. A couple of interesting comments from Noga and David on my post, “A Political Hall of Mirrors,” prompts these further considerations on the reaction to Maureen Dowd’s neocon puppet master column. I don’t think this is a subject in which people need necessarily hold hard positions unwaveringly and completely opposed to differing views. Of […]
The Right to Denigrate Religion
. Over at Jeffrey Goldberg’s place (there’s coffee, hamentashen) we have seen a little exchange between Goldberg and Neera Tanden of the Center for American progress. The subtle but not insignificant difference of opinion has been over the balance between the right of free speech and the responsible exercise thereof. The latter, in this case, […]
I Apologize
. Jonah Lehrer has apologized to his readers for manufacturing quotations in his latest book, to Michael Moynihan for lying about it, and to himself for self-plagiarizing his blog posts for The New Yorker. Fareed Zakaria has apologized to Time and CNN for plagiarizing a paragraph of an article from Jill Lepore at the New […]
“Israel Firster”: Anatomy of a Smear
. There are many aspects to the current controversy over use of the “Israel Firster” term. There are people who use the term – continue to use it, resistantly defending its use – and there are those who criticize them for it. The critics claim that adopters of the term are continuing an ages-old anti-Semitic […]
How We Lived on It (42) – Anti-Semitism, the Ur-Hatred
I’ve been thinking since I wrote “The Uncanny John Mearsheimer,” in which I by the way proposed Jewish anti-Semitism and black-for-white passing as Ur forms of the uncanny, that anti-Semitism is one of the Ur forms of hatred – the group form. Hatred of the other, expressed as demonization, is a primal emotion. In the […]