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 →

Is a penchant for useless information nature or nurture? Whenever I speculate about a likely inborn inclination, I recall how my mother always made sure I learned the origin of every street name in any address at which we lived. So when my parents bought an apartment on Tel Aviv’s leafy Rehov Yosef-Eliahu (near the Mann Auditorium), I was sure to become the only kid around who could expound on who Yosef-Eliahu was. Continue reading →

The requiem for Labor is premature. Labor isn’t terminally decrepit. Nevertheless, its demise is inevitable if it fails to save itself from itself.

What’s at stake isn’t merely Labor’s misfortune but that of our entire body politic, which must be able to count on two responsible mainstream alternatives. Kadima – an opportunistic concoction without a weighty past, a promising future or any true adhesive to bind its cynical melange of expedient self-seekers – isn’t one. Continue reading →

Way back in the antediluvian era of American media, there was a daytime TV offering called Queen for a Day. Many consider it the early forerunner of at least some reality television genres – the sort that focus on family tragedies, personal agonies and other assorted heartrending crises. Each episode featured four contestants vying for the “most miserable” or “most pitiable” distinction. The dubious winner’s bitter lot was rewarded with big-prize giveaways.
It was up to the audience to judge which of the four unfortunates was closer to rock bottom and therefore worthy of their sympathy. That sympathy was grotesquely measured by an “applause meter.” The loudest clapping presumably meant that the circumstances unfolded in one of the competing sad stories were the harshest. Continue reading →

In 1933 FDR hinged his first inaugural address on his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Binyamin Netanyahu should inaugurate his second administration with this exact sentiment, stated as boldly and as unambiguously. Unlike the morale issues of Depression-era America, in our case irrational fear is an existential threat. Continue reading →

In the spirit of Purim, I quipped a few days ago that if it were up to me, I’d appoint ex-Black Panther Charlie Biton our new foreign minister.

It’s actually not altogether preposterous. Tzipi Livni eminently proved that proficiency in the English idiom is no prerequisite for the job. Moreover, Charlie says it like it is, passionately, from the gut, without pedantic quibbling, pseudointellectual hairsplitting or any niceties to speak of. He doesn’t try to be liked. Continue reading →