Monthly Essays

The unusual appellation testifies to the individuality of the character who bears it.

Mamad, mamak, mamam, mamats—how about some sleep?

Operation Midnight Hammer deals a blow to the anti-Western alliance.

Operation Rising Lion.

The rulers of the Gulf states are cheering every Israeli strike. But they now have less incentive to improve diplomatic relations with Jerusalem.

Moses, the muses, and an early-1960s Jewish magazine at Harvard.

Iran has assumed it can keep its assets safe by hiding them deep underground. The IDF's daring operation in Masyaf may have shattered that assumption.

Only one was a mark of prestige for ancient rabbis.

The Bitburg controversy, 40 years on.

At the start of this war, the jihadist group had governing authority, territorial control, a functioning bureaucracy, and a trained army.

The real network of criminals, secret police, and dissident officers that transformed the Ottoman empire.

Exodus's Sea of Reeds wasn't the Red Sea. But was it the Gulf of Suez? Lake Balah? Somewhere else?

There’s no more point in arguing with the UN about Israel than there is in arguing about whether Jews really kill Christians for their blood.

The generation fighting in Gaza and Lebanon is tempered, steeled, anything but fragile, and intensely patriotic.

An American Jewish intellectual considers Israel, American Jewry, and anti-Semitism.

The controversial terms, unlike “West Bank,” were in common use until 1948.

Donald Trump, Paradise Lost, and the origins of a phrase.

Neither Jewish nor Christian traditions call the Decalogue by its biblical name, but the phrases they choose reveal something about their different approaches to divine law.