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…
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…
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….
Alan Johnston’s homecoming is as exciting as Jill Carroll’s a year ago. BBC, CSM–they’re enlightened outlets, and both reporters have had interesting things to say about their captors. Johnston made an effort just now to distinguish between his jihadist captors…
I lately wrote a piece in which I extolled the late E. Digby Baltzell, and credited him with inventing the word WASP. Baltzell, a WASP himself, wished to hasten the day when the WASP caste no longer ruled society. He…
Dan Fleshler has a good account of our evening at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on his blog (realistic dove). He says that progress was made among progressive Jews, though he also faults me for my own comments about the…
The Senate is investigating gifts by drug companies to doctors. Says The Times: the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom…
I was in synagogue last Saturday for a bat mitzvah. The Torah portion was from Numbers, when the Israelites are in Transjordan on the outskirts of the Promised Land. We read what one scholar has called the “most enigmatic incident…
One of my touchstones for trying to understand Israel is something Tony Kushner said to me a year ago: that most American Jews’ idea of Israel is a “fantasy built on a delusion.” They have little idea what it’s really…