Jonathan S. Tobin
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
Do the Jews really need a Conference of Presidents?
Blame it all on John Foster Dulles.
The origins of an entity that has long been considered the focal point of organizational advocacy for Israel dates back to 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of...
Remembering the Holocaust in a post-‘sacred survival’ era
For several decades, the Holocaust shaped the way American Jews thought about their place in the modern world. For the generation that arose in the aftermath of World War II, the Shoah was the...
The moral dilemma of emptying prisons in a pandemic
What is our duty to those confined in places where the coronavirus crisis is a threat? Efforts to protect residents of facilities that serve the elderly have gained a great deal of attention. Yet...
Biden needs the Bernie Bros. Will he give them a say in policy?
In a flight of fancy and an almost superfluous reminder of his irrelevance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested this week that a dream cabinet for Joe Biden should he win in November would include...
A pandemic anti-Semitism ceasefire? Not a chance
Two weeks ago, something highly unusual happened. The United Nations praised Israel. The cause for this remarkable exception to the general rule of the world body’s Israel-bashing was the cooperation between Israel and the...
A disingenuous debate about annexation
The list of signatories to a new letter organized by the Israel Policy Forum protesting the possibility of Israel passing legislation in the upcoming months to annex parts of the West Bank is full of familiar...
The balance between personal liberty and the obligation to save lives
What do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo have in common these days? The answer is that critics of these two very different political leaders are accusing them...
A pandemic Passover without family? Not necessarily
Every year on Passover, Jews ask the same question that is at the heart of the recitation of the Haggadah during the seder: Why is this night different from all other nights? But this...
Why is Mnuchin pushing for a return to appeasement of Iran?
The tyrants of Tehran are in trouble. The coronavirus pandemic has hit Iran particularly hard. That’s due, in no small measure to the fact that, like their counterparts in China, the theocrats running the...
Israel’s democracy was never in danger
Israel’s yearlong coalition standoff appears to have finally ended, and not a day too soon. Without a permanent government in place—as opposed to the caretaker government that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led for...