Sublime

from the perspective of the dominant class in Israel.

When I questioned Taylor about this he entertained my idea. “There may be some truth to that,” he admitted. “I know some Jews who would argue that American culture has benefited enormously from this frothy mix of Jewish intellectuals who think outside the box and don’t subscribe to traditional views. Yeah, but then the anti-Semites say that’s what

The anticipatory nature of redemption in Jewish belief paradoxically softens eschatological fervor and prevents the calamities associated with “hastening the end” that afflict societies in which messianic longing is either too overt or too repressed.

Kamtza and Bar Kamtza are like matter and antimatter, thesis and synthesis, light and shadow. To hate one and love the other is to lose sight of the essential similarity between the two, and thereby to engage in a useless and all-consuming kind of violence. The War of Gog and Magog, and all struggles for total annihilation, emerge from the clash of

Judaism is a particularist faith that recognizes the universality of the human condition.

The prohibition on embarrassing another is one of Judaism’s cardinal sins, they say, and one should sooner die than transgress

A majority of self-styled secularists led the State of Israel, fought in its armies, tilled its soil. In the eyes of many secular and religious Jews, any state so obviously brought into being by human activity, a state often not observant of Jewish traditional practices, a state manifestly vulnerable and full of flaws, could not define itself as a