Jewish Political Thought

In this 1968 Commentary article, a self-described feminist reflects on the virtues of separate gender roles in the synagogue and in the Jewish family. Separate gender roles prevent women from relieving men of their communal obligations, lowering the…

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In this classic 1897 essay by Ahad Ha’am—pen name of Asher Ginsberg—the early Zionist thinker provides an analysis of the material and moral conditions of Eastern and Western Jews and calls for a renaissance of the Jewish spirit…

Is Israel’s Jewish identity in tension with its democratic character? Critics of Israel claim that the Jewish state sacrifices its democratic aspirations in order to preserve its distinctive Jewish mission. In this article from 2010, Israeli law scholar…

Why are Jews socialists? Nobel laureate Milton Friedman set out to explore this question in a 1972 lecture before the Mont Pelerin Society. “Jews owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,” Friedman said. And yet,…

Does Bible Criticism leave room for faith? Noted Bible scholar Jon Levenson points out in this 1993 First Things article that the purely secular, critical approach to the Bible of many academics suffers from the same faults as…

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Writing in Tradition in 1965, Rabbi Isaiah Rackovsky explores the tension between the institution of the family, which serves as the foundation of the Jewish way of life, and modernity, its ideas and political institutions. Judaism sets the…

Writing in 1994, Irving Kristol warns about the demographic problems facing American Jews. By the mid-nineties, the American Jewish community was pursuing a path to assimilation through low birth rates and intermarriage. Both phenomena, Kristol argues, were not…

While today Israel enjoys wide support on both sides of the American political aisle, this was not always the case. Late in 1956 the eminent political theorist Leo Strauss took the unusual step of commenting on contemporary…

What is the Jewish understanding of economic justice? Many Jews assume it is one in which property rights are limited for the purpose of redistributing wealth and lessening the economic gap between rich and poor. Indeed, Jewish thinkers…

Understanding the human condition, the essential qualities that make us who we are, shapes how we think about our purpose as men and women created in the image of God.  Searching for distinctive characteristics that separate the human…