David Mills Atoosa Rubenstein, then the editor of CosmoGirl, a magazine that originated in Hell, explains that “Their mothers have told them, Go for student council, go for the team, go for that job, and that has turned from a message directed toward achievement to being something their whole lives are about. So they apply it to pursuing boys as well.” http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/06/cosmogirl-freedom Read more

  Sunday, June 19, 2011 | Tsvi Sadan It is difficult to be certain why Haim Gouri uses New Testament motifs in his latest book of poems, entitled Eyval, named after Mount Ebal (Deut. 11:29). Gouri is an iconic figure in Israeli culture—the personification of the ideal Israeli. Born in Tel Aviv in 1923, he joined the Palmach militia and was sent to Hungary in 1947 to assist survivors of the Holocaust making their way to Palestine. During the 1948... Read more

By Uwe Siemon-Netto President Barack Obama’s decision to set a timeline for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan against the advice of his generals begs the question: Will populist reflexes inevitably prevent democracies from winning wars of long duration? One of democracy’s most determined antagonists came to this conclusion 60 years ago. North Vietnamese defense minister Vo Nguyen Giap declared that “the enemy,” meaning the West, “does not possess … the psychological and political means to fight a... Read more

But here comes the problem. Aspects of Judaism like circumcision will always be unpopular in customer surveys. If we leave the future of Judaism in the hands of marketing experts, challenging rituals like circumcision or Passover or Yom Kippur will be ignored, and we will end up with a smooth syncretistic mumbo jumbo that has no resemblance to our 3,000 year old tradition. http://www.jidaily.com/Ylb/e Read more

By all means, find and punish the perpetrators: all ten thousand of them. But punishment is only a start, towards helping them discover that guilt and shame on which all human character is built. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1286 Read more

Every time I visit the country I try to talk to Arabs so that I don’t hear only the Jewish perspective. Not that there’s only one Jewish perspective, of course. Anyone who pays even the slightest attention to Israel knows the politics there are famously fractious. The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis agree on some things, however, and you either have to talk to people on the lunatic fringe of the spectrum, to radical foreign activists, or to Palestinians if... Read more

Today, summing up my life (at age 86, you think about this every day you’re still alive), I can sum up my life in three words. My life was typical, tragic, and beautiful. http://www.jidaily.com/HHw/e Read more

William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University. Let me summarize how the key issues appear to me, a working scientist with a better background than most in the physics of climate. CO2 really is a greenhouse gas and other things being equal, adding the gas to the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas will modestly increase the surface temperature of the earth. Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration, from our... Read more

Stern, 35, is an archaeologist and an assistant professor in the history department at Brooklyn College. Her passion is the tomb graffiti of the ancient Jews in what was then Roman Palestine. Graffiti has been “published, but sort of disregarded,” she says. “Whereas I think it is intimate, vocal and spontaneous, and adds to the historical record.” http://www.jidaily.com/hOVB/e Read more

Could you ever imagine that an American government would order the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not to use Christian rhetoric to fuel the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s? http://articles.philly.com/2011-06-12/news/29650099_1_religion-and-politics-christian-belief-church-and-state Read more