Just a few days ago was the longest night of the year. Another way of looking at is that this was night in which the tide of darkness began to turn back in favor of light. Bunched around this time are so many ancient holidays of lights and candles, of...

I grew up in a world of blessings and curses, and I mean a world of radically elaborate blessings and curses. I speak of course of the Yiddish world, the world of Jews from Eastern Europe. It surrounded me and was in the air all the time. The incredible creativity...

Much is being made of Palestinian unilateralism recently, and President Obama and his advisers seem authentically perturbed by the unilateral march to Palestinian statehood declarations at the United Nations come September. It will indeed put the United States in an awful position.

Is this Palestinian move such...

Ever since the disastrous split in Palestinian leadership of several years ago into Fatah and Hamas, it has become clear that disunity has been a critical factor standing in the way of Palestinian statehood. Many reconciliation efforts, with several third parties, were attempted and aborted. This time it seems that...

Men in Middle Eastern palaces making decisions about their lives, their families, their fortunes, their necks. I think a lot these days about such men because history and the fate of millions of people often comes down to what is going on inside their heads. They are certainly not unique...

I have spent the last two weeks, like millions of other people, completely immersed in supporting the brave Egyptian citizens of Tahrir Square. I have spread every piece of truth about them that I could get my hands on to my social network. Indeed their revolution is perhaps the first...

Reflecting on 2010, it's clear that racism in Israel has reared its ugly head. A recent poll published by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only 51 percent of Israelis support equal rights between Jews and Arabs, while 53 percent think the state should encourage Arabs to emigrate from the...

I recently flew Qatar Airlines round trip for a lovely interfaith conference in Doha. I ended up, back and forth to Washington, spending a total of 27 hours in-flight within four days. Not long after I got back, Qatar Airlines was in the news as having been one of the...

President Obama has signaled in recent days that he will be confronting China much more on its global policies. But China is on the rise as the premier economic global power, even as America is on the decline, and it remains to be seen what kind of confrontation could be...

He was racing in a Humvee with four other soldiers, having arrived there just days before, 19 years old. The day he got there his best friend was shot in the head, boom, gone in an instant. Now he was racing along this road when a missile directly hit the...

Recent sputterings of a peace process between Israel and Palestine, the termination of Israel's settlement building freeze causing a demise of said peace process -- again -- has produced a loud, global yawn. What else is new in this endless conflict? Negotiations cannot succeed without a vision, and there is...

It was three days before Rosh Hashanah, and I was predictably anxious about my identity, my life, about my family's Jewish future. As a good and fractious Jew, I was somewhat ambivalent about which synagogue I would go to: The one I sometimes go to? The one I would never...

The recent news of a rogue group of American military personnel murdering Afghans for sport is a sign of America's war fatigue. The more the war drags on without attainable goals the worse the "quality control" of American troops. American troops are exhausted and over-stretched, and we must ask, what...