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A Palestinian Right of Return?Thursday, August 12, 2010 by Ariela Ringel Hoffman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In the view of two eminent experts, international law does not recognize the right of Palestinian refugees or their descendants to return to their former homes.
Rank RivalriesWednesday, August 11, 2010 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
A bare majority of Americans know that General David Petraeus commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Fewer, surely, would be able to name Navy Admiral Mike Mullen as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In Israel, by contrast, the chief of the general staff of the country's defense forces is a household name—for he is the unique individual in public life who is single-mindedly focused on military security, the reassuring figure, above the political fray, to whom Israelis can look with confidence at times of threat to their national safety.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Walter Reich | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Those who wish for Middle East peace must reckon with the lessons that bitter experience has taught Israelis; here are ten of them.A Life in Letters
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Yuval Saar | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Zvi Narkis, who has died at eighty-nine, was one of the most significant designers of modern Hebrew typefaces, placing his stamp on everything from cheese wrappers to currency to the Jerusalem Bible.Right of Return
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Although certified as Jewish by two rabbinical courts, a backsliding convert to Christianity has been denied Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return—but, in a novel and suggestive ruling, invited to try again.Crescent Rising
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Patricia Crone | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A new book presents early Islam as tolerant, open, and ecumenical—an appealing picture, but false to the historical record.Shoftim: Judgment Call
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by David Hazony | Jewish Ideas Daily » Weekly Portions
"Judges and officers shall you make for yourself in all your gates," we are told at the opening of this week's reading, "and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment." The declaration seems obvious at first blush. Who wouldn't want righteous judges? Yet the Bible—more so, perhaps, than any other text of the ancient world—is singularly attentive to this issue of judges, making it into one of the central demands of the Torah.
Rootless Cosmopolitan(s)Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by Sam Munson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The search for the Next Big Thing is as endemic in the American literary world as in politics and the clothing industry. When it comes to writers, the itch tends to express itself through the excited serial discovery of identifiably new or neglected "voices," preferably young and often of the ethnic or sexual variety: African-American, or second-wave feminist, or, recently, immigrant Russian-Jewish. Members of this last category are taken to include the short-story writer Lara Vapnyar, the music critic Alex Halberstadt, the literary anthologist Boris Fishman, and Keith Gessen, a founder of the cultural journal n+1 and sometime novelist. Whether...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by James Kirchick | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A useful fiction to Western governments, even more useful as a propaganda tool of Arab and Muslim regimes, the term "linkage" masks an empty and dangerous illusion.Grand Delusion
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
When it came to nationalism, the late historian and intellectual Tony Judt kept one set of books for Europe and the world and another, invidious one, for the Jewish state.
