To the Arabs, one Jew is worth 1027 Arabs.To the Jews, one loud homecoming is worth 100 quiet funerals. Read More »

Every now and then, I get to teach a fun course that’s far from the mainstream in my field. I just finished teaching a course on Talmudic Probability. Here is the final I gave on Friday. Feel free to give it a shot. 1. ארבעה נשים הביאו 2, 4, 5, ו-8 קיני חובה, בהתאמה. כל הגוזלות התערבבו והכהן הקריב חצי מהם כעולות וחצי כחטאות. Read More »

It seems that some people have a hard time understanding what was so problematic about Obama’s speech. This is especially the case of Jews committed to the Democratic Party (or, more precisely, committed to a particular self-image) at all costs. Read More »

Now that I’ve finished my series, I’m going to occasionally take the liberty to comment on current events. So let me explain what Obama just said and did not say about his vision of a “peace” agreement: 1. The borders will be based on the ’67 lines with swaps. (That’s the part the headline writers seized upon.)2. Read More »

Before we ask if and how a Jewish state is good for the Jews, we need to figure out what it means for anything to be good for the Jews. For this we need to deal with very fundamental questions concerning Judaism, specifically with regard to halacha, belief, morality and nationhood. Read More »

Let’s consider now what specific policy shifts might strengthen communities in Israel. A good starting point for our discussion might be a comparison of community-based charity and state-sponsored welfare. Read More »

Can the state of Israel balance the need to carry out its functions as a state and preserve its Jewish character while at the same time limiting its involvement in matters better left to communities? I’ll divide the discussion into three parts. Read More »

We have seen that anti-religious nationalists, religious ant-nationalists and religious nationalists have all had their favored myths crash against the reality of the state of Israel. I don’t lament this collective disillusionment but rather regard it as grounds for optimism. Read More »

Quick catch-up: I’ve been arguing that a Jewish state can serve as a catalyst for Jewish renewal, but that all of the dominant ideologies in Israel miss this point. Read More »

As we saw in my previous post, the secular Jewish nationalist movement of the late 19 th century was revolutionary by its very nature. It sought to replace a Jewish identity rooted in religion with one rooted initially in ethnicity and ultimately in citizenship. Read More »

As had happened many times before in Jewish history, many European Jews in the late 19 th century found themselves in a quandary. They no longer identified fully with the code and narrative of Judaism, some because the communities they belonged to were too provincial and others because the communities they belonged to were too acculturated. Read More »

Until now I’ve been discussing states and communities in a somewhat general way. From this post on, I’ll focus specifically on Israel. One of the main questions I set out to answer when I embarked on this series is how exactly the existence of a Jewish state advances the interests of the Jewish people. Read More »

Every now and then people who, in the grand scheme of things, look and sound more or less like me state opinions that leave me pinching myself to see if I haven’t been sucked through the rabbit hole. Often these have to do with freedoms they would like to sacrifice to government bureaucrats. Read More »

Let’s think about what legislating morality is likely to achieve. What are the costs and benefits of, for example, outlawing public indecency or selling chametz on Pesach in Israel? What are the costs and benefits of government non-recognition of Read More »

We’ve been considering how Jewish statehood can advance Jewish peoplehood and, in particular, whether this would be advanced or hindered by state involvement in redistribution and regulation and/or state involvement in legislating morality. Read More »

Don’t get me wrong. I’m prepared to defend the view that people do have moral intuitions and that these intuitions are no less real than other forms of cognition. So I’m not afraid of normative claims. But moral intuitions are adequate only within the context of a particular moral tradition. Read More »

In fact, from the mid-18 th century to the mid-20 th century, emancipation of the Jews and general secularization in parts of Europe combined with persecution of the Jews led to precisely the kind of disequilibrium I discussed in earlier posts. Read More »

In the previous post, we made the acquaintance of my hypothetical unaffiliated neighbor. He’s basically a decent fellow whose moral commitments are focused on the only kind of morality he understands – fairness. Read More »

So we have met the unaffiliateds and mused about their narrative and code. My actual neighbor says, perhaps somewhat wistfully, that unaffiliateds make good neighbors. I wonder about that. It is certainly true that an unaffiliated neighbor is unlikely to blow up my house while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!”. Read More »

We have seen that when unaffiliateds coalesce into a sort of non-community community, a narrative emerges according to which fairness is divine and the ethics of community and divinity are retrograde values that necessarily compromise fairness. Read More »