) Indeed, the Khazar customs mentioned by ibn Fadlan, such as beheading corpses before burial, hardly sound Jewish at all. 

What about contemporaneous Jewish sources? From 750 to 950, Judaism's chief religious authorities were the sages (geonim) in what is present-day Iraq. They received and responded to queries on matters of religious law and textual interpretation from all over the Mediterranean, Europe, and Central Asia. Nowhere in this voluminous correspondence can we find mention of the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars.  It does appear, rather late, in other Jewish writings, like the epistle of the Spanish Jewish courtier Hasdai ibn Shaprut (ca. 915–970/990) to the Khazar king—but these writings themselves, according to Gil, were inspired by the decidedly sparse and equivocal Arabic sources.

Gil's exacting erudition, if sustained, may kick the legs out from under a raft of theories like Sand's. Still, one cannot but be saddened at the prospect of losing one of Jewish history's more delightful subplots.  The Khazar legend may tells us little in the end about Jewish life in the North Caucasus in the 8th-10th centuries, but the history of the legend and its uses tells us a great deal about how Jewish identity and continuity have been understood, celebrated, or delegitimized. Was it just a dream? A consoling enchantment for Jews mired in statelessness and exile? It certainly was a provocation—for Yehuda Halevi above all—stretching intellectual horizons toward a more powerfully universal vision of Judaism. 

Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is in Tokyo this week for meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. Lieberman is seeking more robust Japanese pressure on Iran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. His arrival follows a visit only last month by deputy premier Dan Meridor, who is responsible for intelligence matters.

Lieberman's other main goal will be strengthening the economic ties between Israel and Japan, which have blossomed since the 1993 Oslo Accords and the weakening of the Arab boycott.  At $3.4 billion worth of business annually, Japan is second only to China as Israel's biggest East Asian trading partner. (By contrast, Japanese trade with Iran, mostly crude oil, stands at about $14 billion a year. )

Japan's attitude toward the Palestinian-Israel conflict parallels that of many EU countries.  This year, Tokyo backed Israel's admission to the OECD in the face of strenuous opposition by the Palestinian lobby. It also condemned a recent rocket attack from Gaza that claimed the life of a foreign worker in Israel. More categorically, however, it has "deplored" Israeli plans for housing over the Green Line and, like the EU, funneled millions of aid dollars to the Palestinian Authority.

Sentiment among the Japanese intelligentsia also mimics European thinking.  The country's largest conservative newspaper, Yomiuri, recently expressed sympathy with the Arab view that it was hypocritical to focus on Iran's nuclear program when Israel remains a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Culturally, philo-Semitism has long coexisted with anti-Semitism in the Japanese imagination. Some trace the former phenomenon to a 19th-century Scottish missionary who promulgated the notion that the Japanese were descendants of the biblical Ten Lost Tribes. As for the latter, the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion made its way to Japan after World War I, further bewildering a society that had little exposure to Jewish civilization. More recently, the Aum Shinrikyo cult,  prior to releasing deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, published a tract declaring war on the Jews. Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic tropes have had their airing.

Would greater personal contact benefit mutual understanding? Although tourism is hampered by the absence of direct flights, increasing numbers of Japanese tourists, including Christian Zionists, have been visiting Israel. The Japanese embassy is working with the Hebrew University to introduce Japanese society to Israeli high-school students, and a parallel program in Japan would no doubt be equally beneficial. In the meantime, it may gratify some to know that the Israeli pop group Hadag Nahash was warmly welcomed in Japan last year.

A London-based lawyer with the firm of Mishcon de Reya, Anthony Julius has the unusual distinction of being a solicitor-advocate—that is, a solicitor who can also appear in court.  He was on the defense team in the suit filed against the historian Deborah Lipstadt by the Holocaut denier David Irving; he has participated in litigating many cases bearing on the interests of Israel; and he represented Princess Diana in the last years of her life. A first-rate scholar, he is also the author of T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995), Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (2001), and Transgressions: The Offenses of Art (2002).

Now comes Julius's magnum opus, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, just released in the United States. This large, sweeping book is more than a solidly researched and highly readable history of English anti-Semitism; it is an attempt to chart the evolution of anti-Semitism itself, to explain what it is (and what it is not), and to demonstrate how to recognize and name it. Its early chapters—on religious and literary anti-Semitism in pre-modern England—set the stage for Julius's coverage of the modern era and especially of the present day, when the boundaries between hatred of Jews and detestation of the Jewish state have become thoroughly blurred. Indeed, it is the prevalence of anti-Zionism in today's England that motivated Julius to undertake this lucid, erudite, and compelling study.

Julius insists on fair-mindedness but makes no pretense to dispassion. Writing this book, he says, has been like swimming long-distance through a sewer. Out of the mire of his subject, he has produced a work of gripping force.

Elliot Jager interviewed Anthony Julius for Jewish Ideas Daily.

The 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe will be marked this week with speeches, parades, and, one imagines, more than a little concern. The free-fall of the Greek economy has exposed enormous fault lines in the economic institutions of the European Union and the moral community on which it rests. Similarly concentrating the European mind are the recent electoral success of the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary, Russia's swift victory over Georgia and NATO in August 2008, and the challenge presented by the swelling numbers of Muslims and by militant Islam to the new Europe's commitment to tolerance and civic equality.

Jews and Israel figure here in complicated ways.  Holocaust memory has been institutionalized in Europe, not only in monuments and educational projects but in the very vision of the European Community, whose avowed aim of transcending the nation-state owed much to the idea that the Holocaust was the direct result of a fevered and idolatrous nationalism. Culturally, the wraith-like image of the Jew as victim of Europe's most perilous furies has transfixed artists and intellectuals for decades.  And yet, in a terrible irony, this same poignant reverie has helped render today's Jewish nation-state of Israel into a scandalous affront, an insult to enlightened humanity. Should not the Jews, demands Tony Judt, victims of nationalism's worst pathologies, have been the first to understand that sovereignty must be laid aside?

The affront is compounded by Israel's close ties with the crass, capitalist Uncle Sam—which, in another terrible irony, has provided Europe's security umbrella for decades.  All this, together with Europe's abiding guilt over colonialism, helps account for the disproportionate vilification so often hurled at Israel and ranging so far beyond any bounds of reasonable criticism and debate. What it may highlight is an idolatrous fever of a different but potentially no less perilous kind: the worship of a false utopian vision, last incarnate in Soviet Marxism, that would wish away normal self-interest, normal attachments to land and ethnicity, and the normal impulses to national power.

Endless negotiations between the universal and the particular, the ideal and the real, the need for sovereignty and the imperative to contain it by morality and law have been the stuff of Jewish thought for millennia. If there is any one lesson to be drawn from that intellectual tradition, it is that although no magic formulas can square these circles, there are modes of argument and basic moral principles that aid immeasurably in adjudicating disagreement and braking the worst excesses of the human will. In thinking of the conflict whose end is being commemorated this week, and of the portentous if still relatively bloodless crises that rack Europe today, such modest-sounding prescriptions loom as a precious legacy.

Tomorrow, synagogue-goers will hear the final yearly readings from the biblical Book of Leviticus (in Hebrew, Vayikra).  As every year, they will no doubt reflect on what is in some ways the most challenging and mind-bending volume of the Torah.

The books flanking Leviticus on either side easily comport with what we usually think of as "religious literature."  The two before it, Genesis and Exodus, tell stories of creation, family and nation-building, enslavement, exodus, and revelation. Of the two after it, Numbers offers morality tales of the wilderness and Deuteronomy gives us poetry, prophecy, and detailed ethical-legal teachings. By contrast, Leviticus dwells at length on animal sacrifices, on leprosy and other disfigurements, on dietary and sexual taboos, on rules for the sabbatical and jubilee years, ending with a bang of fire-and-brimstone imprecation.

The same sages who canonized the other biblical books canonized Leviticus. Why? To many 19th-century Christian scholars, conditioned by Protestantism to reject ritual and taboo as foreign to religious conscience and spirituality, Leviticus epitomized the decadent legalism and ritualism—the  "Pharisaism"—that the New Testament sought to displace. But more recent scholars have come to see things differently.

They have done so by focusing precisely on the strangest part of Leviticus of all, "the Holiness Code" at its heart (chapters 17–26). There we find, in one breath, exalted moral pronouncements ("Love your neighbor as yourself," 19:18, being only the most famous) alongside exacting prescriptions for ritual purity and impurity, sexual behavior, and other rituals.  

A great step forward in entering the ancient thought-world was taken by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas in a landmark 1966 essay. To her, what may seem to be a series of bizarre and unconnected rituals and taboos actually displays a compelling internal logic and ethic; they are, she wrote, building blocks of holiness, which in biblical terms means wholeness, completeness, and thus godliness.

After Douglas, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars alike have been better able to read Leviticus—and to criticize it, where they have felt compelled to do so, on its own terms.  Jacob Milgrom and, lately, Jonathan Klawans have explicated the prescriptions of the Holiness Code as highlighting the search for the divinely mandated order that permeates the human and natural worlds. To Israel Knohl, rather than regressing from Sinai by restricting holiness to the priestly order, Leviticus strives to transform the moment of revelation into a living reality that enables all, in their moral, spiritual, and physical lives, to participate in the divine.

Through whichever lens one reads Leviticus—rabbinic tradition, historical scholarship, feminist critique, or Jewish theology—its strangeness, its provocative defiance of conventional categories, abides. Isn't this unsettling of the familiar, shouldn't it be, the essence of religion itself?  

This week, the Schechter Institute, the chief educational institution of the Conservative movement in Israel, celebrated its 25th anniversary with the opening of two new buildings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  Following decades of effort, the occasion marks a genuine milestone for the Masorti movement (to use its Hebrew name), a movement still struggling to establish a presence in Israel in the teeth of institutional opposition and public indifference. 

Unlike Orthodoxy and Reform, already established as ideological movements in 19th-century Europe, Conservative Judaism, though tracing some of its roots to the 1850s, took shape in early-20th-century America, to become, in the postwar period, the largest of the three U.S. Jewish denominations. Its greatest achievements lay in the production of high-level scholarship in Bible, Talmud, Hebrew, theology, and history and in the fostering of a widely shared commitment to Jewish peoplehood in its broadest sense. In both respects, and especially the second, Conservatism contrasted at once with the more insular focus of Orthodoxy and with the more far-reaching universalism of Reform.

The commitment to peoplehood helps explain the movement's longstanding connection with Zionism. It also makes the more vexing its failure to make inroads into Israeli society. Today there are about fifty Conservative congregations in the country, a few more than in the state of Pennsylvania, most of them served by part-time and underpaid rabbis. Yet very many Israelis, in their approach to Judaism and Jewish practice, call themselves, and seem genuinely to be, masorti—literally, "traditional"—and indeed the Israeli Masorti movement is itself significantly more traditionalist than its American parent. Why, then, the failure?

The reasons are both political and social-cultural. Politically, the Orthodox rabbinical establishment has for decades succeeded in denying non-Orthodox movements official recognition and, more importantly given Israel's system of public funding for religious institutions, money. This forces the non-Orthodox movements to turn to the courts to secure a modicum of recognition and public space.

Socially and culturally, Conservative Judaism has so far been unable to strike indigenous roots. Its principled middle ground is an anomaly in Israel's raucous culture; its model of congregation and community is alien in a country where even Orthodox synagogues hardly function as community centers; and its palpable Americanness diminishes its authenticity in the eyes of potential recruits among secular Israelis accustomed to regarding Orthodoxy, the religion they reject, as the only religion they would ever choose.  

Another dynamic is operating as well, in both Israel and the US. As the religious movement still most committed to the common denominator of Jewish peoplehood, Conservative Judaism is losing out to the growing numbers of Jews who look to religion for passionate experiences, or strong authority, or a thicker sense of authenticity, or some combination thereof. In the age of a pull to greater religious stringency on the one hand, and to cultivation of the individual self, "the Jew within," on the other, the principle of Catholic Israel enunciated by Solomon Schechter, Conservatism's greatest founding father, has not surprisingly fallen on hard times.

Is there still hope for Masorti Judaism in Israel? If so, it will lie in the emergence of something new and not terribly American: a strong attachment to tradition that is rooted in the Hebrew language and the local landscape, at one with the passions and problems of contemporary Israel, and in collaboration with the more critical voices within the ranks of Israel's religious (i.e., Orthodox) Zionists.  

Early signs pointing in such a direction include the movement's recently reissued siddur, Vaani Tfilati, and in materials being developed by the TALI foundation for use in Israeli public schools.  Such efforts play to the movement's scholarly strengths. Turning these into a lived commitment, strong and supple enough for the rough and tumble of Israeli life, will be its greatest test.

The chairman of Peace Now in France, David Chelma, has been instrumental in a new Jewish effort to dissent from Israeli policies. The initiative is dubbed JCall, a term explicitly intended to evoke the Washington-based organization J Street. Over the past weekend, the group issued a web-based petition, entitled "European Jewish Call for Reason," denouncing Israeli settlements as "morally and politically wrong" and seeking to promote a movement in behalf of "the voice of reason." The 3,000-plus signers include such pro-Israel luminaries as the philosophers Bernard Henri-Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. Israel's former ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi, is also a backer.

The campaigners say they are exasperated with the "monolithic" Jewish mainstream. Not only should it be legitimate for Jews to criticize Israel's policies, according to the multilingual petition, but such criticism is both necessary and praiseworthy. To the contrary, what is "dangerous" is the prevailing situation: namely, the mainstream's "systematic support of Israeli government policy."

The Israeli broadsheet Haaretz has been quick to endorse the JCall initiative, applauding its healthy rejection of "automatic support" for Israeli policy—especially when it comes to Jerusalem neighborhoods over the Green Line. Others are being heard from as well. In a rebuke to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who in a recent newspaper advertisement urged that the fate of Jerusalem be dealt with at a later stage of peace negotiations, an open letter signed by 100 "Jewish Jerusalemites" asserts that Israel's "crafty politicians and sentimental populists" are engaged in a "frantic" drive to "Judaize" the city and foreclose its being "shared by the two nations residing in it."  In U.S. Jewish newspapers, J Street chimed in with a similar retort to Wiesel by the former Meretz-party leader Yossi Sarid.

The notion that dissent within the "monolithic" pro-Israel community operates under severe constraints is axiomatic among the dissenters themselves. In fact, criticism of Israeli security policies by the country's Diaspora friends, including the most prominent, is commonplace. Nahum Goldmann, the venerable head of the World Jewish Congress, publicly broke with Israeli policies in 1967. In 1973, he reportedly helped finance an organization, Breira ("Alternative"), whose rabbinic advisory council advocated the creation of a PLO-led state alongside Israel—this, decades before Yasir Arafat ostensibly recognized the country's right to exist. Goldmann also appealed to U.S. decision-makers to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza. Philip Kluznick, Goldmann's successor, adopted an even more sharply dissenting profile.

In American terms, perhaps the closest predecessor to the JCall petition was the 1978 letter signed by thirty-seven prominent U.S. Jews—writers, professors, theologians—demanding that Israel show greater flexibility in negotiating a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1980, the New Jewish Agenda took up the work of the by-then defunct Breira. Also in the early 1980s, Rabbi Alexander Schindler of the Reform movement asked: "Must we indulge in annexationist fantasies in order to prove that we are passionate Jews?" This year, his successor Rabbi Eric Yoffie said he stood with Obama and against Netanyahu on the matter of a construction freeze in east Jerusalem.  

On the matter of settlements, the roster of Jewish figures who have campaigned against Israel's policies includes a leader of the Conservative movement and former chairs of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. If anything, opinion on Israel's approach to the settlements issue has become institutionalized, with more members of the Presidents Conference dissenting than supporting.

The one constant—from Nahum Goldmann's day through JCall—has been the absence of any countervailing call from anyone, anywhere, to pressure Fatah, Hamas, or the Arab League into adopting less intransigent policies toward the Jewish state.

There are hundreds of Jewish organizations in the United States. Fifty-two national groups have qualified for membership in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. But only a handful, whether secular, religious, or "fraternal," can be said to wield extensive influence either inside the Jewish community or beyond it. One of these is the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a quintessential establishment agency whose annual meeting, held last week in Washington, drew notables from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Founded in New York by affluent, acculturated "uptown" German Jews in 1906, the AJC sought initially to protect East European Jews suffering Tsarist-era oppression. Early leaders, including Jacob Schiff, Mayer Sulzberger, and Louis Marshall, shunned the limelight, discreetly advocating U.S. diplomatic intervention for their less well-off brethren. Theirs was a spirit of noblesse oblige.

When it came to Zionism, the AJC long wavered. It endorsed the Balfour Declaration in 1917, but in 1942 opposed the Biltmore Program, which set the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as an immediate goal. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the AJC supported the Zionist enterprise while continuing to give priority to its major concerns at home: civil liberties, civil rights, and interfaith relations. Only after the 1967 Six-Day war, as pro-Israel positions came to define American Jewish life, did the AJC evolve into a leading moderate-liberal voice championing strong U.S.-Israel ties.

Although it is a membership organization that in principle seeks a broad base, the AJC remains fairly elitist, with policy set largely by its executive director David Harris and senior lay officers. Having apparently weathered the global financial crisis, the agency has adapted its fundraising strategy to focus on specific initiatives and programs, thereby allowing donors to gauge the impact of their support. It vigorously cultivates young leaders, offering them the kind of access to world figures that only an establishment organization can provide.  

In the near term, the prognosis for this venerable group seems positive. But questions arise about the longer term. What does the future hold for the AJC, for AIPAC, for ADL, and for other large "defense" agencies when many of those most ardently committed to Jewish survival today are increasingly aligned with Orthodoxy and when the establishment's demographic base of political and religious liberals seems to be shrinking? Are not small, "boutique" agencies even better positioned than large ones to attract donors intent on targeting their philanthropy? As new media foster a welter of voices demanding a say in Jewish life, how will establishment agencies maintain their preeminence?  

Perhaps most challenging of all, what will happen to the influence wielded by these organizations as the world order fractures and Washington's power is increasingly diminished?

"We still don't understand what happened to the Jews of Europe, and perhaps we never will." Thus wrote the American intellectual and novelist Isaac Rosenfeld in the February 1948 issue of the New Leader. Arguing that in the wake of the Holocaust the familiar discussion of good and evil had become a useless exercise in nostalgia, he concluded: "Terror beyond evil, and joy beyond good: that is all there is to work with, whether we are to understand what has happened, or begin all over again."

This was one of the earliest and still one of the most powerful attempts to render into words the void blasted by the Holocaust into human consciousness. Yet the man who wrote these and many similarly powerful sentences is today remembered, insofar as he is remembered at all, mostly as a legendary failure. His sudden death in 1956 at age thirty-eight, surrounded by a pile of unfinished manuscripts, was the photo finish to what has seemed a waste of great promise, and has made him into a sad, faintly visible comet in the firmament of the fabled New York Jewish intellectuals. Whether he deserves that reputation is the issue addressed in last year's thought-provoking biography by Steven J. Zipperstein.

A lifelong friend of Saul Bellow, Rosenfeld lived the Greenwich Village life of high, difficult ideas and fevered self-exploration—a life known to us most vividly through Bellow's own fictional characters. His lone finished work was a coming-of-age novel; subsequent novels never panned out. The literary work for which he will likely be most remembered is a Yiddish parody of T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Was he confined in a world of disconnected ideas, fatally oblivious of reality? Was he, like other New York intellectuals, trapped by the in-between nature of his era, a period of transition between the passing of traditional modes of Jewish intellection and the new Jewish presence in American universities? Had he lived longer, might he (as Zipperstein suggests) have broken free of the settled judgment of his milieu and realized his literary promise?

Or was he perhaps a casualty of cultural imprisonment? The two regnant mystiques of his time were the mystique of the novel, on the one hand, and of academic scholarship, on the other. Excelling in neither of these sanctified forms, Rosenfeld was most at home, and in literary terms most successful, as a critic and a personal essayist.

Indeed, a certain kind of mind, and certain kinds of truths, are best rendered in that evocative, exploratory genre, which grasps ideas in mid-flight rather than building them either through character and incident or on a bedrock of footnotes. The critical essay was a form well-suited to Jewish life in the immediate postwar period: open-ended, skeptical, argumentative, mixing reason with impressionism, rolling the dice on the power of words to bridge an unbridgeable historical abyss. Rosenfeld was its master.

"The plain sense of things," Wallace Stevens wrote, "had itself to be imagined." Without imagination, there is no culture, language, or for that matter any recognizably human life. But what happens to the "plain sense of things" in the computer age when, with the emergence of virtual reality and virtual community, imagined life can take over, subsume, or become a substitute for recognizably human life?

The question presses itself with special urgency in the case of Judaism and the Jews. A specific people, a specific place, a framework of mitzvot laying emphasis on what we eat, utter, and do: all of these are aspects of a central feature of Judaism, namely, its embodiment. All seem to live in exquisite tension with the virtual dispensation of cyberspace.

The issues are perhaps no more clearly on display than in Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Labs. The Jewish members, or "Javatars," of Second Life attend synagogue, light Hanukkah candles, and study Jewish texts. At various times the world of Second Life has hosted replicas of the Western Wall, the biblical Tabernacle, a Jewish city, and, needless to say, a Chabad House.  

For many this invigorates learning, fosters a sense of community across distances, and enables a creative exploration of Jewish selfhood and group identity.  No doubt. But what, in the electronic ether, is to become of flesh-and-blood Jewish life? The Talmud says (Sotah 14a) that God Himself clothes the naked, feeds the hungry, buries the dead.  In virtual worlds one cannot do any of those things; nor can one visit the sick, shake a lulav, or recite kiddush and then drink the wine.

For that matter, what is to become of religious imagination? The imaginative exertions of prophets, philosophers, and mystics gained much of their charge, including their visual charge, from the ultimate inability truly to picture that which was being envisioned.  Will that mystery vanish, too, in an age when technology can render the most ineffable vision with stark pictorial quality? 

Throughout Jewish history, new communication technologies have been seized upon as keys to both study and belonging. That today's new technologies have been a godsend to the dispersed Jewish people is undeniable; equally undeniable, though, is that they present a conundrum. Like any technology, virtual reality is a tool, one that can enrich or diminish human existence depending on how it is used. Like any technology, it is also a culture, one whose moral and spiritual value will be created or wasted by the people who inhabit it. 

Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, was born in Budapest 150 years ago next Sunday, May 2. He died at age forty-four in Vienna, four-and-a-half decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. Herzl came into maturity with no particular Jewish learning, no Hebrew, and scant ties to his community. Yet with his top hat, white gloves, and tails, this broadminded Central European journalist with a utopian streak came to be the foremost revolutionary of the modern Jewish world.

The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.

Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.

In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree."  Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly. 

King Abdullah II returned home from Washington earlier this month, having attended a two-day Nuclear Security Summit and becoming the first Arab leader to visit the Obama White House. Photographs showed the king and the president smiling and looking relaxed. Ostensibly, Abdullah urged Obama to put forward his own plan for resolving the Israel-Palestinian "tinderbox."

However sincere the king's interests in a settlement may be, they are by no means straightforward. In a subsequent interview with the Chicago Tribune, he predicted that, since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is set to expire in July, and since "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested in peace," a Middle East war this summer is inevitable. On Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, the king professed to be sanguine: "If you solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, nobody needs a nuclear weapon."

It is indisputable that the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty has devolved into a decidedly frosty relationship. The king claims that ties with Israel have never been weaker. Even as his kingdom continues to enjoy trading benefits from the peace, he asserts that economically Jordan was better off "before my father signed the peace treaty." And even as news reports circulated of Iranian SCUD missiles being shipped across Syria to Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon, the Jordan Times was accusing Israel of fixing to start another war—despite what the paper described as the prevailing regional "calm."

The true source of Abdullah's worries may lie elsewhere than in alleged Israeli bellicosity. In an earlier interview with the Wall Street Journal, he expressed his suspicion that Israel intended to "push" West Bank Palestinians into his country; Jordan's foreign ministry recently went so far as to summon the Israeli ambassador to protest, "harshly," a nonexistent "West Bank expulsion rule."  With a population that is already majority-Palestinian, the Hashemite kingdom has long feared being taken over entirely—which is why Abdullah's father Hussein ceded the West Bank to the PLO in 1988 during the first intifada. Though his son continues to see himself as the defender of Muslim and Christian holy places against "continued [Israeli] provocations," he emphatically does not want to resume responsibility for the territory.

What does Jordan want? Above all, it wants the refugee issue to be resolved outside its realm. In the judgment of Assaf David, a Hebrew University expert, the king is both genuinely interested in an Israel-Palestinian peace accord and simultaneously fearful that it will permanently codify the Palestinian refugee presence within Jordan itself and thereby pose a mortal threat to Hashemite rule. Therein lies the Jordanian dilemma. 

Over time, successful social transformations lose their capacity to amaze. So it is that we forget just how astounding was the modern revival of Hebrew as a language suitable for all aspects of life.

Of course, Hebrew never really died; throughout history it was the written language of scholarship and religious thought, and the spoken and sung language of prayer. This rich and multi-layered legacy was mined by the Zionist writers, linguists, and educators who over decades would painstakingly bring forth the modern Hebrew language.

Among the questions they had to settle was how, exactly, to pronounce it. The decision was to adopt a hybrid variant of what is known as Sephardi pronunciation—all the more remarkable in that those doing the deciding, prominent among whom was the great lexicographer Eliezer ben-Yehuda, were themselves Ashkenazi Jews, usually from Eastern Europe.  Theirs was a prime example of the search for authenticity, one of modernity's most valued and elusive signs of grace. 

The decision had a prehistory. From the late 18th century onward, many Jewish maskilim, or Enlighteners, had looked to the Jews of medieval Spain (Hebrew: Sepharad) for role models and precedents. In the work of Sephardi poets, philosophers, and grammarians they saw a reflection of their own cultural ambitions, and in the Sephardi heritage a broad, noble, sunlit path out of the grim traditionalism of their Central and East European communities. At the same time, a number of pious traditionalists themselves had come to prize Sephardi Hebrew for the presumed faithfulness of its transmission from antiquity.

In her recent study, A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry, the scholar Miryam Segal traces the impact of the decision to institutionalize Sephardi pronunciation in early-20th-century Palestine.  Among those affected were such great poets of the national renaissance as Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky. Not only did their verse conform to Ashkenzai  accents and stresses, but their entire cultural agenda involved enunciating new ideas and experiences in the familiar cadences of Ashkenazi Hebrew. Others felt the tension as well; in particular, rabbis otherwise sympathetic to Zionism sought to retain the Ashkenzai accent, and with it the sacral qualities of Hebrew.

With time, writers would make the new Hebrew their own. And as far as spoken Hebrew is concerned, the now-regnant Sephardi pronunciation has entirely superseded the old way, to the point where, for ultra-Orthodox Jews and secular Yiddishists alike, Ashkenazi pronunciation serves as a marker of dissent from Zionism's triumph.

All revolutions have their price, and the Hebrew revolution was no exception. Something was undoubtedly lost when Hebrew became a secular vernacular; but the transformation continues to be a wonder and an astonishment. 

The prevalence of deep anti-Semitism in many parts of the Muslim world is one of today's scarier phenomena. To some, it can also seem mysterious.  To be sure, Jews regularly suffered persecution under the Crescent as they did under the Cross, but not with the same sustained ferocity. Nor did Islam ever bring forth a racially-infused hatred of Jews like that of the Spanish Church—or, in our own times, the Nazis.

Until, that is, the Nazis themselves got into the act. Since then, and to an extent previously unparalleled in Muslim history, Jews and Judaism have been demonized beyond all proportion by Islamic officialdom and Islamic masses, by religious clerics and Westernized intellectuals alike.

In a new book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, the historian Jeffrey Herf has unearthed a hitherto unknown side of the Holocaust: the massive broadcasting in Arabic of Nazi propaganda that mixed cynical anti-imperialism with sincere and impassioned hatred of Jews. We don't know how the broadcasts were received at the time, but they likely played a role in fostering a new Arabic rhetoric that hung in the air and came fully to life in the coming decades. By the 1950s, discussion of the Holocaust became entirely a function of the battle against Israel and Zionism; the events themselves were either altogether denied, or dismissed as providing any sort of basis for Jewish claims, or twisted into the argument that the Holocaust's true victims were the Palestinians.  

Today, although Holocaust denial does not figure much in the writings of al-Qaeda and other radical groups, it has been embraced by establishments from Tehran to Riyadh and beyond, and by groups like Hamas that are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.  In the view of Emmanuel Sivan, one of the world's leading historians of Islam, the migration of Holocaust-related themes into Islamist literature is a main factor behind the powerful toxicity of today's Muslim anti-Semitism and the transformation of the Arab-Israeli conflict from a political contest into a holy war. Unless the resultant demonization is undone, it will continue to pose a grave danger to Jews, to Muslims themselves, and to the civilized world.

The ghosts of Qumran have conjured up two distinct communities of modern scholars: the archaeologists who dig in the caves and discover the libraries, and the textual scholars who read and interpret the Dead Sea Scrolls in cavernous libraries of their own. Not many have been able to move with assurance among both. One of them was Hanan Eshel, who died earlier this month at age fifty-two.

The author of more than 200 articles and several books aimed at both scholars and the wider public, Eshel synthesized a broad knowledge of classical Jewish texts with rich archaeological experience and a deep understanding of life in the ancient world.  Throughout his career he made exciting finds, from his first excavation in a cave near Jericho that yielded letters from the Second Temple period to a dig last year that uncovered the largest known cache of coins minted around the time of the failed Bar-Kokhba revolt of 135–136 C.E. 

Indeed, aside from Qumran, the caves where Bar-Kochba and his rebels took refuge from Roman legionnaires were the chief focus of Eshel's work. In his judgment, the coins he found there ended a millennia-old debate over the causes of the revolt, showing that it was caused at least in part by the Roman re-dedication of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, in an act that inflamed national—and apocalyptic—passions.

The work of scholars like Eshel, teasing all they can out of fragmentary texts and mute sites and artifacts, is no mere antiquarianism. The three centuries that formed his "field," from the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid Greeks in the mid-2nd century B.C.E. to Bar-Kokhba's doomed revolt against the Romans, remain among the most consequential in the history not only of the Jews but of Western civilization as a whole. It saw the destruction of the Temple, the birth of Christianity, and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism.

More broadly, the encounter of Greco-Roman culture with the Hebrew Bible and its adherents formulated terms of debate—reason versus revelation, power politics versus prophetic ethics—that continue to frame our world today.  Thus does the painstaking labor of scholars in the heat of a dig and the hush of a library abet the task of modern self-understanding.

What does the predominantly liberal Asian-American community think of President Barack Obama's policies toward China, particularly on the issue of Tibet?  Where do America's 2.35 million Muslims stand on Washington's conduct of the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan? It's hard to say. Yet minute shifts in American Jewish public opinion are carefully tracked.

Why?  Because, says the Hebrew University political scientist Tamir Sheafer,  although comprising at most three percent of the population, America's Jews—well-educated, relatively affluent, and "over-represented" in medicine, science, law, media, entertainment, and politics—are perceived to be an important, well-organized, and powerful interest group. They are major financial contributors to political campaigns, and in certain states the high turnout of Jewish voters (usually in the Democratic column) can help swing an election. For Kenneth D. Wald of the University of Florida, "Jewish opinion matters because Jews, despite their small numbers, are hyper-political, far outperforming non-Jews in registration, turnout, volunteering, campaign activity, contributions and mobilization."  According to Wald, politicians pay attention to Jewish opinion because "passion and intensity outweigh numbers."

Late last week, a McLaughlin & Associates poll showed that if U.S. presidential elections were held now, only 42 percent of Jewish voters would re-elect President Barack Obama. This represents a precipitous drop from the 78 percent who according to exit polls gave their vote to candidate Obama in November 2008.  But what does it mean? Conservative analysts have attributed the president's loss of Jewish support to his adversarial approach toward the Netanyahu government; liberals, by contrast, point to Obama's perceived drift toward the pragmatic center on domestic issues.

Since the McLaughlin poll asked only about Israel, it is difficult to say which reading is correct. And even on this one issue, the numbers are not perfectly consistent. Indeed, when queried in the same survey about the president's overall handling of America's relations with the Jewish state, fully half of the respondents registered their approval, as against 39 percent who disapproved.  A somewhat earlier survey, conducted by the American Jewish Committee, found 55 percent approving of Obama's approach toward Israel.

Nor, finally, is it clear where Israel ranks on the roster of American Jewish concerns. Although 70 percent say they feel a bond with the Jewish state, many experts contend that this attachment does not top their agenda.

As for how all this might translate politically, Obama's is not the first  administration to dissociate its "rock-solid" backing for Israel from opposition to the country's settlements and its security policies; nor would it be the first to appeal to Jews themselves for support on this point. The Reagan administration's decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the PLO was closely coordinated with dissident elements in American Jewish leadership. The late Max Fisher, a Republican fundraiser, served as a conduit between George H.W. Bush and Yitzhak Shamir, quietly advocating the president's proposal of a freeze on West Bank settlements in return for U.S. loan guarantees to help resettle Soviet Jews in Israel. 

With only 39 percent (McClaughlin) or 37 percent (American Jewish Committee) of American Jews disapproving outright of Obama's handling of relations, some community leaders may thus be as likely to lobby the Netanyahu government to conciliate the American president as to pressure the administration to mend its currently broken fences with Jerusalem. When it comes to the sentiments of American Jewish voters in general, the two polls are hardly negligible indicators, but what their findings might signify for the mid-term elections this November will depend on developments on more than one front, and the presidential race of 2012 is far in the future.

Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.

This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism—in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.

The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause.  Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.

Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge—and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.

In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948–49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict.  Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough. Elliot Jager interviewed Efraim Karsh for Jewish Ideas Daily.

The ten days from last week's Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) through today's Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) to tomorrow's Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzma'ut) constitute, for Israelis and many Jews worldwide, a passage in which the theme of death and loss plays an inevitably central role. The evolution of that theme over the years has come to be reflected in poetic texts and liturgies whose meaning has itself evolved in Israeli and Jewish consciousness.

Perhaps the most famous of these texts is Magash Hakesef  ("The Silver Platter") by the poet Natan Alterman, the centennial of whose birth is being marked this year. The poem, a meditation on Chaim Weizmann's comment that "no state is ever given on a silver platter," envisages the Jewish nation rising to mark the miracle of its renewed independence. Confronted by two ghostly, haggard youths, it asks them to identify themselves. We two, they explain, "are the silver platter/ on which the Jewish state has been given to you."

Alterman's poem was written and published in December 1947, just as the euphoric flush of the UN partition vote on November 29 was giving way to the first clashes of what, by May 14, would become full-fledged war. Was it an elegiac note to victory, or a morbid—and deadly accurate—prophecy of things to come, and to come again? Increasingly it has been seen as the latter.

Another enshrined poem of the 1948 period was Haim Guri's Bab al-Wad, commemorating those who died trying to break the Arab siege of Jerusalem. Set to music early on and recorded multiple times, it has long been a staple of the Israeli airwaves on Memorial Day. Like other early Israeli poets, Guri aspires to the power and mystery of religious texts without explicit reference to God, tradition, or the rabbinic sources with which he himself is deeply familiar. This was very much in keeping with the spirit of the Zionist revolution against Diaspora Judaism and its sorrowful past.

Yet that rebellion, and the principled forgetting that accompanied it, has hobbled Zionism's ability to sustain itself and its inner resources. Over time, the memorial songs achieving canonical status have become increasingly detached from national feeling of any kind—from Dorit Zameret's The Wheat Sprouts Again, a heartbreaking elegy to the fallen of 1973's Yom Kippur War, to Amit Farkash's A Million Stars, the most popular memorial lyric to emerge from the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Implicitly setting themselves against the excesses of ideologically-mobilized verse, these and other personalized expressions of grief cause one to wonder how Israel's national consciousness can recover the crucially necessary tools for integrating past and present, the individual and the collective.

Still, new syntheses do emerge. One sort surfaced this year in Rona Kenan's Songs for Yoel, a cycle of lyrics about the death of her turbulent father in which personal loss is set against the backdrop of decades of Israeli political and cultural history. Another, very different kind was undertaken by Rabbi David Buzaglo, a great paytan, or religious troubadour, who before immigrating to Israel from Morocco in 1965 composed the recently rediscovered Binu Na Mordim ("Wise Up, Rebels"). Writing in explicit counterpoint to Guri's Bab al-Wad, Buzaglo criticizes the harsher edges of the Sabra ethos while weaving modern Israel's losses into the fabric of both history and tradition, the terrible pain of the bereaved into the sacred solace of peace. 

The name alone conjures up story-book images of a horse-drawn carriage from which a pious Victorian benefactor alights to bribe a local official, endow an orphanage, or dedicate a windmill.  Abigail Green's brilliant new biography—elegantly conceived, exhaustively researched, crisply written—presents a far more complicated and fascinating picture.

Montefiore was born in 1784 to a family embedded in the cosmopolitan network of merchant Jews linking London, Livorno, Amsterdam, and the New World: a Sephardi diaspora well-placed for the opportunities presented by the liberalizations of 19th-century Europe. Montefiore made deft use of the new dispensation, at first to make his fortune through his own talents and his marital ties to the Rothschilds and then to undertake a career of charity and activism on behalf of his fellow Jews.

Establishing himself early on as a leader of Anglo-Jewry, Montefiore, an inveterate traveler, undertook with his wife Judith countless trips all over Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire. Their purpose was both to support local Jews and, more ambitiously, to win them greater political and social rights. This latter was a tall order—it took decades for British Jews themselves to achieve full civic equality. Montefiore scored his biggest success when, in the wake of persecutions of Damascus Jews after the blood libel of 1840, he won a royal firman granting equality to Ottoman Jewry.

Here as elsewhere, Montefiore's actions reflected his triple identity: a Jew seeking to improve the lot of his people, an Englishman seeking to further the Empire's interests in the east, and a humanitarian seeking to establish basic principles of justice and equality across national borders.

The last is among the most thought-provoking threads in Green's richly-drawn tapestry.  For centuries, Jewish communities had offered each other mutual support and protection. But now the combination of new technologies (telegraph, newspapers, steamships) with democratic politics and the desire of British and French imperialists to see themselves as forces of progress gave a new complexion to self-help.

Like the Court Jews of old, Montefiore gained entry to palaces and ministries by dint of his wealth and connections; unlike them, he credibly represented not only Jewish concerns but national interests and enlightened public opinion. In his unrelenting philanthropic efforts, too, he was a transitional figure. His efforts in Palestine went beyond traditional alms-giving to the building of institutions; at the same time, for better or worse, he avoided imposing Western rationalism and discipline on his local beneficiaries.

By the time of his death in 1885, Montefiore had achieved a hitherto unimaginable degree of celebrity and public adulation. Both his successes and his failures were intimately connected to the emergence of transnational humanitarianism and the first stirrings of global Jewish politics in the modern era. Today's circumstances are very different, the challenge of leadership the same and no less urgent.  

Alongside the centennial of the kibbutz movement, another, humbler jubilee is being marked: the 80th anniversary of Ha-kibbutz Ha-dati, the religious-kibbutz movement.  A unique blend of nationalism, socialism, and religion, it has generated a legacy whose significance reaches well beyond its sixteen member communes.

The kibbutz movement as a whole was, from its inception, deeply committed to religion—that is, the Tolstoyan religion of labor. The religious kibbutzim strove to wed this new religion with the old one, and thus to remake both. The aim was a return to the land that would at once revitalize the ancient moral-religious energies of the Torah and issue a spiritual challenge to secular Zionism. 

Historically, the organized movement emerged from the coalescence of two groups. One was made up of German adherents of modern Orthodoxy whose religious-Zionist ethos went hand in hand with commitments to science and reason, universal ethics and worldly accomplishment, reworked in a decidedly anti-bourgeois key. The other was the Eastern European religious-worker movement (Ha-po'el Ha-mizrahi), deeply influenced by Hasidism; for these Jews, social justice was a handmaiden to redemption and class struggle was secondary to transforming the human heart. Together, the two groups fashioned an ideal of agrarian halakhic community, aspiring to care not only for the individual's spiritual improvement but for the welfare of society as a whole amid the changed conditions of modern life.

Ten religious kibbutzim had been established by 1948. Five were destroyed and later rebuilt. Today there are sixteen, almost all of them within Israel's pre-June 1967 borders. Although many members sympathize deeply with the settlers in Judea and Samaria, the movement is also one of the few sectors of Israeli society in which one hears left-wing voices speaking in religious cadences. Indeed, it has from the start produced an array of impressive thinkers whose social and religious philosophy retains much of its power even as the movement's economic philosophy fades.

No democracy serves better than Israel as a laboratory testing the limits of civil liberties under traumatic conditions. The results are sometimes incoherent, but the common denominator is that, so long as lives are not endangered, freedoms are mostly safeguarded.   

Some recent illustrations: a Jewish extremist was not prosecuted for holding up a sign calling the president a traitor, whereas another fell afoul of the law for advocating on the radio the expulsion of Israeli Arabs. A Galilee-based Islamist has not been charged for urging Arab students to sacrifice themselves as anti-Israel shahids [martyrs]. Left-wing organizations face no restrictions on gathering or disseminating damaging data about the army, and radical groups may encourage conscripts not to serve.

A story now making headlines and exciting controversy in Israel was initially presented as another civil-liberties conundrum, but turns out to be knottier. It involves Anat Kam, a twenty-three-year-old budding journalist who as a corporal doing obligatory army service unlawfully copied 2,000 highly classified documents onto a (now missing) computer disk. Kam provided a copy to Uri Blau, a reporter for Haaretz, who wrote a controversial magazine piece claiming the army had unlawfully killed two Islamic Jihad terrorists.

According to her attorneys, Kam copied the material because she thought a war crime had been committed. After examining the facts, however, Israel's attorney general certified that the mission in question was perfectly legitimate. Kam is now facing trial; Blau is negotiating to return the stolen material in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

It is a political-science truism that popular commitment to civil liberties can fall by the wayside when abstract principles need to be translated into practice. In the United States after 9/11 and in Britain after the July 5, 2005 bombings, the ideal of cherishing civil liberties while tightening security became an everyday democratic dilemma. What emerges from Israel's all too plentiful experience is that, despite the country's security predicament, the default position of its legal system is to provide citizens with the same protections enjoyed in other Western democracies in peacetime.

Keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists is the announced goal of the Nuclear Security Summit meeting yesterday and today in Washington, attended by representatives of over 40 countries including Israel. It has its work cut out for it. Approximately 35 pounds of uranium-235 (about the size of a grapefruit) or nine pounds of plutonium-239 is enough to make a working nuclear bomb, according to the political scientist Graham Allison. Today, an estimated 4.6 million pounds of nuclear material is dispersed in 40 countries.

Unfortunately, Egypt and Turkey are set to sideswipe the nuclear-terrorism meeting to criticize Israel's reputed nuclear-weapons capability. Faced with this prospect, Prime Minister Netanyahu opted to stay home and send Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in his stead.  It appears that Israel will not be mentioned in the final communiqué being crafted by the Obama administration. Next month, however, Arab states attending a meeting of parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) can be counted on to equate Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity with the unambiguous and real present danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

The one true link is between the menace of nuclear terrorism and Islamist extremism. A.Q. Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, and an array of his associates provided knowhow to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. For its part, Tehran maintains a murky relationship with al-Qaeda and open ties with Hizbullah and Hamas. These organizations have shown no compunctions about engaging in anti-civilian warfare. That may explain why the American President calls a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist organization the biggest threat to the Western world. Yet neither Iran nor North Korea is on the table at today's Washington summit.  

"Jewish leadership" is a phrase whose meaningful content seems to grow paler with each new workshop aimed at cultivating it. ("Where are the Jewish followers?" quipped the late Arthur Hertzberg.) Since Moses, however, one true test of leadership has been the willingness to share the worst fate of one's followers. Such a leader was Leo Baeck.

Born in 1873, the son of a traditional rabbi, Baeck studied at the Conservative seminary in Breslau before moving in 1894 to Berlin, where he studied with the philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey and was ordained by the Reform-oriented Hochschule. His career reflected the mix of traditional learning and piety with broad philosophical horizons and the ethical universalism of Reform Judaism.

Baeck's major work, The Essence of Judaism (1905), was a powerful retort to the Liberal Protestant denigration of Judaism as so much archaic legalism. Christianity, Baeck contended, was a "romantic religion" and, unlike Judaism, unequipped to meet the moral challenges of the real world. That confidence in Judaism's moral resources would in time be sorely put to the test.

A preeminent figure in German Jewry under increasingly grim conditions, Baeck became in 1933 the president of a newly-formed umbrella organization promoting Jewish self-help, education, and welfare. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, he headed a successor organization appointed by the Third Reich: essentially, the first Judenrat. He continued teaching and preaching until his deportation in January 1943 to Theresienstadt. Surviving the war, he moved in its aftermath to London, where he remained a leader of Reform Judaism and a prolific writer and lecturer until his death in 1956, declaring in 1947 that it was still the responsibility of the Jews "to stand in opposition to the very last day, until the Kingdom of God reigns in the world." 

In Theresienstadt, Baeck had chosen not to tell his fellow prisoners what he already knew about the fate of deportees to the East, judging that it would be too much for them to bear. In retrospect that decision has been criticized by some, by others justified or at least forgiven. One thing, though, is certain: up to 1939 and perhaps even later, Baeck could easily have left Germany, having received repeated invitations to the U.S. But even as he worked to facilitate others' emigration, he chose to stay, willingly sharing in the suffering of his people—and thereby bequeathing a powerful teaching to Jewish leaders who would follow him.

David Weiss Halivni sits in the National Library in Jerusalem working, as he has done for decades, on his multivolume commentary to the Talmud.  His lifelong immersion in the Talmud began in his hometown of Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1944, at age seventeen, he was sent with his family to Auschwitz and a series of labor camps, and emerged a lone survivor. After the war he made his way to New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, quickly establishing himself as one of the premier Talmud scholars of the age. 

Like most academic talmudists, Halivni approaches the text with a deep sense of the many editorial hands through which they have passed—of their being products of history. Unlike most of his colleagues, though, he explicitly links his historical work to his theological concerns. Halivni's vision is spelled out in his 2007 book Breaking the Tablets, now newly released in Hebrew translation.

For Halivni, all of Jewish history and creativity has taken shape in the shadow of rupture, destruction, and shattering. The sacred texts themselves, in their gaps, incoherences, and inconsistencies, bear the marks of this shattering, the product of one historical catastrophe after another. Just as the rabbis of the Talmud and their successors labored to heal the fissured traditions they had inherited, the task of today's textual scholars is similarly to draw as near as they possibly can to the original revelation at Sinai.

Halivni believes in that revelation, even as he believes that his critical reconstruction of the tradition puts genuine limits on the reach of rabbinic authority. Very much a believing Jew, he gives haunting expression to his abiding faith in the essay on prayer that opens Breaking the Tablets and that returns us in the end to the texts and traditions that, with all their scars, endure.

Passover marks the anniversary of humanity's longest-running experiment in freedom. Another celebrated experiment—the kibbutz—kicked off its centennial on the first day of the holiday.  In the hundred years since ten men and two women obtained land from the Jewish National Fund for their commune, Degania, kibbutzim have been the scene of sacrifice, achievement, heartbreak, decline, and attempted renewal. All aspects are central to the story of Israel and Zionism.

Kibbutzim never accounted for more than a fraction of Israel's population; their significance lay in the leaders they produced, their central role in the ruling Labor Zionist movement, and their sharp ideological profile.  In coupling agrarianism, collectivism, and a wholesale critique of Diaspora life with a commitment to Hebrew, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people, they proved beyond a doubt that Zionism was, indeed, a revolution.  

The founders of the kibbutzim were certainly rebels, but the very ferocity of their rebellion was a measure of their deep connection to all that they opposed.  Their best thinkers, like A.D. Gordon and Berl Katznelson, produced some of the most inspiring ideas of Jewish modernity. Yet with time the fervor waned.  The founders had been soaked in Jewish culture and pathos; for their children, raised to be farmers and soldiers, Jewish tradition and the struggles of their forebears were distant memories at best.

By the 1980s, the Labor party was no longer the vanguard of Israeli society, and in the meantime the relentless demands of collective life and the inability of central planning to defy the laws of economics had plunged the kibbutzim into crisis. Many privatized themselves, economically and socially; others selectively adopted free-market elements. By the turn of the millennium, out of 280 kibbutzim, only 30 operated according to the classic model. The ability to adapt has been impressive—as is the number of kibbutz children who still volunteer for combat—but the movement's societal presence is a shadow of its former self. 

The privatizations that have saved kibbutzim—and other Israeli institutions—from financial ruin bring their own costs.  Kibbutz collectivism expressed not only a particular vision of social equality but also the solidarity necessary to maintain Zionism in any form. Today, a range of ventures, from urban kibbutzim to eco-villages to pluralistic study institutes, draw on the energies and teachings of the movement. Even if, like all utopias, the classic kibbutzim could not maintain the burden of their dreams, in their successes as in their failures they continue to prod the Israeli consciousness.   

Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace yesterday to ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament on April 12. New elections will take place on May 6. At the moment, the Conservative party under David Cameron is leading Brown's Labor party in the polls; the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg, are in a strong third position.

The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.

As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies. 

What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.

Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.

Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."  

Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.

Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.

Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.

"Is Modern Orthodoxy an Endangered Species?" This was the question posed at a conference yesterday in Jerusalem. Some speakers suggested that the very term "Modern Orthodoxy" doesn't fit the Israeli context or even accurately describe this slice of Jewish life. But what, indeed, is it?

Like nearly all denominational labels, this one is a product of the ideological and political debates of the 19th century, as the radical options posed by modernity—including the possibilities of assimilation without conversion to Christianity and of political self-determination—scrambled traditional categories as never before. In this unprecedented situation, adherents of tradition in general and of traditional Jewish law (halakhah) in particular became one party, now called "Orthodoxy," vying with others for adherents and authority.

Yet it never was a uniform party but rather, in the words of the historian Jacob Katz, "A House Divided." A key issue was, and remains, whether one could be Orthodox and still accept or even welcome elements of modernity and Western culture. Those answering yes became what are known in Israel as Religious Zionists and in the U.S. as Modern Orthodox. But the debates hardly ended there. Which elements of modernity? To what extent, and with what if any qualifications?

The debates themselves point to what makes Modern Orthodox Jews so interesting—namely, their willingness to ask basic questions of self-definition—and simultaneously so anxious for their future. The anxiety is not without reason. In the U.S., though the Modern Orthodox are solidly entrenched as a social group and a way of life, they are embroiled in often divisive internal debate over, these days especially, the opportunities and limits of feminism, and are under steady challenge from a self-confident right wing.

In Israel, the Religious Zionists are analogously riven, not only over feminism but also over loyalty to the state and army, the scope of rabbinic authority, the place of universal ethics, and more; meanwhile, ultra-Orthodoxy has demonstrated a capacity for mobilization that has marginalized the Religious Zionists within the very institutions, including the Chief Rabbinate, they themselves created. Recent years have seen the rise of a powerful new ideology, Haredi-Leumi (ultra-Orthodox nationalist), which affirms Zionism but rejects Western culture.

At yesterday's conference, the speakers thus had much to worry and to complain about. But they also had much to celebrate: the revolution in women's Talmud study, an efflorescence of religious literary and artistic creativity, and the fruits of social activism. Overall, the picture was of intellectual and cultural flourishing alongside social and political beleaguerment: not exactly a new phenomenon in Jewish history. Small in number, the modern (and post-modern) Orthodox continue to play a crucial bridging role between tradition and the larger world, which makes their internal debates among the most consequential in Jewish life today.

Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.    

The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.

At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.

To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."

In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.

And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.  

It is hard to think of another classic Jewish text reprinted, rewritten, and re-imagined as often, or as divergently, as the Haggadah. The Passover Seder is the most ubiquitous Jewish observance—fully three-quarters of American Jews participate in a Seder of some kind, as do 80–95 percent of Israelis. The abundance of Haggadot, in other words, reflects the ubiquity of the observance.

Of course, the Haggadah has long been a mirror of Jewish history. Once its text had stabilized by the dawn of the Middle Ages, it became the object of lavish and continuing attention on the part of commentators, illuminators, illustrators, and translators. The advent of printing made it even more available and even more open to interpretation.  Because the basic text and structure have remained more or less in place, the many versions offer snapshots of their times and places.

Today that historical diversity is in overdrive. The number of new Haggadot produced every year is overwhelming. Even more dazzling, or dizzying, is the range of perspectives they exhibit: rabbinic, academic, New Age, feminist, ecological, neo-Hasidic, and on and on.  

Through the Haggadah and the Seder, wrote the late Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, "the memory of the nation is annually revived and replenished, and the collective hope sustained." Yet precisely that sense of the collective, not to mention its celebration, seems absent from many of today's Haggadot, even the best of them. Instead, the journey of Passover is increasingly, intensely, presented as personal and subjective. Here again the Haggadah serves as a mirror of the times.

If today's radically diverse Haggadot seem to strain Jewish collectivity to the breaking point, will tomorrow's witness a rebound? There are grounds for hoping so, provided the shared center holds: the calendar, the set of practices, and the old text itself, read, interpreted, reinterpreted, and then read—and sung—once again.

When Jews the world over sit down next week to mark the birth of Jewish history, matzah will figure prominently at the table. Matzah baking is an exacting task; according to traditional law, the entire process, from first kneading to exit from the oven, must be accomplished in 18 minutes flat, with not a speck of leaven in sight. For thousands of years, these specifications and others were laboriously met by hand. Yet this most ancient food has a modern history, too.

The first matzah machine was invented in 1838 in France. With rabbinic approval, the technology moved steadily eastward.  The first vigorous opposition arose in Galicia in the late 1850's, as questions about whether the technique met halakhic standards erupted into heated and often personal polemics.  But the fight for and against did not always divide along predictable lines. Some moderate rabbis hoped that opposing the machines would help confirm their traditionalist bona fides, while some staunch traditionalists favored the machines precisely for their elimination of human error. 

The socio-economic arguments cut both ways, too. To some, the machines harmed the unskilled laborers whose livelihood derived from matzah-baking. To others, the lower prices made possible by the machines eased the masses' economic burdens. 

Meanwhile, in America, even those rabbis skeptical of machine matzot judged that they were better than nothing for the nation's many unlettered Jews. In 1888, Behr Manischewitz, an astute and pious immigrant from East Prussia, opened a matzah factory in Cincinnati. Soon facing local competition, he cut costs, improved quality, and burnished his image. His factory introduced the first square matzot, unmistakable products of industrial automation. Advertising his technology to English readers, he simultaneously won rabbinic endorsements in Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals. 

Over time, Manischewitz and his competitors—Streit, Horowitz-Margareten, Goodman—created a distinctively American matzah for a a distinctively American Passover: a holiday coming to be seen less as the birth of a particular nation than as a celebration of freedom in general.

What comes to mind when you think about great moments of crisis in U.S. foreign policy? The Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, Iran's seizure of American hostages? Or, perhaps, Israel's decision to build residential housing in northeast Jerusalem?

Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.

Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.

The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.

Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.

Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.

In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.

Against a background of sharp disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem, the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee winds down today.

On Monday, the 7,500 delegates—Jews, Christians, African Americans, as well as European and Canadian activists—heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare that the United States would tell Israel the "truth" when "difficult but necessary choices" had to be made. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama. Delegates from all 50 states planned to spend Tuesday on Capitol Hill speaking with their respective Senators and Members of Congress.

But what is AIPAC, and what does it mean to be pro-Israel at a time when many American Jews are said to be discomfited by actions of the Israeli government and tensions with Washington?

Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political-action committee created to give money to friendly politicians. Nor is it a foreign lobby. Founded in the 1950's, AIPAC aimed at becoming America's premier, bipartisan, homegrown pro-Israel pressure group. The group's incumbent president is usually a communal leader, Republican or Democrat, with strong ties to the administration then in power. Its current head, Lee Rosenberg from Illinois, was among Obama's staunchest Jewish supporters during the 2008 campaign.

But AIPAC has also become a lightning rod for the animus of those who essentially oppose all Israeli security policies while insisting they favor the country's "right to exist." In The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987), the journalist Edward Tivnan charged AIPAC with unprecedented influence over Congress. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), the "realist" academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt updated and amplified Tivnan's critique, positing that an all-powerful lobby was "silencing any debate at all" on the Middle East, rendering impossible the proper pursuit of American interests, and, through its blind support of Israel's West Bank policies, helping to foment anti-American terrorism.

In reality, AIPAC's leadership includes both supporters and opponents of Israel's West Bank policies. What the organization embraces is a pro-Israel model that leaves to Israelis themselves decisions of existential consequence, reached through the consensus of the country's body politic. AIPAC thus emphatically favors a two-state solution; insists on direct talks between Arabs and Israelis; holds the Palestinians to be the recalcitrant party; and robustly rejects any outside imposition of a "solution."

Is this any different from the model embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and confirmed in survey after survey of national opinion?

A different sort of book launch took place yesterday at New York's Park Avenue Synagogue, a flagship of the Conservative movement. Being celebrated was the release of a long-lost novel left unfinished at the time of the author's death 60 years ago. The author was Milton Steinberg, who once served as the synagogue's rabbi and was among the most influential American Jews of the 20th century.  

Steinberg's early thought was molded by three teachers. At City College, the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen imbued in him a commitment to philosophical rationalism. Rabbi Jacob Kohn taught him that the life of the mind was inconceivable without faith in the very existence of truth. At the Jewish Theological Seminary, he became a disciple of Mordecai M. Kaplan.

Kaplan's monumental work, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), marked the summit of what a recent historian has called "sociological Jewishness." Rescuing non-Orthodox American Judaism from the tepid pieties of ethical universalism, this new dispensation recast Jewish identity and practice in functional terms as a way of maintaining and preserving such American values as pluralism, social justice, and civil society. Sidestepping the hard questions of theology, sociological Jewishness held sway over Conservative and Reform Judaism for decades.

Steinberg's The Making of the Modern Jew (1933) was written in the spirit of Kaplan's desire to combine critical and historical thinking about God and religion with an embrace of Jewish peoplehood, history, and moral concern. In his best-known and still popular work, the novel As a Driven Leaf (1939), the figure of Elisha ben Avuya, a talmudic sage whose mysterious persona has tantalized scholars and skeptics for centuries, dramatizes the tensions between reason and faith. By the novel's end, it is clear that reason cannot live without faith—albeit a faith couched in terms of "a pattern of behavior" for an ethical life, hardly the stuff of prophecy and martyrdom.

Steinberg was an eloquent and prolific writer and lecturer, and his mix of a reasonable deism with a commitment to Jewish life and ritual made him one of American Judaism's most popular expositors. But in his final years—he died at the age of just forty-six—his tone shifted. For him, as for others, the Holocaust shattered confidence in human reason and its ability to face evil. He found an echo to his questions in the Christian thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, began to study mystical texts, laid greater emphasis on prayer, and in a 1949 address called for a return to theology. His last, posthumous work was titled Anatomy of Faith.

Steinberg's lesson, wrote his friend Arthur A. Cohen, was that "any authentic Jewish theology must combine the wise innocence of the Jew, the intellectual rigor of the Greek, and the irresoluble ambiguity of the modern Christian." To this we might add another, central element: a commitment to the Jewish people, past, present, and future.

Early next week, an extraordinary private collection will go on display at New York's Yeshiva University Museum, before heading off in the fall to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The Braginsky Collection of illuminated manuscripts, ketubot, megillot, and printed volumes is not only visually ravishing but deeply instructive. 

The exhibit's many items created in Central Europe in the 15th-19th centuries demonstrate a vibrant visual culture in communities seldom thought of as hotbeds of cultural openness and artistic energy.  They are complemented by beautiful objects produced by Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to India, and from Livorno, Italy, a major center of Jewish publishing in the 17th-19th centuries.

Women regularly figure in the collection's pieces, not only as subjects but as participants and creators. A 19th-century Haggadah is the only known Hebrew illuminated manuscript produced by a woman, Charlotte von Rothschild. Even more striking, and also on display separately at the museum, is the earliest known illustrated Megillah, dating to 1564, named for the scribe who wrote and decorated the text, a Venetian woman named Estellina.

Illustrations aside, a random walk—or Internet scroll—through the works in the Braginsky Collection yields a vista of centuries of learning and invention:  a 13th-century halakhic compendium written in pellucid Hebrew by a philosophically-minded Italian physician; a 17th-century Torah commentary by the kabbalist Shalom Shabazi, the greatest of the Yemenite Hebrew poets; a beautifully illustrated manucript edition, done in Amsterdam in 1752,  of Massekhet Purim, a parody originally written in the 13th century by the Provençal scholar Kalonymos ben  Kalonymos.

Exhibits like this new one and last year's display at Sotheby's of the magnificent Valmadonna Trust, together with the scholarly efforts that underlie them, increasingly put to rest the cliché that the Second Commandment made Jewish visual culture impossible. Not only did Jews commission, write, and illustrate these works, they regularly created visual commentaries reflecting their own attitudes toward both the texts and the surrounding culture, enhancing and deepening the age-old Jewish love affair with words. 

Is Jewishness a matter of belief, or of belonging? The question, which agitates many Jews and non-Jews in today's multicultural world, is in fact very old—and it has been illuminated by recent scholarship into the relationships among Judaism, Christianity, and the religions and rulers of the later Roman Empire. 

The traditional image of Judaism as Christianity's parent has long given way to an image of two competing interpretations of ancient Israelite religion and its spiritual legacies. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., these two emergent religious communities, in all their permutations, would develop in the shadow of imperial Rome.

How and when did they part? In the judgment of some scholars, by the time the editors of the New Testament finished their work in the 1st century, they no longer saw themselves as Jewish. For others, the decisive change was the conversion of Constantine, and with him the Empire, in the early 4th century.  What had begun in Jesus' time as an intramural Jewish debate now became, fatefully, a debate between Jew and Gentile, powered on the Christian side by the belief that the Hebrew Bible was indeed God's word, but obstinately misread by the Jews.

The debate itself, embodied in rabbinic and Christian polemics, both reflected and influenced how each community read Scripture, observed or rejected the Law, and formulated its conception of God. One scholar, Daniel Boyarin, has gone so far as to maintain that the rabbis' elevation of Torah study and development of a culture of argumentation constituted their answer to the Christian identification of God with the Logos.

In an arresting new book, the Israeli scholar Adiel Schremer reframes the discussion. The rabbinic word for heretic (min), he observes, is used not only for Christians but also for a range of Jewish groups whose common denominator was their dispute with communal solidarity.  For the rabbis, in other words, "heresy" was less about belief and doctrine than it was about group identity in the face of Rome triumphant.  

So is Jewishness a matter of belief or of belonging? The answer, of course is that it is both, and more: a peculiar and indefinable mix that since antiquity has made Judaism's boundaries so subtle, and Jewish existence so provocative and perplexing, to Jews and non-Jews alike.

While attention in Israel and elsewhere is focused on the sudden deterioration in relations with the Obama administration, Iran's seemingly unstoppable push for nuclear weapons, and the possible outbreak of a third intifada, few have commented on the implications of the continued hospitalization in Germany of 81-year-old Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt.

On March 4, Mubarak placed Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif in charge of Egypt's affairs and entered a Heidelberg hospital to have his gall bladder removed. German doctors said they are satisfied with his recovery. Nevertheless, rumors that Mubarak had died sent share prices temporarily falling on Cairo's stock market. After two long weeks of uncertainty, images of the president in his hospital room were finally broadcast Tuesday on Egyptian state television.

In the fullness of time, Mubarak will leave the scene. In his drive to stifle political reform in Egypt, he has ended by strengthening the semi-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood as the most potent and cohesive opposition force. The smart money is on Mubarak's son Gamal succeeding his father as Egypt's next president.

Enter Mohammad ElBaradei. An Egyptian expatriate, formerly the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, ElBaradei has been testing the political waters for a presidential run in 2011.  Remarkably, he has been able to unite behind him most of Mubarak's opponents, from the Muslim Brotherhood to liberal reformist Ayman Nour.

Meanwhile, with the president incapacitated abroad, Egyptian authorities are on edge.  Citing "conditions in occupied Palestine," they have canceled a ceremony set for March 21 to inaugurate the government-restored Ben Maimon Synagogue in Cairo; nor, contrary to expectations, will the synagogue be transferred to the nominal jurisdiction of the remnant Jewish community. Anti-Israel demonstrations were held Tuesday on a number of Egyptian campuses.

What if, against all odds, ElBaradei were to take the helm and set Egypt on a path toward representative democracy? Would relations with Israel improve? Unlikely: ElBaradei himself has called Israel the "number-one threat to the Middle East," and demonization of Zionism and Jews has become, by now, a deeply ingrained feature of Egyptian life. No wonder the prospect of Hosni Mubarak's demise has raised concerns in Jerusalem about, among other things, the durability of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

During Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to Israel last week, a routine bureaucratic approval of additional dwellings for ultra-Orthodox Jews was leaked to the media, thereby setting off a crisis in relations between the two countries. The neighborhood in question, Ramat Shlomo, is said to stand in Arab East Jerusalem. But what and where is East Jerusalem?   

The term is an artificial construct, and a misnomer. Jerusalem is a city built on hills, embedded on a mountain ridge; Samaria lies to the north, Judea to the south.  The city has no grid system—no Fifth Avenue to divide the east and west sides. Until Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War,  parts of Jerusalem were artificially separated along the armistice lines resulting from Israel's 1948 war of independence. North, south, and east Jerusalem lay under control of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

By June 28, 1967 the barriers had been dismantled. The city's boundaries were dramatically expanded beyond the six square kilometers of the Jordanian municipality, including the Old City, to embrace the Mount of Olives with its Jewish cemetery, Mount Scopus and the pre-state campus of the Hebrew University, and 28 nearby Arab villages. All were incorporated into Israel proper.  Today the city's Palestinian Arabs carry ordinary blue Israeli ID cards and make full use of universal health coverage as well as other social benefits. They also enjoy the right to vote in municipal elections, but so far have opted to boycott political participation. 

When the city was first liberated, former premier David Ben-Gurion called for a national effort to settle the empty spaces of metropolitan Jerusalem. Since then, international opposition notwithstanding, all Israeli governments have worked to solidify control of the city by constructing a sequence of strategically placed residential neighborhoods: Gilo and Har Homah in the south; East Talpiot in the east; Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze'ev, Neve Yaakov in the north; and Ramot on the northern flank of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Although some Jordanian government lands and some private property were confiscated, most of the strategic sites chosen were on barren hills.  Only in recent years have small numbers of ideological settlers moved into densely populated Arab neighborhoods. As for Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood at the center of the latest flap, it lies to the west of Ramot—that is, in northern Jerusalem.

And where does the United States stand? Among those bodies opposing Israel's 1967 annexation was the State Department. To this day, the American consulate is housed in an antiquated compound on Nablus Road in east Jerusalem, while a separate facility in the center of the city serves as the consul general's residence. (A newly built consulate in west Jerusalem stands empty.) The embassy is in Tel Aviv, since Washington does not recognize Israel's sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem—west, east, north, or south.

Yet on June 19, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson declared: "No one wishes to see the Holy City again divided." Today, any fair-minded visitor would have to acknowledge that Jerusalem is a mosaic of neighborhoods built on hills and in valleys where Jews and Arabs live in proximity and share common spaces. There may come a time when a borough arrangement will permit them to administer the city conjointly; some Israeli governments have also offered parts of the city to a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, to imagine Jerusalem divisible along east-west lines bespeaks a profound ignorance of both history and political geography.

Today marks the rededication of the Hurva (literally, "ruin") Synagogue, once the jewel in the crown of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Its history, and the debates over that history, open a window onto a fascinating chapter with powerful reverberations today.

In 1700, days after arriving from Poland, a Jewish pietist purchased an abandoned plot known since the 15th century as "the Ashkenazi courtyard," hoping to build a synagogue. When his followers proved unable to keep up their payments, the Arab creditors reduced the site to rubble. In the 19th century it arose again, magnificently, thanks to the efforts of a group known as Aliyat Talmidei Ha-GRA, "the aliyah of the disciples of the Gaon of Vilna."

The Gaon ("genius") Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (1720–1797) is celebrated for his massive erudition, intellectual independence, opposition to Hasidism, and elevation of ascetic study into a supreme religious ideal. No less consequential was his messianic teaching, grounded in the Kabbalah, that redemption could be hastened through natural human efforts, undertaken by a spiritual avant-garde in the Land of Israel. In 1808, a number of the Gaon's disciples emigrated, eventually settling in Jerusalem. Seeing in the "ruined synagogue" a potential nucleus for institution-building, they began negotiations with the Pasha for a permit. The synagogue was finally finished in 1864, a communal nerve center until its destruction by the Arab Legion in 1948.

As for the disciples' heirs and descendants, they split into two camps. Some, decades before Herzl, became active in building the new city of Jerusalem and in forming agricultural settlements. Others, taking their cue from the Gaon's spiritual elitism, preferred the cloister of the study hall and the pursuit of religious purity, creating a network of inward-looking institutions that became the forerunners of contemporary Haredi society.

The unearthing of this episode by the historian Arie Morgenstern and younger scholars has led to spirited rejoinders from those for whom Zionism represented a revolt against traditional religion, and could not have emerged from its very recesses. True enough, one cannot see in the Gaon's program anything like the mass social-political movement of classical Zionism. Yet it is undeniable that this small and unfamiliar group played a significant role in the modern Jewish return to the Land of Israel, and their story usefully complicates and deepens contemporary understandings of that return.

One of the more obscure municipal systems knocked out of commission by late February's blizzards along the Atlantic seaboard were eruvim. These, as the New York Times explained, are networks of poles and wires that construct symbolic boundaries around Jewish communities, thus enabling the observant to carry objects through outdoor public spaces on the Sabbath.

The prohibition against carrying is of ancient vintage, attested in the book of Jeremiah (17:21-22): ". . . and bear no burden on the Sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem; neither carry forth a burden out of your houses." The Talmud (Shabbat 96b) finds it implicit in Moses' command in Exodus (36:6) not to bring donations to the Tabernacle on the Sabbath. The prohibitions are also squarely laid out in the Dead Sea Scrolls, from where, according to the talmudic scholar Charlotte Fonrobert, the term eruv itself, literally "mixing," or sharing of property, entered the rabbinic lexicon. Expanding on the communal idea, the rabbis taught that erecting symbolic boundaries effectively created a neighborhood, a group house with many rooms, or what the late humorist Calvin Trillin termed "a magic schlepping circle." 

Recourse to eruvim grew in response to the shift from the largely pastoral settings of ancient Judaism to the increasingly urban milieu of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In today's metropolises, the recent surge in eruv-building is a further sign of Orthdoxy's mounting self-assurance and, not least, of the desire of Orthodox women not to spend their Sabbaths confined indoors with stroller-age children. Eruvim have also been flashpoints, arousing sometimes bitter opposition both from those fearing an influx of large Orthodox families and from the more stringently Orthodox who see promiscuous eruv-building as yet another falling-away from rigorous observance.

What is certain is that today's eruv-builders have stretched the boundaries of communal living—and of the halakhic imagination. Eruv is, of course, a legal fiction—not, however, a trick to obviate God's command but an effort to retain the form, principle, and abiding authority of the law while adapting it to dramatically changed circumstances. Eruv shapes an imagined community, one whose spiritual and moral power, it is hoped, will be more than a match to its textual richness and legal creativity. 

"I am an American, Chicago born"—Augie March's opening flourish, mixing New World swagger with Yiddish syntax—was the calling card of his creator, Saul Bellow, whose own march through American and world literature came to an end five years ago today according to the Hebrew calendar.

Born in Montreal in 1915 to Russian-Jewish parents, Bellow moved at age nine to Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood. Doubly migrant, the multilingual boy (French, Yiddish, Hebrew) became an avid student  and celebrant of that most American city. After university, wartime  service in the Merchant Marine, years in Europe and New York, he returned to Chicago in 1962 with five novels, including The Adventures of Augie March (1953), behind him and more to come.

Herzog (1966) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), among his greatest, saw the ripening of Bellow's distinctive literary idiom, a mix of extravagant comedy with anguish and of Latinate with Jewish registers of speech, the whole animated by ideas pushed to their limits and contradictions: a mix we take for granted today but that first had to be achieved against, in particular, the massive influence of Ernest Hemingway on American writing. In putting a brake on that influence, Bellow created a new mode of apprehending reality through the power of words.

He also rang the changes on Jewish historical types: the garrulous luftmensh, the amorous shlemiel,  the despairing witness.  He was preoccupied with Jewish fate in its own terms and as a marker for the (often shaky) prospects of Western democratic civilization. Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor, blinded in one eye, is "a registrar of madness" in the unraveling New York of the late 1960's. In his late, brief masterpiece, The Bellarosa Connection (1989), the Jewish fate takes center stage in a deep Bellovian meditation on the Holocaust, America, Israel, and the power and inadequacy of Jewish memory.  

In his declaration of independence, Augie March added that he would "go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way." His creator did.

It was fitting that Benny Begin, son of the late Likud-party prime minister Menachem Begin, should have been the cabinet minister representing Israel's government at the annual memorial service on Monday for Labor-party icon Yigal Allon. On the Zionist political spectrum, the Begins are stalwarts of the Right, whereas Allon was decidedly a man of the Left. Yet the inheritors of their respective legacies share a sense of clarity about Jewish rights in Israel, a desire for genuine accommodation with the Arabs, and an emphatic insistence on defensible borders.  

Allon was born in 1918 in the Lower Galilee and died 30 years ago. A leading figure in the Haganah—the pre-state self-defense underground operated by the left-wing Zionist establishment—he was a founder of its Palmah special-operations unit. The experience made him a lifelong proponent of preemptive military action.

During the 1948 War of Independence, Allon, by now a general, participated in many fateful campaigns, including the liberation of the Negev. Although he left the armed forces in 1950, he continued to be widely viewed as Israel's foremost strategic thinker. Allon never forgave David Ben-Gurion for not having ordered the IDF to capture the Old City and the West Bank during the war. The 1949 armistice lines, he said, failed to provide Israel with strategic depth.

After Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day war, Allon helped form a social-democratic movement that would evolve into today's Labor party. He supported settlement-building where militarily justified while opposing construction near Arab population centers. In 1968 he facilitated the Jewish return to Hebron on both security and religious-cultural grounds. At the same time, he warned that failure either to annex or to disengage from most of the Arab-populated territories would transform Israel into a colonial power.

Allon addressed Israel's topographic and demographic dilemmas in what became known as the Allon Plan. It proposed setting the country's border with Jordan at the Jordan River, fostering a belt of Israeli settlements in a 12-mile strip of land along the Jordan Valley rift, and handing over the rest of the West Bank with its Arab-population centers to Jordan. The plan was never adopted, but Allon's argument that the West Bank needed to be demilitarized, and that Israel ought to control access from the east, is today an essential plank in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support for a two-state solution.

At first blush, the blog reads like any modish commentary on the weekly Torah portion, complete with knowing references to the Mishnah and the building of the Tabernacle in the desert.  Only upon closer examination does it become evident that the discussion of the tabernacle as a medium for drawing nearer to God is a precursor to the claim that, nowadays, God can be worshipped "directly." The blogger is a follower of "Yeshua"—a Jewish believer in Jesus.

In Jewish eyes they are apostates, but a group of "Messianic Jews" living in Israel say they follow authentic Jewish lives in the footsteps of Jesus. Spiritually akin to the Jews for Jesus movement, they differ in one salient respect: they tend not to engage in overt proselytizing. They are also much more informally organized, consisting mostly of local leaders and followers who maintain their faith through personal relationships and e-mail lists. 

No one knows how many believers live in Israel—estimates vary from 5,000 to 15,000; there are said to be a hundred congregations. Many immigrated under the Law of Return or underwent Orthodox conversions upon arrival; some are native-born, and some are married to Christian spouses. 

Though ardent in their faith, Messianic Jews are usually discreet about sharing their beliefs. The immigrants especially have every reason to be cautious, fearing loss of livelihood or citizenship if exposed. As for those who are "out of the closet," they face open and sometimes violent opposition. In December, police charged an Orthodox extremist with bombing the home and gravely wounding the son of a Messianic family in the West Bank town of Ariel. Last month in northern Israel, police arrested two men for setting fire to a car belonging to a Messianic Jew. In Beersheba, after years of harassment, Messianic Jews took the city's Sephardi rabbi and an anti-missionary group to court. Today a judge is scheduled to hear final testimony and closing arguments.

During the 14th and 15th centuries, the bona fides of conversos, Jews forced to embrace Christianity in Spain and Portugal, was always suspect; they were denigrated as Marranos (swine). Some number of them did live double lives: outwardly Christian while secretly adhering to Judaism.  In cloaking their own faith, some Messianic Jews today feel, incongruously enough, that they are Marranos in reverse. 

The logic is questionable at best. Little if anything connects the situation of Jews forced to convert to Christianity upon pain of expulsion or death with Jews who have found salvation through Jesus and yet—perversely, to their fellow Jews—insist on adhering to their identity as Jews. The courts will sort out the issues of law and civil liberties. In the meantime, in a country where identity, citizenship, and religious affiliation are intertwined with still-vivid historical memories, the presence of these Messianic Jews poses a unique challenge to the broadmindedness of Israeli society.

One of the potentially deleterious effects of the digital revolution is a flattening of consciousness—or so some fear. What sort of leveling takes place as we click relentlessly through the endless web? At what point do the words—thoughtful, meaningless, moving, inane—all bleed together? How to maintain any sense of the preciousness of language itself?

Several texts recently come to light manage, each in its own way, to remind us that a whole, irreplaceable world can rest in a few furtive lines found who knows where.

Phrases inked on pottery discovered at an excavation in Israel have been dated to the late-11th or early-10th century B.C.E., making this the oldest known Hebrew inscription. The very existence of these stray words on a potshard stirs wonder at Hebrew's longevity and its connective reach across vast historical divides.

At the Yale Law Library, thanks to the Italian Inquisition's massive confiscations of Jewish books and their metamorphosis into raw materials for bookbinders, a different sort of Hebrew fragment has gone on display. This is a manuscript snippet from Maimonides' monumental halakhic and moral code, Mishneh Torah. In its lines, peeking out from the binding of a 16th-century Milanese law book, it is hard not to see a tangible representation of the historical struggle of Jewish learning to sustain itself and grow, via exegesis and commentary, amid alien majority cultures that have tried, in this case quite literally, to close the book on it.

Finally, a French publisher has published the wartime notebooks of the religious philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). A prisoner of war scribbles his thoughts between shifts of brutal labor, and in these comments—on the indelible traces left by human action, on the power of human touch—we discern the seeds of his extraordinary postwar effort to salvage the ethical core of philosophy and civilization alike.   

In his very last letter to his friend Walter Benjamin in 1940, Gershom Scholem wrote that "every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrenched from the forces of darkness." Against that background of mortal threat to the very survival of the Jewish people, today's worries about information overload must seem trivial indeed. All the more powerful, then, amid the digital torrent, is the charge from the past never to lose sight of, and always to preserve, the essence of what we have and stand for.

Several weeks ago, a well-known Modern Orthodox rabbi in New York announced that a learned young woman serving in his synagogue as a teacher, preacher, pastoral counselor, and halakhic guide would henceforth be referred to as "Rabbah"—the feminine form of "Rav," or rabbi.  In thus effectively ordaining Sara Hurwitz as the first female Orthodox rabbi, Avraham (Avi) Weiss set off a firestorm.  The presiding body of ultra-Orthodox rabbis has ruled that Weiss himself must no longer be called Orthodox; the Rabbinical Council of America, an avowedly Modern Orthodox body, may expel him as well. 

No stranger to controversy, Weiss has bucked establishments before, often in the name of his commitment to a far-reaching inclusiveness that he calls Open Orthodoxy. Several years ago, he established a rabbinical school committed to his philosophy; he is also one of the founders of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, an organization of moderate Orthodox rabbis.  

Women's roles in society are debated almost everywhere, but Weiss's move issues from specifically Orthodox trends as well. One is the historically unprecedented emergence in recent decades of women versed in the sort of traditional learning formerly the precinct of men. Challenging Modern Orthodoxy from the other direction is the so-called "shift to the Right," that is, the growth in size and strength of ultra-Orthodoxy: Jews who are more stringently observant than the Modern Orthodox and far less willing to enter into dialogue, especially on matters of principle, with the outside world.

This story bears significant implications for American Jewry as a whole. Ever since the mid-19th century, Modern Orthodoxy has served as a bridge between the mass of non-Orthodox and secular American Jews and the world of tradition, complete with its passion, its scholarship, and, yes, its strangeness.  If, as some suggest, the ordination of Modern Orthodox women will mark the Rubicon beyond which lies a new, "post-Orthodox" age, the bridge may give way to fresh barricades in the already fractious contests pitting Jews against fellow Jews.

Nearly 35 years after her death, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) continues to spark discussion and reflection.  For Israeli readers in particular, the recent appearance in Hebrew translation of her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as well as of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's massive biography (1982, rev. 2004), brings home her continuing ability to frustrate and provoke.

A consummate German-Jewish intellectual, Arendt received a thorough philosophical training, studying (and more than studying) with Martin Heidegger and writing a dissertation on Augustine's theory of love. The rise of Nazism drove her from metaphysics to politics; she became active, first in Germany and later after fleeing to France, in Zionist efforts to publicize Nazi anti-Semitism and to spirit children to Palestine. In 1941 she managed to make her way to New York, where she became a leading figure in the circle of exiled scholars who left an indelible mark on American intellectual life.

In her new life, Arendt wrote for Jewish and general periodicals, worked to recover Jewish cultural treasures scattered over Europe, taught, and in 1951 completed The Origins of Totalitarianism. That work provided, for many, a compelling framework and overarching rationale for the struggle against Soviet Communism, a tyranny of the Left that, she wrote, shared with Nazism, its apparent nemesis on the Right, a diabolical communion of ideological intention and administrative method. 

Her fascination with bureaucratic evil was key to her most controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she coined  the phrase "the banality of evil" to characterize the Nazi enterprise of mass-produced death. Even more contentious was her merciless criticism of Jewish wartime leaders as mere collaborators with the Nazis. For this she was roundly rebuked not only by Jewish public opinion but also by old friends and colleagues on the Left. Gershom Scholem wrote her that, like so many intellectuals, she was bereft of ahavat yisrael:  basic affection for and solidarity with the Jewish people.

At times passionately attached to Jewish life and Zionism, at others deeply hostile to any form of group identity, Arendt seems never to have found a satisfactory way to reconcile a commitment to Jewish survival with the moralism and call to individual conscience that for her made up a Jewish sine qua non. Her strong-mindedness lent drama to her struggles—hence, perhaps, their enduring fascination for subsequent generations still trying to square the same or similar circles, as well as her appeal to those seeking a comfortable exit from Jewish particularity. Her finest writings express an ennobling conception of politics as the collective effort to reflect on, and enact, civic equality and freedom: totalitarianism's opposite.

The hate-fest known as "Israeli Apartheid Week," now taking place in cities around the globe, is bound to affect the morale of Diaspora Jews, if in different ways. Some may be induced to lower their pro-Israel profile, others to dissociate themselves from the Jewish state and its policies, still others to affirm their solidarity ever more resolutely.

We have come a long way since the 1967 Six-Day War. Before that watershed event, Diaspora Jewish life was not noticeably animated by a vigorous commitment to Israel's cause. But the country's spectacular victory in war, in tandem with the energies released by the burgeoning mobilization to free Soviet Jewry, as well as with larger societal trends favoring ethnic assertion of all kinds, served to deepen and solidify the connection between the Diaspora and the Zionist enterprise. In America, pro-Israelism became the defining characteristic of Jewish life.

Over the ensuing decades, however, the stubborn refusal of the Arab-Muslim war to abate, and the decisive turn of the United Nations and the international Left against the Jewish state, have led to a palpable wavering in elite Jewish opinion—and, today, signs of an actual pulling-away. This is manifested at the extreme in the open involvement of a minuscule but vocal number of Jews and Israelis in the Arab cause. More worrying is the articulation of feelings of "exhaustion" on the part of some Jewish liberals and the silent but palpable disengagement of many others from Israel's cause.

Since most American Jews have never visited Israel, it is perhaps no wonder that they are at a loss to defend its strategic policies against daily barrages of criticism. Already a decade ago, a survey by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen found that relatively few American Jews felt "extremely attached" to Israel.  Today, the extent of disaffection may be gauged in a symptomatic proposal for launching a "Birthright Diaspora" program to vie with Birthright Israel for the allegiance of young Jewish adults (including Israelis).   

A mirror phenomenon can be detected among some Israelis who, isolated and resentful, have either misplaced their sense of connectedness to the Jewish people at large or seem positively determined to cut the thread binding them to what one writer derides as Israel's "symbiotic relationship" with the Diaspora.  Since we are no longer one, if we ever were, why pretend to an interest in the perpetuation of Jewish life abroad? Why promote, in the manner of Tel Aviv's Beit Hatfutsot museum, the idea of a "global Jewish people"?

Such are a few of the contending currents of the present situation—a situation that planners of "Israel Apartheid Week" and similar excrescences must hope will issue in an ever greater splintering of the Jewish collective. As against the massed anti-Israel forces, one can but posit an oddly cheering fact: the more they rail, the more they testify to the bedrock persistence of the oneness they strain to obliterate. Acknowledged, unacknowledged, or repudiated, Zion was, is, and will likely remain at the core of Jewish civilization.

Unlike Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not have to take a stroll on the Temple Mount to provoke Palestinian Arab leaders into threatening mayhem. Instead, Netanyahu simply announced a comprehensive plan to strengthen Israel's national heritage by rehabilitating and preserving archaeological and historic sites, developing historic trails, and conserving photographs, films, books, and music of archival value. "A people," he declared, "must know its past in order to ensure its future."

Unveiled on February 2, the plan was greeted with a yawn by the mainstream Israeli media, mixed with a few deprecating remarks about Jewish chauvinism, and was largely ignored by Palestinians. Not until three weeks later did Arab riots break out in Hebron and spread to Jerusalem's Old City and the Temple Mount, where dozens of Palestinian youths locked themselves in a mosque after hurling rocks at visitors to the plateau.

What happened in the meantime was this. Right-wing Israelis protested when it emerged that neither the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron nor Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem, both of them integral to the civilization and sacred history of the Jews, was on the list of designated sites. On February 21, Netanyahu duly announced their inclusion. But the two sites (whose status remains otherwise unchanged) are in territory claimed by the Palestinian Authority, which views Israeli Jews as colonialist interlopers. PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas promptly warned that Netanyahu's "provocation" could "lead to a holy war." Forget could, said Hamas premier Ismail Haniyeh, urging an intifada: should.

Yet the projected enterprise, whatever missteps may have attended its inception, is both entirely normal and entirely legitimate. It is also an urgent need. The state of Jewish identity in the Jewish state is, paradoxically, shaky. In the private lives of many, Judaism has decreasing significance. Many secular youngsters attend schools where neither Jewish subjects nor Jewish values are high on the curriculum. Meanwhile, among their insular ultra-Orthodox counterparts, civics and Zionism are hardly taught at all. And then there are the post-Zionists, some of whom fully embrace the Arab narrative and see the establishment of their country as "original sin" while others shun any emphasis on the specifically Jewish aspect of their national history.

This, then, is the context in which Netanyahu's call should be understood. Nor is his a lone voice. Natan Sharansky, the new chairman of the Jewish Agency, has launched his moribund organization on a new mission: to build the Jewish people into a connected family—and to link Israelis to their Jewish roots. Both men are saying that the culture, traditions, and historical consciousness handed down through the generations comprise the birthright of the Jewish people. Is this national heritage to be lightly abdicated, and in the name of what?

Iran's nuclear program marches on: an existential threat to Israel—target of Tehran's declared genocidal intent—and an immense strategic challenge to the United States and the West as well as to Muslims, Arabs, and others with a stake in geopolitical stability. The Iranian regime has made no bones about seeing this moment as an historical hinge, marked by the rout of American influence and the rise of Tehran as the region's dominant power. As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed last week at his meeting in Damascus with the complaisant Bashar al-Assad, Hassan Nasrallah, and Khaled Mashal, the Americans "have reached a dead end. They once wished to rule over the entire Middle East. Now, they . . . are leaving their reputation, image, and power behind in order to escape."   

As Western options visibly narrow, the fault lines of Western resolve are increasingly evident. Internal disagreements abound on the precise nature of the Tehran regime and the need to contain its ambitions. The failure to form a united front against the ayatollahs is explained by reference to today's neo-mercantile global order: not only Russia and China but even key Western European democracies may make common cause with the U.S. on some issues but are uncooperative or confrontational on others, in no obvious pattern save for the imperatives of national interest and ad-hoc advantage.

Within Iran itself, by contrast, there is the extraordinarily heartening emergence of the Green movement.  In the short term, the effort to crush it has strengthened the hand of the vicious Revolutionary Guards. In the long or (some say) medium term, the opposition could yet gain mass momentum, and with it would grow exponentially the hopes for a better Iran. To be sure, the opposition comprises anti- or non-democratic elements as well as democratic ones, and in any case there is no guarantee that it can prevail soon enough to make a difference. But this merely underlines the pressing imperative of the moment, which is that the current regime must be confronted.

With Washington still bent on avoiding confrontation, however, and still fastidiously refraining from offering even rhetorical support to the opposition, the safer bet is that Iran's rulers will continue to feel emboldened. For Israel—not Tehran's sole or perhaps even its major target, yet certainly its nearest—there could soon be, barring a miraculous turn of events, few if any choices left at all.