Sublime

What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming?

Only if my freedom respects yours can we create a non-tragic human world.

Alexis de Tocqueville

This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions

human life is sacred, that the individual may never be sacrificed for the mass, and that rich and poor, great and small, are all equal before God.

Yet Herzl’s vision of a sovereign state had meaning, increasing numbers of Israelis believed, only if those new Jews rooted themselves and their humanity in the tradition they had inherited. Herzl without Ahad Ha’am was merely political sovereignty—and that, Israelis began to sense, was simply not enough. Theodor Herzl. Ahad Ha’am. Two radically di

In 2003, future prime minister Ehud Olmert called on Israel to “maximize the number of Jews” and “minimize the number of Palestinians.”

European notions of nations and citizenship,

the faith of a man who has considered the very real possibility that chaos and bloodshed are simply all there is.