A major tenet of rabbinic Judaism is that the Bible is not to be taken literally. But of course that’s not the whole story.

Jews were expected to transform their shtetl values, religious traditions, and bourgeois attitudes into muscular exemplars of humanity’s ideal, the New Soviet Man.

The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.

This week, in Basel, the World Zionist Organization convened to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. What was the original meeting like?

Mahmoud Abbas says that the Israelis committed “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. Why does he believe that, and what does the rest of the Arab world think about the Shoah?

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.

The Israeli writer joined us last week to talk about growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the movie made about him and his father.

In a rebroadcast, the Israeli intellectual talks about his best-selling book on the revolutionary political ideas in the last speech of Moses.

One of the greatest Jewish historians on the clash of civilizations that played out within the psyches of young Odessan Jews.

The deultimization of the Hebrew language proceeds apace.

A new history of the American right seeks from the first page to alert the reader to what it is not about: the 40th president. But in the end conservatives can’t escape Reagan—nor should they.

The British writer joins us to think about the ideological battle over the Western tradition and the role Israel plays in that fight.