Excerpted

“the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be. This has had devastating effects on the family and on community life”

29 March 2020 Drew KaplanAmerica

For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the[…]

“We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest”

29 March 2020 Drew KaplanAmerica

When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to[…]

“…there are ultimately four characteristics in candidates that I think drive our perceptions and our decisions…”

6 March 2020 Drew KaplanPolitics in America

I think there are ultimately four characteristics in candidates that I think drive our perceptions and our decisions: competence (can this person do this job); policies (does this person have clear prescriptions to deal with[…]

“we would often be better off worrying about what the appendages in legislatures and localities are doing than about what some ultimate head is thinking”

1 March 2020 Drew KaplanPolitics

This idea of power simply emanating downward still animates apologetics for authoritarianism, but it also leads to excitement about top-down health-care programs that everyone knows will never be enacted by executive fiat. It inspires, too,[…]

“…liberalism has, to an unusual degree, been defined by what it wasn’t”

1 March 2020 Drew KaplanEurope

…liberalism has, to an unusual degree, been defined by what it wasn’t. For French liberals in the early nineteenth century, it was a defense against the excesses of Jacobins and ultra-monarchists. For the free-trading Manchester[…]

“The term ma’aseh is the intrusion of real life events into the largely theoretical in hypothetical discourse of the Mishnah”

17 February 2020 Drew KaplanMishnah

The term ma’aseh is the intrusion of real life events into the largely theoretical in hypothetical discourse of the Mishnah. It introduces an event that happened in the past which has halakhic implications or ramifications[…]

The Siyum HaShas “Shockingly Has Nothing to Do with the Talmud Bavli”

2 January 2020 Drew KaplanBabylonian Talmud

The Event Shockingly Has Nothing to Do with the Talmud Bavli. I kind of knew to expect this—forgive me if what follows sounds hopelessly naïve—but I was struck by how the event had no educational[…]

“So much of contemporary North American Jewish life is like running a heat lamp outdoors in the winter”

2 January 2020 Drew KaplanJewish Community

So much of contemporary North American Jewish life is like running a heat lamp outdoors in the winter. It is so inefficient, so attenuated by the entropy of contemporary society, and still overwhelmed by (post-)Christian[…]

“When you vote, you hopefully evaluate the full gamut of issues and discover that on some issues one party’s views are more in accordance with Torah and on others it is the other party’s, and often neither are”

10 December 2019 Drew KaplanHalakhah

I understand that we have both College Democrats and College Republicans chapters on our campus. To be honest, I don’t understand why. Don’t get me wrong — I can readily understand why a Torah Jew[…]

“…impeachment had all but vanished from English practice when American delegates to the Constitutional Convention provided for it…”

3 November 2019 Drew KaplanPolitics in America

Impeachment is an ancient relic, a rusty legal instrument and political weapon first wielded by the English Parliament, in 1376, to wrest power from the King by charging his ministers with abuses of power, convicting[…]