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…
Just now on Charlie Rose, Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, co-author of the thoughtful Cheney bio running this week, said that opponents of torture are “gutless” when they insist it doesn’t work. The real challenge, he said, is this: What…
The other night at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, Anne Roiphe said that she could have dialogue with anyone except me, because as a non/anti-Zionist, I was denying the right of Israel to exist. Dan Fleshler, the third panelist, and…
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…
Here’s the flyer for tomorrow night’s event, at the Stephen M. Wise Free Synagogue in N.Y. hosted by Meretz USA, that I’m participating in. I see that the Forward’s J.J. Goldberg is moderating, and Anne Roiphe is joining Dan Fleshler…
The New York Post says that the pictorial of Israeli babes in Maxim was “encouraged” by the Israeli consulate in New York. A Globe and Mail article posted by Israel21c, a lobbying organization, is blunter: Maxim’s expenses for the April…
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…
Last night, a religious friend told me about an interesting exchange between Bill Moyers and the female Episcopal bishop, in which the bishop justified discriminating against gays as bishops by saying they would be “crucified.” Here’s the exchange: BISHOP KATHARINE…
On Thursday night at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, 30 W. 68th Street in New York, a number of Jews including myself will be on a panel about “How Do We Talk About Israel?” The discussion is about: how to…
Recently I argued that anti-Zionism might just be the new Zionism for Jewish youth, because it appeals to the same idealistic/prophetic chord in Jewish history that Zionism formerly appealed to. I find some support for my view in an unlikely…
Last night, watching sports, I was shocked to see a Gatorade ad in which Harvey Keitel as a first-base coach counsels Derek Jeter to steal second and calls pitcher John Lackey “a schmendrick.” (Here’s Lackey’s comment). Shocked because schmendrick is…
Congratulations to David Chase for the brilliant ending of The Sopranos! And thanks to him for entertaining us and bringing the culture forward, doing his small part to liberate all the young Meadows and Anthonys in America from the dark…
This morning I woke up with a fresh understanding of the dual-loyalty issues I have been chewing away at in this blog. It is actually staggering when you think about it, that a leading professor of political philosophy–Michael Walzer–can speak…
Speaking of Norm Finkelstein, here is the story of how my blog ended up here, and off the Observer site. And yes, it’s a form of censorship; these views will not be underwritten in the mainstream…
DePaul’s lamentable decision underscores the fact: There is no room in our discourse for sharp criticism of Israel. As a commenter notes below, Grad students take notice..
A couple weeks ago I watched an Asian-American panel on C-Span talking about responses in their community to the Virginia Tech shootings. The main feeling was, shame; they worried that non-Asian Americans would blame the Asian community for the murders….
Neocon Scooter Libby has lots of friends, and many wrote letters to his judge, alas to little effect. (Pat Buchanan believes the huge sentence to be “punitive.” I agree.) A couple things interest me about the letters. Paul Wolfowitz says…
The furor over the immigration bill also involves that word I like: assimilation. Note Ann Coulter’s rage against Hispanics here: [T]raitors who are citizens have destroyed all acculturating institutions… Until the recipient culture is capable of doing an effective job…
APN and AAI set up a conference call today to announce their poll results (below) and when I asked AAI’s Jim Zogby why more Arab-Americans (6%) would have the U.S. lean towards Israel in its Mideast policy than lean towards…
A new poll of Arab-American and American Jewish attitudes on Israel/Palestine shows remarkable agreement. “Seeing eye to eye,” claim the poll’s sponsors, the Arab American Institute and Americans for Peace Now. To wit: –98 percent of Jews says Israelis have…