Gershom Gorenberg Another happy opportunity to showcase the work of my erstwhile students, who have been producing fantastic work (even if I’m a bit late in posting some of it): “The battlefront that I see is not between Islam and the West or Muslims and America but between all of the moderates and all of [...]

[Read more →]

Day 3 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts Gershom Gorenberg Slate has published a third excerpt from my new book The Unmaking of Israel. You can also read Monday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not plan the expulsion of its Arab population in 1948, and yesterday’s, on how the secular [...]

[Read more →]

Day 2 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts Gershom Gorenberg Slate has just posted another excerpt my new book The Unmaking of Israel – this one on how the secular state of Israel created ultra-Orthodoxy as we know it. You can also read yesterday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect. Yoram Kaniuk has won: The prominent Israeli novelist is now very officially a Jew of no religion. Hundreds of other Israelis, inspired by his legal victory, want to follow his example and change their religious status to “none” in the country’s Population Registry, while [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman “The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.” I look up from 60C on [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman We passed him as we trudged up an earthen path in search of a Bronze Age site north of Montpellier in southern France. He had wispy hair and the soft contours of a man grandchildren love to cling to, but the steady stride of a good walker. Giving us a sideways glance, he [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[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 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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]