Matthew Yglesias posted the briefest of responses to the just released Pew poll on various international and Mideast matters, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a pearl of a primer in slanted language and presentation – all in two sentences. I commented on it at Yglesisas’s blog. I told him he packed as much slanting […]
Hatikva at Bergen Belson: April 20, 1945
On April 20, 1945, only five days after their liberation and on the eve of the Sabbath, with dead still on the ground and with people dying daily, inmates at Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp sang the Jewish anthem of hope “Hatikva.” It was recorded by the BBC. The lyric for Hatikva was originally written in […]
“Mac”
“Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair.” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake “Do you really think he was born on Christmas Day,” my mother said. I was already fully adult, but felt instantly young and naïve. “No one knows when he was born. We don’t even know the year.” My mother then […]
Kissinger’s Moment
The monumentally overrated Henry Kissinger had many of them, but this one is the essential moment if we are to believe Martin Peretz. Newly released Nixon Library Tapes reveal this exchange between Kissinger and Nixon. “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And […]
People Give Themselves Away
They do. They really do. Once they cross a certain psychological border of irrational – but always rationalized – bias in their thinking about a subject, and it thus emerges as a kind of fetish, they give themselves away. They can’t help themselves. Often, the clues are subtle, though hardly hidden, and they are frequently […]