On Monday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid announced their decision to dissolve the government and call for new elections—the fifth since 2019. Much ink will be spilled about the successes and failures of the unusual coalition led by Bennett and Lapid and why it collapsed after only a year in power. Einat Wilf attends to the fact that, of the eight disparate parties it brought together, one was the Islamist Ra’am, the first Arab party to be included in an Israeli government. Wilf points out that Ra’am’s participation in the outgoing coalition is in fact a realization of the ideas set forth by the great Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his seminal essay “On the Iron Wall.”

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: