May 20, 2012

Jews, Jewish Leftists, and the Anti-Semitic Left

Last week, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research held an extraordinary conference in New York, with 18 scholars presenting formal papers on "Jews and the Left," addressing such issues as "present-day understandings of Jewish attraction to the Left i...

May 11, 2012

President Obama's Luxurious Schedule

On May 7, Geoffrey Norman posted "Today's Laugh Line" at National Review Online -- a quote from a column by Mark Halperin in Time asserting Mitt Romney has "the luxury of an open schedule" allowing him to "spend every waking hour as a full-time candi...

February 29, 2012

What Needs to Come Out of the Obama-Netanyahu Meeting

Sometime last year, Benjamin Netanyahu asked a high-ranking person at the White House if Barack Obama had decided whether he would use force to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program.  The person responded by asking, "Have you?" The response reflec...

February 11, 2012

When the Sun Was His Smile

In Darkness -- one of this year's nominees for Best Foreign Language Film -- opens February 10.  It is a remarkable film, and an extraordinary accomplishment. The title is both metaphorical and literal: the film takes place during the great da...

June 3, 2011

A 'Brain-Dead Liberal' Awakens

David Mamet's provocative new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, explores in greater length and considerably greater depth the themes he announced in his 2008 op-ed for the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-...

May 3, 2011

The Coming Crisis at the UN -- and How Not to Waste It

The following is an edited version of remarks made in a panel discussion entitled "Goldstone, International Law, and the Coming Crisis in September" held in Los Angeles on April 28, 2011 by Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.The "c...

June 1, 2010

ABC Bashes Bush on Memorial Day

The ABC News report on the rainout of President Obama's planned Memorial Day speech in Illinois noted that Obama had been criticized for not staying in Washington to go to Arlington National Cemetery. But ABC provided a ready excuse, subtitling its r...

February 1, 2010

Deficits you can believe in

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January 29, 2010

A Citizen's Guide to the Constitution

An important book for two groups: those who are conversant with the Constitution and those who are not.Seth Lipsky's new book, The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide, is an essential volume for an educated citizenry. Equally erudite and enter...

January 15, 2010

More than a straw in the wind in Massachusetts

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January 13, 2010

John Kerry displays his usual grace

Tone deaf John F. Kerry, a day after Brown's "It's not the Kennedy seat" goes viral, comes up with a new way to repeat the claim:  It's the "Massachusetts way" to "hand [it] off" to the next Democrat....

September 8, 2009

Challenging the Torah of Liberalism

Norman Podhoretz's extraordinary new book --"Why Are Jews Liberals?" - is a reflection on the question he says he has been asked more often than any other:  why do so many Jews cling to the Left and vote in such extraordinary percentag...

August 4, 2009

Reimagining Government

The section of the White House website entitled "Delivering on Change" has been changed, according to ProPublica, the non-profit newsroom that enables people to monitor changes at the site.  A comparison of the before-and-after version...

October 22, 2008

The Second Coming of Jimmy Carter

Barack Obama is taking America down a path modeled by Jimmy Carter, and threatens to be as bad a president as his trailblazer. A unlikely guide unwittingly will help make the case.David Brooks asserted in the New York Times last week that, after watc...

September 21, 2008

Responding to Neo-Atheism

Neo-atheism has had a very successful publishing run over the past several years, with best-selling books by Christopher Hitchens ("god is not great"), Sam Harris ("Letter to a Christian Nation") and Richard Dawkins ("The God...

August 19, 2008

Obama, Party Loyalty, and His Own Best Interest

There has been a lot of commentary already on the forum at Saddleback Church, but one Obama answer bears some further fact-checking.In response to Pastor Rick Warren's request to provide "an example of where you went against party loyalty and ma...

July 24, 2008

Obama on Jerusalem, Properly Phrased

In its lead editorial yesterday ("Obama in Jerusalem"), The New York Sun noted that Barack Obama's continuing explanations of his AIPAC speech, in which he said Jerusalem "must remain undivided," raise more questions than they ans...

June 25, 2008

Barack Obama's Diplomatic Code Words

Barack Obama apparently has trouble with diplomatic code words. Former Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, Barack Obama's Middle East advisor, told the Israel Policy Forum that Obama did not realize that "undivided" was a diplomatic "code word...

June 13, 2008

Revisiting Obama's Speech to AIPAC

Barack Obama's June 4 speech to AIPAC received a favorable initial response, but the more one scrutinizes it, the more troubling it becomes.  Here are some of the portions that raised questions, ranging from minor to major:1.  Obama began h...

March 23, 2008

A Principled Peace Process

Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni may have been looking beyond the Bush administration when she met last week in Washington with a group of Middle East experts and told them Israel expects "any U.S. administration" to act in accordance ...

February 18, 2008

Clinton, Obama and the Social Security Table

The Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend that, as the February 19 Wisconsin primary approaches, Sen. Hillary Clinton released a new ad, entitled "Deserved," criticizing Sen. Barack Obama for not agreeing to a Wisconsin debate.  ...

February 13, 2008

Palestinian Chutzpah

Reading about the Palestinian Authority asking the State Department to intervene on the PA's side in lawsuits brought against it by U.S. victims of Palestinian terrorism - on grounds that it makes no sense for the U.S. to provide millions of dollars ...

September 11, 2007

Why We Are in Iraq

A review of Norman Podhoretz's World War IV:  The Long Struggle Against IslamofascismIn 1983, Norman Podhoretz published "Why We Were in Vietnam" -- a review of the arguments surrounding a war that had by then become a symbol of strate...

September 4, 2007

Walt, Mearsheimer and the Peace Process

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a 484-page extension of the arguments they presented last year in their tendentious Harvard "Working Paper" and Lo...

August 14, 2007

Bare-knuckled bias at the NYT

The New York Times today carried three news stories and an editorial on Karl Rove's decision to leave the White House.  On page one, in the first paragraph of the lead story, Jim Ruternberg and Seven Lee Myers write [emphases added throughout] t...

July 29, 2007

The New York Times Reports and Distorts a Presidential Address

"...it has almost ceased altogether to be a newspaper."-- Renata AdlerOn July 24, around noon, President Bush delivered an important speech at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.  He discussed in considerable detail the links ...

June 26, 2007

Carter in Britain: There He Went Again

Jimmy Carter was in Britain last week, receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University, which will offer a course later this year entitled "The Middle Ease and the West:  From Confrontation to Coexistence."  The course ...

June 19, 2007

Blaming Bush for Gaza

As Gaza collapsed into Hamastan last week, the New York Times wrote that "Washington is facing a shrinking menu of alternatives."  The Times quoted one of the most prominent peace processors of the Clinton Administration:"We have ...

May 1, 2007

What Tenet Knew, When He Knew It, and Whom He Told

In its lead editorial on Sunday, "Still Waiting for Answers," the New York Times expressed the hope that Rep. Henry Waxman will enforce the subpoena of Condoleezza Rice -- and that she be held in contempt of Congress if she refuses to testi...

November 28, 2006

Revisiting (and Reliving) 1938

“It is 1938; Iran is Germany; and it is racing to acquire nuclear weapons.” Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly punctuated his speech in Los Angeles earlier this month with that sentence.  It was an effective rhetorical device, convey...

November 14, 2006

The World According to Jimmy Carter

A review of Jimmy Carter, Palestine:Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster, November 2006)It is not difficult to understand why Democrats wanted the publication of Jimmy Carter's slim new book (216 pages of text, large print and no footnotes), wit...

March 4, 2006

The Movie Spielberg Didn't Make

Sunday evening, as clips are shown of the films nominated for 'Best Picture,' we will probably see —— along with a worldwide audience —— Golda Meir pondering the decision to assassinate the Palestinians behind the 1972 Munich ...