Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect. The plan is to comb the floor of the Mediterranean for the remains of the ship. The Israeli government will reportedly allocate $60,000 for the search. The next stage, much more costly, will be to salvage the Altalena and turn it into a memorial [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg In service to our readers and to researchers, I’ve started creating a new online archive of historical documents – this one of historical documents that I found in the process of researching my new book, The Unmaking of Israel. First up: the missing epilogue of the Irgun history of its armed struggle against [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Joshua Gutoff has an incisive post on Jewish-American ADD at Frost and Clouds (a blog always worth reading): … Talking about withdrawing from the Occupied Territories – hell, just calling them the Occupied Territories – suggests that the borders of the State have more to do with negotiations and politics and international law [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Two articles by my students at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism last semester have just been published, and are a pleasure to read: Ben Preston’s Hasidic Radicals Bellow Down Tel Aviv’s Streets, an inside look at the Nach-Nachs, alias the anarchistiker hasidim,  is up at The Forward. Yardena Schwartz’s The Arabic Education of [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Office of Misrepresentations I received an email this week from Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) that begs to be read as commentary in the margins of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. In his speech, Netanyahu gave his  inflated figure for the number of Israelis living over the Green Line, said that most lived [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My recent column for Hadassah Magazine on the Egyptian revolution and preserving peace with Egypt is now online. The news came over the radio on a Thursday evening. Indeed, if you were in downtown Jerusalem, the news blared into the street from radios turned to top volume in every café and falafel joint [...]

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Haim Watzman I am impressed. You play like a Jew, Felix. What I mean by that is that you have Johann Sebastian Bach in your heart as well as in your fingertips. Please don’t tell your mother I said this. She would be upset to hear that she has not succeeded in bleaching Israel out [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: The film shows emails scrolling across a computer screen. Addressed to Peter Stein, director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, they carry more venom than it seems mere pixels of text could contain. They accuse him of being an anti-Semite and of running [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My cover story in The American Prospect is now online: Nadim Khoury watches as brown bottles march single file along the conveyor belt from the machines that sterilize them to those that fill them, cap them, and glue on labels reading, “Taybeh Beer. The Finest In The Middle East.” Nadim Khoury at the [...]

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Haim Watzman Mrs. Bond, my twelfth-grade English teacher, launched our class discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by asking whether we thought that the play had been misnamed. I’m sure that Mrs. Bond was one of many teachers who have used that same question to get student readers to think about the structure of that play. [...]

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Haim Watzman The Sapir College faculty member who introduced Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, screened at this year’s Cinema South Festival in Sderot, said that Dumont seeks in his films to understand the intricacies and intimacies of religious faith. Hadewijch is a technically fine, formally intriguing film, one in which it is clear that the director has [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg I confess, I’m not a regular reader of Daniel Gordis’s blog. But an acquaintance thought I should read what Gordis – senior vice president of the Shalem Center – said last month when given the opportunity to address a visiting J Street delegation. So I obliged, and read, and was truly struck by [...]

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