In a comment on this site the other day, journalist David Samuels took a neat swipe at me. He said the figure on 1.1 million Jews killed in the destruction of the second temple period comes from the Roman historian…
In The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier writes: A few days ago a friend of mine published a miserable piece on a matter about which I care deeply, and I am of a mind to be withering about it. The decline…
How interesting that the equation Zionism is racism, such a bloody bone of contention at the U.N.,is now cropping up in the work of Jewish anti-Zionists. 2 examples I’ve seen in the last month: –Avigail Abarbanel, a psychotherapist born in…
In the Times the other day, the main critic of the peace talks between Israel and Syria was Dore Gold, the rightwing former ambassador under Netanyahu who emigrated to Israel from the U.S. and doesn’t seem to believe in territorial…
Reporting on the alternative new Israel lobby, Dan Fleshler scores two points that bear repeating. The first one is joyful news to me, that dovish Jewish organizations “have increasingly worked in tandem on legislative initiatives with Churches for Middle East…
I just did a piece on Zbig Brzezinski for the American Conservative, tried to get him to break loose re Israel/Palestine. The man was careful. But I say it’s the Jeffrey Goldberg effect–when Goldberg all-but-embraced the Walt and Mearsheimer thesis…
Nakba commemorations are coming to an end. This month has been a real eye-opener for me, raised my consciousness. I want to talk about Nakba here in strictly emotional terms. One of the signal moments for me came when Nadia…
Paul Berman says something smart in this generally-obnoxious feed from a Nextbook festival on Jewish power (!)–written up by in the NY Sun by Adam Kirsch– to which of course no critics of Jewish power, even Jewish critics, were invited….
One of my closest friends in this life and the hereafter is Tony Schmitz, a writer I met in 1976 in Minnesota. At the time, he was my first German-Catholic. From a very small town in the German-American zone, surely…