Organized religion may be anathema on the political Left, but the need for the things religion provides - moral fervor, meaning, a sense of community - are not.
'Annie Hall' and 'The Graduate' are incredible films. Why should we be deprived of watching them because some of the men that made them are bad?
While there are perfectly legitimate criticisms that one can make of Israel or the actions of its government - and I have never been shy about making them - those criticisms cross the line into anti-Semitism when they ascribe evil, almost supernatural powers to Israel in a manner that replicates classic anti-Semitic slanders.
The best movie theater in the world is in a dingy basement on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The worn seats are painful. There are probably bigger screens in half the apartments in the complex above the theater. And forget Fandango; the theater barely has a website. You want to buy a ticket? Get in line.
Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.
Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of 'cultural appropriation' is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism - the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones.
For reasons historic, aesthetic, and political, we Jews are most attuned to the anti-Semitism of the far Right - and we find the most sympathy among our progressive allies when these are our attackers.
China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but 'woke' activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.
One of the casualties of Israel becoming an increasingly partisan issue has been American Jews themselves, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic and who see Israel's rightward turn as betraying fundamental liberal values.
Most people, including many Jews, think of Yom Kippur as a 25-hour caffeine headache capped off by a lox-and-bagels binge. It's undeniably that. But it is also, at its deepest level, a dry run. It is the one day of the year when we Jews are asked to look our mortality in the face.
I've been in love with both men and women. I've been ghosted by both men and women.
Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin. For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world's Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.
The leaders of the Women's March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.
One area where American Jews have something to teach Israel is religious pluralism, something that living in a democracy with a separation between church and state has helped us fine-tune.
Liberals shouldn't cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what's liberalism about?
There's no question that Ben Shapiro loves to provoke college students.
Since Britain handed over jurisdiction of its former colony to China 20 years ago, the city has operated under the notion of 'one country, two systems.' That increasingly appears to be an empty slogan.
I believe that it's condescending to think that women and their claims can't stand up to interrogation and can't handle skepticism.
Australia's defamation laws help explain why the #MeToo movement, while managing to take down some of the most powerful men in the entertainment and media industry in the United States, has not taken off there.
Despite the fact that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are not Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox hold the keys not just to Israel's Jewish sacred places, but to the life cycle events - conversions, weddings, divorces, burials - of the country's more than six million Jews.
