A Push to Curb Drug Abuse Among Orthodox Youths
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
Posted: Saturday April 2, 2005
Last weekend, many Jews celebrated Purim, which commemorates their salvation from the hands of a wicked king's minister, Haman, in ancient Persia, by getting drunk. In fact, it is considered a mitzvah to drink immoderately on the holiday, one of the happiest in the Jewish calendar. So why was the Orthodox Union, the umbrella group for Orthodox synagogues in North America, sponsoring advertisements in Jewish publications that said, "Friends don't let friends drink irresponsibly on Purim"?  [Read More]

The Resurrection of Anti-Semitism
Posted: Monday May 10, 2004
Gabriel Schoenfeld discusses his book, The Return of Anti-Semitism.  [Read More]

The Return of Anti-Semitism
Posted: Monday March 15, 2004
Transcript of our conversation with Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of The Return of Anti-Semitism.  [Read More]

Why Genesis? Why Now?
A Conversation with Leon R. Kass
Posted: Thursday February 19, 2004
In June 2003, bioethicist and scholar Leon Kass discussed his new book, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003). After Dr. Kass’s remarks, three respondents offered assessments of the book: Catholic author and theologian George Weigel, evangelical Protestant scholar Alan Jacobs, and Jewish scholar and editor Leon Wieseltier. Center president Hillel Fradkin moderated the lively discussion that followed.  [Read More]

Irreconcilable Difference
By Elliot Abrams
Posted: Monday December 6, 1999
The delusion has taken hold in some quarters recently that deep conversations between Jewish and evangelical Christian leaders will solve the key problem that divides these two communities: evangelical efforts to convert Jews. My advice to those pursuing this dialogue: stay home.   [Read More]

Reform Judaism: A New Path?
A Conversation with Rabbis Jack Luxemburg, David Novak, and Joshua Haberman
Posted: Monday November 22, 1999
At an Ethics and Public Policy Center seminar on June 25, 1999, the subject was the “Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism” adopted a month earlier in Pittsburgh by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.  [Read More]

Judaism or Jewishness?
By Elliot Abrams
Posted: Sunday June 1, 1997
Most American Jewish leaders came to believe that security in America would be found by insisting that this country’s Constitution be secular and that Jewish pressures to diminish the role of religion were based not on self-interest but on faith in law and the Constitution.   [Read More]

"Search" for the Soul of Judaism
By William Brailsford
Posted: Monday May 19, 1997
In modern Hebrew, the words for truth and art come from the same root. With masterful sensitivity, the artist Ben-Zion has transformed the horrible truths of the 20th century into a powerful artistic repertory of etchings, drawings, paintings and sculpture that beckon the viewer into his magical interpretation of the world, and the realities, of Jewish culture.  [Read More]

Into the Melting Pot
'Assimilation, American Style' by Peter Salins
By Elliot Abrams
Posted: Tuesday April 1, 1997
Peter Salins' book is a labor of love as much as scholarship. The child of immigrants who lived the American Dream, he has watched what he calls the "sinister" development of ethnocentricity on the Left and nativism on the Right combine to threaten the American immigration/assimilation paradigm. Salins, a professor of urban affairs at Hunter College and former editor in chief of the City Journal, describes how the system is supposed to work and did work for generations of immigrants, and decries the assault that would split American society into tribes and bar additional immigration. Salins' basic argument can be set forth   [Read More]

Jews Without Judaism
The Vanishing American Jew by Alan Dershowitz
By Elliot Abrams
Posted: Monday March 17, 1997
Why should people not similarly raised and educated stay Jewish, unless they are Jews in the religious sense? Dershowitz has a razor-sharp mind and is a wonderful teacher; it is a mystery that he has written a book that cannot answer that question.   [Read More]