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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

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The Law Behind the Fridman Trial

The Law Behind the Fridman Trial

Artur Fridman did not enter an empty courtroom. Lithuania spent 15 years building the criminal-law boundary now applied to his Facebook post. Artur...

latest 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Grant Arthur Gochin

The Zero Camera

In the summer of 2012, Shane Meadows pointed his camera at seventy five thousand people in Manchester’s Heaton Park and let William Burroughs...

latest 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Vincent James Hooper

Massachusetts, Stop This Before It Becomes Law.

Massachusetts, Stop This Before It Becomes Law.

As an American Muslim, I am sounding the alarm over S.2134. Massachusetts is considering a permanent government commission specifically for Muslims....

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Mansoor H. Laghari

Trump and Netanyahu: Same Persona, Diverging Stakes

Trump and Netanyahu: Same Persona, Diverging Stakes

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu operate from the same political playbook:  charismatic, far right populist leadership that personalizes power,...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

William Keenan

America: Beware of the Islamists in Your Backyard

Becoming an American citizen ten years ago was one of the most exciting and proud days in my life. It was not simply because I had fled Iran – the...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Marziyeh Amirizadeh

Roger Waters Was Right About Technology

Roger Waters Was Right About Technology

I have loved Pink Floyd since I was ten years old. At 56, I remain a devotee, especially of the frisson-and-trance-inducing body of work they produced...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Joseph P. Rhinewine

Women’s Movement That Helped Build Medicine in Israel Gains Strength in Brazil

Women’s Movement That Helped Build Medicine in Israel Gains Strength in Brazil

A century-old organization, present on five continents, expands its presence in Brazil and connects Brazilian philanthropy to one of the world’s...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Silas Anastacio

New York City’s Jewish Museum: Art, History, and 4,000 Years of Jewish Culture

New York City’s Jewish Museum: Art, History, and 4,000 Years of Jewish Culture

The Jewish Museum in New York City is a renowned art and cultural institution located on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. It houses one of the...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Jay Abramson

Could Trump’s Iran Rhetoric Ever Turn Explicitly Nuclear?

Could Trump’s Iran Rhetoric Ever Turn Explicitly Nuclear?

Trump’s threats against Iran already run near the ceiling of what a president can say out loud. In April, hours before a deadline he had set for...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Celeo Ramirez

Metastasizing Language

Who Gets to Be a Political Subject? Netanyahu reportedly called violent settler extremism a “metastasizing cancer.” It is an unusually brutal...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Stop Telling Jews How to Vote

A political moment in Michigan exposes the myth that Jews care about only one issue — and why that myth threatens our community more than any...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Gershon Blumstein

The City My Father Lost — Part III

“The dead ask very little. Only that the ground be permitted to receive them.” The Zentralfriedhof is enormous, and the Jewish sections are at the...

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The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Julian Ungar-Sargon

I Will Never Tell You How to Vote

Every election season, I find myself facing the same question: How much politics belongs on the pulpit? My instinct has always been clear: very...

yesterday 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Ammos Chorny

The Shape of Things to Come?

It is a cliché that prediction is dangerous, especially about the future, but here goes: Israel has probably entered an extended period of stagnation...

yesterday 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Paul Scham

The Progressive Activist Stopped Looking for Peace

The Progressive Activist Stopped Looking for Peace

For years, much of the Western left spoke about Israel and the Palestinians through the language of peace. Its members called for negotiations,...

yesterday 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Tsahi Shemesh

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, Am I Stuck in the Middle? Not!.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, Am I Stuck in the Middle? Not!.

In 1973, Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan wrote a line for Stealers Wheel that seems strangely appropriate for American politics today. For Jewish...

yesterday 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Mitch Mallett

Parshas Shofetim: And So It Goes…

Prophecy as the Living Connection to HaShem After Moshe Rabbeinu The moment of Revelation at Har Sinai stands as the singular climax of human history....

yesterday 20

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Gedalia Walls

When the Body Says Rest

My memories of being sick as a child go way back to our first apartment, where the telephone was a wall unit in the entry hall. “Dr. Weizer, the...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Rebecca Nissel

Eglah Arufah: We Are All Responsible

Eglah Arufah: We Are All Responsible

In the final section of Parshat Shoftim, the Torah describes a strange ceremony called the Eglah Arufah, which was a procedure done if a dead body was...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Maximillian Hollander

What Milk in Meat Teaches About Peer Influence And More Chulin 108-109

Chulin 108 — “What Milk in Meat Teaches About Peer Influence” Our Gemara on this daf discusses the halachic dynamics of a drop of milk that...

yesterday 50

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Simcha Feuerman

When Shabbos Becomes the Shofar: The Rebbe’s Uplifting Message

When the Shofar Is Silent, Shabbos Speaks There is something striking about entering shul on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and not hearing the...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Anchelle Perl

Ceuta is Moroccan, and the Israelification of its crisis changes nothing

Ceuta is Moroccan, and the Israelification of its crisis changes nothing

I am late to this – partly because I was away on summer vacation, but also deliberately so, because the sheer density of bad analysis,...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Adil Faouzi

Two Generations, Two Israels

Two Generations, Two Israels

Two ways of seeing Israel—and one unfinished conversation. A few weeks ago, a friend told me about a conversation he had with his twenty-something...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Brad Goverman

Parashat Shoftim

Parashat Shoftim

The Justice That Sustains the Path Shoftim opens with three words that have echoed through history like few others: Tzedek, tzedek tirdof — Justice,...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Yosef B. Moran

Missing Oren Nahari

It is a tradition to take a shabbas schluff – a small nap in the early afternoon on Saturday. I used to try to avoid falling asleep, tried to stay...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Peta Jones Pellach

A New Mideast Alliance

On August 8, a day after Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan announced the formation of a joint defence pact, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Sheldon Kirshner

The Mecca Pact: Should Israel be worried?

The Mecca Pact: Should Israel be worried?

Over the past weekend, a dramatic diplomatic ceremony unfolded at Al-Safa Palace in Mecca. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Shaike Komornik

What Israelis Should Understand About Somaliland

Israel was the first UN member state to recognize Somaliland since 1991. The next test is whether recognition can become an equal, practical...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Nassir Hussein Kahin

The Non Apartheid State of Israel

To call Israel an apartheid state is absurd as saying that there are equal rights to all peoples in any of the countries surrounding Israel. To call...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Tuvia Book

The Recycling Of Jewish Souls

A Pew Poll released on June 22, 2021 found that the proportion of respondents identifying as Jewish today, and say that they did not have a Jewish...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Allen S. Maller

Harvard Won the Lawsuit. It Was Not Exonerated

Judge Stearns found no plausibly alleged continuing Title VI violation. He did not absolve Harvard of its conduct after October 7. A federal judge...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Haim V. Levy

1747. Kefar Yasif: A New Agricultural Settlement

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL Kefar Yasif: A New Agricultural Settlement Around 1740, a group of families renewed a Jewish presence in Kefar...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Shlomo Pereira

74 Days to Elections: Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue

Tomorrow in synagogues worldwide the Torah potion of Shoftim (Judges) will be read. The portion opens with the following words from Deuteronomy,...

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Sherwin Pomerantz

The Secret of the Small Details

The Secret of the Small Details What Do War, Tefillin, and Vacation Have in Common? There are times when a person needs words of great encouragement....

yesterday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Eliezer Simcha Weiss

Towers in wartime

A little more than a year ago luxury residential towers, one of them 43 stories high, in north Tel-Aviv were hit directly by Iranian ballistic...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Gerard Heumann

The Torah of Eden: Rav Kook zt’l’s 91’st Yahrzeit

The Torah of Eden: Rav Kook zt’l’s 91’st Yahrzeit

THE TORAH OF EDEN: IN HONOR OF RAV KOOK ZT’L’s 91ST YAHRZEIT “The news reaches me from a distant world full of illuminations, The suns there...

yesterday 9

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Itzchak Evan-Shayish

Time is Iran’s strongest ally

What President Trump appears to underestimate is that Iran and its terrorist proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—are not negotiating in good...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Steve Wenick

The tokenistic Jews vs the real Jewish Left

The Jewish Council and other tokenistic Jews vs the real Jewish Left: It’s a re-run of the famous clash between Trotsky and the Jewish Labour Bund...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Philip Mendes

The Great Mistake of 1947?

When the Community of Nations Makes a Bad Decision All of the British efforts to establish a single state in which the rights of the two major...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Gary Epstein

Nobody Left Behind

“It’s like talking to Americans about personal freedom,” Haviv Rettig Gur says when he’s describing Israel’s spirit of solidarity.  More...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

William Hamilton

Social Action Is Not an Optional Addition to the Gospel

A Theology of Social Action and Justice — Part III Christian theology has often treated social action as something added to faith after the...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Ed Gaskin

Featured Post

Featured Post

Elul has arrived, which means the Jewish calendar has once again dispensed with gentle encouragement and moved directly to the annual performance...

yesterday 50

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Talyah Ginsberg

It Ain’t Over Until It Is Over

It Ain’t Over Until It Is Over

For the first time in a long while, someone looking at Israel and the Middle East from a distance might be tempted to believe that the worst is...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Sabine Sterk

Wars Do Not End the Way Trump Thinks They Do

Wars Do Not End the Way Trump Thinks They Do

The demand is documented and can be stated precisely. In June 2025, during the twelve-day war in which American bombers struck three Iranian nuclear...

yesterday 50

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Celeo Ramirez

Testing Prophecy (Shoftim, Covenant & Conversation)

Testing Prophecy (Shoftim, Covenant & Conversation)

In his enumeration of the various leadership roles within the nation that would take shape after his death, Moses mentions not only the priest/judge...

yesterday 50

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Jonathan Sacks

Why Gaza Is Waiting on the Strait of Hormuz

Why Gaza Is Waiting on the Strait of Hormuz

This is the third in a series on the Board of Peace Road Map for Hamas Disarmament Every week now brings at new dispatch on the Gaza disarmament...

yesterday 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

William Keenan

Listen to the Rabbis

The Torah gives us clear instructions that it is our obligation to follow the teachings of the Rabbis. They were empowered to transmit the Oral Law....

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Kenneth Cohen

Can You Belong to a Place You’ve Never Lived?

I have never prayed in the synagogue in Dieren, the Netherlands. I don’t know the rabbi. I’ve never attended a Shabbat service there or celebrated...

yesterday 50

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Lauren Gladstone

The Predictors’ Scorecard

Israel’s elections are but several weeks away – and the press is full of who will win, who will lose, and what does that mean for Israel. Not to...

yesterday 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Sam Lehman-Wilzig

Iran’s Pause May Be Tactical, Not Strategic

Iran’s latest message on the Strait of Hormuz is revealing. The Head of Iran’s National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei, former commander of...

yesterday 50

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Rajeev Kumar