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There's a bestselling book by the psychologist Robert Cialdini titled Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. In one point in this largely non-Jewish book, we are shown a [...]

In 1942, with the world at war, an Oxford tutor wrote a book about traditional faith unlike any other ever published. It consists of missives from a senior devil in [...]

PATTON IS ONE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN FILMS, FEATURING GEORGE C. SCOTT as the brilliant, flawed, and exceedingly idiosyncratic general who believed in reincarnation and insisted he had himself been [...]

As the 80th anniversary of D-Day was marked in early June, many recalled the address given in Normandy by Ronald Reagan 40 years earlier--his celebration of the 'boys of Pointe [...]

As a mob of Columbia students and other anti-Semitic agitators violently entered and occupied the University's Hamilton Hall, only to be valorized by members of the media and the academy, [...]

MARCH 2024 Thousands of years ago, as Solomon dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem, he emphasized that the sanctity of the site was not for Israelites alone. There will be Gentiles, [...]

LET US ponder the Blackstone Memorial, one of the most fascinating occasions in the history of the American relationship with Zionism and one almost entirely forgotten today. It was drawn [...]

RECENTLY, in the Gaza Strip, a Jewish song was composed and sung. Its unlikely origin and subsequent story embody Judaism itself. Colonel Golan Vach of the IDF had been silently [...]

ON NOVEMBER 14, Deborah Lipstadt spoke before the 290,000 assembled in support of Israel, and in opposition to Jew-hatred, on the Mall in Washington. In her remarks, the prominent historian [...]

ON MAY 8, 1997, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia delivered what may have been the most important speech of his life. Strikingly, the address had nothing to do with jurisprudence; [...]

The Bible and its teachings helped form the basis for the Founding Fathers' abiding belief in the inalienable rights of the individual, rights which they found implicit in the Bible's [...]

STRIKING ARCHEOLOGICAL discoveries are a constant in Israel, but they can still occasionally inspire wonder. That is the case with the uncovering of a weapons cache from the second century, [...]

IN 1977, the newly elected prime minister of Israel visited the United States and appeared on NBC's Meet the Press. He was immediately asked about his meeting with President Carter, [...]

ONE OF the first photographs on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows the American arrival at Ohrdruf, a labor camp that was an extension of Buchenwald, in [...]

ON THURSDAY, March 13, my synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City, announced it would not be holding services on Shabbat. To refrain from praying in a community is [...]

WHEN 21ST-CENTURY American Jewry is studied, historians will look back at the story of Oliver Ferber as a snapshot of the era: an inspiring and horrifying episode that tells us [...]

ON A RECENT visit to Israel, I toured the Museum of the Underground Prisoners, in Acre. It is housed in the Ottoman fortress that the British utilized as their most [...]

AS HAMAS FIRED missile after missile into Israel, the Internet was inundated with celebrity condemnations of the Jewish state and misinformation from the media. Yet one pro-Israel image strikingly stood [...]

IN 1949, NINE MONTHS after the State of Israel was formally recognized by both U.S. President Truman and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, Britain refused to acknowledge the existence of the [...]

CECIL B. DEMILLE had a problem. He had already cast all the roles for his forthcoming blockbuster about the Exodus story, The Ten Commandments, but he had yet to find [...]

RABBI HANINA ben Teradyon was executed by the Romans following the fall of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 C.E. AS he was burned alive while holding a Torah in [...]

DURING WORLD WAR I, Lieutenant Harry Truman was assigned to run the regimental canteen at an Army training camp in Oklahoma. To make it a financial success, Harry took on [...]

And He said unto me: 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And I answered: 'O Lord GOD, Thou alone knowest.' --EZEKIEL ON THE LAST DAY OF PASSOVER, the New [...]

'YOUR native language,' Henry Higgins proudly proclaims in Pygmalion, 'is the language of Shake-speare and Milton and the Bible.' George Bernard Shaw knew very well that the Bible was not [...]

WHENEVER ISRAEL'S Temple Mount is in the news, one is reminded of the old joke in which two Americans, touring England, pay a visit to Runnymede. 'It was here,' the [...]

TWO CENTURIES AGO, Percy Bysshe Shelley challenged his friend Horace Smith to a 19th-century version of a poetry slam. He had read of the acquisition by the British Museum of [...]

IF THERE WAS a moment that captured what became known as the mahapach--the political upheaval that marked the rise of the longtime back bencher Menachem Begin to the prime ministership [...]

MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. IT [...]

IT WAS NOT in Eastern Europe, or the Middle East, but in England that the blood libel was born. In 1144, a tanner's assistant by the name of William was [...]

AS THE NAMES OF THE JEWS murdered in Pittsburgh were released, many of their co-religionists, responding online to this unthinkable occurrence, looked to Jewish tradition and parlance. 'Zichronam Livracha,' some [...]

Get thee from your land, from your birthplace, from your father's house, to the land that I will show thee. And I will make thee into a great nation, and [...]

ON JULY 4, 1976, in honor of the bicentennial and during Queen Elizabeth's visit to Philadelphia, the government of Great Britain decided to present a special gift to the American [...]

ON MAY 6, 2022, Israel's Independence Day, the Temple Mount was opened to Jews for the first time in 11 days. Jewish visitors, calmly and proudly walking into the sacred [...]

ON APRIL 13, 1945, a unique service centered on Passover was held in the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Some 1,500 survivors gathered at the Kino Halle, the auditorium that had [...]

AS I WRITE THESE words, the war in Ukraine continues, producing images harrowing, terrifying, and at times inspiring. The outcome, at this point, is uncertain. Yet I am certain that [...]

THE CITY NAME 'Munich' is already profoundly associated with cinematic moral confusion. It was the title Steven Spielberg gave his relativistic reflection on the way the Mossad avenged the murder [...]

'LAUGHER,' writes the the essayist Jim Holt in his book Stop Me If You've Heard This, 'is our characteristic response to the aesthetic category of the humorous, the comical, or [...]

Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who chose us from among the nations and gave us His Torah. --Talmudic blessing over the Torah Helen: Right now, [...]

'TIS THE SEASON to remember Christopher Hitchens.' So my fellow COMMENTARY columnist Matthew Continetti wrote in December in a Washington Free Beacon essay marking the 10th anniversary of the controversial [...]

ON HANUKKAH, as part of the country-wide celebration, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) opened to the public a Jewish town excavated from the earth. Yavneh was where the Sanhedrin, the [...]

THE OLYMPIC TORCH relay is one of the most celebrated of international spectacles. Kindled in Greece, the torch is borne by runners around the world, ultimately ending up at the [...]

IN SEPTEMBER, a bureaucrat at Barnard College, the sister institution of Columbia University, declared the millennia-old religious requirements of Judaism null and void. To understand the exquisite irony of her [...]

The soul of man is the candle of God. -PROVERBS 20:27 Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. -HANNAH SENESH MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith [...]

WHAT IS JUDAISM'S holiest site? It is a simple question with an obvious answer. Thrice daily, Jews pray for the restoration of sacred service to Jerusalem's Temple Mount. It is [...]

EARLY IN 2021, a niche online argument made its way onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal, complete with a catchy headline: 'Designing a Flag for Yiddish Takes [...]

IN APRIL 1945, the BBC's Patrick Walker described to the world one of the most remarkable Jewish prayer services in the history of Judaism. It took place on a Friday [...]

IN JUNE 1981, as Israel was about to begin the holiday of Shavuot, Prime Minister Menachem Begin informed the media he had just ordered one of the most audacious operations [...]

FORTY YEARS ago this month, a small movie was released in England by the name of Chariots of Fire. One year later, it won the Oscar for Best Picture, defeating [...]

Before old age shalt thou rise; and thou shalt honor the presence of thy elders. --LEVITICUS Therefore, choose life, that thou and thy children shall live. --DEUTERONOMY 'WE HAVE discovered [...]

THE RULING issued by the Supreme Court on Thanksgiving eve, in a case pitting an Orthodox Jewish group and a Catholic diocese against New York's governor, was unremarkable. What was [...]