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, “Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine […]

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 have been some of the chief proponents of socialism since its inception, and socialist economic policy was […]

Why have Jewish men and women succeeded in capitalist economies? How is it that Jews have come to be identified with both capitalism and with anti-capitalist movements like Bolshevism? Has capitalism been good to the Jews? Has it been good to Judaism? In a review of Jerry Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews, National Affairs editor Yuval […]

Friedrich Hayek, noted as one of the twentieth century’s greatest defenders of the free market, also made a case for religious traditions. In theory, the energetic, dynamic, disruptive market would seem to be at odds with the restraint, humility, and anti-materialism of revealed religion. Reflecting on Hayek’s praise for both religious order and market freedom, […]

Tikvah hosted an alumni event in Israel last month and invited the American economic thinker Samuel Gregg to speak. Gregg described the cultural foundations of economic order, and of national prosperity. Writing in Mida, Amnon Lord sees a similarity between these comments and Mitt Romney’s somehow-controversial praise for Israel’s start-up culture in 2012. But, as Lord […]

This week, Christopher DeMuth is leading the advanced institute, “Capitalism and the Future of Democracy.” With his aid, we are focusing on the political economy of Joseph Schumpeter, Michael Novak, Irving Kristol, and Thomas Piketty, as well as looking at the political and economic options before, during, and after the 2008 financial crisis. The long-time […]

Is there an authentically Jewish view of economics? Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution argued during Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews” that there is and there isn’t. As with medical care, there are technical dilemmas in economics that do not have an authentically Jewish solution, like the granular questions of monetary policy […]

As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews”, Tikvah’s executive director Eric Cohen offered two philosophical dilemmas for conservatives. The first is how to reconcile the tension between an economics that praises creative destruction and a preference for cultural, political, and religious continuity. The second is the dilemma of conservatism’s metaphysical roots: […]

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.”

The Gospels proclaim that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, meaning Christian doctrine holds that salvation is more difficult for the wealthy man. Judaism doesn’t seem to have the same antipathy toward wealth. But wealth is […]