Open Search form

Constructive Conflict

Apply for a Blog

Oct 19, 2026, 2:12 AM

No Peace with Nuance

I haven’t even started writing, but I can already hear angry voices saying something is wrong with this article's title. Israel and Palestine existing in the same sentence is enough to cause extreme frustration among some on both sides...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 15, 2026, 2:32 AM

Trustees of Sinai

What Conservative Judaism Taught Me About Stewardship The older I get, the more I find myself asking a question I did not spend much time thinking about when I was younger: What happens to the things we have been given...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 6, 2026, 8:57 PM

The Judaism That Lives

How Halakhah Learns to Read a Changing World Beneath almost every Jewish question lies another, more difficult one: How do we live Torah in a world that keeps changing? We are about to ask that question in ways no previous generation...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 4, 2026, 6:10 PM

The Judaism That Lets Us Become

What We Inherit, What We Change, and What We Give Forward I have carried a question for most of my life, though I did not always know I was carrying it. What does it mean to inherit Judaism? For years, I believed...

Gershon Blumstein

Oct 3, 2026, 7:19 PM

The Judaism That Refuses to Choose

Tradition, Change, and the Jewish Conversation That Belongs to All of Us Every Jewish movement has a story it tells about itself. Orthodoxy speaks in the language of preservation. Reform speaks in the language of moral evolution. But Conservative Judaism speaks...

Gershon Blumstein

Sep 20, 2026, 6:15 PM

The Judaism That Refuses to Choose

What Conservative Judaism Can Teach a Fragmented Jewish World Judaism has never been a tradition of easy answers. The rabbis did not build Jewish civilization by eliminating disagreement. They preserved it, studied it, argued through it, and carried it forward....

Benjamen Franklen Gussen

Aug 22, 2026, 11:41 AM

On the Problem of Scale (I)

On the Problem of Scale

Every beneficial system has a characteristic scale. When migration, trade or territorial control exceeds it, scale distortion and scale entanglement turn advantage into crisis. Most political arguments begin too late. By the time we ask whether immigration is good or...

Aug 20, 2026, 9:19 AM

Us vs Them, Part III

Living With “Them”: If human beings will always form groups, how can we live together? Image © Ivan Bassov, 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Living With “Them” In Part I, we examined how people create “us” and “them.” In Part II, we followed those boundaries as they became social and political realities—shaping identities, institutions, borders, and ideas about who belongs. But if group boundaries are...

Aug 18, 2026, 8:04 AM

Us vs Them, Part I

The Psychology of Belonging: How do we create “us” and “them”? Image © Ivan Bassov, 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The Psychology of Belonging Human beings have always divided the world into “us” and “them.” But what creates that boundary? Is it language, religion, ancestry, appearance, nationality, culture, or something else? And do differences create group boundaries—or do we first establish...

Jul 10, 2026, 8:20 AM

The West’s Precipice

IN DECLINE

Can a civilization survive if it no longer believes its own values are worth preserving? "It is only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve." Those words, spoken by Professor Barnhardt...

Load more