Since the 1990s, the Jewish state has done much to break free from the economic fetters of its socialist past, leading to unprecedented growth and prosperity. But many restraints remain, as Sue Surkes explains:

Few [Israelis] know that when they clean the kitchen, the price of their Palmolive liquid soap and Ajax window spray is set countrywide by a single . . . importer and distributor, who also provides them with their Colgate and Elmex toothpaste, Revlon, and Neutrogena beauty products, Speed Stick deodorant, Band-Aid bandages, and more. All of these brands are exclusively franchised to a company few have heard of, called Schestowitz, [which, together with a corporation called] Diplomat, has exclusive rights both to import and to distribute a staggering array of name-brand products that can be found in most Israeli homes.

This kind of centralized control can be found throughout the Israeli economy. It stifles competition, ensures that prices remain high, and helps to explain why the Jewish state was ranked earlier this month as having the eighth-highest cost of living in the world. Nine years after massive social protests against that cost of living, Israel still has more monopolies than the U.S. or any European country.

After mass demonstrations in 2011 that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis onto the streets countrywide—it was estimated at the time that the ten biggest business groups controlled 41 percent of the market value of public companies—the Knesset passed the Law for Promotion of Competition and Reduction of Concentration in 2013. . . . While there is a little less concentration than there was before 2013, the Israeli economy [nevertheless remains] highly concentrated.

Worse still, a proposed new tax law could make things worse:

The Finance Ministry’s chief economist, Shira Greenberg, has been talking over recent months about [applying] the 17-percent value-added tax (VAT) on all items ordered from overseas online retailers, such as Amazon, . . . to help raise cash to pay off the country’s deficit. To date, purchases totaling less than $75 have been VAT-exempt, offering Israelis a way to sidestep inflated prices at home and bringing pressure to bear on Israeli retailers to lower their prices, too.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.