another myth that needs demythifying.

LOL.

"The basic idea is to appear to be presenting a wide-range of ideas, but in reality only affirmations of Israel will be presented."

Ah ha! Ah ha! I'd always thought of the 92nd St. Y as a bastion of liberal inquiry. But now it gets outed by two out-of-the-box thinkers, David Shasha and Phil Weiss. Well done, gents!

Another "open-minded Boomer" myth blown to hell. That's OK … just gimme some truth, as John Lennon used to say.

Phil's incendiary reference to "the color bar even in liberal Jewish circles" is a brilliant extension of Jimmy Carter's apartheid metaphor. Ouch, that's gonna rub some nerves raw.

"The 92d Street Y is offering a haven to neocons … in the greatest city in the woild." Indeed. And 92nd Street's a long way north of 'toity-toid and toid.' LOL …

The Anger, the Longing, the Hope

By URI AVNERY

HE DID not want to be the National Poet. He did not want to be a political poet at all, but a lyrical one, a poet of love. But whenever he turned in this direction, the long arm of Palestinian fate dragged him back.

I am not qualified to judge his poems or to assess his greatness as a poet. Leading experts on the Arabic language are still bitterly quarreling among themselves about the meaning of his poems, their nuances and layers, images and allusions. He was a master of classical Arabic, and equally at home with Western and Israeli poetry. Many believe that he was the greatest Arab poet, and one of the greatest poets of our time.

His poetry enabled him to do what no one had succeeded in doing by other means: to unite all the parts of the fractured and fragmented Palestinian people – in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in Israel, in the refugee camps and throughout the Diaspora. He belonged to all of them. The refugees could identify with him because he was a refugee, Israel's Palestinian citizens could identify with him because he was one of them, and so could the inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories, because he was a fighter against the occupation.

I point out in Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el-Haj that even in historic Poland there was no single identifiable Jewish people because individuals associated with Judaism belonged to two very different often hostile ethnic groups.

So is it really surprising that Zionist Ashkenazim have created a whole cottage industry devoted to misrepresenting the history and politics of Arabs or non-Ashkenazi Jews?

It is. His grammar (or usual lack thereof) gives him away.