War again. Rockets again. Israel assassinates the commander of a radical Palestinian militia coalition in Gaza. In retaliation, gunners in the Strip fire rockets at cities across southern Israel. Israel launches a series of air strikes targeting the launch crews. More than 20 Palestinians are killed and scores injured. In...

It's that time again. On campuses the world over, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is mounting its eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week.

In the past, this has been a time for hardline pro-Palestinians and hardline pro-Israelis to rumble, counter-accuse, hurl half-truths and, often as not,...

In an age of films imagining all, baring all, demolishing all, in this decade of cinematic Holocaust and Jewish-Arab confrontation and IDF agonistes, in this season of obsession with Iran, why should Hollywood's Jews go to see a picture about an abrasively dysfunctional relationship between professors of Talmud strait-jacketed in...

It is one of the few points of agreement between people who are strongly pro-Palestinian and people who are strongly pro-Israeli: All too often, the United Nations fails its tests.

Both sides have their reasons. Palestinians will argue, and legitimately, that the veto power of the United States has shielded...

History, to take license with John Lennon, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Somewhere inside, beneath the air of cheesy royalty, behind the wall of yes men and the armored SUVs of his motorcades, when Benjamin Netanyahu mulls his place in history, he knows what...

The clue to Benjamin Netanyahu is the smile. The more that the broken line of the lips relaxes, the more the eyes turn torn, guarded, distantly hostile, a combination lock on a fortune of pain and dread.

For all that Netanyahu plays the role of Israel's Great Communicator, it is...

JERUSALEM -- Every four years, I watch from a distance as America, land of my birth and my marrow, turns into a foreign country. Familiar people and places grow puzzling, even exotic, under the pulls and spells of this caucus and that dark horse, the backroom heat of the moment...

If you could see Israel naked, it might well look like this year.

For the length of this corrosive 2011, you could feel something numbing, something comforting, being stripped away from us. The protective coloration -- the start-up sheen, the silvery comb-over pretense of democracy and peace-seeking, of Jewish values...

A balagula, a wagon driver, shuffles into the town inn, crestfallen. "What's the matter?" the innkeeper asks, pouring him a drink.

"I was so close. So close," the balagula replies. "My plan... I could feel it was going to work. Every single day, I gave my horse a little less...

Speaker Gingrich, if you're serious about becoming president, it's time that you got to know us a bit better.

Let's start with the occupation, our 44-year-long experiment in re-inventing the Palestinian people. This is what you need to know before you bet your political farm on it:

We don't have...

Every vote sends a message. Last week, when the Berkeley Jewish Student Union voted to bar J Street's student organization from membership, the message it sent was regrettably clear:

The choice is up to you -- you can be welcomed as a Jew, or you can speak your...

We're a people that can appreciate nasty, us Jews. Chalk it up to survivor guilt or oppressor guilt, put it down to a legacy of Talmudic and tribal disputation, to a legacy of abuse, or to a tradition of stand-up, the evidence is clear: Two Jews, Three Zingers -- barbed,...

How does Israel expect to explain itself after this? How are people who support Israel supposed to understand the Black Flag legislation which has expropriated the business of the Knesset?

Fortunately, the language of the Bible now has a word for all of it. It's spelled Bet Vav Lamed Shin...

I have a nephew who's never seen Israel. I have young cousins, and friends and children of friends, who have never been here, but who have long wanted to come visit.

I want them to come soon. Before it's all gone.

The Israel I want them to see is dying...

The same question, wherever you turn. In a hundred accents, at the green grocer's, the dentist's, the college library, the gym. From garage to synagogue, the question doesn't change: Will we attack Iran?

Which is to ask: Will Iran then reduce Tel Aviv, and all of Israel, to ashes?

If...

My daughter went to school this morning worried about her civics exam. She came home worried about explosive warheads.

As of this week, she's in range.

Her school is now within reach of rockets that travel farther and with far more deadly payloads than the weapons we knew just a...

Israel-bashing is not what it used to be. In fact, Israel-bashing is not what it was a week ago. The difference is Gilad Shalit.

The difference is that it now turns out to be just fine for U.S. Jews to denounce the actions and policies of the government of Israel...

On the High Holidays when I was small, Jews wore clothes they were not comfortable in, in order to ask themselves questions they were not comfortable with.

Some things don't change.

On the High Holidays when I was small, the old people, when they weren't discussing the Old Country, would...

There's a certain implied danger in the idea of playing darts in the dark. Particularly when there are numerous players in a crowded room, and not one has a well-defined target.

For Mahmoud Abbas' Palestine, for Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel, and no less, for the Obama administration, the effort to bring...

[The following was written three days before the largest protest demonstration in the history of Israel.]

How can you tell if a revolution is real? When this all started, I had no idea. But I kept going to the tent camps and to the marches until I learned. It took...