Free Republic

Egypt is in turmoil again. Syria is embroiled in civil war. Iran continues building a nuclear device. Militants in Iraq have killed more than 4,000 people so far this year, more than 800 of them in July alone, according to the aptly named Iraq Body Count. And what is Secretary of State John Kerry's focus? It is the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Again facing U.S. pressure, Israel has agreed to renewed peace talks. It rejected demands from the Palestinian side for withdrawal from "occupied" lands and the freezing of new "settlements" as preconditions, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did agree to...

A history of Jewish literacy remains to be written. It will be a colorful and complicated work, as befits the variegated linguistic history of the Jews, and for American Jewish readers of our day, I mean the honest ones, it will be a disturbing work. Whereas the Jews have always used many languages, Jewish and non-Jewish ones, and whereas complaints about the faltering level of competence in Hebrew appear in many medieval and modern sources, the awful fact is that Jewry of the United States has decided—it was a decision, even if it was never formally made—that the Jewish tradition...

A campaign to persuade major booksellers to move missionary-generated holiday Passover Haggadahs off the "Judaism" shelves has won the first round. The Jewish anti-missionary organization Outreach Judaism raised the alarm about Passover Family Pack: Everything You Need to Enjoy a Passover Seder Dinner earlier this week, warning Jews the so-called Haggadah was really a Christian text. Rabbi Tovia Singer, director of Outreach Judaism, called on Jews who unsuspectingly purchased the book to return it at the point of sale, and to lobby the bookstores and corporations to remove the tome from the "Judaism" section of the shelves. Singer also called...

Perhaps the major reason Jews have been able to keep their national identity alive for 3,000 years, the last 2,000 of which were nearly all spent dispersed among other nations, is ritual. No national or cultural identity can survive without ritual, even if the group remains in its own country. Americans knew this until the era of anti-wisdom was ushered in by the baby boomer generation in the 1960s and '70s. We always had national holidays that celebrated something meaningful. When I was in elementary school, every year we would put on a play about Abraham Lincoln to commemorate Lincoln's...