More Recent Reading
Dear L., Here is a list of some books I’ve read in the past few years. Given my pretty rigid leftist mindset, Simone Weil’s maxim was often on my mind in reading the following……
Category: Israel
Our 65th Exchange on Israel and Palestine
A summer evening, 2008, we’re shmoozing at Coffee Cartel. All these years later, Nava, I remember you telling me at one point, totally matter-of-fact, no trace of irritation, “You know, you’re very one-sided.” I acknowledged,…
Something I Came across in Tablet
Consider, for a moment, the road traveled by many American Jews these past 15 months. One day, they were members in good standing of a virtuous, unimpeachable community of people who attended the finest schools,…
Something I Came across in The Spectator
The left knows that history is leaving them behind. That the momentum is no longer with their racial hucksterism, gender lunacy and cancel culture, but rather with those millions of good, working people who are…
Today’s One-Liner (#69)
“People ignore reality in favor of their bright ideas.” –Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 1965, quoted in Susie Linfield, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky
Today’s One-Liner (#66)
When I know I can change things, I become as active as a cyclone. –Golda Meir, in Oriana Fallaci, Interviews with History and Conversations with Power
Recent Reading
The job of an intellectual is to listen to the history that is being made all around you and to respond in new ways by re-assessing your previous beliefs. This is what the founding generation…
Dear Ziva
Dear Ziva, I’ve read two of Hillel Halkin’s books: Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic and A Complicated Jew: Selected Essays. (I loved his translation of Sholem Aleichem [Tevye the Dairyman and…
Choosing Guiding Means
A few years ago I read Amos Oz’s trenchant book, How to Cure a Fanatic. His context was the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Therein, Oz noted that “the essence of fanaticism lies in…
From Lea Goldberg’s Diary
The greatest and only crime: spiritual laziness. And within that spiritual laziness, one doesn’t even acknowledge it, making it seven times worse. –Peter Cole, Hebrew Writers on Writing