I’m in L.A. One of the liberating things about being here is that while there’s Jewishness all around me, it is not as confining a Jewishness as the one in New York. The definition is looser. At a Christmas party…
A friend went to Jimmy Carter’s book-signing in Pasadena the other day. 3200 books, all snapped up weeks before, then signed by an aloof former president, who did not shake hands but was flanked by two phalanxes of security. Everyone…
When I was a kid, my parents had an expression, WASPy Jews. It was based in part on our one German-Jewish relative: Trudy (a pseudonym). Trudy was cold, straightforward, and wealthy. German Jews and Eastern-European Jews used to be the…
I heard a report that Sen. Barack Obama’s position on Israel/Palestine is no different from the Democratic mainstream, that in fact he abandoned a more progressive view—which you might expect given his multicultural/international backstory—to get there. I asked someone who…
M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he’s balanced by Alan Dershowitz. It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to…
A few months back, the brilliant and flawed David Brooks said that blue/red was giving way to a new divide in American society that would play out in ideology and partisan politics: globalist interventionist elites on one side, populist isolationist…
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…