Death of Utopia

Niccolò Machiavelli, the quint-centenary of whose Discourses on Livy will be celebrated in 2017 as a great event in European history of political ideas (the treatise was written around 1517) is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern political thought, and rightly so. (Continue...)

Doom Sayers Get it Wrong

We live in the time of fear, panic, and doom-mongering. Never before did the modern Western societies have so little trust in their institutions, so little confidence in their ability to fulfill political visions and programs as they do now. We would be deceiving ourselves in thinking that it had always been so. Social criticism is not fear-mongering, just like the new waves of moral panic should not be equated with so many dystopian novels of the past. (Continue...)

The scapegoat for all seasons

My story is inseparable from my experience as a member of the European Parliament. During my term (2009-2014), I was in a position to witness the debates and political skirmishes in the House that allowed me to anticipate easily what happened recently in the United Kingdom. (Continue...)

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Devil in Eastern Europe

Was the God s on the side of the poor and innocent, or did he side with evil due to being totally neutral and impartial to all of his creations? This was the central theological and philosophical issue for the Nobel Prize winning Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) – a major Eastern/Central European author who passed away twenty-five years ago. (Continue...)

Grotesque, God and miracles

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), a great Polish-born Jewish writer, a poet of the East European Jewish soul, the guardian angel of the Yiddish language in modern literature, and a Nobel Prize winner, died twenty-five years ago. This brings us closer to his immense legacy that covers Jewish tradition and modernity, especially his short stories on how modernity came into Jewish life. (Continue...)

The banality of evil: The case of Vladimir Bortko

That evil can be banal we learn from Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Report on the Banality of Evil published in 1963. As we all know, Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, caught the chief architect of the Holocaust in Argentina, and brought him to Israel where his trial took place. (Continue...)