If in the past, we tended to speak about tensions in Israeli society in terms of Arabs and Jews, religious and secular, or Right and Left, the findings of the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2018 Israeli Democracy Index, released last week reveal a major new split: the split over Israeli democracy. In today’s Israel, the fundamental question that defines the state—what…

Is American Jewry estranged from Israel? Recent novels by Krauss, Safran Foer, and Englander prove just the opposite Nathan Englander’s latest novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017) culminated in a romantic union. The lovers in the novel, an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim, are forced to hold their assignation in an underground tunnel beneath the Gaza…

Beit Shemesh is a highly unlikely choice from the outset. It has been the scene of an intensive struggle for control of the public space, pitting the ultra-Orthodox against the town’s secular and religious Zionist residents. The conflict is not just a matter of ideology, but also of practice. Ugly and aggressive exclusion of women is common. Especially notorious are…

What complicates the relationship even more is that some of the religion-state arrangements and “deals” are not made on the national level, but rather--locally. And so, every mayor in the country can have a real impact not only on the public space in his or her own town but also on politics and this relationship at the national level. This…

Conference on Genomics – From Disease Prevention to Treatment, Population, Medicine and Society, Haifa, Technion and Clalit Health Fund, 2-5 Oct. 2018 During the first international conference on this subject, which took place in Haifa in 2016, I deplored the gap between the fast advancing genetic sciences and Jewish historiography. Historians should have discovered the human genome as a new…

Israel's national clock is about to strike on the 'Days of Awe', a time of soul searching and reckoning. This is most clearly expressed in the classic confession - "We have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have slandered” - the main theme of the Yom Kippur service. The confession, a deliberate self-criticism, is based on two…

The Jewish calendar should guide our lives not only as individuals and a community, but also as a society and a state. If we want to preserve our identity as a distinct cultural and national group, we must make the effort to shape the cycle of time in our own way. In our daily lives, the clock is set to…

Generations of rabbis and scholars have endeavored to understand the reason for the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. The Talmud and Midrash propose a wide range of solutions, all of which assign the blame to the behavior of the generation that experienced tragedy. One of the most fascinating of these interpretations is found in the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Metzia…