Gershom Gorenberg Earlier this month, the Israeli Supreme Court woke up from a deep slumber and issued an order to the government to evacuate the illegal outpost of Migron on the bypass road between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements north of Ramallah. Migron, according to founder Itay Harel, was originally established on the hilltop in [...]

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Haim Watzman And the Lord appeared to me by the sycamores of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as I sat at the door to my tent in the heat of the day, and I raised my eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by me. And when I saw them, I ran out to [...]

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Haim Watzman The tent protesters have achieved one thing so far—they’ve convinced me to read the financial pages. I had a lot of fun at the happening on Saturday night. It was a real pleasure to participate in a demonstration attended by more than 50 people—the same people all the time. There was a great [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The question of the week last week was: Would the protests fade or grow? What would happen Saturday night? On Saturday night, the moment I got to downtown Jerusalem, I knew: The previous week’s demonstrations had been a warm-up act, a small-town band before the real show, merely a test of the amps [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Excerpt from my new column at The American Prospect: … Because the protests are a challenge to the entire political system, politicians have been absent from the list of speakers at demonstrations. On Wednesday, the new movement did suffer an old-fashioned parliamentary defeat: On a straight party-line vote, the Knesset ratified real-estate legislation [...]

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Haim Watzman My friend from Kehilat Yedidya, Nir Levy, has been commemorating the current protest movement with a poem a day. Levy, who writes under the penname Nahir Libi, is the author of a fine first book of poetry, Mahol HaNefesh, which he’s also turned into an intriguing and moving show integrating readings of his [...]

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Haim Watzman The tent protesters who’ve shaken the complacence of the Israeli leadership these last few weeks combine, as most protest movements do, radicalism with reaction. That is, they call for sweeping changes in Israeli society and government, but they also hark back to a mythical golden time when, they believe, Israeli society was kinder [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Michael Chabon — author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — received an advance copy of my forthcoming book. He writes, Until I read The Unmaking of Israel, I didn’t think it could be possible to feel more despairing, and then more terribly hopeful, about Israel, [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Foreign coverage – especially American coverage – of the rising social protest movement here continues to be sporadic and off-target. The mindset behind the media failure, let me suggest, is also what prevented a meaningful debate on economic policy in the United States before the national-debt deal. ‘For Sale: Country, Model ’48, in [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Five minutes after I read a fresh online item about the Knesset passing the National Planning Committees Act (popularly known as the Vandal Act, based on a word play that defies resistance), I stepped out my front door and found an advertising flier, very glossy, hanging from the doorknob. The timing could not [...]

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Haim Watzman Break free of your computer monitor and get some SoJo in person! Gershom and I will both be making trips to the U.S. in the coming months. It’s an opportunity to ask your synagogue, JCC, college, army unit, or think tank to have us over to give you our take on current events [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg This afternoon the leaders of the tent-city protest movement held a press conference to reiterate their demands. If you know Hebrew, you can watch it in the video here. If you don’t, a slightly abridged translation follows. In the margins of these demands, I’d make several notes. First, just as Stav Shaffir says [...]

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