Article Archives

The Azeri Exception

Someone forgot to tell the republic of Azerbaijan that Jews and Muslims cannot live together in peace. Somewhere between twenty and forty thousand Jews reside in that Shiite country, which sits on Iran's northern border and enjoys diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Israel. Can this last, and for how long?

Jumping with Dance

"I don't like that people think Israel: war, guns, army. This doesn't really color who we are."  Thus speaks Ohad Naharin, artistic director of the Batsheva dance company, which recently completed a triumphantly successful round of performances in New York. To tell the story, and the significance, of modern dance in Israel is indeed to add a bright and distinctive hue to the "color" both of the state and of its cultural achievements, among which Batsheva occupies a place of shining honor.

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.

Who is Ed Miliband, and What Does He Want?

With the Conservatives now in power in Britain, the Labor party has been sorting out not only its personnel but its policies, including toward Israel and the Middle East. In his campaign for the party's leadership, in which he narrowly edged out his brother David, Ed Miliband pledged to visit the area to see first-hand "what is happening on the ground."

Was Lenin Jewish?

The Bolshevik Revolution undertook to change history. In line with that aim, its leaders set out to control the writing of history. The scholar Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, who was born and studied in the Soviet Union, learned the hard way that history is shaped by how information is managed and made available. Confronting the challenge head-on, he has published a book, Lenin's Jewish Question, about the ancestry of the man who masterminded the 1917 Revolution and became the iron-fisted dictator of the early Soviet state. 

Guaranteed in America

Why should the Netanyahu government place any faith in the incentives offered by President Barack Obama in return for an extension of the moratorium on settlement construction? So grumble some Israelis, pointing for added emphasis to Obama's refusal to honor an earlier, Bush-administration pledge to Ariel Sharon.

Under Islam

In the two decades following the establishment of the state of Israel, approximately 850,000 Jews were forcibly driven out of Arab lands. Their expulsion marked the beginning of the end of 2,500 years of Jewish life in North Africa, the greater Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. Until recently, their story has been largely unrecognized and untold in the English-speaking world.

Who Needs Denominations?

Several weeks ago, an American law professor who serves on his synagogue's search committee for a new rabbi put forward the provocative argument that the process was not only stifling but illegal. The culprit, he wrote, was the highly restrictive role played by national rabbinic bodies.

Bi-Polar Europe

Last month, Western intelligence services uncovered a plot by Arab men holding European citizenship to carry out simultaneous shooting strikes in France, Germany, and Britain.  The United States apparently thwarted the attacks in a targeted killing campaign using drone aircraft against suspected Taliban- and al-Qaeda-backed terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Good Girl Gone Bad

Fifty-five years ago, a star was born: plucky, lucky Marjorie Morningstar, the "American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish." At least, that's how Time described her. Today, depending on whom you ask, Herman Wouk's 1955 novel, Marjorie Morningstar, is either the story of the romantic awakening of a blue-eyed Jewish beauty or a cautionary tale about what happens when you stray too far from your origins.