Everyone is stunned that a process that should be occurring 9 months to a year from now is occurring now: the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. It is completely premature. And now the Republicans seem to be following in this daffodils-in-winter behavior. The cable stations are talking about Giuliani’s numbers against McCain.
The prematurity Read More
Yesterday on “Meet the Press,” a bunch of journalists rued the new landscape created by Patrick Fitzgerald and his star witness Judith Miller. Tim Russert, Gwen Ifill, Howard Kurtz—they all feared damage to professionalism, that the public might see the press as in bed with powerful officials. (Aren’t they?) Even as they complained, the journalists Read More
Richard Silverstein, the blogger Tikun Olam, writes in the Guardian that progressive Jewish bloggers have played an important role in undermining the establishment Jewish consensus re Israel.
A new weapon in the battle for that free exchange of ideas has been a burgeoning culture of American Jewish blogs devoted to Read MoreMy dad’s real smart, even if he doesn’t agree with me on my Middle East politics, and a couple weeks ago he said something that stuck. He was saying that Jimmy Carter’s book is a sign of rising anti-Semitism (something I disagree with), a sign we’re entering a new phase for Jewish power in the Read More
I continue to get heat from Chomsky supporters for my (yes, ill-tempered) post the other day. Richard W. Symonds writes,
I still question your view that he did not “deliver” his “$5 lecture” – it was not advertised as a lecture – as you will see here :Arieh Lebowitz, of Meretz/USA, who gives me lots of info and links, sends me a correction. I said that hechsher is Yiddish for Kosher, Arieh says it’s not, it’s Hebrew. (I was trying to sound smarter than I am. I heard a rabbi using the word last summer, and thus became a know-it-all). Read More
I can’t stop talking about the wonderful-horrible AJC report, it’s so changed the landscape. Again I say, give credit where credit is due: this was the AJC’s reactionary pushback against Carter and Walt and Mearsheimer, and it blew up on the Jewish right/mainstream when the Times actually chose to write about it. Thus the anti-intellectual, Read More
A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel’s interests and the U.S.’s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset with me, including friends.
Well now in The New Republic, John Judis Read More
The AJC’s report on “Only Self-Hating Jews Don’t Like Israel”—it’s actually called “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism”—is officially an embarrassment. I say officially because the report’s theme that it is “illegitimate” for Jews to question the nature of the founding of Israel, that such inquiries represent a “betrayal” of Israel, based on “tangled Read More
Noam Chomsky’s assistant comments below that there is an illness in the linguist’s family and that’s why he had to run, to make a plane back to Boston. Also I note that Chomsky gave good weight at an earlier event at Columbia the same day. I’m feeling bad about the meanspiritedness of Read More
