Haim Watzman I recently bumped into a mild-mannered, bookish paratrooper I know. He had come home to Jerusalem for a short weekend after spending two weeks in Gaza. I didn’t know what to expect when I asked him what he thought of the war. I thought I might hear him echo my own thoughts, and [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Following on my previous post on the appointment of George Mitchell as President Obama’s Mideast peace envoy, I’ve written an open letter to Mitchell. The full text is at The American Prospect. Here’s an excerpt: …as I’m sure you know, in coming here from America now, the biggest difference you’ll experience is not [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg This is a story about politics. My father was an engineer. He hoped I’d be one. Then he had a grandson. When my son was around 6, my dad got him a subscription to Invention and Technology. Invention and Technology is a good magazine if the thing that interests you most about the [...]

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Haim Watzman ”Humor in the Tanakh”, Daniel Saunders promises us on Jewcy. And what a relief to find some lighthearted biblical exegesis amidst the posts like Jamie Sneider’s account of interfaith sex with her not yet ex-husband, Mia Rut’s three-way date with a Jewish guy and a Russian cat (sorry I keep picking on you, [...]

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Haim Watzman Gershom gets requests for advice from seekers of Jewish identity, I get them from soldiers. I’ve edited the letter slightly to make it clearer and to avoid giving away the writer’s identity.-hw Dear Sojo, You have said something to the effect that soldiers do not have the right to refuse orders to go [...]

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We do our best to post high-quality material, and we’re grateful to our readers for the generally high level of discussion that takes place in the comments to our posts. If we don’t always respond ourselves, it’s because we’re busy working on the next post. Recently, however, we’ve had several cases in which readers have [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Responding to the appointment of George Mitchell as Barack Obama’s Mideast envoy, Abe Foxman has achieved something remarkable: He has outdone Marty Peretz in the tasteless-comment competition among the self-appointed cheerleaders of Israel. And Foxman did it without using words unprintable in this respectable blog.

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My translation of David Grossman’s piece in The Washington Post-hw by David Grossman Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster — despite our disparate strength, and even when we try [...]

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Haim Watzman Q: Why Magnus Arbuthnot! How unexpected to see you in South Jerusalem! What brings you here? A: I have been sent by a respected and impartial NGO to investigate the carnage inflicted by Israel in the Gaza Strip. Q: Which NGO would that be? A: An NGO that uses an ostensible human-rights agenda [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg I have a new article up at the Hadassah Magazine site on African refugees in Israel: When he was 13, Akon told us, the government-backed militia came to his village in southern Sudan. “They started killing people and burning their houses,” Akon said, speaking so quietly that I had to lean over our [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Strange as the memory is for me now, the first words I ever got published were poetry. In the last few years, poetry has been a very sporadic pursuit. Yesterday, though, looking for an entirely different file, I happened on a poem I wrote nearly eight years ago, early in 2001, apparently after [...]

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As the Gaza war winds down, and as the extent of the death and destruction becomes evident, many critics of Israel are charging that Israel was wrong to attack the Hamas regime at all. It is important to distinguish between the conduct of the war and the circumstances that made Israeli action inevitable and necessary, [...]

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