So have we reached the end of the line? Do the latest failures and miscalculations — the relentless assault on the al-Shifa Hospital, the fatal airstrike on aid-workers, the targeting of an Iranian General in Damascus, while Hamas’s hostages languish …
The truth about Jews for Palestine
At London’s weekly anti-Israel protests each Saturday, one can often find a small group of strictly Orthodox Jewish men — always men or boys, never women. Generally no more than a dozen, they hold signs with wording such as “Judaism: …
The burden of Jewish privilege
We Jews have an old joke about the Holocaust: Abie Cohen, after being gassed and burnt in Auschwitz, goes to heaven. After a few weeks of waiting patiently, he eventually gets to see God and demands to know if the …
Jerusalem is Israel’s future
For a brief moment, when I was younger, I found myself in Jerusalem. By day I studied the Talmud with my teacher, and by night I wandered its streets.
I would veer into the dark alleyways of the Old City, …
The self-delusion of secular Jews
What can we Jews not accomplish? There were three years between the ovens of Auschwitz and the foundation of the Jewish State. And then the Israelis transformed the wasteland between the River and the Sea into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying …
Philip Guston’s fight against evil
Two years late and trailing clouds of derision after the Boston Museum of Fine Arts didn’t feel it could mount the exhibition without a confetti shower of trigger warnings and leaflets advising on “Emotional Preparedness”, the Philip Guston retrospective finally …
Orthodox Jews aren’t safe in New York
The other day, my husband took my middle son, who is almost five, to a Whole Foods near our home in New York. When he came back, he told me he’d felt uneasy there. Usually, strangers smile at my son …
Jews are not safe on Britain’s campuses
In my first year at university, in 2005, I vividly recall coming across a Guardian article by Luciana Berger headlined “Why I had to resign”. This was 14 years before she quit the “institutionally antisemitic” Labour Party; back then, she …
Who is indigenous to Jerusalem?
Moments after the first images of the Hamas terror attack on October 7 hit the web, people on the Left started to cheer on the brutal assault as an act of “decolonising” Israel. “What did y’all think decolonisation meant?” tweeted …
Will Jews return to the Ghetto?
It is a warm Monday morning in Rome, and the city’s ancient ghetto resembles an armed camp. As carabinieri line the streets, a cloud of melancholy hangs in the air: not only had more than 1,400 Jews recently been slaughtered …
Violence stalks Gaza through history
Where does the story of Gaza begin? In this region, history — or histories, given that here there is no such thing as a singular history — is serially and violently contested. “Anyone who tells a story knows that most …
The shattering of the Jewish world
My father had told me, the night before, that he wanted to go to the synagogue, because of the festival, that it would be a happy time to be in the sanctuary. And so that morning, we went, knowing something …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
The four thinkers who took on the mob
What is the formative connection between the private self and other people? Or, as the architect of libertarianism Ayn Rand once put it, how should we order “the two principles fighting within human consciousness — the individual and the collective, …
The power of the Kennedy Myth
“Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
Having asserted a claim to literacy, I will now tell you what I’ve been reading, and why. I read for …
