As I have to remind myself and readers, I’ve spent all of 10 days in Israel, and sometimes dehumanize the Israeli experience. Here’s a note from someone who’s spent more time on-the-ground, my friend Peter Drubetskoy, a veteran of the…
This is a funny video, in a kind of Israel-lobby Amos ‘n Andy way, about Rahm Emanuel as being the great Jewish hope. A lot of waving blue-and-white flags.
Before I went to bed last night I was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Jew as Pariah, from 1944. It is an essay about an assimilationist impulse: creative Jews in Europe who “were great enough to transcend the bounds of nationality…
Jack Ross on my assimilationism: Does your wife really celebrate your holidays too? My line is that if I had lived in Wilhelmine Germany or even in a certain place and time in this country I would have been a…
Last week at the National Press Club, Paul Krugman said what he’s said before, but even more pithily: To be taken seriously on foreign policy in Washington, you have to have been wrong about Iraq. Or words close to that….
Here is a pretty darn good post at TPM by Bernard Avishai from Hebron. It’s goodness stems from its honesty about the disgusting conditions created by the settlers and the threat they represent to any fairness in Palestine, and the…
Today I went out with my wife to buy a Christmas tree. Right after we got ours, this Subaru pulled in with Amherst College and Putney School stickers, driven by a little guy with glasses and an ironical expression, and…
AIPAC just released a statement condemning Hamas for failing to extend the “tahdiyeh,” or period of calm that ended on Dec. 19. In that statment, AIPAC bragged about Israel’s efforts to provide for Gaza: More than 300 truckloads of aid…
John Mearsheimer blurbed Avraham Burg’s great new book on the Holocaust, which, two months after its publication, was written up by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times two days ago. Mearsheimer had this response to Bronner’s piece: Bronner’s job…