Featuring prime ministers, kidnappings, popes, silences, exiled shadows, portraits, intellectual origins, the best minds, and more.

The authors of a new book explore the principles animating Israel’s founding moment.

Featuring wars, peacemakers, two cultures, pogroms, plays, four ages, wild problems, caves, magic, letters, American conservatives, liberal parents, radical children, and more.

What happens when the study of the humanities migrates from campus to the web?

The late historian’s memoir, an unstinting portrait of the unhappy collision of tradition and modernity in Lebanon in the years following World War II, is one of the best of our time.

When it comes to Israel, the longtime columnist, a bellwether for conventional American opinion on the Middle East, is stuck three decades in the past.

An interview with Ruth Calderon, a Talmud scholar and former member of Knesset, on the Judaization of the Israeli public sphere—and much more.

Israel’s future prime minister watched Churchill up close in war-time London, and then sounded Churchillian notes when called upon to rally his own nation.

A new interview, published in English here for the first time, reveals the political tradition at work in the Israeli leader’s thinking.

Five of our writers pick several favorites each, featuring a duke’s children, Jewish treasures, zealots and emancipators, revolts, dual allegiances, spies, and more.

Israel famously has no constitution. It turns out that’s no accident but rather the will of its first prime minister, who explains his thinking here.

Five more of our regular writers pick several favorites each, featuring Stalingrad, the master, Margarita, parasitic minds, infectious ideas, dust, heaven, Zoom, traveling light, and more.

The don of liberal Zionism has come out against a two-state solution. His argument is delusional and messianic. But that’s not the real problem with it.

As a new biography shows, David Ben-Gurion could be petty, harsh, and stubborn. He also decisively shaped almost every institution that would form the state of Israel.

What the future prime minister of Israel had to say about his past and present homelands.

Three elections having led to inconclusive results, a fourth now looms. There’s another, smarter, more representative way.

As the nation gears up for its third election in a year, the time may have come to consider a different way of voting.

Six more Mosaic writers share their favorites, featuring shadow strikes, orchards, gleanings, constitutional evolutions and revolutions, serotonin, odd women, and more.

For thousands of years both friends and enemies of Judaism have labeled it a religion of deed rather than creed, of law rather than faith. A new book firmly and fervently disagrees.

The notorious author of The Invention of the Jewish People is back, this time with a screed against certain French intellectuals with a certain something in common.

Letters, antidotes, eternal lives, outcasts, secret worlds, pogroms, and more.

A new biography compels the thought that the prime minister’s alienation from opinions held dear by the Israeli elite—and by his biographer—has been one of the secrets of his success.

As his new memoir brings home, Moshe Arens is one of the most accomplished, articulate, and clear-eyed figures in Israel’s history. What a pity that his best ideas were often thwarted.

Spy games, catch-67s, lionesses, smugglers, patriots, setting suns, and more.

A new biography brings to life a leader of few words who accomplished much with the ones she had, and reminds us how much of her Zionist perseverance remains intact today.

Without knowing the Middle East, the author of a highly regarded new book presumes to prescribe what would be best for it—and especially for Israel.

A new book shows the role played by anti-Semitism in the strengthening and consolidation of Islamism in France.

In its embrace of social psychology and “process over politics,” the new hit drama mirrors the mentality that helped produce the disastrous Oslo Accords themselves.

A new production of an old play stresses the benefits of religious tolerance. But the play itself suggests there might also be costs—and specifically for Jews.

The “voice of Israel,” as David Ben-Gurion dubbed him, was revered abroad, mocked and sidelined at home. A new biography helps explain why.