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Yochanan SchimmelpfennigThe Times of Israel (Blogs) |
The modern Jewish political imagination has long been organized around a seemingly unavoidable question: what political space is available to Jews in...
There is a point at which a community can become so accomplished at explaining the hostility directed against it that it gradually loses the ability...
Perhaps the General Has Begun Asking the Right Question Gadi Eisenkot has spent most of his adult life inside Israel’s security apparatus. He...
Who Gets to Be a Political Subject? Netanyahu reportedly called violent settler extremism a “metastasizing cancer.” It is an unusually brutal...
The Exodus Has Been Cancelled… Several thousand years after the Exodus from Egypt, the Nile crocodile has finally been offered employment in the...
Israel Is Not Losing People. It Is Losing the Capacity to Replace What It Uses On the same day that new figures showed Israeli emigration remaining at...
Bratslav Tailors — בראַסלעווער שנײַדערס The Shoah destroyed not only Jewish worlds, but many of the people who should have taught...
The Watches and the Lute In Levi’s home in Rehovot, time appeared in two forms. It rested behind glass in rows of wristwatches, each mechanism...
The Diaspora is not a branch of Israel. Israel is one historical configuration of Jewish endurance: powerful, consequential and tragic, but neither...
Sharren Haskel has proposed an elegant solution to Israel’s democratic deadlock: everyone may vote, but not every vote may be allowed to govern. Her...
The Handshake Over the Terrified Prisoner A Jewish state whose minister boasts that Palestinian prisoners wet themselves from fear, while other...
Democracy Is a Courtesy Israeli public discourse is impressively democratic. Every few days, someone announces that democracy is in danger: the courts...
Itamar Ben-Gvir does not shoot Palestinians. He does not stand at checkpoints, raid homes at night, burn orchards, block ambulances, or pull the...
Three days before the Knesset formally dispersed, Bezalel Smotrich announced that the security cabinet had approved NIS 1.3 billion for the...
British Jews are increasingly asked to prove their loyalty to Israel by suspending judgment of the Israeli state. This demand is presented as...
Israel Was Added After the Deal The most revealing fact about the US–Saudi nuclear agreement is not only what it may permit, but when Israel entered...
Israel spent years confusing American permission with sovereign power. Netanyahu’s reported panic exposed the difference. The moment Washington...
Smotrich’s Grammar of Absolute Victory Bezalel Smotrich has defined absolute victory. Not as a general promise to defeat Hamas or as a formula...
On July 4, 1946, forty-two Jews were murdered in Kielce, and dozens more were wounded. The eightieth anniversary of the pogrom should be more than...
הִנְנוּ עַצְמְךָ וּבְשָׂרְךָ אֲנָחְנוּWe are your bone and your flesh.— 2 Samuel 5:1 There was once a country...
The Café Destroying Jerusalem There is something deeply unsettling about a society in which a person can be accused of “destroying Jerusalem”...
The Election Netanyahu Cannot Lose Israel may hold a lawful election on October 27, count every ballot correctly and certify the result — and still...
The greatest achievement of Israeli democracy may yet be persuading the lambs that moving Passover forward is a reform enacted entirely for their own...
When I published “For Truth’s Sake: Love Vance,” I was not claiming that JD Vance secretly hated Israel. My argument was more structural and...
The State That Consumes Its Society “If one question must be asked without end, not because we do not know the answer, but because the answer has...
The comparison between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump is usually made at the level of temperament and rhetoric. Both attack the press, denounce...
Rabbi Seth Winberg deserves credit for refusing the easiest accusation. The fact that many young American Jews support a binational state does not...
Israel’s political crisis is sustained by groups and institutions that claim to carry the country on behalf of everyone else. The problem begins...
The young are not abandoning a living world. They are watching adults turn sacred fragments into excuses for avoiding shared responsibility. There is...
Everyone Has a Plan for Gaza Governments have plans. Donors have plans. Security officials have conditions. Technocrats have committees. International...
Netanyahu’s Concrete State: How Israel Learns to Live With Impunity Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival has required more than coalition...
We Love America. How Convenient. We love America, of course. It is rich, cinematic, generous when it wants to be, brutal when it has to be, and always...
Netanyahu’s triangle of failure is now impossible to ignore. October 7 destroyed his security myth. Iran exposed the limits of his strategic...
סְיָג לַתּוֹרָה, לֹא מָגֵן שֶׁקֶר Seyag LaTorah, Lo Magen Sheker A Fence for the Torah, Not a False Shield Torah is not a...
Judea Is Not a Footnote Naftali Bennett and Israel’s Unfinished Return The debate around Naftali Bennett is usually misread when it is reduced to...
Judaism Is Not the West’s Moral Certificate Something has shifted inside part of the Israeli right and part of the American Jewish establishment....
When Providence Becomes a Party Instrument There is a dangerous moment in Jewish political life when theology ceases to be an opening toward judgment,...
Korach is one of the most dangerous political figures in the Torah because he says something that sounds true. In Numbers 16, Korach and his men rise...
The case of Pilar Rahola is not only about Pilar Rahola. It is about what happens when a democratic society begins to translate political...
The Haredi draft crisis is no longer a sectoral dispute. It is not merely about manpower, coalition bargaining, or the familiar slogan of sharing the...
Bnei Brak should stop being discussed as if it were merely a demographic inconvenience, a political irritation, or an embarrassing relic at the edge...
The Idolatry of Force Is Not Strategy There are moments when a state is not defeated first by its enemies, but by the collapse of its own language....
Israel Was Not Betrayed. It Was Repriced. Israel was not betrayed by Donald Trump. It was repriced, and that distinction is brutal but necessary....
How Media Caution Protects Strategic Failure from Recognition Not every form of caution is intellectually responsible. Sometimes caution is simply the...
Israel’s War, America’s Ending Benjamin Netanyahu is claiming victory over a war whose ending he no longer owns. That is the quiet defeat inside...
The De-escalation Trap When peace does not remove danger, but transfers it. A ceasefire can be a moral achievement. It can also be a technology for...
AI and the Shape of the Jew The most dangerous antisemitism is not always the one that announces itself. Sometimes it arrives as plausibility. A...
Israel Cannot Outsource the Permission to Survive There are moments when an alliance does not break. It simply reveals what it has become. The latest...
The Activism That Cannot Hear Palestinians The contemporary Western activist often does not hear Palestinians first. He hears the echo of his own...