When it comes to Donald Trump, two fundamental questions have kept many of us up late far too many nights over the last four years. First, what makes Trump so…
Articles
Mathias Enard’s Orient
I was perhaps 13 or 14 when I first met Muhammad Asad, alias Leopold Weiss, the distinguished journalist and author of The Road to Mecca (1952)—a memoir of his mid-century travels in…
La Belle Juive
As a keen museumgoer, I have spent countless hours looking at paintings of beautiful Jewish women. Yet until recently I had not realized that the motif of the beautiful Jewess is a recurrent and evolving trope in Western literature and the visual arts.
The Jordan Peterson Show in New York
Recently, I reviewed Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, using a traditional style of storytelling, instead of a typical book review, which, given the stature of the man among his…
The Philosophy of a Drywall Man
Occasionally, I come across remarkable Americans who remind me of the spirit that has made the United States an exceptional nation, one that has injected an earthshaking dose of heroism…
Dinesh D’Souza Defends America
Little did I know that I would finish reading Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The Big Lie, in a Starbucks in Seville, Spain. It speaks to the power of the author’s spell…
Choosing Which Language to Live In
“I feel closer to an Arab from Morocco than to a Jew from Brooklyn or Boston.” My mother is a Moroccan Jew, born and bred in Tangier, where she also spent…
Mimouna: Moroccan Jews Trusting Their Muslim Neighbors
The vast majority of people in the Christian and Muslim world know very little, or nothing at all, about the history of the Jewish communities in the Muslim world. The…
Islam, Arabs and the Hijra
The traditional account of Muhammad’s life tells us that in June of 622, upon getting wind of an assassination plot against him at Mecca, he escaped with some of his…
The Language of the Koran
When we look at Late Antique Syro-Palestine and Arabia in the early seventh century, the time when Islam is said to have become a religion, an interesting yet complex mosaic…