In 18th-century Britain, it was customary to tie a string around a smoked fish – which in the curing process turned red in color and pungent in odor – and drag it through the woods to train hunting dogs to follow a trail. At a later stage, the red herring was used to deliberately confuse the hounds to test their ability to stick to their prey’s scent or to prolong the foxhunt. Continue reading →

He punctuated his carefully enunciated phrases with frequent throat-clearings, hemmed a lot and hawed even more, yet among all the hems and haws, Barack Obama told the truth, even if maybe not only and certainly not all of it. Nevertheless, it’s a sure bet to take him at his word when he declared that “if someone was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that.” Continue reading →

Preempting an opponent’s objection with an objection – thereby turning an argument on its head – is the bread-and-butter of polemics. The tactic is common everywhere – from ordinary conversation to the halls of academe and courtroom litigation. When used cunningly, counterarguments can become the demagogue’s most invaluable of tools, used to sway the intellectually indolent and apply populist pressure. Continue reading →

How ironic that the one peeve which impelled Labor to foment a coalition crisis early this week had nothing to do with the government’s chronic ineptitude – not with its mismanaged war or with the corruption endemic in its ranks. What finally got Ehud Barak’s goat was the fact that his man didn’t get control of the clout-laden Knesset Finance Committee. Continue reading →

When US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was here last and reproved us with a sanctimonious schoolmarm’s sternness, she pro-forma professed to genuinely believe that Jews unlawfully seized “Arab Jerusalem.” To facilitate Washington’s self-serving cockamamie “two-state vision,” it’s therefore incumbent upon Jewish trespassers to renounce what isn’t theirs, and certainly not construct more housing for more unwanted Jews. Continue reading →

I was Brooklyn bound – or so I thought. I took the subway to see a fellow alumna of New York’s High School of Music and Art (as today’s LaGuardia High School for the Arts was then called). I looked forward to the nostalgic reunion. I hadn’t been in NYC for ages, and catching up with an old classmate seemed an indispensable component of walking down memory lane. Continue reading →

The Prime Minister’s Office recently earmarked a trifling NIS 200,000 to “deepen awareness of Theodor Herzl’s legacy.” But instead of forking anything out for hype and pageantry, Ehud Olmert need only focus on what got Herzl into hot water at 1903’s Sixth Zionist Congress. There the harbinger of Jewish national revival felt impelled to vindicate himself and reaffirm his devotion to Zion, rendered suspect after he proposed Uganda as a nachtasyl (nighttime asylum) – a temporary haven for Jews fleeing czarist pogroms. Continue reading →

Speakers of Yiddish and German doubtlessly remember being cautioned that their conduct reflects on how they were reared. When their behavior failed to meet expectations, the predictable admonishing question always was “where is your kinderstube,?” Literally kinderstube means the children’s room or nursery. Over time it had come to be semi-synonymous with propriety because it denoted upbringing – the scene where value-systems are nurtured. Continue reading →

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. – James Madison

The fact that political science professor Ze’ev Sternhell received the Israel Prize as Independence Day drew to a close last week was nothing but a proclamation of prejudice by the High Court of Justice, because that same court had 11 years previously deprived the late Shmuel Schnitzer of the prize awarded him. Continue reading →

One of the best books anywhere about the lead-up to Israel’s independence is perhaps the most unlikely, least attractive and inordinately trivia-laden little volume imaginable. It was composed by a man considered to have been one of old Mapai’s particularly lackluster functionaries – Ze’ev Sherf. The pinnacle of his career was his brief elevation to the post of finance minister in 1968. Continue reading →