Romney is not alone on Israel

Yanks! You either love 'em or hate 'em. Or (like me) both. Until I went to live and work in the US some 12 years ago my experience of Yanks was confined to meeting them at conferences and spending time as a tourist in their midst. The US is a vast country. Most of its citizens do not have passports and so have never ventured beyond its borders.

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The Iranian argument threat

Normally we wait till it's too late, so let's get this clear in advance.

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Putin’s policy on Syria is right

Is it really in the interests of Israel, or of the West, that the Syrian civil war should result in the departure from Damascus of President (and ophthalmologist extraordinary) Bashar al-Assad?

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Shuls that are too big to manage

This is a painful and unusually personal column, because it concerns the complete breakdown of management at my shul and the partial breakdown of community relations.

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'What if' game is a cheap trick

"Counterfactual conditional analysis" is a phrase used to describe an approach to the past in which the questions asked are not "what happened and why did it happen?" but rather "what might have happened and why did it not?" In other words, the "what if…" approach.

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Eruv or not to eruv: who cares?

The other day, notices appeared in our area informing of a consultation concerning the erection of an eruv. As the notices went up, so too did the balloon. One hundred per cent of those questioned by Aaronopoll in a survey for this column, were not just opposed to the eruv, they were foaming at the mouth.

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Prejudice made respectable

On the subject of the unassuming hairdresser from Oldham, Mohammed Sajid Khan and his diminutive but charming wife Shasta Khan much more remains to be said.

Mr and Mrs Khan hold the dubious record of being Britain's first married couple to be convicted of terrorist offences. At Manchester Crown Court she was given an eight-year sentence as a reward for having planned to blow up Jews.

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What kind of 'support' is this?

Much anguish has been expended over Jews who detest Israel so virulently they are in the forefront of the delegitimisation campaign. Such people were devastatingly satirised by Howard Jacobson as "as a Jew" Jews, who parade their identity solely to demonise Israel.

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Great leaders, but what legacy?

Apart from the fact that we both shared a Jewish identity I had one thing in common with the late Rabbi Yosef Elyashiv, whose funeral in Israel last week was reportedly attended by 250,000 people. Neither he nor I had ever studied at a yeshivah. In my case, this was more by design than by accident: my career took me into academia at the age of 18 and I have never been inclined to leave.

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Islam must let bad ideas perish

In his memoirs, published last year, Ken Livingstone referred to "several commentators and minor intellectuals" who, he said, had become obsessed with Islam. These included Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and me.

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