When Offir Asher returned to Israel after 18 years in Toronto, he dreamed of building a world-class resort village on the Mediterranean shore. The reward he and his business partner Pini Malka reaped for their trouble was to be tarred as “avaricious real estate developers” by Israeli president Shimon Peres and demonized by environmentalists, led ...

When Daniel Luban published an essay in Tablet Magazine last week finding resonances between what he called Islamophobic opposition to the Park51 Islamic center and past anti-Semitism, one comment on the piece jumped out at us. “This article is in serious denial,” began a brief, angry response from David Horowitz, the conservative intellectual and activist ...

Lately in New Orleans, I’ve been dreaming of moving backward in time. It’s a strange sensation: to start at the end and move to the beginning. Time dissolves in dreams, as it does in certain stories.
Jews belong to the oldest book club in the world, and we’ve been dissolving time forever in our old stories, ...

Russia’s great expanse stretches south from the Arctic for many thousands of miles until it comes to a halt at the long spine of the Greater Caucasus Mountains. The republics on the northern side of the Caucasus, including turbulent Dagestan and Chechnya, still belong to Russia. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, on the southern side of ...

Saudi Arabia lacks Israel’s official stance of nuclear ambiguity, but its status is even more opaque. Indeed, though it has never acknowledged a nuclear program, the kingdom may already have a bomb.
With Iran’s seemingly inexorable march toward a nuclear weapon, it’s not difficult to see why the Saudis would want one of their own, to ...

In the fourth grade, I stopped saying the pledge of the allegiance. While the other children clapped their hands to their hearts, I stood, my arms limp, lips still. It was not an act of rebellion, nor did I intend to disrespect the United States. I’d simply decided—after several classmates had tried to convert me ...

Last summer, addressing a seminar attended by Israel’s political elite, one of the country’s most celebrated ideologues shared his vision for the future of the Jewish state. “The worst solution is probably the right one,” he said. “A bi-national state, full annexation, full citizenship.”
The idea itself—a heterogeneous and democratic nation of Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, ...