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…
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Monthly Archives: July 2007
Why Does a Hooked Fish Vomit?
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…
Death-Sniffing Cat Shows Up in the News, Anchoring My ‘Sopranos’ Theory
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…
Learning to Love the Web (Including Jpod?)
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…
Naqba Is Openly Discussed in Israel, Not Here
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….
Glenn Greenwald Responds to My Criticism
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…
Blacks Lift Prohibition on Discussing Urban Dysfunction. Can Jews Do Same Re Foreign-Policy Power?
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…
‘The New Yorker’ Gives Good Weight to Israeli Dissident Burg
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,…
Once Upon a Time, The Times Debated Israel and Divided Jewish Allegiance
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…
The New Republic Raises Dual Loyalty Issue, Re Israeli Arabs
In the latest New Republic the Israeli historian Benny Morris raises my favorite issue, dual loyalty, this time with respect to Israeli Arabs. In rejecting author Tom Segev’s likening of the Arab minority in Israel to blacks in the U.S….
Dershowitz Once Celebrated Jewish Influence and Called Support for Israel a ‘Secular Religion’
I’m reading a surprisingly-good book, The Vanishing American Jew, by Alan M. Dershowitz. Dershowitz can be angry, or mean, but in 1997, when he wrote this book, he had a more open spirit. The book is surprising because Dershowitz and…
‘Dual Loyalty’ in the News, This Time the Jewish Week
Interesting that an editor of the Jewish Week has gone after Eric Alterman for his comments re dual loyalty. So the issue is in the air. Add the Week’s interest to John Judis’s, Gabriel Schoenfeld’s, Alterman’s, and (by implication) Tony…
Assimilation v. Dual Loyalty in American Jewish Identity
My favorite newspaper, Haaretz, again breaks ground with a piece on Jewish identity in the U.S. The author, Yair Sheleg, wants Jewish organizations here to come out against intermarriage, he/she wants them to support Jewish education so that Jewish kids…
Half of Europeans See Jews as Loyal to Israel
Yesterday I faulted the U.S. press for not doing surveys on American public opinion re Jews & Israel. Well, it turns out that Haaretz just published such a poll in Europe, conducted by the Anti Defamation League, showing that over…
The Press Injects Race into Bonds Story. Why Not Religion Into Mideast Issues?
The book business sometimes promotes books as “widely anticipated.” This is usually a lie, but for Farrar, Straus and Giroux this September, it’s not. A great number of people are breathlessly anticipating the publication of The Israel Lobby book by…
Justice for Holocaust Survivors’ Children! And What About Palestinian Refugees?
Is there a statue of limitations on Nazi crimes? According to Haaretz last Friday, thousands of children of Holocaust survivors were about to file suit in Israel against the German government, demanding payment for therapy: So far, some 3,000 Israelis…
Pape and the Neocons Agree: Suicide Terrorists Are Broadly Supported
I missed a central point when writing about Robert Pape’s theory about suicide terrorism yesterday. Pape says that an essential aspect of the practice is that suicide terrorists are venerated by their societies. They are martyrs, and are assured of…
Would Total American Withdrawal End Suicide Terrorism in Iraq?
One of my many disappointments with the media is that in the wake of the attacks in England and Mike Chertoff’s gut-check, we have seen no Op-Eds by Robert A. Pape, the realist at the University of Chicago who knows…
BBC Revises Iranian Prez’s ‘Wiped Off Map’ Language
An anticolonialist blog (sent along by Joachim) says that the BBC has begun to revise its description of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s alleged threat to Israel. [In a July 8 article,] the BBC said: “In October 2005, the Iranian president made…
Once Again, Haaretz Says What Our Press Won’t Dare To
George Ajjan tells me that at a meeting of Arab community leaders last night (in New Jersey, I presume) a friend told him about an article in Haaretz describing a growing trend to delegitimize the idea of a Jewish state…
For a Two-State Solution in the U.S., 1861-65
At the warmongering American Enterprise Institute Monday, Frederick Kagan pushed for continuing the war in Iraq by saying that things looked lousy in the Civil War here in 1862 or so, but Lincoln stuck with it notwithstanding widespread grumbling over…
Great Slappers in History: Couric vs. Patton
New York Magazine’s profile of Katie Couric is already famous for her admission that she repeatedly slapped a staffer on the arm after he put the word “sputum” in her script a few weeks back, sputum being a word she…
The Times Dismisses One-State Discussion as ‘Insidious’
Yesterday’s profile of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the Times was an important expression of mainstream liberal opinion. It was fair and limited. The author, Roger Cohen, is agonized by the moral position of an Israeli society that has…
My Assimilating Weekend
I spent the weekend at my wife’s family’s community in the Pennsylvania mountains, an old Quaker retreat with a distinctly elite flavor. I made a faux pas when I whipped up a fruit salad for the dinner Saturday and used…
Vietnam, Iraq–and Suspicions of the Israel Lobby
I like Scott’s comment from yesterday, that maybe the Iraq war will do to the current Establishment what Vietnam did to the last one, break it down. Certainly this disastrous war goes way beyond George Bush and even Dick Cheney….