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Ofer Idels

Reflections on past and present

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Jan 18, 2026, 12:44 AM

On Modernity and Irresponsibility

The dissonance between campus protests against Israel and the academic silence surrounding the killing of protesters in Iran exposes a sharp—and painful—paradox: the growing aversion of significant segments of Western academia to Western values themselves. As Israeli intellectual Tomer...

Dec 21, 2025, 8:17 AM

Have hope in Zionism

Last month, the Tikvah Fund awarded the Herzl Prize to three of the most influential voices in American Jewry: Dan Senor, Bari Weiss, and Ben Shapiro. During the discussion, the panelists grappled with the future of American Jewish identity,...

Nov 23, 2025, 1:12 AM

Anti-Zionism Is Not the Answer

Once again, rapid upheavals are reshaping global attitudes toward Jews. As in the late 19th century, moments of profound social and political instability have produced new forms of antisemitism. Then, the crisis of European modernity redefined the Jew as...

Nov 13, 2025, 6:16 AM

Is Zionism the Crucible of History?

Let’s begin with a slight provocation: Is Zionism the zero point of history? Not in the self-centered sense of the historian who imagines his subject as the axis of the universe, but in a more urgent one – that every...

Nov 6, 2025, 11:01 PM

We Don’t Need to Imagine the Fall of Rome

When the present feels unbearably loud, it’s worth pausing to ask what, if anything, history can really teach us. Even when we strip away the noise and the quarrels, history remains a reluctant teacher, insisting only that we cannot...

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About Me

Ofer Idels is the Jenny Belzberg Postdoctoral Fellow in Israeli Studies at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Zionism: Emotions, Language, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Embodying the Revolution (Rutgers University Press, 2025). He also writes on Substack.

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