As anecdote has it, George Bernard Shaw once asked an attractive socialite whether she’d sleep with him for a million pounds. After she answered in the affirmative, he offered her a mere 10 shillings. Outraged, she railed: “What do you take me for? A prostitute?” Shaw reputedly replied: “We’ve already determined that. We’re just haggling over the price.” Continue reading →

US President Barack Obama’s intentions when delivering his overlong, cloying and history-warping Cairo University speech may have been good. He may have genuinely imagined himself on a messianic mission to win Muslim hearts by virtue of his own (hitherto expediently downplayed) Muslim background. Continue reading →

There never were good old days. Olden times produced heaps of evil, torment and immeasurable pain – foremost for the long-suffering Jewish people. But at least psychologically the bad old days were simpler and therefore the misery was more straightforward. Continue reading →

In salvaging the image of a beleaguered country like Israel, it’s not merely the justice of the case which counts, and not only how convincingly it’s made in private. The key is to ensure listenership. Even the most effective of arguments is useless without an audience. Continue reading →

From the outset it was unrealistic – if not altogether foolish – to look for any show of emotional empathy or heartfelt contrition from the German pope during his historic address at Yad Vashem. Those who harbored such expectations didn’t base them on Benedict XVI’s actual personality but on a kindly spiritual Santa, a figment of their wishful thinking. Continue reading →

Dreams, when they serve as wish-fulfillment vehicles, are hard to give up. They become sources of comfort and confidence – even if, all too often, false ones. They are the gossamer pedestals on which dreamers base their prestige and self-possession, even when these contradict empirical evidence and coolheaded realism. Continue reading →

It’s doubtful Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) ever delved into Protagoras’s philosophic slyness when he was enrolled at Moscow’s communist-era Russian University for Friendship between People (aka the People’s Friendship University of Russia, also aka the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University). Continue reading →

There’s no telling where the final ideological resting place of intellectually restless Yosef Haim Brenner – one of the Second Aliya luminaries and founding giants of modern Hebrew literature – would have been had he not been slain before reaching his 40th birthday. He might have evolved into a nationalist like initially-leftist Moshe Shamir, or followed his socialist leanings to the farthest radical fringe. Speculations are moot. Brenner was a full deck of cards from which any hand could have been dealt. Nothing was irrevocably predetermined when Arab marauders took his life on May 2, 1921. Continue reading →

My mom was never big on surprises, especially when it came to birthday gifts. The surest way not to miss the mark, she reckoned, was to straight out inquire what I wanted. Just before I turned nine, I asked her for a volume of poet Natan Alterman’s Seventh Column. My wish was granted and the brown hardcover anthology has remained one of my most cherished possessions ever since. Continue reading →

Minimal intellectual honesty compels us Jews to admit that we live in dangerous times – so dangerous that they cannot but remind us of the noxious atmosphere that led to the incomparable tragedy we will solemnly commemorate this Tuesday. Continue reading →