The Magnes Zionist

Elul is the Jewish month for soul-reckoning. Traditionally, Jews don't make New Year resolutions, but they are expected to try harder in...

Aristotle's logic includes not only rules of valid inference but also fallacies, i.e., rules of invalid inference and other strategies t...

It has been my custom to reproduce this “Selling Purim to Progressives” post occasionally on Purim.  The last time was in 2015, when we were...

Following Secretary of State John Kerry's speech on Israel-Palestine, Prof. Corey Robin pointed out the following on Facebook: There...

Dear Readers, As some have pointed out to me, this blog is virtually defunct. I hope to write something occasionally, and I will post it h...

By “anti-Palestinianism” I understand prejudice against Palestinian Arabs based on perceived negative qualities of Palestinian cultural or n...

Since the election of Ehud Barak as prime minister in 1999, if not earlier, there has been no center left in Israel. Of course, there has be...

J. K . Rowling has signed a statement against the cultural boycott of Israel, and has called instead for cultural engagement.  Some of her P...

Update: Apparently, the Spanish festival has recently apologized and reinvited Matisyahu . The festival organizers' should not be confu...

These are sad days for Israel/Palestine, but today I got a kick out of a story that I thought at first was produced by the satirical mag, th...

A story reported last week by Inside Higher Education read like a McCarthyist nightmare:  A Brazilian university administrator urgently req...

Many people have different positions on the wisdom, and even the legitimacy, of tactics involving boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) ...

I was asked last summer by a friend what was my reaction to the Two States in  One Homeland initiative. My short answer was that it had som...

Several days ago, the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, which takes testimonies from IDF soldiers, published a booklet of over sixty testim...

Dr. Max Klau and Rabbi Sid Schwartz (a rabbi for whom I have enormous respect)  have written an article arguing that young progressive Jews ...