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The Patriarch and the Palestinians

Cole S. Aronson

If I drink coffee at every meeting, I’ll kill someone,” His Beatitude Pierbattista Pizzaballa says when I ask him to join me for an espresso while we talk. Who...

Israeli Strategy and Palestinian Despair

Cole S. Aronson

Jerusalem was awakened this past Shabbat morning by sirens announcing missiles and by the low thud of the guns that intercept them. My friends in the Israeli Defense Forces...

Anti-Zionism Goes Woke

Cole S. Aronson

The No-State Solution:A Jewish Manifestoby daniel boyarinyale university, 200 pages, $30 Like a starving zombie, identity politics bites into longstanding left-wing ideas and movements, reforming them in its own...

First Things Is Good for the Jews

Cole S. Aronson

Resist junk food journalism. Support journalism that nourishes the mind and soul by contributing to our year-end campaign today. First Things is good for the Jews. I know few students...

Chanukah and the War on Sports

Cole S. Aronson

A few years ago, a friend and I left our yeshiva in the Judean hills to spend Shabbat with some acquaintances studying in Jerusalem’s enormous Mir Yeshiva. We prayed,...

The Civic Duties of Hasidic Schools

Cole S. Aronson

The way to fix well-funded, failing schools is more funding––unless the schools are privately run. Welfare dependency isn’t lamentable––unless the dependents belong to religious sects. Standardized tests are bigoted...

On the Ukrainian Border

Cole S. Aronson

I doubt if we ever come back home,” says Helen, who until recently taught English to second- and third-graders in Mykolaiv, a southern Ukrainian city of several hundred thousand. “Putin...

America Needs a Kosher Diner

Cole S. Aronson

America has given the world two things: baseball and jazz,” said a great professor of political philosophy one fine New England morning. This erudite patriot wouldn’t mind if I...

How to Read Ecclesiastes

Cole S. Aronson

Ecclesiastes is a book of doom. In twelve undramatic chapters, King Solomon seems even more stubbornly disconsolate than Job. Empire, wealth, wisdom, virtue, and still “all is futility and...

True Jewish Lit

Cole S. Aronson

The Blessing and the Curse:The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Centuryby adam kirsch w. w. norton, 304 pages, $30 The title of Adam Kirsch’s survey of...

The Lesson of Leaven

Cole S. Aronson

About fifteen years ago, on the third or fourth day of Passover, some relatives took me and my brother to a sports bar to get some lunch. One of...

The Jealous God of Chanukah

Cole S. Aronson

I sometimes think that the hardest part of Judaism is its regimen of self-improvement. Moderate your appetites—no Chateau this-and-that, no Swiss on a reuben, no lobster. Sex is for...

Coronavirus Shabbat

Cole S. Aronson

I’ve been in an apartment on a quiet Jerusalem street for the past couple of weeks. Last week I spent Shabbat alone for the first time. Friday night after...