Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion Is Israel Athens or Sparta?
Saul Bellow, in his “To Jerusalem and Back,” wrote approvingly of how Israel was so special a place because it sought simultaneously to be both Sparta and Athens — and largely succeeded at both. That was in 1976, 34 years ago. The other day, in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s leading daily, Eitan Haber, who was Yitzhak…
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Opinion No Escaping the News From Israel — Not Even in Israel
I come to Israel in significant part to escape the news from Israel. Back home in Boston, between the Israeli papers and the many other online sources of information and opinion, the news relentlessly caroms between the scandalous and the unbearable: record poverty, educational decline, political ineptitude, national fatigue, only rarely relieved by a feel-good…
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Opinion Michael Oren’s Incredible Shrinking Tent
Here we go again. This is about two people, a man and a woman, who both live, not incidentally, in Washington, D.C., but who apparently inhabit very different planets. One is named Michael Oren. He is the current ambassador of the State of Israel to the United States. Oren has a fine scholarly reputation and…
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Opinion No Point in Prophecy, No Time for Despair
Who can foretell the things that will fell us, who can count them? What I mean is, why bother? It’s not just that prophecy for some millennia now (since the destruction of the Temple, R. Yohanan says in the Talmud) has been reserved for children and fools. It’s that 2010 begins sourly, and there is…
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Opinion A Netanyahu Conversion? The Case for Skepticism
Too transparent to be a scam, more nearly a farce. I refer to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 10-month “freeze” in settlement construction on the West Bank, about as gummy a freeze as can be imagined, a freeze meant to change nothing, only to placate the Americans. That is, admittedly, an increasingly contrarian view. Many people, including…
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Opinion Uncivil Rhetoric, Uncivil Realities
There’s anger in the air, considerable anger. No great surprise: At the end of October, there were nearly 16 million unemployed persons in the United States; a third had been unemployed for more than six months; there are six times as many job-seekers as there are job openings. Another 11.7 million people are either working…
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Opinion Our Convenient Truths Are Not the Whole Truth
Thinking about the Middle East is a sure-fire way to induce a headache — and, if you’re more than a disinterested witness, a heartache, too. Wise people will, therefore, seek to avoid thinking, will instead take such new information as comes their way and immediately squeeze it into familiar categories, categories that we have, over…
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Opinion When We Were the Vanguard
Those were indeed the days my friend, and we truly thought they’d never end. We thought the nights would be for dancing and for stars, and the days — the days for making real the dreams, dreams learned from Isaiah and Amos and Walt Whitman and Camus. We loved being precocious and parading our precocity,…
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