My crowd is buzzing over Connie Bruck's profile of Sheldon Adelson in The New Yorker. I have pressed for just such coverage of the U.S.'s third-richest man, and birthright-nut, for months. I notice that the Israel angle is right up front. And from what Richard Silverstein says, the piece is great.
I will read the piece later and surely have a specific response, but for now I have to say that following on the heels of Jane Kramer's wonderful piece about the campaign against Barnard anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj a month or so back, this piece is proof of a splendid development: editor David Remnick is committing the resources of the most important magazine in the country to the exploration of the machinations of the Israel lobby.
Remnick took strong exception to Walt and Mearsheimer last September in a piece that was unfortunately dispositive: it allowed liberals to turn their heads. And his own instincts are moderate (here praising Benny Morris as fairminded--the historian whom Uri Avnery describes as an “extreme” rightwinger). But meantime Remnick has accepted the essential intellectual and professional challenge of Walt and Mearsheimer: This stuff is unexamined, it is too central to our politics to be ignored. So he has responded journalistically, publishing these two important factual pieces (in both of which, it must be said, the villains are far-rightwingers, i.e., easier targets than, say, Howard Berman, AIPAC, or even Joe Lieberman). I couldn’t stand the New Yorker during the runup to the Iraq war, it was the negative of its courage during Vietnam. This coverage shows that good journalists have grown from that disastrous experience, and that the culture is changing under our feet.
