The deepening political crisis surrounding Iraq has generated fears in the Jewish community that Americans are going to blame Jews for the failure—because so many Jewish leaders supported the invasion of a country that had many times attacked Israel, but…
Norah O’Donnell on MSNBC just now did a very aggressive job of interviewing Steve Berman, one of the Jews who resigned from the Carter Center advisory board in protest of Carter’s book. O’Donnell asked whether he had been “lobbied” by…
One thing that Walt and Mearsheimer do in their rebuttal is to list the large number of policymakers, including Jews like Feith, Perle, Wurmser and Wolfowitz (I would add Abrams), who are “deeply committed” to Israel and helped get us…
I’ve just gotten a copy of a 79-page paper called “Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of ‘The Israel Lobby'” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The scholars began circulating the rebuttal privately in December but have not…
In her 1997 autobiography, the late Katharine Graham of the Washington Post described her father as an assimilating Jew who didn’t talk about his Jewishness to his Episcopal-church-going children. He was “involved in Jewish charities, causes, and international issues. “He…
The fallout from Walt and Mearsheimer’s bombshell paper on the Israel lobby includes a loss of credibility to Commentary and the New Republic, two eminent journals (to which I subscribe, thereby emulating my parents, whose house was filled with stacks…
Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, who died at age 97 in 1990, has a place in American Jewish history. Her grandfather, Isaac M. Wise, founded the first Jewish seminary in the U.S., the Hebrew Union College. Her father, Adolph Ochs, bought the…
NBC Nightly News last night offered three separate soundbites of Tom Brokaw, first in its opening coverage of the Ford funeral, then in an interview by Brian Williams, then in a special section of excerpts of eulogies. The royal placement,…
R.W. Apple’s 12/5 memorial service at the Kennedy Center, lately rebroadcast on C-Span, was a good look at the social ways of powerful journalists. Apple seems to have socialized—surprise—on the Democratic lib/left. A eulogist, the powerful corporate lobbyist Anne Wexler,…