In late February 2002, shortly after Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah presented columnist Thomas Friedman with his famous Saudi peace plan, the director of Israel’s vaunted Mossad went to his boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. His advice: Welcome the initiative as a bold step toward peace. The plan offered Israel full recognition and normalized relations with…
One positive thing you can say about Peter Beinart’s critics is that none of them has smacked him in the face with a rifle butt. Not yet, anyway. That might not be far off, though, judging by the overall tone of the published reactions to his new book, “The Crisis of Zionism.” I was going…
The pioneering 19th century Yiddish novelist Mendele Mocher-Sefarim (Mendele the Book-Peddler) was best known for lovable characters like “Fishke the Lame” and poor “Benjamin the Third,” but he started his career writing biting satires about corrupt Jewish community leaders. It’s hard to know which genre he’d be writing if he lived in Israel today. The…
Jonathan Tobin, senior online editor of Commentary magazine, writes. A lot. At least a lot of short, sharp blog posts on his magazine’s website in the unabashedly conservative style that has defined Commentary for decades. It’s an ideological publication, which holds to a point of view that certainly has its place in the firmament of…
Pennsylvania, it’s sometimes said, can best be understood as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh separated by Alabama. Geographically speaking it’s a big state in the heart of the liberal Northeast, home to great universities, Ben Franklin and the Liberty Bell, anchored by a great Eastern metropolis at one end and a once-booming Midwestern steel town at the…
As President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepare to meet in Washington March 5 to thrash out their Iran differences, observers everywhere are scrambling to sort out exactly what the two men disagree about and what can be done to bridge the gaps. The answers, surprisingly, are: not much — and not much….
America’s chattering classes periodically fall in love with a new book that seems to alter the way we see the world by exposing a hidden crisis or explaining one that defied comprehension. One blockbuster can change history. In the 1960s, best-sellers launched liberal crusades: the war on poverty in Michael Harrington’s 1962 “The Other America,”…
To understand the new unity agreement between the two Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, it helps to recall the story of the village beggar and his cake. It happened once that the village beggar asked the rabbi for a ruble to buy some food. An hour later the rabbi saw the beggar in the market,…
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