One positive thing you can say about Peter Beinart’s critics is that none of them has smacked him in the face with a rifle butt. Not yet, anyway. That might not be far off, though, judging by the overall tone of the published reactions to his new book, “The Crisis of Zionism.” I was going…
The Crisis of Zionism By Peter Beinart Times Books, 304 pages, $26 It’s not often that the publication of a book is preceded by months of debate about its central argument. But that has been the fate of Peter Beinart’s “The Crisis of Zionism,” for which defenses and denunciations stretch back to 2010. It was…
As J Street, the self-styled pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby, opens its annual conference this year, it does so at a time of unparalleled growth for the group, and serious setbacks for its cause. With talk of war with Iran dominating Israeli–American discourse, the dovish lobby is working hard to return the Palestinian issue to center stage….
If well-meaning American Jews who love Israel believe that the occupation of Palestinian land and people is detrimental and wrong, what are those Jews to do? How can they express those beliefs and take actions that protect Israel, support their fellow Jews, and also hold Palestinians appropriately accountable for their own actions? One response to…
By most standards, SodaStream is a great Israeli success story. The company’s product, a home carbonating device for soft drinks, is sold by all major retailers in the United States. The company’s stock is traded in Nasdaq. But if a call to boycott products from Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank gains traction, SodaStream,…
Leaders of federated Jewish philanthropies agree almost unanimously that younger, under-50 Jewish donors—even those already committed to giving to Jewish causes—have little interested in giving to Israel, reports Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev in a blog post from the General Assembly of Jewish federations, now meeting in Denver. There is a general unease about giving to Israel,…
An essay published by the web-zine, The Awl, has gotten a lot of attention in our little corner of the blogosphere. It’s called, “Life After Zionist Summer Camp,” and the author is Allison Benedikt, film editor at the Village Voice. I should say before I go any further that Allison is a friend and the…
Haaretz reporter Anshel Pfeffer has a very important piece in the Friday paper that looks at the Gaza Flotilla incident and the yawning gap between Israeli and international perceptions of the affair — and then connects it to Peter Beinart’s “breathtaking” New York Review of Books essay, “The failure of the American Jewish establishment.” In…
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