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Yochanan SchimmelpfennigThe Times of Israel (Blogs) |
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...
There are moments when an election is no longer simply an election. It becomes an operation performed on public memory. Benjamin Netanyahu now appears...
The most dangerous political events do not always announce themselves as ruptures. Sometimes the rupture is hidden inside continuity. The flag remains...
A poll is not a covenant, and a majority is not yet responsibility. Numbers may indicate a political opening, but they do not by themselves constitute...
There are moments when polite language becomes indecent, not because it is vulgar, but because it refuses to name what is happening. It covers...
Israel, Netanyahu, and the Patron’s Invoice There are moments when diplomacy stops pretending to be diplomacy and reveals itself as accounting. The...
When “We Jews” Becomes Too Simple There is a sentence one hears more and more often: we Jews will manage. Let them talk. Let the world condemn....
As public opinion shifts, governments turn protest into policy, and Jews abroad become unwilling proxies for Israel, the question is no longer whether...
Timothy Snyder recently described the United States under Donald Trump as engaged in “superpower suicide.” The phrase is harsh, but useful. It...
There is a moment when corruption stops being a scandal and becomes a form of government. It does not always arrive with bags of cash, crude threats,...
When the Nefesh Leaves the Throne Jewish language becomes weak when it is translated too quickly into the language of the modern self. Bitul...
The Vatican is right to enter the debate on artificial intelligence. But it should not be the only religious voice standing at the threshold. Pope Leo...
When Ground Ceases to Be Ground There are books that can be rejected only after they have been read. Eyal Weizman has written such a book....
Bezalel Smotrich should not be defended, but he should not be misunderstood. That distinction matters. To defend him would be to become an apologist...
Eurovision and the Failure of Managed Absence The most interesting fact about Eurovision 2026 is not that Israel did not win. Bulgaria won, and did so...
Adam Was Not Created to Be an Interface The first mistake is to think that Adam means “the first human being.” That is already too modern, too...
There was never one “New Jew.” There was a struggle over which Jew would be allowed to carry the future. This is the necessary continuation of any...
The State Was Not the Beginning There is a lazy way to speak about Zionism, and there is a serious one. The lazy way begins in 1948 — with borders,...
My view of Hannah Arendt remains critical. I do not treat her as a secular prophet whose every sentence must be repeated with the solemn face of an...
A community does not betray itself by asking difficult questions. It betrays itself when it leaves those questions to its enemies. A movement built to...
There is a form of seriousness easily mistaken for strength. It speaks from above. It guards the entrance. It decides who may think, who may speak,...
There are moments when a community must stop consoling itself with its own vocabulary. Israel has become very skilled at speaking the language of...
Israel is not arguing about a medical procedure. It is arguing about who may touch the forbidden place where death, name, lineage, and future meet....
I have been reading Susanne Heim’s Die Abschottung der Welt. Als Juden vor verschlossenen Grenzen standen 1933–1945, and what stays with me is not...
On Israeli Independence Day, the real question is not only what binds a people together, but what kind of moral language teaches the weaker side to...
When the Uniform Comes Off, Power Remains Three young women showed up for their final discharge day from the IDF in civilian clothes: a tank top, a...
When Collaboration Stops Looking Like Collaboration The pretext for this text was a Times of Israel article on Henri Matisse and the question of...
To Not Was Not a Scandal. It Was an Offer. When a swastika appears in the Polish parliament, the easiest response is to speak about the brutalization...
When Power Starts Dressing for the Altar This is not a joke. It is not internet sludge. It is not one more vulgar Trumpian performance to be filed...
Great Israel Begins Before the Border Moves The most dangerous territorial projects do not begin with tanks. They begin when a larger map stops...
“A shelter that destroys the house is not safety” When Jews Start Looking for Safety in the Wrong Places One of the ugliest political facts of our...
At a moment when one after another the stories meant to shield political incompetence, moral inertia, and a catastrophic failure of imagination are...
A worker can lose his job for a serious mistake. A driver can lose his license. A surgeon can lose the right to operate. But in Washington’s war...
A recent Times of Israel article on Mordecai Kaplan and the public backlash against his rewritten Haggadah and prayer book offers more than an episode...
There is a moment in every conflict when the greatest danger is no longer the missile, the ultimatum, or even the regime itself. It is the word that...
What is now emerging from Washington is not merely a decline in tone. It is a decline in political form. On April 5, 2026, Donald Trump did not...
A Jewish state must defend Jewish life. But the moment force begins to sound self-justifying, something has already gone wrong. Jewish history does...
How Fake Precision Manufactures Civilizational Claims Not every dangerous fiction now arrives as propaganda. More and more often, it arrives as a...
The Order After the Citizen The Golem returns not as myth, but as infrastructure. The citizen is no longer the subject of order, but its managed...
Before Passover, Jews perform a strangely delicate act. We search the house by candlelight for crumbs. Not for furniture. Not for walls. Not for the...
The State That Weakens Itself: Compression, Not Confidence On March 30, 2026, the Knesset passed the Penal Law (Amendment – Death Penalty for...
The Problem Is Not Only the Deal. It Is Also the Dealer. David Horovitz is right to identify the visible danger. If Donald Trump seeks an agreement...
המרכבה נוסעת, והכיסא ריק Ha-merkavah nosa’at, veha-kise rik. The chariot keeps moving, but the throne is empty. State Without a...
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