In Israel, 70,000 Ultra-Orthodox men are enrolled in yeshivas (Talmudic academies) for married men, known as kollelim (singular: kollel). It is well known that this phenomenon is associated with indefinite deferment of military service, nonwork and poverty. This paper explores the ideological...

Although they lived in different times and under different circumstances, Spinoza and Mendelssohn both saw the need to examine the relationship between the state and individual religious belief as the character of Europe changed. Both men envisioned a society governed by a social contract...

This book reviews, organizes and categorizes the humor of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the Midrash, and presents it to the reader in a clear, readable, accessible manner. These works, replete with many types of humor and wit, have influenced the Jewish people in a major way over the...

Humor is the lingua franca of the Jewish people. Even outside the world of the professional comic, we find ordinary folk answering a question with a question, employing a sarcastic retort, offering self-deprecating witticisms. For Jews, this special brand of humor has become a defining...

MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this paper the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a...

The concepts of disagreement, diversity, toleration, and pluralism all belong to the experience of multiplicity and heterogeneity in social life, but while disagreement and diversity describe states-of-affairs, toleration and pluralism denote attitudes and normative values. This article analyzes...

Theodor Herzl's thought was a product of an Austrian political and humanist culture. His political values were formed within a multinational, cameralist tradition, which at its best bred a tolerance for differing persons and cultures but isolated the private individual from a responsible role in...

The present study is part of a much larger study that examined the ethics of bribery and the ethics of tax evasion from a variety of perspectives. In this study, data were taken from the most recent World Values Survey. More than 62 percent of the Jewish sample believed that taking a bribe could...

Theodor Herzl published his programmatic book The Jewish State in February 1896. Central to it was the discrimination (and hatred) commonly known as "antisemitism." Herzl viewed antisemitism as the heart of "the Jewish question," but also as the potential motive power to achieve a Jewish State....