Showing 20 Result(s)

My thoughts on book reviews and culture

A recent piece in The Economist (I’m an avid cover-to-cover reader of the newspaper) has prompted me to articulate my thoughts on the dynamics of culture; my letter is below.  The Economist lamented the grade inflation in book reviews today, compared with a prewar golden age of sharper pens when reviewers were willing to be …

Provisional Loyalty to a Provisional State

Each of us gets to decide whether to follow the rules or change them. In Hebrew we call this ‘combina,’ a slang word referring to the bypassing of rules or commitments. Haaretz, October 15, 2010 A historic event passed almost unnoticed on Sunday. A group of some 200 intellectuals and other public figures gathered in …

How to Read Kafka?

  Kafka’s Bed The following exercise is intended for night owls who have a hard time waking up in the morning: Imagine a scenario to get you out of bed.  That, I suggest, is more or less the Gedankenexperiment, perhaps the creative impulse behind much of Kafka’s work.  I don’t mean it as an interpretation …

Review of Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut 

What Was Forster Thinking? The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-Aug. 2015 “ARCTIC SUMMER,” the title of an unfinished novel by E. M. Forster, well suits this fictional biography of the English writer. It’s hard to imagine a writer further away from the romantic image of the struggling, mercurial artist. Forster was born in 1879 and …

Review of Barney Frank’s Autobiography

Homo Economicus The Gay and Lesbian Review, Sep.- Oct. 2015 Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage by Barney Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux 400 pages, $28.   GAY, JEWISH, and left-handed, Barney Frank likes to say that he’s a natural advocate for minorities. At the same time, had he not been …

Thousands Become Millions: An Error in Translation Gains Credence in The New York Times

תקציב הפרסום הגאה של עיריית תל-אביב וגלגוליה של טעות תרגום העין השביעית, 30 בינואר 2012 נניח שאתם העורכים של עיתון ישראלי הצריכים להעריך את התקציב של מסע פרסום במימון ציבורי להאדרת שמה של תל-אביב כמעוז הומואי מצטיין. בלי להציץ, מהי לדעתכם עלותו הכוללת של הקמפיין? עכשיו מותר להציץ. ב-21 בפברואר 2011 פירסם ynet ידיעה שעניינה …

Confessions of a Pinkwasher

Gay City News, December 7, 2011 The New York Times recently dedicated precious space to the follies of Israel’s public relations. I’m not talking about Sarah Schulman’s “Israel and Pinkwashing,” which alleges that the Israeli government effectively leverages the gains of the LGBT community to have its way with the Palestinians, but rather a Times …

Bias in Black and White

The venomous disregard for the truth makes Spanish criticism of Israel banal and misses important issues. This simplistic anti-Israel narrative represents not a noble struggle for human rights, but rather a contamination of both journalism and the great democracy that the newspaper serves. (Read on the Haaretz website) Haaretz, April 3, 2009 Imagine that Spanish …