Neal Gabler
By Neal Gabler
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Culture Why We Must Beware Trump’s Willing Executioners
‘It is a disgrace which gets worse with every day that passes,” one observer wrote of the deteriorating political scene we know all too well. “Politics everywhere and everywhere the terrorism of the Right…. It is astounding how easily everything collapses.” He added, “It is shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches…
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Culture Why Jews Must Never Let Go of Their Liberalism
In these dark days of post-election despondency, I have managed to cling to a slender reed: Jewish liberalism. According to a Pew Research Center survey, Donald Trump won a majority of every other religious group: Catholics by 52% to 45% (non-Hispanic white Catholics, naturally, 60% to 37%); Protestants, 58% to 39%; evangelicals and born-agains, 81%…
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Culture How We Should Remember Kirk Douglas on His 100th Birthday
Kirk Douglas, who turns 100 on December 9, is both a movie legend and a Hollywood anomaly: a star divided. Most stars lodge in our collective consciousness. Douglas, while a first-magnitude star, was never quite an indelible one, save maybe for the dimple in his chin, never one who seemed to capture the zeitgeist the…
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Culture My Life Among The Trolls
In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a pretty vicious country these days, and by that, I don’t mean the obvious instances of intolerance-cum-violence against African Americans or Muslims or the LGBT community. I mean the everyday little nettles and barbs with which nearly all of us are inundated. Meanness in America is a…
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Culture What We Write About When We Write About Barbra Streisand
So why write about Barbra Streisand? When I was approached to write a volume in a series of book-length biographical essays on Jewish lives, being published by Yale University Press, I was given the liberty to choose whomever I wanted. I took that responsibility seriously. Going in, frankly, I wasn’t a huge fan of Streisand’s…
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Culture The Secret Identity in My Spam Folder
Appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving. If you looked at me, you’d see an oldish, unprepossessing, rather dull fellow dedicated to his daughters and his work, and anything but a master of the universe. But that is not the whole story. There is, alas, another me, tucked away out of sight. This other…
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Culture Are All Men Still Jews?
Reflecting on 2015, I was reminded of Bernard Malamud’s quote, “All men are Jews except they don’t know it.” Malamud later clarified that he was talking about “how history treats all men,” which is to say, badly. It is a deeply empathic observation, as it understands that suffering and humiliation are inextricably bound into the…
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Culture Of Tattoos, Fords, Volkswagens and Arthur Godfrey
We Jews may be the elephants of religion — if not of politics. We have long, long memories (to wit, we are still fighting over Israel after thousands of years), though those memories may be attenuating through assimilation. I thought of that recently during the Volkswagen emissions scandal. I had never known a Jew who…
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