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May 15, 2025, 11:58 AM

Wisdom First, Then Victory

Níkē Sandalízousa. Photo: Niko Kitsakis, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Fixing_her_Sandal#/media/File:Nike_adjusting_sandal.jpg

At the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens, on the way to the great temple of Athena known as the Parthenon, there is a small temple to Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. The temple is small, as befits...

Apr 23, 2025, 3:55 PM

Where Did I Put the Tablets? A Midrash for the Neurodivergent Prophet

Author’s Note What if Moshe Rabbeinu—Moses our teacher, the humblest soul who ever lived—had ADHD? I don’t mean that as a joke, or a diagnosis. I mean it as a lens: What if the overwhelm, the speech struggles, the sacred temper, the...

Apr 22, 2025, 12:49 PM

Make Netanyahu the next pope

Pedro Berruguete, Portrait of Sixtus IV (c. 1500), oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art (PD via Wikimedia Commons)

Israel's prime minister bears a certain resemblance to a long-ago pontiff who Machiavelli described as 'spirited'

Moshe-Mordechai van Zuiden

Apr 1, 2025, 12:04 AM

The Sages of the Talmud try to help us to think like us, not like them

Our own thinking is the Giving of the Torah all over again on our level Insecure people want authorities to tell them what to feel, think, and do. But supreme teachers want their students to trust their own thinking! Often people...

Mar 18, 2025, 4:56 PM

On Genetics and Genocide

Image copyright Alex Sinclair

I’ve heard it said dozens of times in conversations, and read it hundreds of times online. “They’re all evil. They’re all barbarians. Their Jew-hatred is embedded so deeply that they’ll never change. It’s in their nature.” These sentiments about Gazans...

Chana Yehudis Zahav

Feb 22, 2025, 7:38 PM

I too dreamed, hoped, went through self denial, assumed, the Bibas family must be alive. Who kills children and their mother in cold blood? It is impossible. I grew up a religious Zionist and now am Hareidi, always very Jewish. I lived through the 2nd intifada, I lived through...

Philip Earl Steele

Feb 19, 2025, 11:11 PM

Bibas – a name for the ages

The name Bibas resonates deeply, as it reaches back to the earliest beginnings of the Jewish national revival and its movement Zionward. Back to the rabbi of Corfu, Yehuda Bibas (1789-1852), who was among the first committed proponents of the...

Feb 2, 2025, 12:48 AM

Harris’s Israel Stance Ended Her Career | Gregory Lyakhov

Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff disembark Air Force Two at Denver International Airport Monday, March 6, 2023, in Denver. (Official White House Photo/Lawrence Jackson) PUBLIC DOMAIN: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vice_President_Kamala_Harris_and_Second_Gentleman_Douglas_Emhoff_disembark_Air_Force_Two_at_Denver_International_Airport_Monday,_March_6,_2023,_in_Denver.jpg

Gregory Lyakhov contends that Vice President Kamala Harris’s political downfall in the 2024 election can be traced back to one defining misstep: her public criticism of Israel during its war with Hamas. While various factors played into her loss,...

Philip Earl Steele

Jan 16, 2025, 6:01 PM

Now for that other fatally flawed “konceptsia”…

Holocaust education in its many forms has long been a central pillar in the struggle against antisemitism and the largely indistinguishable plague of anti-Zionism. But does such outreach work? Experience over the past 15 months bespeaks a conceptual failure. Let’s take...

Uri Pilichowski

Jan 8, 2025, 9:59 PM

Israel Comes at a Heavy Cost

Until the Simchas Torah massacres of October 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was the Israeli leader that witnessed the heaviest Israeli losses during the surprise Yom Kippur War. Without its soldiers ready for battle the first three...

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