Archive

If I drink coffee at every meeting, I’ll kill someone,” His Beatitude Pierbattista Pizzaballa says when I ask him to join me for an espresso while we talk. Who...

Good news from Jerusalem. For weeks, groups of Jews have ascended the Temple Mount and prayed out loud and prostrated themselves. They are resisting what is colloquially known as...

Jerusalem was awakened this past Shabbat morning by sirens announcing missiles and by the low thud of the guns that intercept them. My friends in the Israeli Defense Forces...

The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto by daniel boyarin yale university, 200 pages, $30 Like a starving zombie, identity politics bites into longstanding left-wing ideas and movements, reforming them...

Resist junk food journalism. Support journalism that nourishes the mind and soul by contributing to our year-end campaign today. First Things is good for the Jews. I know few students...

A few years ago, a friend and I left our yeshiva in the Judean hills to spend Shabbat with some acquaintances studying in Jerusalem’s enormous Mir Yeshiva. We prayed,...

The way to fix well-funded, failing schools is more funding––unless the schools are privately run. Welfare dependency isn’t lamentable––unless the dependents belong to religious sects. Standardized tests are bigoted...

I doubt if we ever come back home,” says Helen, who until recently taught English to second- and third-graders in Mykolaiv, a southern Ukrainian city of several hundred thousand. “Putin...

America has given the world two things: baseball and jazz,” said a great professor of political philosophy one fine New England morning. This erudite patriot wouldn’t mind if I...

Ecclesiastes is a book of doom. In twelve undramatic chapters, King Solomon seems even more stubbornly disconsolate than Job. Empire, wealth, wisdom, virtue, and still “all is futility and...

The Blessing and the Curse:The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Centuryby adam kirsch w. w. norton, 304 pages, $30 The title of Adam Kirsch’s survey of...

About fifteen years ago, on the third or fourth day of Passover, some relatives took me and my brother to a sports bar to get some lunch. One of...

I sometimes think that the hardest part of Judaism is its regimen of self-improvement. Moderate your appetites—no Chateau this-and-that, no Swiss on a reuben, no lobster. Sex is for...

I’ve been in an apartment on a quiet Jerusalem street for the past couple of weeks. Last week I spent Shabbat alone for the first time. Friday night after...

A column about Jewish things. Chanukah is Judaism at its least demanding and most comfortable. We light beautiful candles––two-thirds of American Jews do so at least once––and put them...