Dan Fleshler has a good account of our evening at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on his blog (realistic dove). He says that progress was made among progressive Jews, though he also faults me for my own comments about the…
The Senate is investigating gifts by drug companies to doctors. Says The Times: the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom…
I was in synagogue last Saturday for a bat mitzvah. The Torah portion was from Numbers, when the Israelites are in Transjordan on the outskirts of the Promised Land. We read what one scholar has called the “most enigmatic incident…
One of my touchstones for trying to understand Israel is something Tony Kushner said to me a year ago: that most American Jews’ idea of Israel is a “fantasy built on a delusion.” They have little idea what it’s really…
I just got hold of a copy of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good Vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Greenwald is a leftlib blogger/lawyer and has a mind like a steel trap: fiercely logical….
Last night’s discussion among progressive Jews on Israel, , organized by Charney Bromberg of Meretz USA at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, was a turbulent one. A lot of that turbulence surrounded me and my views. The…
Paul Berman’s piece in TNR on Tariq Ramadan is important, and deserves attention for a few reasons. One is Berman’s point that western liberals have rationalized the stoning of adulterers and other primitive practices in the Muslim world. I’m not…
I don’t share Joachim Martillo’s view of the Holocaust. The Nazi crimes define the word heinous. I don’t see the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine in ’47-’48 as comparable to the Holocaust. I’m also not going to be blocking Martillo…
A great book came out last year called To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, by Will Blythe (yes, a friend), about the undying rivalry between Duke and the University of North Carolina. The rivalry goes way beyond…