Haim Watzman
Dear Niot,
The scene at your enlistment next Monday will not be as dramatic as your grandfather’s. He set off for infantry boot camp in the U.S. Army on February 19, 1944. His entire family—Ma, Pa, and sisters Jean, Bernice, and Laki—accompanied him to the train station at Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. Your great-grandmother and [...]

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Haim Watzman
“Fire! Fire! The Temple’s on fire!” I cry out, waking myself up.

Ilana rolls over and glares at me. “Calm down,” she says. “Your freedoms do not include shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded Temple.”

“Ohmigod,” I say. “I had the weirdest nightmare.”

“It must be something you didn’t eat,” Ilana suggests.

“I was a dog,” I say.

“A [...]

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Haim Watzman
When I encountered Shahar Bram’s lyric “North of Boston” on the back page of Ha’aretz’s arts section last month, I was immediately struck by its plethora—celebration, really—of intertextuality and interlingual word play. A poem awash in allusions and puns that cross textual and linguistic boundaries is by definition impossible to render into any [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
Prof. Stanley Fish has a regular online column in the New York Times on education and society. His latest post is intended as a critique of right-wing efforts to treat universities as businesses, and specifically of of a proposed “reform” (“deform” would be a better term) of the Texas A&M college system.
Criticizing free-market [...]

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Haim Watzman

On Monday, January 29, 1945, by swerve of shore and bend of bay, the SS Rizwani sailed into Alexandria and Tally Clerk Elias David Levy went ashore. The photo on his leave pass shows a dark youth with intense eyes, broad shoulders, and oiled hair, carefully parted on the left. He’s wearing a heavy [...]

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Haim Watzman
Once again I’ve been called on to review a book about an American who served in the Israeli army. This time it’s stand-up comedian Joel Chasnoff’s The 188th Crybaby Brigade, in The Jerusalem Report. (Four years ago I reviewed Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prisoners in The Washington Post.)
The American-in-the-Israeli-Army book has become an annual event, [...]

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On Being Shocked, Shocked to Learn That Israel Is Not a Liberal Utopia

Gershom Gorenberg
My new column is up at the American Prospect:
Meyer Landsman lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. Landsman is the hero of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in which the Jews lost the 1948 war in Palestine and have taken refuge [...]

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Haim Watzman
It’s not the headline that’s remarkable, it’s the picture. The website of the great science journal that I occasionally do news pieces for, Nature, has a headline today that is already somewhat ho-hum. Jews Worldwide Share Genetic Ties!
We’ve seen this before, in reports of studies of mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited only [...]

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Haim Watzman
I misstated the director’s name in the original version of this post. My apologies.
In this friendless week for Israel it’s refreshing and instructive to get away to Sapir College’s annual Film Festival of the South and be reminded that loneliness is sometimes a fact to be lived with, and that history gives us brethren [...]

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Haim Watzman
It’s always easy to tear a translation apart, and the easiest kind of translation to tear apart is poetry. Vladimir Nabokov, who lived multilingually and thought a lot about translation, was one of the best, and funniest, critics of other people’s renditions of Russian classics into English—as can be seen now in his ”Art [...]

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Haim Watzman

I trail behind my son on the steep descent into the Amiam canyon in the central Golan. He’s in sandals and I’m in hiking boots, but he skips down like a mountain goat as I lumber like the cows that observe us inscrutably from the opposite slope. While I count myself a good hiker, [...]

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Haim Watzman
My dearest Ms. Profound Esophagus,

My heart has been racing and my mind churning since our meeting last night on level minus 4 of the Jerusalem municipality parking garage. Since my All The President’s Men-inspired leap into journalism when I was just out of college three decades ago I have long imagined of meeting [...]

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