Haim Watzman Sorry to have been absent from the blog this week—I’ve been busy trying to keep up with the comments on Gershom’s South Jerusalem History Awards post, which has set an all-time SoJo record. Pretty interesting debate, too (although I encourage Suzanne, Charlotte, Raghav and the rest to count to ten before hitting the [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My new column on the the U.S. Jewish establishment repeating Netanyahu’s misleading spin on East Jerusalem is up at the American Prospect: Western communists, it was said in another era, took out their umbrellas whenever it rained in Moscow. I remembered that adage as I read a recent statement from the Conference of [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg At the start of a new week, I’d like to award the best and worst discussions of history in the past week in Israel. The best take on the past came from Yoram Kaniuk, writing at Ynet (in Hebrew and English translation). Kaniuk writes about the government’s intent to legislate against commemorating the [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My review essay on Paul McGeough’s book “Kill Khalid” and the history of Hamas appears this weekend in the Review section of The National, published in Abu Dhabi. “When Israel occupied Jerusalem, I was 14,” Sheikh Jamil Hamami once told me. Hamami grew up in East Jerusalem. That week in June 1967, he [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,” remarks the patient in one of the two beds opposite mine. He has a long face, flowing long white hair parted in the middle and, like me, he’s dressed in hospital pajamas. The bristled cheeks have a plasticity [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman It’s summer and the Jews are being perverse again. Instead of singing of sand and sea, next week we’ll spend a day fasting and lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. The lamentation lyrics get pretty sickening—blood flows, people get tortured and burned alive, famished women cook and eat their own children. Why do we [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman Leeor Kaufman’s Destiny Hills, screened at the Jerusalem film festival this week, documents the struggle of Mohammad of the al-Talalqa Bedouin tribe of the Negev to assert his right to live on his tribe’s ancestral land. In cinematic terms the film is impressively accomplished, and Mohammad, his wife, his four sons, and the [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg In the post below this one, you’ll find my American Prospect article on Breaking the Silence’s book of testimony from soldiers who fought in Gaza last winter. There’s much more I’d like to say, but here are just a few notes in the margins: Reading the testimony, one can find some evidence for [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My new article on the latest, and most extensive, testimony from soldiers who served last winter in Operation Cast Lead is now up at The American Prospect: “We didn’t see a single house that was not hit. The entire infrastructure, tracks, fields, roads — was in total ruin,” an anonymous soldier says, describing [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman Israel-Palestine polemicists have much to learn from Sean Wilentz’s thoughtful essay Who Lincoln Was in the current issue of The New Republic. Wilentz argues that politics is not an obstacle to the achievement of ideological goals, but rather a necessary and valuable means of achieving them. Lincoln ultimately succeeded in freeing the slaves, [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman A couple weeks ago I published my first short story. That’s an important milestone in my career as a writer, since up until now I’ve only published journalism and non-fiction. But, in fact, it’s less of a breakthrough than it sounds, because I made my fiction debut in the pages of a news [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg As a follow-up to an earlier post, I have a new column in Moment magazine on the Chabad rabbi who recently wrote that “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way…  Kill men, women and children (and cattle).” Manis Friedman, unfortunately, isn’t alone in our world in claiming divine [...]

[Read more →]