Fathom

The Jewish Political Tradition

Excavating the Jewish political tradition Alan Johnson: Let’s start with two big questions. What is the Jewish political tradition? And what is the four volume work The Jewish Political Tradition that you are helping to edit? Michael Walzer: Well, what we mean by the Jewish political tradition is simply the long history of Jewish reflection…

Responding to the NGOs Durban Strategy: between engagement and confrontation

Gerald Steinberg

In early 2013, after a long and difficult debate, the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) approved a programme to sponsor Jewish volunteers to work with mentors from Oxfam Great Britain. These activities will take place under the banner of the ‘Grow/Tatzmiach’ project, whose official objective is to ‘tackle injustices in the international food…

Turkey and Israel: the limits to rapprochement

Shashank Joshi

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not known for his sense of irony, but he might reflect on the curiosity that, just as his country’s diplomatic ascent seemed to have stalled, he has secured two of the greatest political prizes within weeks of one another. The first was a ceasefire agreement with the Kurdish…

‘We should still be prepared to intervene’

Richard Perle on George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the Arab Spring

Part 1: Early Influences Alan Mendoza: Richard, you’ve been a pivotal figure in the US defence and foreign policy establishment for four decades now, but why don’t we start right at the very beginning before you arrived in Washington DC. I’m curious to know who were the early influencers on your thought? Richard Perle: Well, when…

The Making of The Gatekeepers

Dror Moreh

an interview with Dror Moreh

Dror Moreh is the director of the Academy Award nominated Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers, a rare insight into the Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic secret service agency). For the first time ever, six former heads of the Shin Bet agreed to share their insights and reflect publicly on their actions and decisions. Intimately interviewed, they shed…

The pleasures of antisemitism

Eve Garrard

The Pleasures of Anti-Semitism Antisemitism is much more than a cognitive error. It attracts by providing the deep emotional satisfactions of hatred, tradition, and moral purity. (A shorter version of this article appeared in Fathom Summer 2013, Issue 3.) There is something strangely ineffective about many of our attempts to combat anti-Semitism. We treat it…

Israeli cinema: gay but not queer

Yair Raveh

We begin this piece with some trivia. In the past nine years, five Israeli movies grossed more than two million dollars in the US. Now, two million dollars for a small foreign language art film is a lot of money. Rare are the foreign films that reach it, and before 2004 no Israeli film had…

April 26, 2013, 09:40 AM What does Israel’s Arab minority really think?

The Israel Democracy Institute’s ‘Israeli Democracy Index 2012’ – an annual comprehensive survey of the mood of Israeli society, widely considered one of the most authoritative in the field – provides some fascinating data about attitudes among Arab-Israelis regarding Israeli democracy and the state itself. The findings (not significantly different to previous years) certainly reflect…

April 26, 2013, 04:29 PM A moment to seize in the Israeli-Palestinian arena

President Obama’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in late March had, among others, the objectives of resetting relations with Israel’s leadership and its public and trying to reinvigorate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and generate public support for it. He without doubt succeeded in the former, but whether his visit will have any lasting…

April 26, 2013, 01:19 PM The Jewish Political Tradition

Videos & Podcasts

The Making of The Gatekeepers

An Interview with Academy-Award nominated director, Dror Moreh

Reviews & Culture