Haim Watzman “Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.” I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table. “All I see is a blur,” I said. “I think I [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new piece is up at the Daily Beast: Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: [...]

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Haim Watzman “This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.” “This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not [...]

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Haim Watzman Dear Friends, This coming week, during the Pesach holiday, we will mark the first anniversary of the death of our son Niot z”l. Niot, a soldier in the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was killed in an accident. We miss him very much. In Niot’s memory, his family has established, in cooperation with the Society [...]

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Haim Watzman Dani held his coffee glass up to the sky. The residue the Turkish coffee grounds left on the sides filtered the rays of the late March sun like a gossamer veil that brings to light precisely what it hides. Nuriel, Dani, and I were on our bellies on the top of a desert [...]

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Haim Watzman The sniffles turned into sobs during the dissonant piccolo solo. The Israel Philharmonic was about four minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony and the weeping distracted me from the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, who seemed not so much to be cuing the orchestra as to performing a long slow death dance. [...]

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Haim Watzman To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen: I would not disturb you at your studies were it not that the problem I face is pressing and the agony of my soul no longer bearable. Nor would I dare to write you under a false [...]

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Haim Watzman I almost stopped reading Aurelie Sheehan’s short story “Recognition” after the first sentence. Oh, God, another piece of fiction about a writer, written by a writer who only knows how to write about writing for an incestuous circle of other writers. But I had a rare opportunity to dip into some short fiction [...]

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Haim Watzman “Can I get some cooperation here?” asks Yoel in the firm but plaintive voice of a reserve platoon commander. Tourjeman, Brosh, and I are sitting like three monkeys (bald, sandy blond, bearded; wiry, fit, and flabby) on a small mound at the foot of the dusty spur that we’ve been charging up all [...]

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The lastest issue of Newsweek has a spread on on its writers’ choices for the top 10 books of the year. The Unmaking of Israel is on the list, picked by Peter Beinart: The online version is the Daily Beast’s longer listing of top reads for the year. If you’re in Israel and can’t find [...]

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Haim Watzman 10 July 1922 To the editor of Kuntres: My fellow music lovers in the Yishuv, tilling the land and laboring on the roads as they whistle and hum the works of the great composers, will no doubt be interested to hear of my encounter with the man who is perhaps the most notable [...]

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Haim Watzman I think it was my senior year in high school in which my friend Dave first discovered the truth. And since I was his best friend, he was determined to impart the truth to me as well. It was a cover story in Time magazine, I’m pretty sure, that set Dave off. It [...]

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