A friend writes:
Today’s New York Times Book Review contains three reviews in three pages (pp.
10-12) directly or indirectly about Israel. This odd concentration is not
explained by a national or religious holiday, a special issue or a designated
section. The shortest of the pieces, "Zionist in the White House," a review by
Jonathan Tepperman of a book by Allis and Ronald Radosh about Harry Truman in
1948, answers for the "readable prose" and "good anecdotal color" of the book
and its "general sense of fairmindedness (except perhaps toward the Arabs)." No
detail is offered to specify the reservation behind the parenthesis.
Stephen Pollard, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle, is the reviewer assigned
for a polemical book by the neoconservative journalist Bruce Bawer, entitled
Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Bawer, an American expatriate
in Norway, judges that Europe is on the brink of cultural surrender to radical
Islam. If the process continues, Bawer argues and the Times reviewer agrees,
the cultural surrender will be followed by political collapse. "Bawer is
unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply terrifying."
A full page is given to the review of Israel is Real: An Obsessive Quest to
Understand the Jewish Nation and its History, by Rich Cohen. The reviewer, a
former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Tony Horwitz, is also featured on p.
4 with an "Up Front" box signed by the editors, which quotes Horwitz’s e-mail
in praise of Cohen’s book: "I admire Cohen for not only asking tough questions
but gleefully puncturing every Zionist piety. He’s sure to hear from his own
Uncle Mort, as well as Aipac and other enforcers of Jewish correctness on
Israel." These bold words scarcely correspond to the content of the review.
Horwitz quotes with jocular approval Cohen’s portrait of Menachem Begin, "the
hawkish but shlumpy prime minister elected in 1977: ‘He looked like my Grandma
Esther’s second husband, Izzy Greenspun, of Skokie, Ill., who stuttered and
repeated and got flustered and died while wiping a dish.’" And Horwitz admires
Cohen’s deftness at "humanizing a man like Ariel Sharon, ‘the fat old kosher
butcher, with blood on his apron and a sly grin on his face’ who is also a
beloved general, grief-stricken father and tragic old man." The second-to-last
paragraph touches briefly in passing the "plight" of the Palestinians (plight–
word dear to sympathizers in a rush), with some breezy raillery against the West
Bank settlers and "their spiritual forefather, the ‘perfectly named Rabbi
Abraham Kook.’" Horwitz reports that Cohen looks on Zionism as "fatally flawed
from the start"; but if that is a central premise of the book, it can hardly be
inferred from this account. The Times message is spelled out, rather, by the
subtitle of the review–"The history of Israel is full of nutritious morsels,
leavened with the absurd." There are problems, yes. But violence? From the
shlumpy Izzy Greenspun? Oppression? From the friendly neighborhood butcher?
