Haim Watzman I didn’t hear the “Re-Vo-Lu-Tion” chants that Gershom heard because I was unable to attend the demonstration Saturday night. Had I not been otherwise engaged, I would have attended, but I suspect that I would come home more meditative and less enthusiastic than my blog partner. Like Gershom, I’m delighted to see Israel’s [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg The dead have come to life. I saw them marching tonight through Jerusalem, jumping, swaying, pounding pots and water-cooler bottles as drums, the Israelis in their twenties who’d been written off in a thousand political obituaries as dead of terminal apathy, sweating in the absurd heat close to midnight, roaring so deep you [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My new column on the economic protests sweeping Israel is now up at The American Prospect: “Even Adam Smith is turning over in his grave,” reads a handwritten sign pinned to one of the small, square tents. Next to the sign, sewn to the tent, is a piece of cloth with the address [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Blogs, as this blogger knows painfully well, are intrinsically built for short attention spans. So how do you make a blog enjoyably intellectual, something that usually requires remaining focused for hours at a time? The trick at  The Page 99 Test is based on a maxim by Ford Maddox Ford, “Open the book [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Two more thought-provoking reports from my students at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism  have just been published: Simone Gorrindo’s article on the Israeli version of the abortion debate is now up at Tablet. The argument is quieter here, perhaps, but not less intense. And naturally, it’s laden with extra helpings of history, nationalism [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg Responding to my post on the Boycott Act, philosophy prof Sam Fleischacker has succinctly explained the difference between boycotting Israel and boycotting the settlements: …a nice way to draw the distinction between boycotts of Israel and boycotts of the settlements is that the former attacks the Israeli constitution (the general structure of the [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman The summer of my crush on Muffy was a summer of disparate parts (I had read a poem by Henry Reed). There were no centers to hold (we did Yeats in 20th-century lit class). I had just finished my junior year at Duke University and I was part of a quaternity (I had [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: This article is against the law. To be more precise: It includes a call for boycotting the products of West Bank settlements, a call that will be illegal in Israel as soon as legislation just approved by the Knesset is published in the official [...]

[Read more →]