Yitzhak Laor

In Aviv Talmor's lovely mockumentary, the director sets off to establish whether Israel's national poet could really be his forebear.

Lapid's call for a universal draft is the slogan of the bourgeoisie, coming one step before the economic cutbacks that will deepen inequality. And he's just one of three macho men in power.

In the last book he wrote before his death, one of America’s most celebrated intellectuals shares his insights on everything from French socialism to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Two Israeli filmmakers went to the Hebron Hills to document Palestinians eking out a living from scavenging in a dump, and fell in love with their subjects.

Judge Menachem Finkelstein's book on Natan Alterman's political poetry obfuscates history in ways the poet rejected, possibly due to his own needs to justify his actions while serving as military advocate general.

The Berliner Ensemble offers a last opportunity to see Brechtian acting, wherein text and actor separate from each other before your eyes, and irony floods the stage.

The language used in a 400-year-old guide to formulation of legal documents reveals much about Jews and their religion, then and now

The rise of the extreme right requires a descent into a mythical world in which there is no chronology. No one asks any longer about the logic behind a given action. No one casts doubt any longer on the motives behind military operations.

The problem with Orientalist discourse of our commentators − which sees the world through the prism of the Shin Bet Security Service − is that it helps to seal off the ghetto into which we are gradually locking ourselves, a ghetto within the Middle East and within world history.

There is great irony in both the cliched plots of 'Mad Men,' and in the fact that the popular television series was created by men: It is clearly a show for women

A new biography of Simon Wiesenthal is about one man's ability to maneuver among a very large number of entities in order to achieve an objective, without selling his soul to the devil

What do the stories of Isaac and Ishmael have in common, both from the point of view of their ancient written source, and in the wonderful Rosh Hashanah liturgy?

A year and a half after he passed away at age 67, a film about the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish only heightens the feeling of loss that characterized his life and work - and now his death.

The publication in Hebrew of Freud's final work is an opportunity to look at the valiant, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt by the father of psychoanalysis to understand the origin of the Jews.

The beauty of this volume, which includes poems written in English and their translation into Hebrew, is to be found principally in the original texts.

The 26-year-old Druze artist Randa Mdah longs for Syria, but has chosen to live in Ramallah, where she's created a work so powerful it cannot be captured in photos

Maybe Altman's book, in which she captures the butterfly of the White Rose group, is so moving because of the paucity of Israeli discourse on German resistance.

Over and over, Klingberg comes back to the painful question that plagued him in prison and continues to torment him today: What would have happened if he had not caved in under pressure and confessed to the charges against him?

We have two cards up our sleeve: One is Mizrahi, the other is 'universal.' We pull out one or the other according to convenience

He was shunned by his colleagues for his political opinions. But Baruch Kimmerling did not relinquish his convictions, which included a demand to hold his own society up to the general rules of scientific sociology.

A eulogy for Tanya Reinhart, a brilliant linguist whose academic credentials were matched by her keen sense of political responsibility

A eulogy for Tanya Reinhart, a brilliant linguist whose academic credentials were matched by her keen sense of political responsibility.

Choice quotes from the writings of Yair Lapid, the journalist.

Kamm is an exceptional hero. She went so far, even farther than the few who refuse to serve and occasionally stand up to challenge the occupation, disappearing below the horizon of the obvious. She did not refuse to act. She acted and paid dearly.

The Israeli left is blaming tycoons and 'strong unions' for current economic woes. But unions are actually the last example of our national solidarity.

As the Boston Marathon bombing shows, when 'we' are hit, it's major news. But when atrocities occur outside the Western world, they're inconsequential.

Whether it's the media's coverage of last week's horrific traffic accident in Nesher or the Transportation Ministry's rail plan for the Galilee, the racism toward Arabs in this country cannot be concealed.

The state is growing generations of nationalistic androids, spreading ignorance of history and disrespect to the victims. Ashes do not talk, after all.

The Israeli left is still waiting for a president to come here and, like a police officer, bring peace to our country in the name of American values, as America has done in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and other places the Israeli left never mentions.

Paradoxically, secular Zionism is returning to its Central European roots. It's a shtetl with a huge budget, and a synagogue where empty cliches are espoused.

If it were a comedy, we would be laughing over Lapid’s notorious ignorance ‏(and his insistence on core studies for the ultra-Orthodox‏). But this is our country, these are our lives.

While Palestinian blood is being spilled in the West Bank, Israel's leftists and liberals are busy fomenting hatred toward ultra-Orthodox Jews.

News consumers don’t really love the truth. They love sudden revelations, belated of course, so they can’t do anything about it − like the reports on Zygier, which will have to tide us over until the next wave of excitement.

The time has come to encourage the international community to fight Israeli intransigence and pressure Israel to give up on the occupied territories and its residents, who lack a voice from the perspective of our democracy.

The election burst the illusion of radical left parties that invested their energies in campaigning primarily through social networks.

The homogeneous Zionist left and center remember the Arabs only when they need their vote, the handymen of elections.

Elections, like weddings, are a wonderful time for self-delusion. And our blinded society is crumbling like soil in the face of this election's heavy machinery.

Here is the code to Israeli conformism: Protest - yes; resistance - no. Confirm what already exists. Put on a missionary smile and sway together to the songs of Naomi Shemer. A settler from Hebron? Why not? There's room for everyone.

Miri Regev is not only our democracy. Ironically, this carnival - and this is truly a carnivalesque experience - is the democratic ideal.

Yacimovich does not recognize any discourse that she does not control. As a result, her image as a national leader is fading in the public consciousness.

The equality between our representatives and their representatives with regard to salaries, and in their lives after the Knesset, constitutes a reflection of self-interest.

Before the vote on the Palestinian bid at the UN, the Israeli political map had never been so concerned with itself, and with such banality, far from the history that is passing us by outside of our ghetto.

The people who decide on the assassinations do not think about the dead in Gaza, but neither do they think about the little girl who screams in fear in Ashkelon or the boy crying in his sleep in Ashdod.

The pretentious fringes of the left can indulge themselves in the debate over 'either one state or apartheid,' but meanwhile the destruction is being done by the government and the IDF.

Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid ('There is a future') party is the epitome of nothingness.

Over there, without understanding the cost of war, Americans will be electing a president today.

There is not one element of that Zionist ethos represented by the right wing that did not nest for years in the Israeli unsayable.