David Shulman

The Widows’ Laments

Buddhist Baedekers

Waiting for the Perfect Word

The Ravishing Art of Alchi

I visited Alchi in 2004. I was left, then as now, after spending some weeks with Peter van Ham’s book, with a sense of a dizzying proliferation of vital beings mobbing my eyes. In all of South Asian art, there is nothing quite like these densely painted murals.

Bedouins Halt the Bulldozers

For the Israeli right, the Bedouin Palestinians of al-Khan al-Ahmar are one of the last obstacles to a far-reaching annexationist program. They also have the incorrigible flaw of not being Jews in a Jewish state now run on exclusionary ethno-nationalist principles.

The Last of the Tzaddiks

What is a decent human being supposed to do in the face of devastating threats to human dignity and basic human rights?

Off With Their Heads

Bulldozing the Peace Process in Israel

The most immediately consequential effect of Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem is to reinforce Israel’s belief that sheer force will subdue the Palestinians and make them go away. This is the annexationist program that now drives Israeli policy.

A Hero in His Own Words

Shimon Peres’s ‘No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination, and the Making of Modern Israel’

Israel’s Irrational Rationality

The country I came to live in fifty years ago was utterly unlike the one I live in today.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Tibet's Hidden Kingdom

Guge was once home to a major inner-Asian dynasty whose artists and craftsmen produced a plethora of masterpieces over some five centuries. Those that survived the Chinese Cultural Revolution give us a tantalizing sense of the lost world that imagined them into being.

Expelled from Palestine

Today, most of the Jordan Valley, undoubtedly one of the most ravishing landscapes on the planet, is under direct and exclusive Israeli military, legal, and political control; a Palestinian population of some 15,000 Bedouins who are settled in the valley is tacitly targeted for expulsion.

Israel: The Broken Silence

Israeli human rights activists are under attack

Jerusalem: Why Should Things Not Get Worse?

These days Jerusalem is a sad and scary place. Whether you are Jewish Israeli or Palestinian, there is a sense of lurking danger, random, episodic, entirely unpredictable.

Gaza: Killing Gets Easier

In early May, Breaking the Silence, the organization of Israeli ex-soldiers, published a report on the Israeli army’s campaign in Gaza last summer.

Bibi’s Betrayal

Israel's Stark Truth

The Israeli electorate has given a clear mandate. There will be more antidemocratic legislation, more attempts to undermine the courts, more rampant racism, more thugs in high office, more acts of cruelty inflicted on innocents.

Inside the Hidden Temple

Peter van Ham, an authority on early Indo-Tibetan art, has given us a splendid photographic record of the mid-eleventh century masterpieces of the Tabo monastery—the most intact of all early medieval Buddhist artistic sites in the Western Himalaya.

At the Heart of Hinduism