Herzl's NFP. And Our NYT.

At last week’s conference on “Freud’s Jewish World” at the Center for Jewish History, two scholars talked about journalism. Freud lived an upper middle class life in Vienna, and until he fled Nazism as a dying man, he read the paper that all professionals read: the Neue Freie Presse (pronounced, Noi-a Fry-a Press-a).

The Read More

Borat’s Coded Message: Pogroms Could Happen Here

The movie Borat is a lot of things, a comic triumph, mean, weirdly Tocquevillian. It is filled with anti-semitic humor, and I admit I laughed. But there is also something really scary about the film, and that seems to me the takeaway, if you are Jewish (which the maker, Sacha Baron Cohen, is): the feeling Read More

The Whitney Confronts Reality In Excellent Hopper Exhibition

Who’s responsible for mounting the superb exhibition devoted to the paintings, drawings, prints and notebooks of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) at the Whitney? The accompanying press materials don’t say. The show, part of the museum’s ongoing anniversary celebration, is a world apart from the rest of Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75, an Read More

Letters

Goading Galbraith

To the Editor:

Among the complaints that Charles Taylor has with Peter Galbraith’s book on the Iraq war [“Breaking Up Is Good to Do: The Case for an Iraqi Split,” Book Review, July 31] is a big one, which proves to be a major error, and a small one, which is so minor Read More

Collective Punishment in the Old Testament

From The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick (1999):

“In the Jewish tradition, some memories are very long lasting… Some memories, once functional, become dysfunctional. The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther tell of the queen’s soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews’ armed enemies but the enemies’ wives and children—with a Read More

A Queen of All Media Misses Grand Synthesis

You’ve got to hand it to an artist who could even conceive of an erotic burrito, and then muster up the talent to create a sculpture fulfilling the idea’s absurdist promise. There it is, at the beginning of The Art of Betty Woodman, a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring more than 50 Read More

A Stylish Contradiction: Furst’s Romantic Realism

Throughout his elegant and compact sequence of espionage novels set in the Europe of the 1930’s and 40’s— The Foreign Correspondent is the ninth—Alan Furst has been trying to marry romance and dread. This is not something that would have occurred to Eric Ambler who, in his prewar foreign-intrigue novels, wrote like a man hunkering Read More

A Stylish Contradiction: Furst’s Romantic Realism

Throughout his elegant and compact sequence of espionage novels set in the Europe of the 1930’s and 40’s—The Foreign Correspondent is the ninth—Alan Furst has been trying to marry romance and dread. This is not something that would have occurred to Eric Ambler who, in his prewar foreign-intrigue novels, wrote like a man hunkering down Read More

My Jewish Problem: Jewish Superiority, Jewish Elite

I went to a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Saturday and in some part because of my blog, and its discussion of Jewish politics, felt a little alienated. I forgot to get a yarmulke, then I ran to get one. I wondered who if anyone there had seen my ideas. Later, at the reception, I Read More