Two nights ago, at my childhood vacation house in Cape Cod, I couldn’t get to sleep, tormented by thoughts about assimilation. This was after a dinner where I told friends and family I’m writing about being an assimilationist, and trying…
I went fishing for the first time in a year or two yesterday, on Cape Cod. There’s a lot of pleasure in it: the getting up early, the hanging with a guy you like for a few hours, the risk…
My argument that the ‘Sopranos’ ended with a bloodbath (which David Chase didn’t show out of sensitivity to our love for the Soprano family and because it was obvious to the discerning) was based in part on the figure of…
A year ago I freaked out when neocon John Podhoretz, angered by something I wrote about the neocons, sent me an email saying, “We know where you live.” I got very upset about it and raised a stink in my…
Here is a shocking speech made by Sen. Joe Lieberman last week to the new Israel lobby group: Christians United For Israel. Shocking because it is so filled with religious talk about the Biblical covenant between God and the Jews….
Maybe Typepad’s comment mechanism is screwy–Glenn Greenwald was not able to post the following yesterday in response to my criticism of his book, A Tragic Legacy, and sent it along to me. I’m sure I’ll have some response of my…
In the last few hours I’ve watched two remarkable conversations about race on television. Last night on CBS Evening News, national correspondent Byron Pitts asked black leaders in Philadelphia whether the high murder rate there wasn’t a black problem. They…
Praise is due The New Yorker this week for publishing a thorough, thoughtful piece of reporting called “The Apostate,” about Avram Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset who has shocked Israel by coming out as an anti-Zionist. The piece,…
Justin Elliott graduated from Brown this year. His last paper in college was about the debate over Zionism that “flared up” in the pages of the New York Times before the birth of Israel. I append the full paper, which…