James North writes: I remember Mahmood Mamdani from 35 years ago, when he was the most dynamic leader of the newly-organized union of graduate students at Harvard. Today he is a distinguished professor at Columbia, one of our most original…
Last night I went to hear Rashid Khalidi speak at the Brooklyn Reform synagogue, Beth Elohim. A gorgeous temple, and before giving Khalidi the microphone at the altar, Rabbi Andy Bachman went down the list of groups that had sponsored…
The AP from Jerusalem: two versions of the official Netanyahu cabinet photo were released. One is photoshopped to remove the two women in the cabinet, to placate the Orthodox objections to photographing women.
Michelle Obama has been a giant hit, I’ve observed with joy, but something has been made of her gaffe with the Queen of England, putting her arm around her. You don’t touch the Queen. Oh– of course, you don’t touch…
Columbia had its semi-annual University Lecture last night: history professor Ira Katznelson’s thoughts on tolerance and liberalism, using the example of the history of Jews in England, from their expulsion in the 1200s to their readmission in the 1650s to…
Typically, I misplayed the bounce on the Pankaj Mishra post earlier today about the reverence among Hindu nationalists for Hitler and Zionism. My friend of Indian extraction gets it right: That’s one thing I love about the Israel-India alliance– Indian…
In The National, Pankaj Mishra is dyspeptic about partition, which has led both India and Israel into a “moral wilderness” of nationalism. (I do wish he’d pointed out that the Pakistanis got a state, the Palestinians didn’t.) He says in…
Excellent report in the Forward by Anthony Weiss showing that Yemen’s 300 Jews, whose transfer to Israel from the Arab nation has become a cause celebre among western Jewish/Zionist groups in the wake of the murder of one of the…
Tonight the 92d Street Y held a panel on “Why Zionism has become a dirty word,” with four Zionists on stage and some non-Zionists demonstrating out in Lexington Avenue. The hall was less than half full, and the panel itself…