No great achiever - even those who made it seem easy - ever succeeded without hard work.

Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon.

The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

The market economy is deeply congruent with the values set out in the Hebrew Bible. Material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task. Work is a noble calling.

Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.