Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of…

Just In... This was not how the cautious, self-disciplined Prime Minister Theresa May was supposed to sound. “Yesterday I laid out the first step of an ambitious plan to set Britain on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world," she wrote…

Just In... Alexander Kaplen died December 16, 2015, at the age of 56. He was 31 when I last saw him on March 5, 1991, about 5:30 p.m. I know the time because I had rushed to the bank in a taxi with $8,000 in cash. The money was the Wigwag Magazine…

Just In... This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to…

Just In... France’s momentary appearance on the world stage as a champion of free expression, after the execution of the beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, made for a break in her relentless culture of repression of free speech, which she shares with…

Just In... Two weeks ago, the British press broke the news contained in Professor Alexis Jay’s “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham.” Between 1997 and 2013, Jay estimated, 1,400 young girls in that Yorkshire town were…

Sam Schulman is wrong; same-sex marriage is simple, sacred, and very Jewish indeed About the author David Wolpe is rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of, among other books, Why Be Jewish? and Why Faith Matters. He can be found on…

Just In... Martha Bayles, one of the great unsung critics of the baby boom generation, has written a book that is unusual for her. This is a brisk, how-policy-has-gone-wrong-and-what-to-do-about-it book, which conceals in its pages something more: a…

In “Same-Sex Marriage and the Jews,” Sam Schulman offers an insightful, erudite account of how non-Orthodox Jewish communities got from Leviticus 18 to the Kiddushin Service for Same Gender Couples—or, you might say, from Sinai to Stonewall. Still…

The greater threat to Jewish mores stems not from same-sex marriage but from heterosexual promiscuity. by Isaak Asknaziy. Courtesy Wikimedia. About the author Rabbi Shlomo Brody, founding director of the Tikvah Overseas Students Institute, is an…

The Reform and Conservative branches of the Jewish religious world have been eager to institute gay marriage. The only outlier is Orthodoxy. What's at stake?

Just In... London In Britain, education reform is not the safe topic for conversation between liberals and conservatives it is in America. The glossiest people in U.S. media circles support school reform: Hearst and Bertelsmann supplied New York…

Just In... In 2012, American conservatives occupied themselves with the stately process of challenging a sitting president. While we were enjoying the pomp and ceremony which just ended, European conserv-ative parties and governing coalitions have…

Just In... In 1990, as I was nursing a mortally ill magazine, I got a call from a literary agent. “I have a great idea for a book. Your dad [a neurologist at the University of Chicago] could do the medical part, and you could write it. The book is…

Just In... "Perhaps I’m being overly cynical,” wrote a well-known realist and conspiracy theorist on April 23, “but the new ‘strategic partnership’ agreement between the United States and Afghanistan strikes me as little more than a fig leaf designed…

Just In... Geert Wilders, the big-gesture Dutch politician who has made a career out of outspoken enthusiasms and denunciations in a country which is careful of its speech, has begun to take on water. In the June 2010 election, the Freedom party,…

Just In... As Maine is New England’s Texas, France is Europe’s U.S.A. It’s big. It’s ornery. Like us, the French are notably more inward-looking than Europe’s other populous, geographically big, and prosperous states. Despite France’s co-leadership…

This weekend is the anniversary of the first truly liberal attempt to prevent hatred by restricting free speech. On March 15, 1939, Denmark made it a criminal act to spread “false rumors or accusations” in order to incite “hatred against a group of…

The hero of Charles Dickens's novel "Martin Chuzzlewit," just off the Liverpool steamer and landed at the port of New York, knows virtually nothing about America, but he learns a little something about it when he attends his first boarding-house…

Just In... Last month, the Canadian journalist Richard Klagsbrun drew attention to a newly submitted Master’s thesis at the University of Toronto’s ed school: “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust…