To fix what’s wrong with America, we should first understand its defining civic faith
Contrary to starry mythologized notions of the liberalism of our ‘founders,’ it was Columbus, the Puritans, the positivists, and a whole host of other completely insane people who made the New World we now inhabit, for good or ill
How the Dreyfus affair inspired sociologist Émile Durkheim, who died 102 years ago today, to develop an original, provocative, and optimistic view of the French Republic and the rights-bearing individual
How the modern academic discipline of ‘Jewish Studies’ was invented in Renaissance England by the the greatest Christian Hebraist of the age
And what their French origins, and their waning and rising relevance to the power structures over the centuries, say about the new Washington
Award-winning author wrote seminal biography on Freud, traced European thought, Jewry
The Enlightenment was never about colonialism or mindless pursuit of perfection—it was, and is, about liberating us all
Hilde Spiel’s newly re-translated biography of the Austrian aristocrat is a cautionary tale of Jews during the German Enlightenment
In a pair of influential speeches to the Arab world, Obama has presented incompatibly multiculturalist and universalist positions. To lead in the Middle East, he must choose one.
When the Western press gives credence to anti-Israel propaganda, as it did in recent reports about a Palestinian woman killed by Israeli tear gas, it’s Arabs who are hurt most
Working on a book about the United States and Israel, we learned to stop worrying and love the idea of divine election
A new book shows how a set of 18th-century etchings helped change the way Europe thought about religion
Mirror images at odds
The controversial leftist Israeli politcal scientist Zeev Sternhell paints a damning, if perhaps uncontextualized, portrait of ‘anti-Enlightenment’ thinkers