‘To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” – Barack Obama, Dreams of My Father Continue reading →

It’s hunky-dory to kick off another year with comforting reassurances of stability. There are no unsettling changes in the wings. What was is what will be, albeit with slight superficial variations. For instance, Yossi Beilin will keep on tinkering with our existential interests as he did so assiduously hitherto. Although he announced his retirement, indefatigable Beilin is still out there avidly looking for E.T., still trying to broker that intergalactic encounter between alien life-forms, the one that will bless us with universal bliss. Continue reading →

We’re all familiar with holier-than-thou anti-Semites whose much-touted “best friends” invariably are Jews. Well, the good news is that Jane Fonda is awfully fond of us. She says so in her blog. Given all that fondness, Fonda feels persecuted for no fault of her own. She cannot fathom why she must “wake up in the morning to a barrage of e-mails” about “a petition protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature a celebratory ‘spotlight’ on Tel Aviv… By doing this the festival has become, whether knowingly or not, a participant in a cynical PR campaign to improve Israel’s image, make her appear less warlike.” Continue reading →

“Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la happy birthday sweet 16,” Neil Sedaka crooned his way to pop-culture immortality in those antediluvian days of 1961. Sixteen years are indeed a milestone. Any girl born this week in 1993 is, to borrow from yesteryear’s hit-song lyrics, “not a baby anymore.” She might well have “turned into the prettiest girl” and into “just a teenage dream.” Continue reading →

Without historical context there can be no real understanding of existential issues, certainly not of essential continuities. That’s why those who seek to obfuscate and skew do their utmost to erase telltale fundamental perspectives and present whatever they focus upon as cogent isolated concerns. Continue reading →

Sweden is beautiful – home to beautiful blonde, blue-eyed Nordic types who spare no effort to stress just how beautiful they are. Claiming a superior streamlined aesthetic, the beautiful people export beautiful designs – as in IKEA and H&M brands. Likewise resplendent in smug moral self-satisfaction, they idolize their own idealized virtue and spare no effort to convert the rest of the world to their more august standards and unadulterated perceptions of goodness. Continue reading →

Two traumas shocked this country’s Jews at the tail end of sizzling August. Both were defining watersheds but they occurred 76 years apart. The time lapse alone appears to rule out any correlation between the two. Yet, as is almost invariably the case here, the past is never irrelevant to the present and seemingly distant history is ever interconnected with what took place just a chronological microsecond ago. Continue reading →

Anyone familiar with the Arabian Nights tales knows they depict a reality comprised of layer upon shadowy layer, one concealed behind another. Cloaked schemers abound, each exploiting another schemer, each duping someone for secret ends. Life is an interminable complex of nefarious conspiracies in which it’s best not to trust anyone but suspect everyone. Continue reading →

If anyone can lay claim to consummate mastery of the thriving art of history-forging, it’s the Jordanians. Their entire state, nationhood and very identity are counterfeit. Had the international community not been sympathetically predisposed to lap up the lie, Jordan obviously couldn’t pull it off. Its wholesale fabrication hinges on a world that contentedly collaborates in hoodwinking itself. Continue reading →

Dear President Obama,

Your objection to Jews remodeling an inconsequential erstwhile Jerusalem hotel has become the talk of the country here. Everyone knows of your keen involvement in the paltriest details of our everyday existence. Nothing is too remote, trivial or petty for you. So long as it’s in Israel, you make it your business. To resort to a somewhat archaic American idiom, bully for you! Continue reading →