The experts have apparently agreed that it wasn’t values that lost us the last election. It was passion, and above all, it was the passion of fear. But maybe frightened people look for strong leaders, whose strength is revealed in …
Virtue, Markets, and the Family
Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over …
Running as a social democrat for the Senate in the Czech Republic is not for the timid. In my district, four voters out of five stoutly affirm social democratic values and virulently reject social democratic candidates. After forty years of …
States’ rights have long seemed to go hand in hand with conservatism. But this need not be the case. What would a progressive federalism look like?
American Views on Personal Morality and the Law
The Year of the Biopic
Bush’s Budget and the Gutting of Social Security
Is It Time to Amend the Constitution?
Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life
Democrats Agree on How to Play Defense, but What Are They Fighting For?
The post-election stress disorder afflicting Blue Americans (wherever we live) continues four months after the election. We still obsess about what went wrong. Was gay marriage the determining factor? Moral values in general? Was it the threat of terrorism? Did …
The focus on family values in political discussion is relatively new. Although William Safire has produced multiple editions of his Dictionary of American Politics, the term does not appear until the 1995 edition, when Safire includes a quote from the …
If asked to define the concept of Zionism in one word, I would choose “borders”; allowed one more word, I would add “sovereignty.” These two words alone elucidate the profound connection between the Zionist revolution and the essence of Diaspora …
I am honored that Lance Compa and Sheldon Friedman took the time to formulate such thoughtful and generous responses to my essay. I admire their work, appreciate the breadth of experience they bring to bear, and share many of their …
