Leading Figures

The Discreet Coyness of Salam Fayyad

In a recent short article, Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, has reported on his program of building the civic and economic infrastructure of a Palestinian state, a program now into its second year of creating "facts on the ground."

The Cosmopolitans

How many flavors does Zionism come in? The usual answer is three. Naturally, the reality is more complicated than that. And, in a period when Zionism is in serious need of defending and new thinking, some scholars have been complicating it still further.

Declaring Palestinian Statehood

Palestinian political figures, said to be frustrated with the pace and trajectory of peace talks with Israel, have increasingly made noises about taking matters into their own hands and unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state.

Kadima in the Wings

Whether or not Benjamin Netanyahu accedes to American pressure for a renewal of the construction freeze in West Bank settlements, the prospect has created roiling dissension within the prime minister's Likud party and raised the possibility of a split—or, to be more accurate, another split.

Obama and Israel: What Now?

Since the Obama administration's major defeat in the American midterm elections, commentators have been wondering how the new constellation of forces in Washington will affect the president's Middle East peace initiative.

A Jewish Renaissance?

In recent years Israel has become a vast open-air laboratory for experiments in Judaism, re-fashioning rituals, reading old texts through new lenses, scrambling and fracturing familiar dichotomies between secular and religious. Secular yeshivot, mainstream performers singing medieval Hebrew hymns, non-denominational "prayer communities" in hip Tel Aviv, kabbalistic therapy movements, Judaism festivals on once-socialist kibbutzim—something is going on here, but what?

What’s Left?

Usually, when Israelis speak of Left and Right, they are differentiating mainly between security hawks and peace-camp doves—not between liberals and conservatives in general, or in the American or European sense.  By this definition, Israel's left wing is in a sorry state.

Who’s “Right” in Israel, and Who Isn’t

Last month, two dozen followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane marched on the Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, stronghold of the extremist Islamic Movement. They were making the point that Jews have the right to go anywhere in Israel. In the predictable mayhem that ensued, a dozen police were injured and ten Arab rioters were arrested. Sympathetic reports about the "mounting anger of Israel's Arab minority" made the world press, as did portrayals of the Kahanists as Israeli "right-wing activists" and "nationalists." But is that what they are?

The Warrior Rabbi

Praise of military virtue, prominent in the Bible, is almost non-existent in the Talmud, which, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews by the Romans, either ignores wartime feats or re-interprets them as allegories of intellectual or spiritual prowess. The Talmud's relative silence on the subject would prove enduring. Until the second half of the 20th century, with few exceptions, military virtue was consistently depreciated in traditional Jewish thought.

Jews and Their Historians

Over the last two centuries, Jewish identity has assumed an often bewildering variety of forms—religious, political, social, and cultural. One form, insufficiently recognized as such, is the study of Jewish identity, especially as filtered through Jewish history. Its main means of expression is the academic enterprise known as Jewish Studies, a field that in turn comprises a variety of specific schools and thinkers.