SAPIR Journal

12/09/2025

In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, SAPIR is convening a special conversation with Bret Stephens and Mijal Bitton to discuss the implications for America, American Jews, and the values we hold dear. Join us TOMORROW at 11 am.

Charlie Kirk, a conservative political activist, was murdered at a campus event in Utah on Wednesday afternoon. As Americans reckon with this horrific act of political violence, many are alarmed at the grim message it offers about the state of our politics and where our democracy is headed. Join SAP...

05/09/2025

“For many of its secular pioneers,” writes former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in his most recent SAPIR essay, “Zionism was a revolt against chosenness. It was an attempt to become a nation like every other.” Today, especially after October 7, many Israelis are reevaluating this very notion and wondering: is the Jewish state chosen, and if so, for what purpose?

Join him in conversation with SAPIR Editor-in-Chief Bret Stephens on Monday, September 8 at 12:00 PM ET, for a searching discussion on Israel’s identity and destiny in a post-October 7 world.

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

20/08/2025

SAPIR's Winter issue will be on the theme of Aspiration, the first time we'll be repeating a theme. As we put together the pieces, tell us your moonshot ideas for the Jewish community and Israel!

18/08/2025

“Antisemitism reminds us that we are different,” observes researcher David Wolfowicz. “But only Judaism can tell us why." In a time when Jew-hatred makes it increasingly difficult for many to be Jewish, it is even more challenging — but necessary — to understand just what being Jewish means. Wolfowicz proposes some answers.

After a wave of pogroms shook Russia in the early 1880s, the Zionist thinker and physician Leon Pinsker wrote that the Jew appeared in the ...

18/08/2025

What could make the people of Israel go extinct? Scholar Richard Hidary argues that “Israel’s treasured status is fundamentally conditional” on Jews recognizing the responsibilities of their covenant. “For Israel to exist as a nation,” he writes, “it must be on God’s mission.”

During the 15 years that Israel controlled the Sinai Peninsula, an archaeological excavation there uncovered something remarkable. Scholars...

15/08/2025

Looking at the ways in which assimilation into American life has “left many American Jews suspicious of their own tradition,” Rabbi Noa Kushner suggests turning to those who participate in Jewish community in alternative ways. By extending their covenant to those who stand on the edges of their communities, American Jews can revitalize what it means to be chosen.

I know that the idea of Jews being “chosen” was at one time controversial, but in the circles I travel, it feels practically quaint. In...

15/08/2025

What does the process of conversion reveal about the meaning of chosenness? The choice to convert to Judaism involves immersion in the Jewish story and an embrace of Jewish history, belief, and practice, writes Rabbi Adam Mintz. But it also requires an embrace in return: “an obligation on that people to choose them back.” Just as the Jews were instructed to love the stranger among them, he explains, they must also extend this love to the stranger who has become one of them.https://sapirjournal.org/chosenness/2025/the-paradoxes-of-conversion/

14/08/2025

Though the Hebrew Bible depicts chosenness as a mysterious act of God that singled out the Jewish people, the sages grappled with this idea in various later works and turned the story on its head, cementing a narrative in which the patriarch Abraham chose God rather than the other way around. Scholar Malka Simkovich reflects on this textual tradition and its ramifications for understanding chosenness. The task of the Jews, she writes, "is to acknowledge that God wants us as his partner, and that we want God back."

The notion that God chose the people of Israel over other nations is a millennia-old enigma that has caused no little embarrassment, not to...

13/08/2025

As antisemitism surges among some public figures and influencers who call themselves devout Christians and Catholics, it is increasingly necessary to understand the relationship between Judaism and Christianity—which is not, as explains, one rooted in hostility and mutual exclusion. Instead, "it is clear that Catholic teaching leaves no room for the denial of Judaism's continued validity and significance." George offers a nuanced and deeply thoughtful Catholic perspective on God's covenant with the chosen people and their role in the divine mystery of salvation.

Upon his resignation from the pontifical office in 2013, Benedict XVI largely retreated from public view to avoid becoming a distraction to...

13/08/2025

If it’s a commonplace truth that the Jewish people were chosen, a question naturally follows: chosen for what? Bret Stephens argues that the long and illustrious story of Jewish achievement is the result of a unique heritage composed of "Jewish ideas, role models, practices, and historical experiences."

In May, the New York Times published obituaries for Philip Sunshine, Peter Lax, and Richard Garwin, all of whom died within a few days of o...

12/08/2025

What is “the other side of chosenness”? Former Iranian political prisoner Kian Tajbakhsh’s life story is punctuated by the grim spectacle of being chosen for the wrong reasons when Iran’s hardline regime tried to erase him in his homeland.

When a Jewish journal invited me — a former political prisoner in Iran — to reflect on the theme of chosenness, I was both hono...

12/08/2025

The idea that Jews are the chosen people has long been fodder for antisemites, but for the Jews, writes novelist Howard Jacobson, it has been nothing more than "a burden from which no serious Jew has a right to expect relief." He reflects on his adolescence as one of “the chosen” and how an ever-present feeling of difference has informed his life as a novelist.

In June 2006, a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was captured by Palestinian militants and abducted to the Gaza Strip. Five years later...