Opinion

• Opinion

  Robert Aumann, Teacher Laureate

  The two winners of the 2005 Nobel prize in economics were announced the other day: Thomas Schelling, now at the University of Maryland, (before that, for many years, at Harvard University), and Robert Aumann of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Paul Samuelson aside, the winners of the Nobel in economics usually are not well known…

  By Leonard Fein

  4 min read
• Opinion

  The Book of the People

  This coming Tuesday, Jewish congregations around the world will complete their annual cycle of public Bible readings and start the reading anew, and they will mark the moment with the raucous festival known as Simchat Torah, the “Joy of the Torah.” The holiday is noteworthy for a number of reasons, but none more poignant or…

  Oct 21, 2005 | 3 min read
• Letters

  October 21, 2005

  Don’t Turn Communal Back on Jewish Felons I am very disappointed that no one in the Jewish community seems willing to help Barry Gibbs (“Out of Jail, Mob Fall Guy Pines for a Shul and Some Shellfish,” October 7). After all, we help Israel, Holocaust victims, Jewish arts and culture, Jewish education, hurricane and tsunami…

  Oct 21, 2005 | 5 min read

Columnists View All

• Alyssa Katz Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors

  

• Rob Eshman Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews

  

• Dan Perry How Israel became a country where teenagers murder each other in cold blood

  

• Emily Tamkin American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt

  

• Jay Michaelson Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here’s what Jewish organizations should do about it. 

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  In the Beginning …

  In addition to its specific, text-related theme, Simchat Torah has an added significance: It marks the end of the month-long cycle of holidays that begins with Rosh Hashanah. It is an emotional roller-coaster of a month for observant Jews, running from the trumpeting grandeur of the New Year proclamation to the anguished soul-searching of Yom…

  Oct 21, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Give Protestants Stake in Peace By Investing in Interfaith Efforts

  Last week’s vote by the Episcopal Church of America to reject divestment from Israel didn’t simply happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of renewed efforts by Jewish organizations to engage the mainline Protestant churches. Last month I traveled to Israel with a group of Christians for the first time. The experience has convinced…

  By Robert Horenstein Oct 21, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  So Help Us God

  Finally, proof that belief in the biblical God poses a toxic danger! An American sociological journal has posed a challenge to religious faith that is being heralded by secularists across the English-speaking world. The sociologist at the center of the controversy, Gregory Paul, writes in the Journal of Religion & Society that compared to other,…

  By David Klinghoffer Oct 21, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  A Poverty Of Leadership

  Here is a story. It is a story about what the media can accomplish and what intellectual curiosity in high places can produce, and how a crisis that is not an “Act of God” comes to be recognized and to galvanize a nation. In 1960, during his campaign for the presidency, John Kennedy visited the…

  By Leonard Fein Oct 14, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  The Miers Test

  It’s a sure sign of how low President Bush’s fortunes have sunk that the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, clearly intended as a deft feint to circumvent Senate mud-wrestling, is instead turning into a first-class political debacle. In its desperation to find some traction, however, the administration appears to have crossed a constitutional line…

  Oct 14, 2005 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Storming the Gates

  The baroque scenes that unfolded on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa over the last two weeks, described by Marc Perelman in his Page 1 report, seem as though they were lifted from some futuristic end-of-the-world movie epic rather than from today’s headlines. But they are real. In two separate assaults a week apart, hundreds…

  Oct 14, 2005 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  The One-and-a-half-state Solution

  Anyone who has followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent decades knows that mainstream thinking on both sides has evolved considerably, to a point where Jerusalem and Ramallah (and Washington, too) endorse a two-state solution. The advocates of Greater Israel or Greater Palestine — a single Israeli or Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the…

  By Yossi Alpher Oct 14, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  We the Individuals

  For a generation of American Jewish baby boomers who grew up looking east toward Zion from the West’s leafy suburbs, Israel has always come off as the poorer relation enduring scrappier circumstances. America had what Israel lacked: a Constitution, and good plumbing. American bathrooms were tidy and porcelain, with soft rolls of Charmin; the typical…

  By Bethamie Horowitz Oct 14, 2005 | 3 min read