Monthly Essay ·
As 1970s America unraveled, both radicals posed “uncomfortable questions for comfortable Jews.” What did they ask, and are conditions ripe for similar figures to emerge?
Observation ·
The recent decision to stop selling the books of a disgraced Orthodox children’s author reflects a pre-liberal sensibility worth recovering.
Response ·
Missed the live event? Catch the recording here of Daniel Johnson speaking live on the secularization of America with David Wolpe and Chris Arnade.
Monthly Essay ·
Europe is far down the path from a gradual fading of religion to stringent ideological secularism. Is America destined to follow?
Response ·
Modern freedoms leave us wanting more. The author of our monthly essay joins us and a noted rabbi to talk about how conversion came to be an antidote to liberal restlessness.
Monthly Essay ·
Longing to leave liberalism behind, everyone from Catholics to Communists is experimenting with self-transformation. What's fueling that desire, and is it strong enough to make the break?
Response ·
Samuel Goldman and Ruth Wisse tackle Jewish attitudes toward free speech, social media, and the tendency of American Jews to support ideologies that harm the Jewish community.
Monthly Essay ·
In 1977, a Jewish director of the ACLU famously agreed to defend the rights of neo-Nazis in Illinois to demonstrate in public. Would the same thing happen today—and should it?
Observation ·
Moshe Koppel’s new book Judaism Straight Up looks at today's progressive and traditional moral psychologies and finds one wanting.
Observation ·
In his new book, Ross Douthat writes convincingly of America's descent into decadence and torpor. Can anything stop the slide?
Observation ·
The question sounds absurd, but anti-circumcision activists are winning legal and policy victories—and overturning the definition of freedom of religion in the process.
Response ·
This question, and the tensions generated by it, underlie any discussion of Jewish–Christian relations.
Response ·
In the debate over the place of Christianity vis-à-vis secular liberal culture, let the Church speak for itself.
Observation ·
In his new book, Leon Kass shows Americans how to honor the benefits of liberal democracy, including individual freedom and human equality, while recognizing their high costs.
Response ·
For traditional Jews and Catholics alike, liberalism has presented parallel but different dangers; so has anti-liberalism.
Observation ·
A noted philosopher's critique of one of liberalism's most treasured theories clears room for a conception of politics informed by Judaism.
Observation ·
Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian of Victorian Britain and of the 18th-century Enlightenment, has lately devoted special attention to Jewish history and culture. What's the connection?
Response ·
There is a liberal slant in biblical studies, but it has an older and more persistent source than merely the general liberalism or leftism of today’s academy.
Response ·
American Jews, following American liberalism, have abandoned belief in the nation-state, non-voluntary communities, and religion in the public square.
Observation ·
Is the recent upsurge of European populism a blip on the historical horizon, or the sign of a fundamental restructuring of the continent's order?
Observation ·
What a new history of American civil religion gets wrong.
Response ·
A society that honors and reveres nothing but individual freedom will become a society that honors and reveres nothing at all.
Response ·
The Ten Commandments tell us nothing directly, and little indirectly, about the proper limits of government power. For that we must turn to John Locke.
Response ·
Two political alternatives, each susceptible of deformation.
Response ·
A conflict between inflamed populism and the ideology of global, technocratic empire.
Monthly Essay ·
A conflict is brewing over the shape of the international order. It centers around an idea—a biblical idea—long thought discredited by political elites.
Response ·
The push to establish and enforce a national secularist creed is undermining traditional faiths' right of free exercise.
Monthly Essay ·
Seeking to prohibit every kind of "discrimination," activists in and out of government threaten the free practice of, among other faiths, Judaism.
Observation ·
A new theory of Jewish nationalism promises to be more liberal than the old one. But it profoundly misunderstands Zionism—and liberalism.
Response ·
The threat to religious liberty has its roots in a progressivist faith that has been steadily gaining momentum in America for at least a century and a half.
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