Article Archives

Philosophy as a Way of Life

Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom." Yet a glance at contemporary academic philosophy is enough to make one ask, "What's love got to do with it?" How could such dry, tedious, soulless verbal excursions ever have been meaningful to anyone, let alone some of the greatest minds in history?  The answer is that in its origins philosophy was not an abstract theoretical enterprise but a way of being in the world--an exercise of reason in furtherance of a broader spiritual and moral regimen. Restoring this lost perspective was the work of the French intellectual historian Pierre Hadot, who died last week at...

Imagined Communities

"The plain sense of things," Wallace Stevens wrote, "had itself to be imagined." Without imagination, there is no culture, language, or for that matter any recognizably human life. But what happens to the "plain sense of things" in the computer age when, with the emergence of virtual reality and virtual community, imagined life can take over, subsume, or become a substitute for recognizably human life? The question presses itself with special urgency in the case of Judaism and the Jews. A specific people, a specific place, a framework of mitzvot laying emphasis on what we eat, utter, and do: all of these...

The Impresario of Zionism

Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, was born in Budapest 150 years ago next Sunday, May 2. He died at age forty-four in Vienna, four-and-a-half decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. Herzl came into maturity with no particular Jewish learning, no Hebrew, and scant ties to his community. Yet with his top hat, white gloves, and tails, this broadminded Central European journalist with a utopian streak came to be the foremost revolutionary of the modern Jewish world. The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled...

Jordan’s Dilemma

King Abdullah II returned home from Washington earlier this month, having attended a two-day Nuclear Security Summit and becoming the first Arab leader to visit the Obama White House. Photographs showed the king and the president smiling and looking relaxed. Ostensibly, Abdullah urged Obama to put forward his own plan for resolving the Israel-Palestinian "tinderbox." However sincere the king's interests in a settlement may be, they are by no means straightforward. In a subsequent interview with the Chicago Tribune, he predicted that, since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is set to expire in July, and since "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...

Speaking of Hebrew

Over time, successful social transformations lose their capacity to amaze. So it is that we forget just how astounding was the modern revival of Hebrew as a language suitable for all aspects of life. Of course, Hebrew never really died; throughout history it was the written language of scholarship and religious thought, and the spoken and sung language of prayer. This rich and multi-layered legacy was mined by the Zionist writers, linguists, and educators who over decades would painstakingly bring forth the modern Hebrew language. Among the questions they had to settle was how, exactly, to pronounce it. The decision was to...

Muslim Anti-Semitism

The prevalence of deep anti-Semitism in many parts of the Muslim world is one of today's scarier phenomena. To some, it can also seem mysterious.  To be sure, Jews regularly suffered persecution under the Crescent as they did under the Cross, but not with the same sustained ferocity. Nor did Islam ever bring forth a racially-infused hatred of Jews like that of the Spanish Church—or, in our own times, the Nazis. Until, that is, the Nazis themselves got into the act. Since then, and to an extent previously unparalleled in Muslim history, Jews and Judaism have been demonized beyond all proportion...

What the Archaeologist Knew

The ghosts of Qumran have conjured up two distinct communities of modern scholars: the archaeologists who dig in the caves and discover the libraries, and the textual scholars who read and interpret the Dead Sea Scrolls in cavernous libraries of their own. Not many have been able to move with assurance among both. One of them was Hanan Eshel, who died earlier this month at age fifty-two. The author of more than 200 articles and several books aimed at both scholars and the wider public, Eshel synthesized a broad knowledge of classical Jewish texts with rich archaeological experience and a deep...

Polling American Jews

What does the predominantly liberal Asian-American community think of President Barack Obama's policies toward China, particularly on the issue of Tibet?  Where do America's 2.35 million Muslims stand on Washington's conduct of the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan? It's hard to say. Yet minute shifts in American Jewish public opinion are carefully tracked. Why?  Because, says the Hebrew University political scientist Tamir Sheafer,  although comprising at most three percent of the population, America's Jews—well-educated, relatively affluent, and "over-represented" in medicine, science, law, media, entertainment, and politics—are perceived to be an important, well-organized, and powerful interest group. They are major financial contributors to political...

1948: Palestine Betrayed

Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency. This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because...

Remembering the Fallen, and Why They Fell

The ten days from last week's Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) through today's Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) to tomorrow's Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzma'ut) constitute, for Israelis and many Jews worldwide, a passage in which the theme of death and loss plays an inevitably central role. The evolution of that theme over the years has come to be reflected in poetic texts and liturgies whose meaning has itself evolved in Israeli and Jewish consciousness. Perhaps the most famous of these texts is Magash Hakesef  ("The Silver Platter") by the poet Natan Alterman, the centennial of whose birth is being marked this year....