Gershom Gorenberg If Palestinians adopted a Gandhian nonviolent strategy, could they reshape the entire conflict with Israel and finally realize a two-state solution? If so, why haven’t they done so? Or perhaps they really have at certain times and places, and Israel has broken that form of resistance as well? Those questions have been asked [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman In his introduction to the Mishna, Maimonides (known as “the Rambam” in Jewish tradition) tells a story about the revelation and transmission of the Torah. Reading this story in light of Islamic doctrines about sacred revelation and transmission reveals that Maimonides, who lived in an Islamic society, sought to ground the written and [...]

[Read more →]

When I told my son that I was going to Cape Town, he told he had a friend there who belonged to a mosque committed to including women in worship, a community under the leadership of a progressive imam. It happened that my commitments to teach at Limmud, the South African version of the British [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman When do religions based on text and revelation turn fundamentalist and extreme? When their adherents take their holy books and divine messages to be sources of infallible wisdom that needs no human mediation. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other creeds can all inspire their adherents to take individual responsibility for weighing competing moral values, [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman Y. Ben-David, South Jerusalem’s most intrepid commenter, writes, in response to my previous post on anti-Semitism in Islam, that a significant part of the Muslim world today subscribes to theologies that demonize the Jews, as well as to outlandish conspiracy theories. I’d like to declare here, on the front page of this left-wing [...]

[Read more →]

An afterword to Haim’s post on screeds about anti-Jewish attitudes in Islam: A few months ago I wrote an article about anti-Muslim and anti-Christian prayers in Judaism. The anti-Christian prayers are medieval (I urged excising them.) The anti-Muslim prayer I cited is apparently a fake antique: It’s written in a medieval style, and it follows [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman There he goes again—Benny Morris is giving the battle against Islamic anti-Semitism a bad name. But then he’s not alone in fray. Nearly every passionate participant in the battle—Pipes, Horowitz, you name it—would make the angelically tolerant Roger Williams, the great American founder of religious toleration, go apoplectic. In one of the perverse [...]

[Read more →]

Everyone knows that Europe has grown more anti-Semitic, as Avi Primor writes in the new issue of the Journal of Foreign Affairs. Like many things that everyone “knows,” the facts are different, writes Primor, who’s the former Israeli ambassador to the European Union and now head of the Center for European Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Last month, military historian Edward Luttwack used the pulpit of the New York Times op-ed page to offer a solution to the American right’s burning problem: How can Barack Obama be attacked as both a dangerous Muslim and as the follower of a dangerous black pastor? (As I wrote , this is difficult [...]

[Read more →]

At the Wonk Room , Matt Duss discusses attempts by the National Review to prove that Barack Obama might actually be a closet Muslim who (gasp!) studied Quran as a child in Indonesia. And here I thought the unhinged right was busy sliming Obama for his connections to his pastor.  What an interesting man that Obama [...]

[Read more →]

Reading your last post , Haim, I suspected that you’ve been hacking into my thoughts. Not about swimsuits per se , but about Daniel Pipes’s curious belief that swimming in mixed company is a democratic duty. Strangely, I spent a day once with Pipes. A dovish friend of mine with an interest in the Middle [...]

[Read more →]

“Ancient Jerusalem Safari” said the sign on the side of the open-sided bus. It was parked this morning in the lot at the end of the promenade that stretches from UN Hill almost to Hebron Road. The promenade is an arc of stone walkways and stairs, of lawns and landscaping with a view northward of [...]

[Read more →]