Repeat Offender

NEXTBOOK — November 26, 2008
Was there ever a more favorable time to be an American in Germany? I wasn’t here during the Berlin airlift as the sky filled with small parachuted packages of raisins floating down from U.S. bomber planes. So maybe then. But the symbolic weight of Obama’s win seemed to redeem us all [...]

Dropped Ball

NEXTBOOK — September 24, 2008
The owners of the Jets and Giants football teams decided last week to reject a bid by the German insurance company Allianz for naming rights to their new Meadowlands stadium. It seemed there was little else they could do after the New York Times reminded everyone that this was the company [...]

Divided Soul

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — MARCH/APRIL 2008
Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white [...]

Six Days, 40 Years of Controversy

FORWARD — June 1, 2007
The weeks following the Six Day War found Israelis not sure if they were awake or dreaming. Everyone spoke of miracles, of the supernatural forces that had guided the Jewish army to such overwhelming victory. The names of the generals — Rabin, Hod, Sharon, Peled — resounded like the names of [...]

Reassessing FDR’s Legacy

FORWARD — September 22, 2006
In his counterfactual vision of the United States during World War II, “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagines a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator turned America Firster and Nazi sympathizer. President Lindbergh soon signs a nonaggression pact with [...]

The Neoconservative Persuasion: Examining the Jewish Roots of an Intellectual Movement

FORWARD — January 6, 2006
The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy
By Murray Friedman
Cambridge University Press, 310 pages, $29.
Commentary in American Life
Edited by Murray Friedman
Temple University Press, 232 pages, $22.95.
The Neocon Reader
Edited and with an introduction by Irwin Seltzer
Grove Press, 320 pages, $15.
Acknowledging the Jewishness of neoconservatism has always [...]

Disengaged: A Letter from Tel Aviv

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005

Jews don’t live in Gaza anymore.
For the first time since the Six Day War, the Jewish state has voluntarily picked up and left part of the territory that the Palestinians claim as their homeland — ending, de facto, a fraction of the occupation. Gaza, this grossly overpopulated, twenty-five-mile-long splinter of [...]

Why Don’t Journalists Get Religion? A Tenuous Bridge to Believers

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — MAY/JUNE 2004
Ash Wednesday was not a good day to eat breakfast and read the newspaper at the same time. Across the country, culture sections fronted a movie still of a man whose skin had the texture of raw meat, his palms nailed to a wooden cross, his head a bloody pulp [...]