Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and an author, most recently of We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.
Eric Alterman
By Eric Alterman
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Opinion Hysterical ‘Anti-Semitic’ Claim Backfires
The decision in late December by Rachel Kleinfeld, founder of the Truman National Security Project, a defense-oriented Democratic think tank, to sever publicly all ties with former fellow and ex-AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, brought to an end what was an ugly episode in Washington’s Israel-focused policy community. Block had orchestrated a sloppy smear campaign against…
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Opinion Israel Turning Into Theocracy
It is becoming increasingly obvious that a break between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, particularly its American variety, is fast approaching. The reason for this is that Israel is slowly but inexorably turning into a conservative theocracy while the Diaspora is largely dedicated to liberal democracy. The strategy of the “pro-Israel” camp among American Jewish organizations…
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Opinion Pernicious Attempt To Brand Protest as Anti-Semitic
Is the Jewish congressional representative from heavily Jewish Long Island, Steve Israel, “standing with those calling for the killing of Jews”? Does the Jewish representative from heavily Jewish Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “agree with various calls for Jews to be ‘run out of the country’ and to oppose and ‘destroy’ the State of Israel”? Sean…
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Opinion To Test Beliefs, Listen to the Other Guy’s
When did your dad become a Republican?” That was the question with which my 13-year-old daughter dutifully reported she had been greeted the morning after parents’ night at her school. What had I done to deserve this? Well, the previous evening I took a look at the proposed reading list, which leaned, believe it or…
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News Blogger Jennifer Rubin Keeps Washington Post Job After Norway Gaffe
The Washington Post got into a bit of a kerfuffle recently when its conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin put up a post attempting to assign blame to Islamic “jihadists” for the July 22 bombing in Oslo and then let the post stand for more than 24 hours. This despite the fact that it was widely reported…
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Opinion Eric Alterman: Yale Acted Correctly in Axing Anti-Semitism Initiative
Yale University’s decision to shutter its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism and replace it with the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has inspired considerable controversy, much of it highly acrimonious. On the one hand, this is surprising. YIISA was a tiny institute without much of a profile at Yale, much less…
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Opinion Will the One-State Solution Become the Only Solution?
Tony Judt’s deliberately provocative 2003 New York Review of Books essay, “Israel: the Alternative,” is a lesson in the limits of American Jewry’s allowable discourse when it comes to Israel. Writing explicitly in the tradition of thought experiment, rather than policy proposal, about what he called an “alternative future,” Judt suggests that Jews and Arabs…
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Opinion The Republicans Heart Netanyahu
When a group of student radicals took over the Columbia University administration building in 1968, they issued a series of demands having to do with university policies. The administration wisely ignored these demands, however, because it understood that, in actuality, they were not terribly relevant to the problem it had on its hands. As radical…
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