Despite liberalization and modernization around the world, anti-Semitism endures and, in some places, seems to be getting more toxic. Herzl’s solution to the problem of anti-Semitism, Zionism, has not been a salve either; now some argue that Israel is the cause of rather than the solution to today’s anti-Semitism. But the truth is that anti-Semitism’s permanence is […]

Biblical history is the fount of the Jewish people’s collective memory, and the editors and redactors of the Hebrew Bible strategically deployed this history for a distinctly political purpose. In the pages of Azure, biblical scholar Jacob Wright argued that, in addition to celebrating the glory of military victory, the editors of the Hebrew Bible […]

As Catholic theologian, social critic, and First Things editor R.R. Reno sat in the synagogue pews one Saturday morning, watching his daughter assume her place in the people of Israel as a bat mitzvah, he was provoked to scrutinize his own Christian faith in light of the Judaism of his wife and children. In this […]

How a nation understands its founding shapes its aims and ideals decades after its founding. For Israel, that means interpretations of the thought of Theodor Herzl speak to fundamental questions of national life. By the year 2000, the Israeli left launched a campaign to officially redefine Israel as a secular, democratic state with a Jewish majority […]

The Christmas season is an annual reminder that American Jews are a small minority in a largely Christian country. It has also become occasion for Jewish church-and-state separationists to condemn public ceremonies as harmless as “a creche being erected outside a town hall, or students in public schools singing Christmas carols.” In “Christmas, Christians, and the […]