Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect. The neighborhood covers the hilltops. Beyond the last row of apartment buildings, the slope descends steeply, carpeted in loose rocks, olive trees, and brutally thorny shrubs. A long bridge, part of the highway linking Jerusalem to West Bank settlements to the south, sweeps across [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, may be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s favorite Palestinian leader — a true ally, a blood brother. What they share is an all-or-nothing approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: either complete Palestinian rule over the [...]

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With immeasurable sorrow, I must tell our friends that Haim’s son Niot has left this world at the age of 20. Niot, who was on furlough from the Israel Defense Forces, passed away two days after a diving accident in the Red Sea waters near Eilat during Pesah. He was laid to rest last Sunday [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The Obama administration’s wild generosity to Bibi may not be quite what it appears, as I explain in The American Prospect: “There must be more here than meets the eye,” friends and colleagues have been saying about the deal that Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu reached for a new three-month freeze on West [...]

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Remember that you saw it here first!

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Haim Watzman The International Relations and Security Network, a Zurich-based information service for international relations and security professionals, interviewed me for its current special report on Israel. Hear me talk about Israeli democracy and Judaism, and please come back here to comment, object, question–and perhaps even concur–with my views. Just don’t be confused–the picture on [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column on the failure of the IDF rabbinate is up at Ha’aretz in Hebrew and in English translation: The news in brief: A woman soldier asked to say kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, in an army synagogue. The rabbi of the base refused to let her. Again the army rabbinate showed narrow-mindedness [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg More suggestions for Seder discussion: We are, of course, the most free people in history. We can live where we want (even if the cars, streets, and shop signs make a thousand neighborhoods look the same); we can do what we want (though some days the choice seems to be between which brand [...]

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I’ll be speaking tomorrow, Monday March 16, at 8 pm. at Evan Fallenberg‘s writers’ studio in Bitan Aharon, near Netanya. I’ll be discussing the dos and don’ts of memoir and travel writing. Tickets are NIS 60 at the door, NIS 50 a piece if you bring a spouse. Reserve seats by writing to evanfallenberg@gmail.com. Directions [...]

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Gershom is in the U.S., I’ve got the flu, and on top of that my hard disk died. On top of that, my parents are coming from the U.S. for a visit tomorrow. So my apologies, and my thanks to those of you who have kept the discussions going in the meantime. I hope to [...]

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We do our best to post high-quality material, and we’re grateful to our readers for the generally high level of discussion that takes place in the comments to our posts. If we don’t always respond ourselves, it’s because we’re busy working on the next post. Recently, however, we’ve had several cases in which readers have [...]

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My translation of David Grossman’s piece in The Washington Post-hw by David Grossman Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster — despite our disparate strength, and even when we try [...]

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