Pushback on Gaza. From the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: So far, there have been only a few cases of alleged serious misconduct involving the “cold-blooded” killing of civilians, and these are in dispute. Ethan Bronner does the heavy…
I found this obit for Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s son Nicholas Hughes, 47, who hanged himself last week in Alaska, where he worked as a fisheries biologist, offensive. It subordinated Hughes’s life to a recitation of the famous tragedy…
Jeffrey Goldberg has a very interesting dialogue here with his friend Ari Roth of Theater J in Washington in which he scolds Roth for his plans to mount a production of “Seven Jewish Children,” by Caryl Churchill. The Goldberg-Roth dialogue…
Playwright David Zellnik went to the New York Theatre Workshop last night for the second of three nights of readings of Caryl Churchill’s short, Gaza-inspired play, Seven Jewish Children. His report: So last night was pretty thrilling. From what I…
Yesterday there were two posts on the recent report “A Last Chance For A Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement: A Bipartisan Statement on U.S. Middle East Peacemaking”(pdf). Both Roger Cohen and Andrew Sullivan made reference to it, and it is reportedly on…
Every day now I dip into Kafka, because he was so intelligently engaged with the Jewish question in Europe at a time when Zionism enthralled Jews, because it seemed to be the answer. Kafka was both a Zionist and not…
I visit my wife in the bathtub most mornings. A ritual of unemployment, or of the new employment, the home office. My wife is into yoga, and she told me about the feeling of a world community in yoga: anywhere…
My new theme is that there is a tremendous amount of rage against Israel that is at last boiling to the surface post-Gaza, especially amid the air of righteous impunity the Israelis have adopted toward the atrocity claims. Latest piece…
A historical friend responds to my report the other day in which Abe Foxman of the ADL said that Zionism is racist in the way that all forms of nationalism are racist: Foxman is right, you know, about nationalism. Germany…