A lot of my friends in Jerusalem think that mayoral candidate Nir Barkat will save the city. There are generally two arguments they offer: First, he’s a former high-tech entrepreneur, and the business world produces better managers than the political arena does.
Second, and much more important, Barkat is secular. Among secular, traditional, and modern-leaning [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
At the airport, before his takeoff for the Middle East, no one will ask Barack Obama if he packed his bags himself. It would be rude, and besides he has a full-time handler for that. He never has the lurching feeling as the cab leaves his house that he left the tickets on the [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
Sometime before November, traffic in Jerusalem will be tied up by Barack Obama’s visit. My new article in The American Prospect explains what Obama should do while he’s here to prepare for the presidency, and why he won’t do any of that:
…In Jerusalem, Obama has another task — shoring up support among voters who [...]

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See my new “Necessary Stories” column in The Jerusalem Report, A Cab Driver’s Lament. If you’re in Jerusalem, need a cab, and want to enjoy a particularly pleasant ride, try my favorite driver at 050-260-8698.

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Haim Watzman
“On both sides of a war, unity is reflexive, not intentional or premeditated. To disobey is to breach that elemental accord, to claim a moral separateness (or moral superiority), to challenge one’s fellows, perhaps even to intensify the dangers they face,” Michael Walzer writes in his seminal Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer refers in [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg

The Washington Post’s campaign factchecker awards three Pinocchios to conservative rottweiler Floyd Brown - and to his pseudo-academic alter ego, Daniel Pipes - for promoting the canard was a Muslim as a child and is hiding the fact: “Both Brown and Pipes base their arguments and conclusions on factoids that have appeared [...]

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Haim Watzman
I recall a gathering of journalists once many years ago at which a well-meaning but clueless intern told me that she worked in “Jerusalem, Israel” and then quickly corrected herself: “I meant just Jerusalem. I believe it should be an international city.”
In response to my Jerusalem Day post earlier this week, DanH asks a [...]

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Haim Watzman
“Rejoice with Jerusalem,” says the prophet Isaiah. Recall its destruction whenever you celebrate, says the Psalmist. In two months time we’ll mourn its destruction with the fast of the Ninth of Av; today is Jerusalem Day, Israel’s celebration of its capital city. Both ancient texts and modern realities force us to conceive of the [...]

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Mondays are women’s nights at the Jerusalem Pool, where I swim every day. From the hours of six to nine p.m., this South Jerusalem pool is closed to me simply because I’m a male. On Wednesday nights, women get the same treatment.
Daniel Pipes spends some of his no doubt precious time chronicling swimming pools in [...]

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“Ancient Jerusalem Safari” said the sign on the side of the open-sided bus. It was parked this morning in the lot at the end of the promenade that stretches from UN Hill almost to Hebron Road. The promenade is an arc of stone walkways and stairs, of lawns and landscaping with a [...]

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“This Obama, is it true he’s a Muslim?” Iris, my bank clerk, asked me this morning. My immediate reaction was to dismiss the charge scornfully. It’s an urban myth of a vile kind, I said. But as the conversation proceeded, I realized that Iris had asked the question because the prospect of a Muslim president [...]

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Yesterday, Ilana and I attended a funeral at a moshav near Netanya. And as always happens on our occasional trips to places where there’s lots of space, we momentarily longed to sell our tiny apartment and move out to the country.
The two-hour drive back was enough make me appreciate the city and remind me why [...]

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