I think I was too harsh on Noam Chomsky yesterday. Oh well, I said it. Anyway, here’s Peter Voskamp, editor of the Block Island Times, offering a better picture of the great man: I saw him a few years ago…

The New York Times’ stunning piece last week about the American Jewish Committee’s effort to smear leftwing Jewish critics of Israel as antisemites did what 1000 blogs, 100 human rights reports, even 10 pieces by Tony Judt, could never do:…

Even as it disappointed on the field, the Super Bowl supplied racial drama. The historical celebration, that a black coach was finally coaching a Super Bowl team—and not just one, but both coaches, both teams—was all over the airwaves. Even…

My people came to this country in the ten years either side of 1900. They were afraid of the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, they came from Poland, Bukovina, Bialystok, to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. Some day…

Now that everyone except Dick Cheney agrees that Iraq has dissolved into civil war, I grabbed a couple of neocons’ (and neolibs’) books off my shelf last night to see how they treated the issue of Sunnis and Shi’ites killing…

Doni Remba, a peace activist, disputes my claim that the progressive voice in Jewish life has been marginalized by the neocons. He has some evidence: he says he’s getting traction in the Jewish press for his view that there has…

One of the challenges facing American Jewry is to understand the Palestinian version of Israel’s war of independence in 1948. What was, for Zionists, a great triumph was for Palestinians a Naqba, or catastrophe. 700,000 of them were soon gone….

A couple of times now, I’ve posted items imagining Jimmy Carter as being motivated by a spiritual debt to Anwar Sadat. Carter made Sadat stay at Camp David in 1978 when he wanted to leave; and Sadat gave his life…

I emailed Tony Judt to tell him how Dershowitz had characterized his position re Israel. Judt responded: “It is a lie, and implicitly defamatory (a dissolver of Israel is an anti-Zionist is an anti-semite, etc…). From Dershowitz one expects no…

The other day at Brandeis, Alan Dershowitz, responding to Jimmy Carter, took a shot at NYU’s Tony Judt because of Judt’s famous call (in the New York Review of Books) to give up on the idea of a Jewish state….