Zionism

Yeshiva Revolution

Shaul Stampfer, one of Israel's foremost experts on Eastern European Jewry, is the most unlikely of iconoclasts.  A thin, quiet, unassuming man, he gives the impression that he would have been happy as a simple melamed (elementary school teacher) in the shtetls he describes.

Neologism and Nationalism

There has never been agreement about Zionism.  Not only is the idea of Jewish nationalism controversial, the very word “Zionism” arouses unique passions, as a recent controversy highlights.

Through Night and Fog

My father and I visited Auschwitz for the first time this summer.  It was toward the end of a long trip to Eastern Europe.  We had already gone to the killing fields and forests of Lithuania, and to Warsaw, where my father broke down . . . 

The Last Berber Jews

As a child, the French filmmaker Kamal Hachkar learned the Berber language from his grandparents in Tinghir, a Berber oasis city east of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.  As an adult he discovered that the now exclusively Muslim town once had a substantial Jewish community.

Inventing Pluralist America

With the United States of 2012 more culturally diverse than ever, it is tempting to think that the country’s social pluralism was foreordained.  After all, aren’t we a nation of immigrants?

The Aircraft Plot

Forty-two years ago today, on June 15, 1970, a group of Soviet dissidents gathered at Smolny Airport outside Leningrad.  They had bought all the seats on a 12-passenger aircraft headed 240 miles northwest to Priozersk, near the Finnish border.

Peter Beinart, I Quit.

Peter Beinart's new blog on the Daily Beast titled Open Zion (formerly Zion Square) is dedicated to an "open and unafraid conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future."  But after several weeks of Open Zion, one writer has concluded that its conversation is not, in fact, open—and is not one in which he can continue to take part. Here, he resigns his position. 

Who’s Against a Two-State Solution?

"Two states, living side by side in peace and security." This, in the words of President Barack Obama, is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Washington is fully and determinedly on board. So are the Europeans. The UN and the "international community" vociferously agree. Successive governments of the state of Israel have shown their support for the idea. So far, there is—just as there has always been—only one holdout.