This week’s haftorah should come with a disclaimer: If you want good news, don’t hire a prophet.
Isaiah is case in point. Even as he embarks on what is known as a haftorah of consolation, the old man is adamant not to allow the gleaming glories of the future to blind us to the dark vagaries ...

Like the best and the worst of Hollywood’s summer fare, Inception, the new film by Christopher Nolan, is one part epistemology and three parts explosion, a gorgeous spectacle that offers one large existential question and many kinetic attempts at an answer.
The question is this: What is reality? Or, more specifically, how can we be sure ...

Bernard Avishai detects chauvinism in editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse’s argument against Israel’s controversial conversion bill. I’ll leave aside the ordinarily astute Avishai’s downright creepy choice of words—one doubts that, if he had been responding to a male writer, he would have used the word “sassy” or conjured up an image like “brunette fetishists.” The real discourteousness ...

While you were likely spending your weekend trying to cool off, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was heating things up at his cabinet meeting Sunday, taking a stand against the proposed, and controversial, conversion bill.
“The Prime Minister said today in the cabinet meeting that he objects to the proposed conversion bill, which could tear ...

Summer is upon us, so allow me to adopt the heated language of film critics everywhere and claim that if you’re going to read just one haftorah portion this year, make it this week’s.
The Hollywood jargon isn’t entirely inappropriate. The scolding sermon in question, by the prophet Isaiah, has everything a blockbuster can hope for: ...

Meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu last week, President Obama could not have been more effusive. “I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu wants peace,” Obama said. “I believe he is ready to take risks for peace.”
A newly revealed tape of Netanyahu in 2001, being interviewed while he thinks the cameras are off, shows him in a radically different ...

The prophet Jeremiah launches this week’s haftorah with a poignant question. Channeling God’s voice, he asks, “What wrong did your forefathers find in Me, that they distanced themselves from Me, and they went after futility and themselves became futile?”
What follows, in the grand prophetic tradition, is a litany of complaints. Again we see the Israelites ...

If the fanatics have their way, Ilana Hammerman might spend the next two years in prison.
An Israeli journalist, Hammerman befriended a teenage Palestinian girl and was heartbroken to learn that, like most Palestinians in the West Bank, the girl—writing about the encounter in Haaretz, Hammerman called the girl Aya to protect her identity—was confined to ...

In the matter of the preponderance of existential angst among inanimate objects, few can match Woody, Buzz, and the other characters in the popular Toy Story franchise. Unlike most of cinema’s summer stock—a sticky syrup of expletives and explosions—the series, now in its third installment, revolves around playthings pondering their agency, mortality, and raison d’être. ...

For most of Jenny Baruchi’s life, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem meant nothing more than the cluster of buildings her mother, a cleaning lady, had to mop, scrub, and dust every day. Whatever hopes she may have had to one day attend the prestigious institution herself grew dimmer when she gave birth to her first ...