Here is a shocking speech made by Sen. Joe Lieberman last week to the new Israel lobby group: Christians United For Israel. Shocking because it is so filled with religious talk about the Biblical covenant between God and the Jews….
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…
My favorite newspaper, Haaretz, again breaks ground with a piece on Jewish identity in the U.S. The author, Yair Sheleg, wants Jewish organizations here to come out against intermarriage, he/she wants them to support Jewish education so that Jewish kids…
Yesterday I faulted the U.S. press for not doing surveys on American public opinion re Jews & Israel. Well, it turns out that Haaretz just published such a poll in Europe, conducted by the Anti Defamation League, showing that over…
The book business sometimes promotes books as “widely anticipated.” This is usually a lie, but for Farrar, Straus and Giroux this September, it’s not. A great number of people are breathlessly anticipating the publication of The Israel Lobby book by…
I missed a central point when writing about Robert Pape’s theory about suicide terrorism yesterday. Pape says that an essential aspect of the practice is that suicide terrorists are venerated by their societies. They are martyrs, and are assured of…
One of my many disappointments with the media is that in the wake of the attacks in England and Mike Chertoff’s gut-check, we have seen no Op-Eds by Robert A. Pape, the realist at the University of Chicago who knows…
An anticolonialist blog (sent along by Joachim) says that the BBC has begun to revise its description of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s alleged threat to Israel. [In a July 8 article,] the BBC said: “In October 2005, the Iranian president made…