Elliott Abrams has served two presidents, working on issues in Latin America, the Middle East, and human rights. In the service of his country, he has always been unabashedly Jewish. Was there ever a tension? How did his Jewish upbringing and Jewish pride shape him for a life in American politics and diplomacy? Abrams talks […]

As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute “The Case for Nationalism,” the participants heard from the great Jewish dissident, thinker, and statesman, Natan Sharansky. Sharansky discussed the ideas of his book, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy; the problem of a world with “nothing to die for,” to quote John Lennon; and the complementarity of the […]

Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Obama administration has come to the point of mulling sanctions on Israel if Israel continues to build settlements. “I’m obviously not going to comment one way or another on reported internal deliberations,” a State Department spokeswoman said. “We’ve made clear our position on settlement activity publicly and that hasn’t […]

The latest episode of “Conversations with Bill Kristol” features Ruth Wisse, the dean of the study of Jewish literature and distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund. As it so happens, Professor Wisse is teaching the advanced institute “Jews and Power” at Tikvah’s New York office this week while her interviewer, William Kristol, is the […]

Tikvah faculty member Rabbi Daniel Gordis writes in his Bloomberg View column of the chilling similarities between the famous Kishniev Pogrom and the slaughter of Jews at prayer in Har Nof. In 1903, in what’s now Moldova, dozens of Jews were slaughtered and many more were raped, disfigured, and tortured. At the Sixth Zionist Congress […]

Three years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Commentary senior editor Abe Greenwald penned an essay for Jewish Ideas Daily on the lessons of 9/11. Greenwald focuses on the realization of the world’s hatred: [T]he Obama White House has issued “guidelines” setting a tone for the American government’s commemoration of September 11 at home and […]

The shtetls were not farming villages; they were merchant towns. Nor were the shtetls Jewish ghettos. Rather, Jews made up half the population. The popular image derived in large part from “Fiddler on the Roof” is romanticized and wrong. Fortunately, a recent book, The Golden Age Shtetl by Yonahan Petrovsky-Shtern, puts these myths to rest by […]

What is the proper relationship between Jews and political power? To what extent should Jews eschew worldly power for the sake of piety? How Machiavellian can Jews allow themselves to be? Two of the Jewish world’s most esteemed intellectuals, Ruth Wisse and Moshe Halbertal, examined these questions for participants in the Tikvah Fund’s Summer Fellowship […]

To begin a close reading of one of Karl Marx’s most important early works, “On the Jewish Question”, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz identified two kinds of emancipation Marx is concerned with. The first is political emancipation, or liberal democracy. But Marx sees that kind of freedom as insufficient; what is needed is “human emancipation.”

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a resolution condemning Israel for, among other libels, “the targeting of civilians.” The resolution never once mentioned “Hamas.” As is so often the case with absurd resolutions against Israel, the United States was the only nation to vote “no.” Why have the European capitals turned against […]