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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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 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….
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…