There is, it seems, a bit of an occupational hazard to this column-writing business. It probably holds for all sorts of topics, but it’s undoubtedly true when thinking aloud about Israel. Read More »

Kamal Subhi, formerly on the faculty of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University, recently joined other clerics in warning that if the Saudi ban on women driving is lifted, mixing of genders will increase and that, in turn, will encourage premarital relations. Read More »

Seventy years ago this week, Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “a day which will live in infamy.” He was right. Read More »

When he passed away on November 8 in Jerusalem, the American- born Rabbi Natan Tzvi Finkel was widely credited with having transformed the Mir Yeshiva into the world’s largest. Some 100,000 people flocked to his funeral. The procession began at the Mir in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood, and continued afoot to the Har Hamenuhot cemetery. Read More »

Mr. Prime Minister, Before the Shalit deal fades entirely from view, many of us are hoping that you have noticed what you unwittingly unleashed.  I don’t mean the next wave of terror or the terrible decisions that Israel must make before the next kidnapping.  We knew about those even before last week. Read More »

With Israel’s international standing crumbling and its internal cohesion fraying, Netanyahu urgently needed to restore Israeli morale. ….  A Foreign Affairs article … No one in Israel is calling the agreement signed for Gilad Shalit’s freedom a good deal. On many levels it is terrible. Read More »

My grandfather, for many years a leading figure in American Jewish life, would occasionally share the following quip with me.  “There are two views of sociology,” he would say.  “The complimentary view holds that sociology proves the obvious.  The more realistic view holds that it proves the false.”  And then he would burst out laughing. Read More »

As delegates gather in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly next week, the U.S. was seeking a last-minute compromise to delay a U.N. vote supporting Palestinian statehood. Turkey and Egypt have lent support to such a resolution, and American negotiators in the Middle East were in talks aimed at averting the U.N. Read More »

From the June issue of our publication, Daniel Gordis’s article ‘Are Young Rabbis Turning on Israel?’ has occasioned impassioned debate around the world, with a flood of responses coming into our offices by e-mail, through our website, and, yes, even in envelopes with stamps on them. Read More »

There’s nothing quite like staying in a lakeside cabin in Ontario for a few days to get the Middle East entirely out of your system. Surrounded by nothing but trees, birds, water and a couple of wonderful friends, it all begins to melt away. Read More »

If you don’t know any better, Tykotzin actually looks like a decent place to live. A small town in northeast Poland, it’s just a nicelooking Polish village. Modest but wellmaintained homes, clean streets and a well-coiffed central square with a church at its edge. Read More »

There are still those unexpected moments here, fleeting and infrequent though they may be. Moments that provide a glimpse of what we could yet create in this young country of ours. Read More »

[Note:   On May 3 rd , Daniel Gordis addressed the “J-Street Leadership Mission to Israel and Palestine.”  The following column is based on his remarks that day.] Good morning and welcome to Jerusalem. Read More »

There were years when Yom Ha’atzmaut was cause for near-euphoria. The first sovereign Jewish state in 2,000 years, Israel represented to Jews everywhere much more than a country, a flag, and even a homeland. Read More »

We read it so often that we hardly even notice it anymore. It’s that famous line from the Haggada, which Jews around the world will recite in just a few days: “And even if we were all wise, filled with understanding, all elders and all learned in the Torah, we would still be obligated to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Read More »

In this spring of youthful Arab discontent, it has become de rigueur to note that no one could have seen this coming. We had no warning, the strategists are all explaining – there was no way to predict this. Perhaps. But closer to home, where other seismic shifts are already changing our world, we do know already what is happening. Read More »

It’s a strange world, indeed, when the one place in the Middle East that seems the most stable and secure is the State of Israel. This is the spring of Arab revolt. Read More »

Lev Paschov, an Israeli soldier who immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return from the Former Soviet Union, was killed while on active duty in Southern Lebanon in 1993, and buried twice. Read More »

I still recall the day, some 40 years ago, when my mother told me that she remembered vividly the moment that she’d heard that FDR had died. I was stunned. She’d been so young. Read More »

Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine February 11, 2011 I imagine that I am not alone in having thought often of November 1977 in the last several weeks. I was young, a college student, but I still remember one particular afternoon of that month with exceptional clarity. Anwar Sadat was coming to Jerusalem. Read More »