My people came to this country in the ten years either side of 1900. They were afraid of the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, they came from Poland, Bukovina, Bialystok, to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. Some day…
Last night, NBC Nightly News reported Ari Fleischer’s testimony from the Scooter Libby trial, in which the former press guy said he had sought immunity from prosecution because he had done the very thing that Libby is accused of doing:…
Now that everyone except Dick Cheney agrees that Iraq has dissolved into civil war, I grabbed a couple of neocons’ (and neolibs’) books off my shelf last night to see how they treated the issue of Sunnis and Shi’ites killing…
Doni Remba, a peace activist, disputes my claim that the progressive voice in Jewish life has been marginalized by the neocons. He has some evidence: he says he’s getting traction in the Jewish press for his view that there has…
One of the challenges facing American Jewry is to understand the Palestinian version of Israel’s war of independence in 1948. What was, for Zionists, a great triumph was for Palestinians a Naqba, or catastrophe. 700,000 of them were soon gone….
I saw “Pan’s Labyrinth” the other night. It’s a great movie, period. That said, my friends and I differed on the thrust of the allegory, whether it is political or psychological. The movie is set, very realistically, in a fascist…
A couple of times now, I’ve posted items imagining Jimmy Carter as being motivated by a spiritual debt to Anwar Sadat. Carter made Sadat stay at Camp David in 1978 when he wanted to leave; and Sadat gave his life…
I emailed Tony Judt to tell him how Dershowitz had characterized his position re Israel. Judt responded: “It is a lie, and implicitly defamatory (a dissolver of Israel is an anti-Zionist is an anti-semite, etc…). From Dershowitz one expects no…
Last weekend an old friend came by and surprised me with an offhand statement. She had been friends of the writer George W.S. Trow, who died last November at 63, and she said he had been in and out of…