Article Archives

America the Biblical

The Greeks did not invent equality. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and the gang famously believed that the rich are different from you and me—not merely because they are shaped by their privileges but because they are actually, literally made of superior stuff.

Gender Trouble

Suddenly, it seems, gender segregation is everywhere in Israel—buses, army bases, Jerusalem sidewalks, Beit Shemesh schoolyards and, above all, the front pages. What is going on here? Why is all this happening now? Let's begin with the second question.

Human Rights and Religious Wrongs

Although the discourse on human rights has a long pedigree, traceable at least to early modern natural rights theory and politics, the philosophical case for human rights against one alternative, religion, has yet to be made.

Among the Literati

Some days, I can't help thinking back 25 years to my high-school French course, which is where I first encountered the concept of the juste milieu—the happy medium—and the difficulty of achieving it. Why is the happy medium so elusive? Why do I more often feel caught betwixt and between or, even among my fellow Jewish-American writers, alone?

Two Palestines, Complete

Some saw history in the making. With jubilation and fanfare Fatah and Hamas agreed last spring in Cairo to form an interim technocratic administration, hold parliamentary and presidential elections by May 2012 and, ultimately, to establish a national unity government.

The Couch and the Confessional

Sigmund Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism, was published in 1939, a year after  he fled, mortally ill with cancer of the jaw, from Nazi-occupied Vienna to London.  The book is famous for its speculations that Moses was not Jewish and that the people he led out of Egyptian slavery murdered him.   

Judaism on Steroids

Ryan Braun, the reigning MVP of baseball's National League, is having a rough offseason. On December 12, ESPN reported that Braun had tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug (PED) after a league-mandated drug test revealed elevated levels of testosterone in his system.

The Whole Damn Deal

On April 2, 1979, President Jimmy Carter recorded in his diary that he had asked Robert S. Strauss to be his Mideast peace negotiator. Strauss answered, "I've never even read the Bible. And I'm a Jew." Observance-wise, Bob Strauss, who spent 50 years as a consummate practitioner of American politics, wasn't much of a Jew.  

The State of Christianity

On a sun-drenched day during the week before Christmas, Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre was crowded with pilgrims from Nigeria. They were taking turns kneeling and praying at a marker on the spot where, sacred history has it, Jesus was crucified, entombed, and resurrected.

Goodnight, Vienna

The Jews of Vienna did not merely understand the world: they took Marx's point and changed it, too. From Freud's psychoanalysis to Wittgenstein's philosophy, from Mahler's music to Herzl's Zionism, they made a unique contribution to modernity.