Israel

Is Israel’s Labor Party Finished?

What has become of Israel's left-wing Labor Party some five months after its leader, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, abruptly defected to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?

No Ford in Israel’s Future?

With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has initiated a phased withdrawal from its long, largely behind-the-scenes campaign to influence Israeli politics.

Love, True Love, and Statistics

The depth of sympathy for the Jewish state among ordinary Americans ought to be cause for positive amazement. In stark contrast to strikingly negative European attitudes, a far-reaching CNN poll released on May 31 presents an uplifting picture of American public opinion toward Israel.

To Ransom or Not to Ransom?

The PLO's first attack on Israel came when Mahmoud Hijazi and five other terrorists attempted to bomb a water-pump station in southern Israel. Once captured, Hijazi received the second death sentence ever handed down in Israel. Though his sentence was later overturned, the story was far from over.

We Were the Future

Few uniquely Israeli institutions have ever held the world's imagination like the kibbutz: a radical Jewish experiment in communal living, social justice, economic egalitarianism, and the reorganization of family life. Indeed, perhaps the most radical innovation of all was the "children's house" (beit y'ladim).

The Jewish Way in War

How can democracies, acting under the conventions of international law, defeat Islamist terrorists operating by their own benighted rules? How, especially when UN member-states are prepared to enable terrorists by perverting the rules of war and human rights?

American Orthodoxy and Its Discontents

A "case study in institutional decay": that description of Orthodox Judaism in America was offered in 1955 by the late sociologist Marshall Sklare. It has long since entered the gallery of scholarly misjudgments, acknowledged as such by Sklare when events turned out to belie his assessment.

The Russian Wave

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, some one million Jews have come to Israel from the former Soviet Union (FSU), enlarging the country's population by 25 percent and forming the largest concentration in the world of Russian Jews.  They have left their mark in almost every walk of life. And yet, as a group, they are still something of a mystery.

No Springtime for Palestinians?

In his May 19 speech celebrating the Arab Spring, President Obama expressed enthusiasm for the "movements for change" that have been unseating tyrants previously supported or tolerated by the United States. In language echoing that of his despised rival George W. Bush, he adopted as his own the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East.

What Would Ben-Gurion Do?

How would David Ben-Gurion handle himself if he were the one scheduled to meet Barack Obama on May 20 and address a joint session of the U.S. Congress a few days later? That hypothetical question has been aired frequently by Israelis in the run-up to Benjamin Netanyahu's pending appointments in Washington.