The First Amendment and the Vocabulary of Freedom
Oral arguments in a case involving two Catholic schools sometimes sounded less like a jurisprudential clash over the First Amendment than a synagogue kiddush.
Friendship in the Fields of Moab
Naomi and Ruth have mourned together and are now setting off on the 50-mile journey from the plains of Moab to Bethlehem, toward an uncertain future—alone but side by side.
Could It Have Happened Here? The Implausible Plotting of The Plot Against America
Was America in 1940 primed for an antisemitic leader, as Roth and his adapters would have us believe?
Beauty within Beauty: How Lag BaOmer Stopped a Plague
“One cannot, says Hasidism, have to do essentially with God if one does not have to do essentially with men.”
My Scandalous Rejection of Unorthodox
All of us in the online OTD community have gone through some version of the transformation Unorthodox dramatizes, and we gobble down and fiercely debate every new OTD memoir that hits the shelves, every documentary and movie that comes out.
Maimonides and Medinat Yisrael
Moses Maimonides may have left the Land of Israel for Egypt, but his thoughts on the messianic future are still relevant to the modern Zionist project.
Ivan the Terrible?
A new miniseries from Netflix manages to maintain the tension of the long-decided, if not entirely resolved, case of John Demjanjuk.
Touch: Passover under COVID-19
It makes sense not to touch during a pandemic. But did we truly touch before it and will we after?
Indispensable Man
In his effort to cut David Ben-Gurion down to size, Tom Segev blames him for failures that were not his and gives him insufficient credit for his achievements. A closer examination of the historical record reveals a greater man than the one Segev attempts to dissect.
The War on History
"People have often asked me if something like the revisionist Israeli historiography to which I contributed in the late 1980s exists on the Palestinian side."