Sam Fleischaker’s article was also good. I recently finished reading Paul Gottfried’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, which I think our own Aaron recommended in these comments a while ago, and I think Fleischaker’s piece serves as a the start of a corrective to Gottfried’s argument (made with typical paleocon boorishness) that our concern for the Other is really the product of a deformed, secularized Protestantism. (I suppose he would respond that Fleischaker is stretching the authentic concept of veahavta et hager beyond recognition in service of multi-culti ideology or something.)

Finally, Tu B’Av is an… interesting choice for a symbol of women’s empowerment. The Talmud says that the point of all that dancing in white dresses that Pinchasi mentions was for the men to choose wives. (Which in her article gets transformed into: “Maybe at the end of the evening they will find a partner.”) I guess it goes to show how our progressive-puritanical religion resists attempts to enlist it in service of moral and political activism, no matter how necessary it is. See Levinas, “Judaism and Revolution.”