Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at the Daily Beast: Out for my morning bike ride Sunday, I looped up the ridge to Kibbutz Ramat Rachel on the south edge of Jerusalem. Two flocks of teenagers were coming down: the first dressed in white shirts, dark pants and crocheted skullcaps, the second in knee-length [...]

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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 column, now up at The American Prospect. Enjoy. And please help keep the Prospect publishing. Talk about a quick campaign. The latest one in Israel lasted about a week, and there wasn’t even an election at the end. Just last weekend, local political commentators were enthusing about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at the Daily Beast: I found the pamphlets on a table at the Hillel house of a West Coast university. They’d been left by a representative of Stand With Us, the Los-Angeles based member of the “Israel advocacy” family of organizations. The booklets, entitled Israel: Pocket Facts, were [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The American Prospect, my journalistic home for the past 10 years, is in danger of closing. The magazine operates as a non-profit, and will only be able to keep publishing with the immediate help of donors. The Prospect is an invaluable source of reporting and progressive political analysis. The loss of the magazine [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg And here’s my new column from Moment Magazine: The incident repeats itself with small variations. A rabbi somewhere in America writes to ask if I’ll come speak to his congregation about Israeli politics and my recent book, The Unmaking of Israel. Afterward I receive another email: At a meeting of the Israel Committee [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new article is up at The American Prospect: The decision broke with a policy that Israel has held for 20 years: no new settlements will be established. Right-wing Israeli governments, in particular, have broadcast that policy as part of their international PR efforts. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his most senior [...]

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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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My former student Sumit Galhotra has an excellent piece up at HuffPo on marking Armenian remembrance day in Jerusalem: JERUSALEM — As dusk settled over the Old City one evening recently, Noemie Nalbandian stepped into the dimly lit cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. Hundreds of oil lamps hung from the vaulted dome [...]

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Faith-based policy, nativism, and Ayn Randian economics will not create a Jewish electoral shift. Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect. Forecasts of the Great Jewish Shift began as soon as the presidential campaign did: This year, we are told, Jews will finally vote Republican, or at least significantly more of [...]

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To distract attention from his economic policies, Netanyahu blames the victims Gershom Gorenberg My new Daily Beast piece is up: Spring in Israel this year brings not only Pesah but a whiff in the air of renewed economic protests, like those that swept the country last summer. Activists believe that after a long winter of [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new piece is up at the Daily Beast: One day in the late 1980s, my wife and I visited a staffer at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for an off-the-record conversation. The walls of his office were decorated with large maps produced, he mentioned, by the CIA. One showed the West Bank, [...]

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