Haim Watzman Why send a crack naval commando unit to quell a political demonstration? We don’t know all the facts yet, but on the face of it Israel has again overreacted and, in doing so, gotten itself into a situation much worse than it would have been in had it not responded to this pr [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic, former Iraq hawk, has made a splash by noticing that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman It’s always easy to tear a translation apart, and the easiest kind of translation to tear apart is poetry. Vladimir Nabokov, who lived multilingually and thought a lot about translation, was one of the best, and funniest, critics of other people’s renditions of Russian classics into English—as can be seen now in his [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Road 443 from Modi’in to Jerusalem through the West Bank has supposedly reopened today for use of the Palestinians who live along it. My new piece in The American Prospect explains what has actually happened. Arriving home in Israel after a semester teaching in New York, I got in a taxi at Ben-Gurion [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman I trail behind my son on the steep descent into the Amiam canyon in the central Golan. He’s in sandals and I’m in hiking boots, but he skips down like a mountain goat as I lumber like the cows that observe us inscrutably from the opposite slope. While I count myself a good [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman A preview of a conversation I’ll be leading at an all-night Shavu’ot study session this evening—happy holiday to all. Ostensibly simple, theologically maddening, Psalm 146 is one of my favorite biblical poems—precisely, perhaps, because its ostensible simplicity is so maddening. And since it gets recited each day in the morning service, where it [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My latest piece for the American Prospect: Lest it be said that I never agree with anything that Benjamin Netanyahu says, I actually concur with one clause — not a whole sentence — in the speech he gave Tuesday evening. “The struggle for Jerusalem is a struggle for the truth,” the prime minister [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg From the American Prospect, how to understand what Bibi says, and what the State Department doesn’t say: A worldly colleague of mine once complained that with the demise of the Soviet-era Pravda, the intellectual joy went out of newspaper reading — the satisfaction of examining photos for who wasn’t on the dais, of [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Even if cyberspace has no “here” or “there,” I found it difficult to blog at SouthJerusalem when I was physically far from Jerusalem. Now I’m catching up – first by posting what I’ve written for the American Prospect. Here’s my piece on the Anat Kam controversy. Please pay attention to an important detail: [...]

[Read more →]