Dr Yair Wallach discusses the changing nature and meaning of text – from stone inscriptions to street names to business cards – in Jerusalem of the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Timothy Brennan’s new biography of Edward Said, the feted Palestinian-American scholar, explores the different aspects of a quintessential 20th-century intellectual

Prof. Dan Rabinowitz discusses the role of the Middle East as both a major generator and a primary victim of climate change

Prof. Amichai Cohen explains the changing role of the High Court of Justice in maintaining the checks and balances of Israeli democracy

How did governance and governability become a partisan issue? And what is the role of the public service in safeguarding the will of the people?

We take a detour to follow the path of American nudists (intellectually). From the late 19th century to the prudish post-war years, through to the let-loose sexual revolution, historian Sarah Schrank reveals all, in her book “Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body”

The putative omnipotence of Vladimir Putin has led many to view Russia as a uniquely autocratic country. Timothy M. Frye argues that Russia is neither completely unique, nor primordially prone to strongman leadership – the explanations are far more complex

A historian’s hunch led Nancy MacLean to the archives of James McGill Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who also incidentally became the patron saint of the Koch brothers. Her book sparked a controversy as deep as her subjects

Polish-Canadian historian, Prof. Jan Grabowski, discusses Jewish-Polish relations during the Nazi occupation, as well as the politics of memory in contemporary Poland and how he has been personally affected by it

David N Myers and Benjamin Ravid discuss the life and work of Simon Rawidowicz, a seminal, albeit somewhat forgotten, 20th-century Jewish intellectual, upon the publication of an edited volume of his selected writings