Yesterday I caught part of PBS travel guru Rick Steves’s wonderful trip to Iran on television. His whole message was great, till he spoke of “family values” in Iran. That’s why people support the Islamic republic, he said, they have…
A week or so back I wrote that in my 50s I am past caring whether someone calls me a self-hating Jew, and a friend asked me to explain this attitude. When you get to be in your 50s you…
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…
Every day things are changing. A progressive’s election changes the water in the aquarium. David Ignatius in the Washington Post has a fabulous piece attacking the tax-deductible funds that fuel the Israeli colonies. He makes the point we’ve made many…
Amazing how the Gaza slaughter continues to reverberate–as the deaths of children should. Pat Oliphant did a stunning cartoon of a jackbooted headless Israeli pushing a star of David over the little people of Gaza. “I paused when I saw…
I love a lot of goyim. That might be the essence of my assimilationist problem. If you love some goyim—any goyim– then the idea of Jewish difference and exceptionalism becomes very hard to maintain intellectually and in your life choices….
I’m reading Kafka these days not just for the incredible pleasure of it but because Kafka lived in a very similar Jewish moment to ours, which he recognized as transitional. Jews were included as never before. They had important jobs…
Yesterday I went on Press TV to discuss the Israel lobby with Elazar Barkan and Dan Fleshler, and after the taping, the three of us hung out in a hallway talking. We all disagreed about what the lobby is. I’d…
Lately I did a post on the question, Why do we single Israel out for indictment in a sea of man’s inhumanity to man? It’s the Dershowitz question, implying that we do so because we’re anti-semitic. Well here is a…