Spring 2025

At my grandparents’ house in Tehran, the day began as usual. Breakfast was a smorgasbord of sangak (a thin bread made in a stone oven, bought fresh and warm every day from a local baker), honey, feta cheese, yogurt, and …

The easiest Egyptian revolutionaries for a non-Arabic speaking American to find are the young bloggers, wielders of camera-phones, YouTube uploaders, and social-network activists—”shabab al-Facebook,” as they are sometimes known, the Facebook youth credited with the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. They …

Rather than engage my argument, Marshall Ganz dismisses it out of hand. He says that I misunderstand his work, but he never says how. Instead, he expounds on his theory of “public narrative” and its ability to move people by …

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America by Grace Elizabeth Hale Oxford University Press, 2011, 386 pp. CULTURAL REBELLION is at the center of American history and has intersected with …

A Nationalist Conservative revolution has triumphed in Budapest; its leaders are busy dismantling constitutionalism and the rule of law. How could this have happened? And can the Western Left do anything about it? There was a time when Hungary seemed …

In the world I was born into, Israel was an emotion wrapped in an idea. Simply by existing, the Jewish state was a portal to deliverance, and since I had been carried through that portal at birth, so to speak, …

We asked four writers to answer these two questions: What is your own relationship to the state of Israel? And how do you think that American Jews, as a whole, should relate to Israel? These weren’t, so to speak, the …

“For about two years now, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been co-opting much of the GOP playbook on education. They support charter schools. They endorse merit pay. They decry teacher tenure and seniority. On alternating Thursdays, …

In 2009, The Hurt Locker prompted a great deal of controversy, and not just because it was about a controversial war. Thousands of consumers who wanted to watch the movie downloaded it freely instead of paying for tickets. The movie’s …

Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition by James T. Kloppenberg Princeton University Press, 2010, 296 pp. TOWARD THE end of James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama, the author ponders an anecdote from the candidate’s speech on race in Philadelphia …

When Americans on the Left—and in the Center and on the Right, for that matter—turn their attention to the issue of protest in contemporary China, they most often think back to the traumatic upheavals of 1989, which began with inspiring …