Tom Ricks of the Washington Post is ticked that I said he is on “the left” (in my last item re Obama). He wrote me a note, here’s the exchange: TR: Describing Iraq as a Hobbesian state worse than a…
The Iraq Study Group report has freed the left to describe Iraq in a new way, as worse than a civil war. On Meet the Press, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post said: Right now it’s…the pure Hobbesian state, the…
At last week’s conference on “Freud’s Jewish World” at the Center for Jewish History, two scholars talked about journalism. Freud lived an upper middle class life in Vienna, and until he fled Nazism as a dying man, he read the…
Hillary and Bill Clinton met behind closed doors this past weekend with Minister Avigdor Lieberman, among other Israeli officials, at the behest of Brookings’ Saban Center —so JTA reports. Lieberman is a racist. He has supported the expulsion of Arabs…
The paddling Jimmy Carter is receiving for making criticisms of Israel that are common in Israel demonstrates a law of the Israel conversation: It is one thing for Jews to criticize Israel, but it’s not O.K. for non-Jews to do…
The other night at NYU, Tony Judt said, “Fasten your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy night,” and then dropping his scarf and jacket on the stage, gave a barnburner about the intellectual’s responsibility. Here are some of his…
Jimmy Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” in the title of his new book has generated a lot of controversy—the Washington Post reporting that a Middle East scholar has angrily resigned his affiliation with the Carter Center over Carter’s book….
What an irony, that a war advanced by many as an alternative to forging a peace in Jerusalem—indeed who saw it as a clean break from such negotiations—has had the opposite effect. And how revealing, that in seizing on the…
Leon Wieseltier expresses the Israel-lobby position by saying, Sure, hold an international conference to fix Iraq, but don’t bring Palestine into it. It’s the same line Kenneth Pollack gave us 4 years ago when he issued his manifesto for disaster…