SAPIR Journal

09/04/2025

Announcing The SAPIR Debates, a new series in partnership with 92NY featuring a spirited but civil exchange of views on the most consequential issues facing the Jewish community. The series begins on Thursday, May 15 at 7:00 PM ET on the question: Is Donald Trump Good for the Jews? Moderated by Bret Stephens, the debate will feature former Trump Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.

In American Jewish life, few questions are as fraught — or as revealing — as this one: Is Donald Trump good for the Jews?

09/04/2025

03/04/2025

In a special event at Park Avenue Synagogue, SAPIR Editor-in-Chief Bret Stephens, Associate Publisher Ariella Saperstein, and recent contributor Adam Kirsch joined Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove for a conversation on “The Bounds of Jewish Disagreement.” Watch it now.

Diversity of opinion is a key feature of our ancient tradition. Dating back to the Talmud, we have taken pride in our capacity to transcend difference throug...

02/04/2025

This week, Israeli president Isaac Herzog, a recent contributor to SAPIR, sat down with Bret Stephens for a special pre-Passover conversation. Watch it on YouTube, or stream it as a podcast.

As we prepare to celebrate our freedom from slavery, has the promised land lived up to the promise of Zionism? After October 7, can Israel’s internal differe...

27/03/2025

On Monday, March 31 at 9:30 AM ET, join us for a special pre-Passover conversation between SAPIR editor-in-chief Bret Stephens and the 11th President of the State of Israel, Isaac Herzog. Register now.

And they saw the God of Israel: Under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. —Exodus 24:10

27/03/2025

In the latest SAPIR Conversation, Mijal Bitton sat down with Felicia Herman for a conversation on her recent article, "Why I Am Not a Jew of Color." Stream it now on YouTube or as a podcast.

In her recent SAPIR essay, Mijal Bitton wrote that she does not identify as a Jew of color, despite being a non-white Jew, because the “term often feels more...

11/03/2025

“Blazing Saddles began as a Jewish project and became a Jewish-black project,” writes film critic David Denby of Mel Brooks’s classic 1974 comedy film. He tells how Brooks’s “love of cruel jokes, his insistence on humor as the answer to death, was joined to black outrage over racism and also to the kind of liberal Jewish temperament that flourished in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Nothing is more stirring in Western movies than the horses. Beautiful and noble beasts, always our friends, they carry Indians, villains, a...

11/03/2025

In recent decades, “the once wildly diverse Jewish Diaspora has become less so,” writes demographer Joel Kotkin, with 90 percent of all Jews today American or Israeli citizens. But within the United States, Jews have moved south in substantial numbers, potentially reshaping what it means to be an American Jew.

You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II ...

10/03/2025

Is multiculturalism destined to fail? Is it possible to reject identity politics while also championing strong Jewish identities? Rabbi Meir Soloveichik looks to a book by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks to consider whether democracies can function when they contain fundamentally different cultural communities.

The eight most audacious words in American Jewish history were written by a German immigrant to Charleston, and yet they do not form a sing...

10/03/2025

Maimonides Fund scholar-in-residence lays out the origins of the term Jew of color and its political undertones. For her, the term “feels more focused on ‘white’ Jews than on people like me.” She writes that “many of our conversations about Jews of color relied on false assumptions.” What were they?

It took me years to understand why I reacted so strongly to being called a Jew of color. On paper, I seemed a perfect fit for the label:...

07/03/2025

On Monday, March 31 at 7:00 PM ET, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove will moderate a discussion with Bret Stephens and Adam Kirsch, who wrote in the new Diversity issue about the limits of acceptable discourse within Jewish communities. Join us in person at Park Avenue Synagogue and streaming online. Register now.

And they saw the God of Israel: Under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. —Exodus 24:10

07/03/2025

With the apparent growth of anti-Zionism on the Jewish far Left, many Jewish leaders have struggled to understand the place of anti-Zionism in communal discourse and identity. Adam Kirsch asks whether anti-Zionism be a Jewish value.

Is it antisemitic to be anti-Zionist? The question has been unavoidable since the Hamas attack of October 7. For most American Jews, protes...

07/03/2025

Bret Stephens explains his recent decision to decline an invitation to appear onstage to argue about Israel with an old political sparring partner. Was it the right choice? And should viewpoint diversity serve as an organizing principle for discourse?

Not long ago I was invited to share a stage with a well-known Jewish writer whose political views had, over the years, shifted from center-...