I’m stuck. The world is wobbling from crisis to crisis — think Iran, think Greece, think Syria, think a dozen and more other centers of misery, red meat for carnivorous columnists, but I am stuck. I cannot get beyond one word. It is the word that Newt Gingrich used the other night, in the last…
Poor Jews, the saying goes, are middle-class Jews without money. The unstated assumption is that the conventional cultural standards of the middle class are not displaced by a “culture of poverty” when Jews tumble down the class ladder. It is, however, important to remember that some Jews — estimates vary, but a reasonable guess is…
An easy case followed by a harder case: At the beginning January, Israel’s Channel 2 reported that it had encountered in the town of Kiryat Malachi what used to be called here in the United States a “restrictive covenant.” Such a covenant is a legal device that enables the seller (or renter) of real estate…
All the pastries and the fine wines cannot erase our tortured wisdom; though affluent, we are not comfortable. We are imprisoned both by our memories and by the world’s disorder. Our only remedy is to remain prisoners of hope as well, to remember not only yesterday but also tomorrow, the promised tomorrow. The notion that…
Our world has rarely seemed so impenetrably mysterious as it has these past days. The spectacle of hysterical weeping and wailing in North Korea follows hard on the heels of 10,000 protesters marching in downtown Cairo in outrage over photos of soldiers dragging women by the hair and stomped on them, stripping them half-naked in…
‘Distancing” is the current favored word to describe the reaction of many American Jews, especially young Jews, to the ongoing situation in Israel. (Curiously, Peter Beinart’s essay in the New York Review of Books in May 2010, which catalyzed much of the conversation, nowhere uses the word.) But “distancing” is inadequate to describe the range…
Let’s start with the good news. Dorit Beinish, president of Israel’s Supreme Court and vehement opponent of what she calls “incitement against the court,” exempts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from her indictment. And rightly so. In her remarks during a conference on public law, Beinish mentioned the role of Netanyahu in blocking the bills that…
Few stories that start out as potential bombshells end up as utterly duddish (from “dud”) as the “hot mic” exchange between Presidents Sarkozy and Obama. Duddish, that is, here in Israel, where I am for a couple of weeks; not so back home, in the States, as we shall see. If I were a rich…
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