Ethics

Career Corps

The United States has its military academies at West Point and Annapolis. The British put their officers through Sandhurst. But how will the Israeli Defense Forces, a citizen army, train its officers for the 21st century?

Slaughterhouse Rules

Pending approval by its upper house of parliament, the Netherlands will join Switzerland and a handful of other Western countries in mandating that animals slaughtered for food must first be stunned unconscious, generally by a hammer blow to the skull.

Capital Crime. Capital Punishment?

Since its founding, the only person ever to be executed by the state of Israel has been the notorious Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. But the brutal murders of Udi and Ruth Fogel and three of their young children this past March has the IDF weighing the possibility of seeking the death penalty for the Fogels' murderers.

The Tourist’s Dilemma

On the southwest coast of Albania on the Ionian Sea, opposite the Greek island of Corfu, beneath the modern town of Saranda, lies the ancient city of Onchesmos. That ancient city had a synagogue.

Before the Law

The holiday of Shavuot, which falls this year on June 8 and 9, commemorates the giving of the Law. In video interviews conducted by the Israeli media agency Leadel, the prominent legal scholars Suzanne Last Stone and Alan M. Dershowitz explain the differences between Jewish law and Western law, and how their own interest in the former has informed their careers in the latter. —The Editors

Jews and Capitalism

Why are so many Jews discomfited by capitalism—and not merely by the caricature of capitalism as rapacious speculation and exploitative profiteering but by the very idea of organizing an economy along free-market lines?

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.

Sympathy for the Devil

Occupying a place of particular infamy in Jewish collective memory is an 18th-century serial apostate, sexual deviant, messianic pretender, and chameleonic charlatan. His name was Jacob Frank.

Israel and Western Guilt

"Confront Your Privilege." So reads a "subtly coercive" sign on display at tony American liberal-arts colleges. Why coercive? Because, as Wilfred McClay explains in an illuminating recent essay in First Things, what such signs are really telling the students is, "Feel Guilty."