On March 5, the Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett traveled to Russia, where he had a several-hours-long meeting with Vladimir Putin. That the trip took place on Shabbat—Bennett is an Orthodox Jews—stressed its significance. Some criticized Jerusalem for making an apparent overture to the Kremlin just two weeks after it launched its massive military offensive into Ukraine, but it later became clear that Volodymyr Zelensky had himself requested Israeli mediation. Based on a series of interviews, Moav Vardi explains the strategic logic behind this carefully planned diplomatic initiative:

In the 1930s, a Republic Jewish judge, observing his coreligionists’ commitment to the Democratic party, quipped, in Yiddish, that Jews have three velt (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world), and Roosevelt. Since then, Jewish devotion has attenuated somewhat, although Jews still overwhelming lean Democratic. Most American Jews, however, are unfamiliar with the terms “this world” or “the next world” in any language. Carefully examining a wealth of statistical data, Samuel J. Abrams and Jack Wertheimer argue that the sort of robust Jewish liberalism that characterized U.S. Jewry a few decades ago is in steep decline. Jews, they explain, are undergoing their own version of what political scientists call the “great sort,” whereby politics, religion, and place of residence increasingly align: