Israel’s founders made little of the declaration at the time. It took decades of work by figures of widely different political stripes to make it the towering document it is today.

A much-loved new biography argues that the convicted Soviet spy “betrayed no one.” How has the myth of her innocence become so untethered from the evidence of her guilt?

America has been learning and forgetting the lessons of 2001 for decades. It’s now in the midst of forgetting them again. Will the same result follow?

How could the man who at one point openly scorned religion also be the forefather of the political coalition that ensured for it a key place in Israeli life?

To understand the significance of a new definition of anti-Semitism speciously promising clarity and fairness, we need to see whose interests it serves, not what its supporters believe.

The fourth conflict in the last twelve years between Israel and Gaza looks remarkably like the first. What happened?

Longing to leave liberalism behind, everyone from Catholics to Communists is experimenting with self-transformation. What’s fueling that desire, and is it strong enough to make the break?

In 1977, a Jewish director of the ACLU famously agreed to defend the rights of neo-Nazis in Illinois to demonstrate in public. Would the same thing happen today—and should it?

It’s been a year since most American synagogues closed their doors. Will the practices they adopted to survive undermine their prospects when the pandemic ends?

For decades, America’s foreign-policy establishment has, in the name of peace, incentivized conflict in the Middle East. Now that it’s back in power, can it learn from its mistakes?

A young secular Viennese writer had an experience 125 years ago that would lead him to change Jewish history forever. He could never explain it. Can anyone else?

How I came to translate one of the greatest stories in all of Yiddish literature, a work that I believe uniquely illuminates the debate at the very center of Jewish modernity.

Three decades ago, a million emigres from Eastern Europe arrived in Israel, increasing its population by 20 percent almost overnight and changing its culture forever. What’s their story?

In Israel and in traditional communities, life and liturgy don’t run away from hardship. Most American Jews prefer to think on the brighter side, but that comes at a high cost.