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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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 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Haim Watzman I am impressed. You play like a Jew, Felix. What I mean by that is that you have Johann Sebastian Bach in your heart as well as in your fingertips. Please don’t tell your mother I said this. She would be upset to hear that she has not succeeded in bleaching Israel out [...]

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Haim Watzman Mrs. Bond, my twelfth-grade English teacher, launched our class discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by asking whether we thought that the play had been misnamed. I’m sure that Mrs. Bond was one of many teachers who have used that same question to get student readers to think about the structure of that play. [...]

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  Gershom Gorenberg I’m pleased to announce that my new book, The Unmaking of Israel — on the crisis of Israeli democracy and how to solve it — will be published in November by HarperCollins. I’ll be coming to North America for a lecture tour at that time. The book is now available for pre-order [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: Daniella Weiss has a soft smile and a round face that is remarkably unwrinkled for a woman of 66 known for most of her adult life as an incendiary activist. A cloth cap covers her hair, in keeping with a strict reading of Orthodox [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Thanks and an apology are in order. The thanks are to all those who donated to the Dalal Project, helping to fund Dalal Rusrus’s stay at Alyn Hospital, and to all those who contacted Israeli officials, helping to get Dalal’s parents permits to bring her from the West Bank to the hospital in [...]

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Haim Watzman Some years ago, when my family was young, I had a neighbor with very strong opinions. Strong and often different from my own. Gavriel was warm, generous, devoted to his family, humble before his God, and dedicated to his country. He died suddenly and far too young. In the years before his death, [...]

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