One hundred years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1919, a small, newly formed Yiddish acting troupe staged the first performance of a comedy titled Bronx Express. The play opens on a summer evening as a grimy, bearded Jewish workingman named Harry Hungershtolts (meaning “Hunger-proud”), exhausted after a day at the factory sew­ing buttons onto garments,…

Israeli society was long perceived as culturally, socially, and polit­ically liberal, similar in orientation to societies in North America and western Europe. Its more recent rightward turn has thus triggered much hand-wringing—both at home and among friends abroad. Those whom Menachem Mautner terms Israel’s “liberal for­mer hegemons” (LFHs), secular Ashkenazi Jews in law, media, business,…

In early 1912, Theodore Roosevelt began his legendary campaign for a third term in the White House. The endeavor would lead him to break with his native Republican Party and champion the infant “Bull Moose” Progressive Party in one of the most colorful presidential runs to date. Sensing the weight of that year’s struggle, Roosevelt…

In 2016, voters on both sides of the Atlantic shocked the political establishment by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump. In the eyes of their critics, these movements represented the resurgence of dan­gerous forms of populism and nationalism. Combined with earlier “nationalist-populist” victories in central Europe, and rising support for populist parties elsewhere, commentators at…

When labor and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin put forward their ambitious Freedom Budget for All Americans in 1966, they couched their political argument in the powerful idiom of liberal nationalism. “For better or worse,” Randolph avowed in his introduction, “We are one nation and one people.” The Freedom Budget, he…

For roughly the past half century, the middle swath of America has been widely written off as reactionary, backward, and des­tined for unceasing decline. CNBC recently ranked the “worst states” to live in, and almost all were in what is typically defined as the Heartland.1 Paul Krugman of the New York Times sees the region…

What should the United States do next about the trade and broader economic challenge posed by China? This question, which was raised in January as soon as the two governments signed a deal tantalizingly called “phase one,” has seemed especially difficult to answer since President Trump declared on July 14 that he wasn’t interested in…

Quantum computing, which exploits the entanglement of particles that so infuriated Einstein (“spooky action at a distance”), is not a receding mirage like cold fusion, feasible in theory but not in prac­tice. It is already with us as Google, IBM, IonQ, Rigetti, and Honey­well have assembled working specimens of suitably otherworldly appearance. We are thus…

As America transitions to 5G wireless networks, the U.S. intelligence community sees the Chinese telecom giant Huawei as a systemic security risk. In response, President Trump has banned the use of Chinese 5G equipment in U.S. networks. But despite these measures, there is still deep concern that eventually Huawei will dominate global markets, displacing the…

We begin with our conclusion: China has surpassed or will soon sur­pass the United States in many key dimensions, including economic growth, health care, education, 5g network rollout, and the development of artificial intelligence. Today, 103 years after the Russian Revolution, central planning can finally be effective and strategic, thanks to the volume of available data…