Raphael Magarik
By Raphael Magarik
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Culture In Defense Of Education, Against Hucksters And Sorcery
Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American By Ilana Blumberg Rutgers University Press, 210 pages, $19.95 American popular culture lies to us about teachers. It tells us they ought to be magical. Teachers, in the American imagination, enter schools as shadowy outsiders, often inexplicably. It doesn’t matter whether we are in…
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Opinion Ilhan Omar Is Not Anti-Semitic. She’s An Anti-Imperialist.
There are two stories this week about Rep. Ilhan Omar, the new Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota. But the trick is, you cannot understand one without the other. Let me explain. First, she tweeted that Republican attacks on her and Rep. Rashida Tlaib were “all about the Benjamins.” Her suggestion that money heavily influences politicians’ positions…
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Culture Where Did The Myth Of ‘Jewish Success’ Come From Anyway?
Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s By Eliyahu Stern Yale University Press, 320 pages, $45 Why are Jews so successful? The question is embarrassing, because it is usually asked either by anti-Semites or by right-wing Jewish chauvinists. Fine. All the more so, it deserves an answer. After a millennium on the margins of…
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Opinion Birthright Is Chasing Away Engaged Jews To Please Pro-Israel Hardliners
Picture the scene: A group of young American Jews, visiting Israel for the first time on Birthright, demand more education about the country and its politics, trying to realize an age-old Jewish ideal of sharp, open debate. They form new organizations and movements around Jewish political activism, and they form links with groups of Israeli…
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Opinion The Ugly Reason Naftali Bennett Is Minimizing Anti-Semitism
Among the many inversions of the Trump presidency, perhaps none is weirder than the spectacle of Naftali Bennett, the ultranationalist Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister, downplaying anti-Semitism. Up until now, Bennett seemed to see anti-Semitism rising everywhere around him: in Poland, to which he cancelled a trip in February; in the BDS movement, which he called…
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Culture Of Course We Have To ‘Politicize’ The Pittsburgh Bloodbath. That’s What Jews Do.
This week, you will hear many voices telling you not to “politicize” the shootings in Pittsburgh. “I will not politicize the murder of 11 Jews,” celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach wrote, before bizarrely connecting Pittsburgh to the Iran deal. “Have a moment of silence, light a candle,” Shmuel Rosner suggested, and don’t “treat this butchery of…
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Opinion How The Jewish Left Learned To Stop Playing Defense And Fight Anti-Semitism
It is no surprise that the British Labour party would ask an anti-Zionist to help fight anti-Semitism. Labor’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has long supported the Palestinian cause, and facing a long-running scandal over Jew hatred in Labor, it is natural that the British Left would turn to the Jewish Left. Indeed, Corbyn has long been…
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Culture Gary Shteyngart Takes On The Trump Era (Again)
Gary Shteyngart was writing about Trump all along, and we didn’t know it. Consider the contents of his novels: Russian oligarchs undermining foreign governments for obscure reasons; the rotund failsons of the mega-rich, their gross bodies engorged on unimaginable luxury; the blurring borders between politics and multi-level marketing; and, despite ever-increasing inequality and the threat…
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