Uncommon knowledge about the Middle East

For those struggling with the long history and intricacies of Middle Eastern politics, Michael Totten (an independent journalist who appears in my blogroll and about whom I once blogged) appears on the show “Uncommon Knowledge” to break it down for you (in the embedded video below).  He also recently authored a book entitled The Road [...]

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Odds and ends for Yom HaShoah

Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) begins tonight.  This year, I’ve collected a selection of oddments – thoughts, articles, and a new book – to share. First the thoughts, in no particular order: 1) Discomfort over the Shoah haunted the Israeli psyche for decades after the end of World War II.  The inability to comprehend the [...]

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Book review: Leon Uris’s The Haj

Several months ago, I read Raphael Patai’s book, The Arab Mind, in an attempt to understand better the historical, cultural and sociological underpinnings of Arab behavior, both here in Israel and elsewhere.  I found the book very instructive, if a bit dry and academic.  (My review in the following three posts: I, II, III.) Then [...]

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Anonymous was a woman

One of the many Yahoo groups to which I belong is the Digital Eve group.  A chat list for women professionals in Israel, it usually has job listings for positions I am unqualified for, and requests for advice I cannot give.  But today someone (probably a Yale alumna) posted a link to this very interesting [...]

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Book review: Kathryn Stockett’s The Help

My family had just moved to southern Georgia (a few miles north of the Florida border), when I entered junior high school.  If junior high wasn’t bad enough in itself, I was in a new state, new school, with kids who had been together since pre-first (that’s Southern for kindergarten).  Add to that the fact [...]

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Lessons from a comment section

Michael Totten has posted an interview with Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist, who recently published a book entitled A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism. The book documents the impact on Israeli society of terrorism by telling the stories of thousands of Israelis murdered by Arab terrorists. Meotti’s choice of title [...]

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Book Review: Alan Dershowitz’s “The Best Defense”

I’m not sure there’s a soul in the Jewish world who doesn’t know who Alan Dershowitz is.  Made a full professor at Harvard Law School at age 28, one of America’s premier defense attorneys, a stalwart defender of Israel (though not of the settlements), and prolific author of books about the American legal system, Judaism, [...]

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The independent Michael Totten

A couple of years ago, my friend Michael A. Burstein (a science fiction writer; here’s his website) steered me toward independent journalist Michael Totten’s blog.  I was pleased to find Totten’s reporting thorough, thoughtful, and unprejudiced.  He takes a keen interest in the Middle East, visiting Lebanon and Israel frequently.  With Israel in most journalists’ [...]

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Book review: Haviva Ner-David’s Life On the Fringes

A few months ago, Rabbi Avi Weiss of Riverdale conferred rabbinical ordination on Sara Hurwitz.  It created something of a furor at the time, which has since seemed to die down (at least in the Orthodox circles I inhabit).  I gave the matter some thought at the time, and wrote a post about it. I [...]

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Book review: “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French

A couple of months ago, the Cap’n and I went to an event at the new, beautiful AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) offices in Talpiot.  Besides offices, event and conference rooms, and a small radio studio, the AACI has a very good English library.  They receive donations from patrons, and duplicates or [...]

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Book review: Abba Eban’s Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes

I recently finished reading Abba Eban’s Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes (published 1992).  From his childhood to his service in World War II, and into his career as a statesman for the newborn State of Israel, his account is filled with the insights and observations of a scholarly, well-mannered, intelligent thinker and actor.  I [...]

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The challenge of recognition

For some weeks, I have been making my plodding, gradual way through Abba Eban’s Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes (published 1992).  In addition to being one of the chief architects of the newborn State of Israel (chiefly in the area of diplomacy, at one time serving simultaneously as Ambassador to the U.S. and Ambassador [...]

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Book Review: Daniel Gordis’s Saving Israel

Last summer, on my family’s trip to the US, I read Daniel Gordis’s latest book entitled Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End.  At the time, I couldn’t resist collaring the Cap’n every few pages to read him a passage that seemed to me to nail the problems, [...]

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Book review: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics

In college and for some years afterward, I was a card-carrying Liberal.  I championed the poor and disenfranchised, and automatically mistrusted capitalism, the government, and anyone powerful.  I didn’t necessarily have a lot of facts about the world at my disposal (despite—or because of—being a recent college graduate), but my dogma of rallying behind the [...]

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Book review: Abba Eban’s My People: The Story of the Jews

Jewish histories seem to have a theme to them.  I remember reading Solomon Grayzel’s History of the Jews and his beautiful introduction in which he states clearly his thesis, that whenever a door was closed on the Jews somewhere in the world, another was opened. Abba Eban too has a theme in My People—that no [...]

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The Jane Austen (video) companion

I’ve been a devoted Jane Austen fan since I was 13, when the BBC aired its version of “Pride and Prejudice” on Masterpiece Theatre.  Since then, I have read most of her novels, and seen at least one dramatized form of each of them.  My favorite of her novels (which for me means the one [...]

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Some of my questions about the Arabs answered… Part IV

This is the final post in a series of four in which I pose a question I’ve had about Arab culture and the Arab world for some time, and the information I was able to glean from Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, which I finished reading recently. What challenges must the Arab world overcome to [...]

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Some of my questions about the Arabs answered… Part III

This is part III in a series of four.  Each post contains a question I’ve had about Arab culture and the Arab world for some time, and the information I was able to glean from Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, which I finished reading recently. Why can’t we in the West resolve our differences with [...]

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Some of my questions about the Arabs answered… Part II

This is part II in a series of four.  Each post contains a question I’ve had about Arab culture and the Arab world for some time, and the information I was able to glean from Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, which I finished reading recently. Why does the Arab world nourish such an obsessive hatred [...]

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Some of my questions about the Arabs answered… Part I

I recently finished a book entitled The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai.  Originally published in 1976, it was revised in 1983, and re-published in 2002 (after the terrorist assault on the United States on 11 September 2001).  The book includes a valuable foreward by Norvell B. DeAtkine, a retired US Army colonel who possesses a [...]

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