Here’s Newsweek’s piece on the rich holding back on ostentatious spending because it’s not cool right now. Almost all the magazine’s examples of rich guys would seem to be Jewish: Richard Fuld, somebody Koch, Ron Perelman, Steven Schwarzman, after whom…
My father just turned 83. At Thanksgiving the other night we went round the table giving thanks and he said he would wait for everyone else to say thanks before he said his. By the time we finished people had…
The Australian anti-Zionist, and Jewish atheist Antony Loewenstein, is visiting the States. He talked at Harvard last week. Told this anecdote: I met a group of influential left-oriented Jews in Melbourne last year. They wanted to engage with me and…
My wife and I went to a family gathering yesterday in the neighborhood she grew up in, Chestnut Hill. The Nebraska game was on and a few of us talked about international politics. We talked about human rights in China,…
Thanksgiving has become a secular religious festival. Last night, we went round the table saying what we were thankful for. Few of the thanks were explicitly religious. Though one nephew said he was thankful that his father is a Christian….
Imagine if Palestinians took over the King David Hotel and killed a bunch of people. I’m sure there are some Palestinians who would like to do that. It would be further proof that there is no one to deal with…
I said earlier this week that I was going to get to Jeremy Ben-Ami’s comments at the Jewish antiwar conference of last Sunday. Ben-Ami is the brains of J Street, the alternative Jewish lobby; and he was introduced with genuine…
For a year I’ve thought that the best analysis of the peace process is Henry Siegman’s fabulous piece in LRB last year saying it has been a “scam” aimed at covering Israel’s accession of more territory. Now here is a…
Does it surprise you that liberal internationalists wish to provide neocons political cover unto the last day? Not really. George Packer wants David Frum to replace Bill Kristol as a columnist at the Times. Frum is a smart guy and…
JSF notes that Samantha Power, Rob Malley and Zbig Brzezinski are absent from Obama’s national security transition team while James Steinberg, who helped write Obama’s AIPAC pander last June, and Dennis Ross are there. As well as a former AIPAC…
I’m reading Lincoln to understand the occupation. This is going to be one of my ongoing themes, might as well tell you now, how Lincoln worked at himself over 3 decades to bring slavery down. No, the occupation isn’t slavery,…
A lot of the stuff I write for this blog is critical or angry or mocking, reflecting my angst over the state of the Jews and my anger at the neocons for pushing the Iraq War. Today I’m sitting down…
I saw Jack Ross the other day in New York city and heard his rabbi refer to him as a “silent genius.” Nice words. One reason I’m drawn to Jack is that he utterly lacks a problem I have: I…
All you need to know about the Israel/Palestine situation (as I say often on this blog) is that in 1947, four groups were promised states in Asia: Indians, Pakistanis, Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Three of these groups got a…
Obama’s still opaque to me. I have no idea of his motivation. Scares me that he has hired so many Harvard Law School grads you can’t even count em. Bill Clinton was into Rhodes Scholars, another meritocratic blue ribbon. Mike…
That’s from a great letter To the New York Times in 1992 by a guy in Brookline, birthplace of Mondoweiss. The guy’s name is Andrew Perrin and he now seems to teach political sociology at UNC. Has a nice face….
Children in Ni’lin demonstrate against the annexation wall and as they advance on the construction are tear-gassed by Israeli soldiers. Which side are you on?
How did I ever get my little pariah fingers on this thing? A report on “Israel Advocacy,” by the “Strategic Planning Subcommittee” of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston says that–are you sitting down?–Israel has a giant image problem in…
The lasting image I’ll have of yesterday’s conference on Jews against the war 6 years after the fact will be of Rabbi David Saperstein of the Union for Reform Judaism going on at length and almost angrily, citing Hebrew words…
So far everything I’ve quoted from the conference in NY yesterday on Jews uniting to end the war (six years after the war started) has been positive. Very forward statements from Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Elizabeth Holtzman, and MJ Rosenberg. These people…
Yesterday demonstrated the political limitation of Jewish communal organizations for me. At some point you are doing a potato sack race–or whatever you call that race where your leg is tied to someone else– with a neocon. That’s how it…
Yesterday Lilly Rivlin of Meretz USA invoked Amos Oz and Ariel Sharon as peaceable figures (oh well), but also said the names Brzezinski and Scowcroft not with anger but with respect, in the Jewish house. She said we are facing…
Today’s conference at New York’s Central Synagogue on Jews uniting against the war—six years after it matters—was remarkable for two things: the soulsearching over the Israel/Palestine issue, which represents real progress after years of denial that the occupation had anything…
A conference in New York today putatively aimed at reviving Jewish opposition to the Iraq war–six years after the barn door opened, and all the horses went down the hill with fiery nostrils–was actually devoted to soulsearching over the Jewish…
Brilliant piece by Gideon Levy–only in Haaretz–saying that the peace camp in Israel has been feckless from the start, and all are implicated in the settlers’ movement. So much for the accidental empire claims of conscience. And when Levy says…