There wasn't much to read in this morning's Ha'aretz, Israel's serious and left-leaning morning newspaper. Nearly every one of the paper's senior writers has written a piece about how amazing it is that the United States is on the verge of electing a black president.

It is...

Penitents are like voters. They face critical choices, ones that will set the course of their lives, and must make them in a situation of uncertainty. Committed voters try to grope through the fog of rhetoric in order to understand the true wills and predilections of the candidates they must...

There he goes again--Benny Morris is giving the battle against Islamic anti-Semitism a bad name.

But then he's not alone in fray. Nearly every passionate participant in the battle--Pipes, Horowitz, you name it--would make the angelically tolerant Roger Williams, the great American founder of religious toleration, go apoplectic.

In one...

Beirut is an evocative city even when you've only seen it in its worse moments. In yesterday's New York Times, Roger Cohen waxes nostalgic about Beirut of a quarter-century ago, and in today's Ha'aretz, Yehuda Ben-Meir praises Israel's restraint in not invading the city back in the first...

"Are you going to vote for Obama?" my 14-year-old daughter, Misgav, asked me the other day.

"I don't vote in American elections," I replied, "because I'm Israeli."

"But you could vote, right?"

"I could," I acknowledged. "I'm also an American citizen. But the last time I voted was in 1980....

America is the land of freedom. It is the world's standard for democracy; its ideals of personal freedom and civil rights are the envy of all enlightened citizens of the world.

If you grew up in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, as I did, this is what...

Poor kids get worse educations and graduate from high school at lower rates than rich kids. That's bad. What could be worse? In Israel, what's worse is that, according to the Bank of Israel's annual report (not yet available on line, but here's a report by Or Kashti in...