Article Archives

I’ve Got Friends in Low-lying Places . . .

It would be tragic if Israel were to lose the vote of any of its few reliable supporters at the UN, but that is just what might happen over the next few years—not due to any political intrigue but on account of global warming.

The Sigd Festival Comes Home to Jerusalem

On the Sigd, Ethiopian Jews would walk to a mountaintop and pray to return to Jerusalem.  Now they are in Jerusalem, and the Sigd is a national holiday in Israel.

The Turning of the Torah Tide

“Torah Judaism today retains more of its youth than at any time since the Haskalah.”  Historian Marc Shapiro recently made this remark.  Can he possibly be correct?

A World Without Enemies

In Isaac Babel’s 1931 short story "Argamak," a Jewish intellectual "thirsting for peace and happiness" joins a Red cavalry division made up of Jew-hating Cossacks.  The division commander understands the Jew’s strange choice—and has contempt for it.

Lincoln’s “Limp”

Abraham Lincoln was a transcendently great American president.  Yet Steven Spielberg’s recently released film Lincoln depicts him as a practitioner of political chicanery and manipulation.  Must an individual be calculating and deceitful in order to be a great leader?

Israel’s Friends in Gaza

Hamas was quick to declare victory in the latest conflict with Israel.   A closer look at the price it paid in terms of personnel and equipment shows that its bravado was false.

The Twenty-Seventh Man

On the night of August 12, 1952, a group of Yiddish writers was executed on Joseph Stalin’s orders for the crime of writing while Jewish.  The executions were the tragic culmination of the grand romance between Jewish intellectuals and Marxism.  

Inheriting Abraham

On August 28, Jon D. Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University, spoke with the current class of Tikvah fellows about his latest book, the first volume in the Library of Jewish Ideas: Inheriting Abraham. Here, an edited transcript of the event.

The Peacemaker

About Menachem Begin the thing that I remember most was the way he talked.  Begin wouldn’t say that he was born on the eve of the First World War; he’d say, as he did when a group of us from the Wall Street Journal interviewed him in 1981, that he was born “into” World War I.  

The Tish and the Thanksgiving Table

In a scene in Avalon, Barry Levinson’s cinematic memoir of growing up in Baltimore with his Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents, Uncle Gabriel Krichinsky, brilliantly played by Lou Jacobi, arrives—late, as usual—for the extended Krichinsky family’s annual Thanksgiving dinner.