Gershom Gorenberg I’m glad that Haim brought up the ethics of the Gaza war. Because the news cycle has a ferociously short-term memory, the elections pushed the war and its unanswered questions out of the headlines. But we shouldn’t wait 25 years for an animated documentary to get us to have a conversation that should [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The day after the election, the most horrifying part of the outcome was watching Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu trying to outbid each other for Avigdor Lieberman’s support. That’s over:  Netanyahu won, and is commited to having Lieberman, our aspiring autocrat, in his government. The next chapter in horror is watching Bibi try [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Bloggingheads invited me to talk with neocon David (“Axis of Evil”) Frum about the election fallout here, the new administration there, and what it would take to reach peace. You can watch here on SoJo, or switch to blogggingheads.tv if you want to zoom in on a particular topic.

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Haim Watzman What was most surprising about the conference on Battle Ethics in the Cast Lead Operation held on Sunday by the Ethics Center at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem was how much agreement there was among speakers with ostensibly different points of view. Everyone from noted liberal Mordechai Kremnitzer to the IDF’s favorite ethicist Asa [...]

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Haim Watzman The neurobiologist Steven Rose argues in an essay in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature that there are certain hunches scientists should not follow—namely, those which have to do with the relationship between race, gender, and intelligence. In a paired essay, developmental psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue for the pursuit [...]

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Haim Watzman Peter Gray came to my youngest daughter’s school last night to talk about why I should just relax and let my daughter play her way through her adolescence. About fifteen months ago, Misgav, now 15, asked to transfer to the Sudbury School in Jerusalem. The school, located a short walk from our home, [...]

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Haim Watzman The talk in the locker room at the Jerusalem Pool has been surprisingly conciliatory since the election last week. Dani, who voted Meretz (after seriously considering Hadash) and Siman, who voted Likud, agree that the next coalition should consist of the Likud, Kadima, and Labor, under Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership. When I pointed out [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg I try to get away from business on Shabbat. I don’t read newspapers. They make me feel like I’m at work. OK, if my kids are reading this, they’ll point out, gently I hope, that I don’t try very hard not to talk politics. I can’t go 25 hours without a fix. In [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Prof. Stuart Cohen has precisely analyzed why the war in Gaza failed – why, in fact, it was a failure when it began. The full piece is at the BESA website. Here’s a start: In his classic work, On War, Clausewitz commented that: No one starts a war – or, rather, no one [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg In 2007, I wrote an extensive profile of Avigdor Lieberman in the Atlantic. To complement Haim’s suggestion that we understand Lieberman’s voters,  here’s my effort to understand what drives the man himself. Avigdor Lieberman is an oversized man in an undersized room. His beard, remorselessly trimmed to a narrow, graying stripe around his cheeks, [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My review of Jimmy Carter’s new book, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” is now up at the New York Times Book Review: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” the new White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has said, exuberantly defining the economic meltdown as an [...]

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Haim Watzman Why do I really dislike Avigdor Lieberman? Because he’s forcing me to write about politics. When Gershom and I started this blog, I thought he’d take the political beat and leave me free to write about my country’s diverse and exciting culture and literature. But who can concentrate on books when the wolves [...]

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