The Top 21 Most-Read Stories of 2021
As 2021 draws to a close, we take a look back on our popular stories of the year.
From the Newsletter | The Politics of Paranoia, Then and Now
It’s always tempting to think that things have never been this crazy.
From the Newsletter | The Summer of 1942
Sometimes the best way to get a clear view of what’s happening in the present is to glance backward at the past.
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What Should the Role of American Jews Be With Respect to Israel Today?
What, if any, obligations do we have toward Israel?
Opinion | ‘Replacement Theory,’ Mainstreamed
White replacement theory, the repugnant racist trope that claims America’s white population is being displaced by people of color, is once again receiving a wide audience among those feeling malnourished by Donald Trump’s absence from their social media feeds.
Opinion | The Summer of 1942
On July 1,1942, Cairo was about to fall to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German and Italian forces.
Visual Moment | Judy Chicago’s Revolutionary Art
Judy Chicago always wanted to be an artist. “From the time I was a child,” she writes in her 2021 autobiography, The Flowering, “I had a burning desire to make art.”
In ‘Honeymood,’ Wedding Night Balagan
In Honeymood, director Talya Lavie makes piercing observations about fraught relationships, family tensions, marital doubts, lingering affections for past loves and the challenges of long-term partnerships. Thrown into the mix is a mysterious ring with a sensitive past best kept secret—which, of course, it would not remain.
Poem | Apple of Imperfection
First speech is the speech of love.
Essay | Leo Strauss, Bigotry and the Blues
The progress of equality is arguably the mainspring of modern political history. Alexis de Tocqueville considered the spread of equality to be the inexorable tendency of Western societies, and the 20th-century wars with Nazism and Communism can be interpreted as struggles over the principle’s validity and scope: Nazism fought to establish racial hierarchy in place of equality, while Communism fought to extend equality to the economic sphere, at least in theory.