JERUSALEM, Israel, Aug. 8—Ostensibly, Jordan and Israel are at peace, and have been since 1994, when Jordan’s King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a historic treaty at Wadi Araba. Still, most of the people I spoke to in Amman, where I spent last week, reacted testily, or worse, when I announced my Read More
I’m freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I’ll begin with the personal.
The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full circle on my life as a young Jew, a life I began to move away Read More
Two nights ago on CNN, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dore Gold in Jerusalem and identified him as Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. The polished Gold offered, as usual, an articulate statement of Israeli attitudes toward the war effort. “Well for most Israelis who see this—” he began.
Lauren Likkel
If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, it shows Muslim men, having been barred by Israeli soldiers from entering the Read More
Joey Cavod has pointed out Biblical errors in an article I wrote for the Observer this past week. In explaining the ancient attachment of Jews to the West Bank, I wrote, “David bought Shem, and that is Jerusalem. Joseph bought Nablus. Abraham bought Hebron when he wanted to bring Sarah to this place.”
Joey Read More
I’m in a little town in Israel near the Lebanon border, full of reporters. They’re flirting, over their expense accounts, as the shells are fired nearby, and the rockets land. At dinner, the restaurant’s dog shoved in under my table, afraid of the explosions. Reminded me of home, where the dog is thrown by fireworks Read More
A couple years back a publisher who signed my (meager) checks asked me how I could justify being so critical of American policy in the Middle East and Israel when I’d never been to Israel. I’d traveled all over creation, never to Jerusalem. I answered that I’d never been to Vietnam or Iraq either, and Read More
The Forward (in a fine piece of reporting on a conference on the future of the Jewish people arranged by a leading Jerusalem thinktank, to which no women were invited) quotes feminist leader Shifra Bronznick, and on third reference to her notes that she is “the life partner of Forward editor-in-chief J.J. Goldberg.”
Good Read More
Some commenters have gathered on my Juan Cole post to slag Cole. I need to defend him.
One thing they’re angry about is that Cole is being considered for a top job at Yale. They say that he doesn’t have the publications to merit such an appointment. Wrong on 2 counts. Cole has a Read More
I went home for Passover yesterday and felt guilty. I feel close to my family but little closeness to my tribe. I am less Jewish than I have ever been, and certain statements I have made in the last year, both out loud and in my head, about my problem with religion, about official Judaism Read More
