Who were the most (and least) Jewish presidents?
Some had strong ties; others were unabashed antisemites
Ronald Reagan
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Opinion How America Got So Angry (Hint: It Didn’t Start With Trump)
As president, Barack Obama had a catch-phrase that he often invoked at moments when America seemed to have shamed herself: “That’s not who we are.” He said it after the Sandy Hook massacre. He said it to defend academic freedom and to oppose Islam-bashing and anti-immigrant agitation. His critics on the right hated it. They…
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Culture Before Trump, Philip Roth Took Aim At The ‘Grotesquerie’ Of Ronald Reagan, Too
Back in January, Philip Roth gave an email interview in the New Yorker in which he was asked to respond to the election of Donald Trump. In a string of fittingly eloquent invective, Roth called Trump “humanly impoverished,” and “incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency.” “It isn’t Trump as…
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Opinion An Impatient and Uninformed Electorate Dooms America To Repeat History
Those who don’t learn from history, as the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it. This is not just a cliché, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump. It has happened so many times in history: A nation encounters difficulties, economic woes, wars, demographic changes, usually brought about by an incompetent or misguided leadership….
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Opinion Poverty Shock: Stats Show Ills Began in 2001, Not ’07
Just in time for the fall harvest festival of Sukkot, the U.S. Census Bureau has published what we might call a 2013 update of America’s own Harvest of Shame: a comprehensive annual report on the state of income, poverty and health insurance in the United States. To be fair, it’s not all bad news. For…
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Opinion Minority Inequality Falls, Income Inequality Rises
Some interesting new ideas today about inequality in America. First, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson offers an important insight into the different kinds of inequality that exist and the differing responses. Over the past half-century, he writes, public pressure for black, women’s and gay rights has brought down barriers confronting those excluded because of their…
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Culture The Tsarnaev Brothers Are Many Things. But Cowards? Not So Much.
“A heinous and cowardly act,” President Obama called the Boston Marathon bombing soon after its occurrence. Heinous, it certainly was. But why cowardly? To do what the two Tsarnaev brothers did —construct and transport homemade bombs that could have gone off in their hands at any moment, fling them out the windows of a speeding…
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Opinion Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Icon, Was Wiser Than Friend Ronald Reagan
Say what you will about former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who passed away April 8 at age 87: If she imposed unnecessary suffering on ordinary Brits through her heartless economic policies, which we call Reaganomics and the rest of the world still calls Thatcherism, she at least had an excuse. Ronald…
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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
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Opinion First Camp Auschwitz, now Alligator Alcatraz — why the right is obsessed with commodifying brutality
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Culture Why is the Department of Homeland Security quoting the Bible on Instagram?
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Sports A Jewish pitcher was tapped to start the MLB All-Star game. In a menschy move, he gave it up.
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