Explaining Israel

The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America

In this collection of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics between 2014 and 2024, Peter Berkowitz explains Israel by reporting events, examining ideas, and placing both in their larger geopolitical context.

The senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution draws on the great Israeli mosaic of people, opinions, and aspirations to illuminate the domestic politics, diplomatic and national security imperatives, and multivalent spirit of the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy.

The carefully curated collection of essays in Explaining Israel demonstrates that to understand the Jewish state, it is necessary to appreciate the nation’s accomplishments and setbacks, the sources of its political cohesiveness and the forces dividing it, and the splendid opportunities and grave threats that it confronts.

The essays commence with Israel in 2014 at the height of its prosperity and self-confidence. They explore intensifying schisms inside the country and gathering dangers on its borders and throughout the region. And they culminate in penetrating analyses of the two crises that struck Israel in 2023. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sweeping judicial-reform proposals set off bitter controversy and months of massive protests. Then on October 7, Iran-backed Hamas jihadists invaded Israel, massacred some 1,200 people and kidnapped around 250, enmeshing Israel in a seven-front war against Iran and its regional proxies.

Berkowitz’s essays clarify the breathtaking achievements, the heartbreak, and the remarkable resilience of a nation struggling valiantly to be Jewish, free, and democratic in a dangerous region crucial to America’s interests.

Reclaiming Liberal Education in America

With this compilation of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics from 2014 through 2025, Peter Berkowitz provides a brief history of the decline of liberal education in America as well as a case for—and measures essential to—reclaiming it.

The writing brings to light liberal education’s aims, structure and content, and spirit. The essays emphasize the critical importance for freedom and democratic self-government in America, putting ongoing tensions about higher education—especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities—in their broader intellectual and political context. They also express the many dysfunctions that haunt American campuses, including censorship, curtailment of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct, invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty based on race and other forms of group identity, and politicization and gutting the curriculum.

Berkowitz takes special note of the rise of antisemitism on campuses following Iran-backed Hamas’s October 2023 massacre in southern Israel. He investigates the ensuing public reckoning with the sorry condition of American higher education. And he dives into the Trump administration’s arguments with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities over antisemitism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and free speech and intellectual diversity.

Throughout the collection, Berkowitz offers reforms for revitalizing colleges and universities to the mission that best serves the public interest, which is to prepare young people to thoughtfully put to use the rights and act on the responsibilities of freedom.