Modern Times

The Tribes Speak

Unrest is spreading in the Middle East, but everywhere it displays a unique character. Take Jordan. In an unprecedented public letter to King Abdullah II, thirty-six of the country's tribal leaders have warned that "Jordan will sooner or later be the target of an uprising similar to the ones in Tunisia and Egypt."

The New York Times Revises the Peace Process

"The Peace Plan that Almost Was and Still Could Be": blazoned over the entire cover of the February 13 New York Times Magazine, the sensation-seeking headline comes accompanied by a photograph from the back of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, each with his arm around the other.

Calling David Ben-Gurion

Times like these tend to remind us what a rare thing is great statesmanship. How many leaders are capable of wedding long-term vision with the nuts and bolts of politics and institutions, let alone an understanding of great historical forces with the will to shape them and the wisdom to know the will's limits?

Arab Stirrings

On January 14, the strongman of Tunisia, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in panic to Saudi Arabia after the astonishingly spontaneous, Facebook-driven crumbling of his corrupt regime.

The Iraqi Jewish Archive

To whom do antiquities belong?  For Jews, the question took on flesh in 2003 in the flooded basement of a building belonging to the Iraqi secret police.

A Zionist Who’s Who

The state of Israel, like the Zionist movement in all its forms—political, cultural, artistic, religious—was an astounding collective creation. The famous names are known, as are the slightly less famous.  But what about all the others?

Under Fire

The second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006 forced Israelis to come to grips with the definitive end of the Oslo era and the shattering of two fundamental assumptions about the nature of their conflict with the Palestinians.

The Huguenot Connection

In the darkest hours of the Holocaust, the safest place for Jews in occupied Europe may have been the southern French hamlet of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

Land of the Crescent Moon?

When an Islamist suicide bomber accidentally detonated two of the three explosive devices he had brought to a bustling Stockholm shopping district in early December, Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt urged his fellow citizens in the "Land of the Midnight Sun" not to jump to hasty conclusions about any jihadist connection.  But that may prove tricky.

The DNA Speaks

Are Jews a "nation" or a "people"? The Hebrew term ‘am means both.  Both terms, moreover, have been subjected to disapprobation in our time—although not nearly to the extent of "race," a term that Jews themselves stopped using nearly a century ago. How, then, are we to think about the mounting genetic evidence that points to Jewish biological continuity over time?