A Little Valentine’s Day Straight Talk. By Susan Patton.

A Little Valentine’s Day Straight Talk. By Susan Patton. Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2014.

Advice for the Young Women of Princeton: Find a Husband. By Susan A. Patton. NJBR, April 1, 2013. With related articles, video, and audio.

Susan Patton, “Princeton Mom,” Is Back: An Academic Takedown of Her Many Misguided Arguments. By Nina Bahadur. The Huffington Post, February 14, 2014.

Dear Susan Patton, Single Women Don’t Need Your “Straight Talk.” By Emma Gray. The Huffington Post, February 14, 2014.

The End of “Marriageability?” By Robert VerBruggen. Real Clear Policy, February 14, 2014.

The 11 best quotes from Susan Patton’s new book. By Urvija Banerji and Anna Mazarakis. The Prox, March 3, 2014.

The 10 Worst Pieces of Advice From Susan Patton’s “Marry Smart.” By Claire Fallon. The Huffington Post, March 6, 2014.

14 Questions for Princeton Mom Susan Patton. By Emily Levy. Vocativ, March 7, 2014.

Susan Patton interview. By Rabbi Joseph Potasnik (her cousin) and Deacon Kevin McCormack. Audio. Religion on the Line. 77 WABC Radio, March 9, 2014. Interview starts at 77:40 in the podcast.

Elites Close Ranks Around Ivy League Intermarriage. By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, April 7, 2013. With related articles.

Katty Kay: Marriage Is “Old Fashioned” If You Want to Have Kids. NJBR, April 18, 2013. With video.

Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too. By Kate Taylor. NJBR, July 17, 2013. With related articles.


Patton:

Another Valentine's Day. Another night spent ordering in sushi for one and mooning over “Downton Abbey” reruns. Smarten up, ladies.

 

Despite all of the focus on professional advancement, for most of you the cornerstone of your future happiness will be the man you marry. But chances are that you haven’t been investing nearly as much energy in planning for your personal happiness as you are planning for your next promotion at work. What are you waiting for? You’re not getting any younger, but the competition for the men you’d be interested in marrying most definitely is.

 

Think about it: If you spend the first 10 years out of college focused entirely on building your career, when you finally get around to looking for a husband you’ll be in your 30s, competing with women in their 20s. That's not a competition in which you’re likely to fare well. If you want to have children, your biological clock will be ticking loud enough to ward off any potential suitors. Don't let it get to that point.

 

You should be spending far more time planning for your husband than for your career—and you should start doing so much sooner than you think. This is especially the case if you are a woman with exceptionally good academic credentials, aiming for corporate stardom.

 

An extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult. Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women.

 

Could you marry a man who isn’t your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can’t keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won’t find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing. And if you start to earn more than he does? Forget about it. Very few men have egos that can endure what they will see as a form of emasculation.

 

So what’s a smart girl to do? Start looking early and stop wasting time dating men who aren’t good for you: bad boys, crazy guys and married men.

 

College is the best place to look for your mate. It is an environment teeming with like-minded, age-appropriate single men with whom you already share many things. You will never again have this concentration of exceptional men to choose from.

 

When you find a good man, take it slow. Casual sex is irresistible to men, but the smart move is not to give it away. If you offer intimacy without commitment, the incentive to commit is eliminated. The grandmotherly message of yesterday is still true today: Men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free.

 

Can you meet brilliant, marriageable men after college? Yes, but just not that many of them. Once you’re living off campus and in the real world, you’ll be stunned by how smart the men are not. You’ll no doubt meet some eligible guys in your workplace, but it’s hazardous to get romantically involved with co-workers.

 

You may not be ready for marriage in your early 20s (or maybe you are), but keep in touch with the men that you meet in college, especially the super smart ones. They’ll probably do very well for themselves, and their desirability will only increase after graduation.

 

Not all women want marriage or motherhood, but if you do, you have to start listening to your gut and avoid falling for the P.C. feminist line that has misled so many young women for years. There is nothing incongruous about educated, ambitious women wanting to be wives and mothers. Don’t let anyone tell you that these traditional roles are retrograde; they are perfectly natural and even wonderful. And if you fail to identify “the one” while you’re in college, don’t worry—there’s always graduate school.


Gray:

It’s Valentine's Day. I’m single, I’m a college graduate, I’m 26 and I’ve spent the last four years tirelessly working to advance my career as an editor. According to “Princeton Mom,” Susan Patton, tonight I’ll probably be crying into my Seamless-ordered sushi and tomorrow I need to buck up and find a damn husband.

 

On behalf of the vast majority of single women that I know – who are, as Patton so quaintly put it, “not getting any younger” – I’d like to tell her: “Thanks, but no thanks.” Your so-called “straight talk” isn’t doing those in your target demographic any favors.

 

Of course, this is not the first time the 1977 Princeton grad has argued that “career women” are wasting their youth on caring about their jobs, that the only good men out there can exclusively be found in your undergraduate university classes, and that being deeply passionate about (and loving) your work is mutually exclusive with being deeply passionate about finding love and a life partner. She's already made this argument twice, but I suppose that a holiday dedicated to Hallmark cards, ostentatious shows of affection and overpriced prix-fixe dinners is as good a time as any for her to push out her drivel of a message once again – and shill for her upcoming book.

 

To the Susan Pattons of the world, I want to make the following very clear about single women in their 20s and 30s:

 

1. Most of us are looking for love.

 

As many single women can attest, there is a vast gulf between being open to love and going on dates, and actually finding a person who you mesh with, who you care about and who cares about you. The women I know put aside time out of their busy weeks to date and to push themselves into new situations where they might meet potential love interests. We sign up for Tinder and Hinge and OKCupid and JDate, half out of boredom, but, ultimately, with an air of hopefulness. With each swipe or like or match we wonder whether this will be the one that works – and often, it’s not. (The same can be said for all of the wonderful and not-so-wonderful potential partners we met during our college years. I don’t believe that the men I met when I was 20 are any more “marriage material” than the men I meet now.)

 

We enter relationships and end said relationships when they are not right, we endure heartbreaks and bad dates, and also have great sex and great stories. Some of us find someone we think we'd like to be with for a very long time during these years – and some of us don’t. Both are fine outcomes, and most people do not end up in one camp or the other because they did or did not try hard enough to “plan for a husband.”

 

2. We also are dedicating considerable time and energy to our careers – but it’s not a waste of time.

 

Not only do most of the single women I know love their jobs, find fulfillment in said jobs and cannot imagine leading lives that did not include a career, but also, for most of us, work is and will always be a necessity for survival. Even recognizing women who would prefer not to work after marriage, most of us will not marry a partner who can afford to take on the full financial burden of his family. As of May 2013, 4 in 10 American households with young children had female breadwinners. And single, childless women in urban centers are on their way to out-earning their male counterparts. But none of this means that these women will be forced to opt out of marriage because they’ve spent time advancing their careers and are making decent salaries. In fact, highly-educated, successful women are just as likely to get married (if not more so) than other women, they just tend to do it a few years later.

 

3. Having – and enjoying -- sex does not prevent us from finding true connection.

“Men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free,” Patton writes, sounding more out of touch than I thought was humanly possible. I know women who have slept with men right away thinking it would be completely casual, and ended up marrying those men years down the road. I know women who did everything “right” and by “the rules” with a potential partner and ended up dumped. I have heard (and experienced) nearly every iteration in between. Sex is complicated and means something different to every person. It absolutely can make or break a relationship, but not because you messed up and “gave it away”too early. And honestly, any man who would lose interest in me right after we slept together, is probably not a man I’d want to commit myself to legally for the rest of my life, anyway. Plus, 95 percent of American couples who make the trip down the aisle have slept together far before their wedding night.

 

4. We don’t devalue marriage or motherhood. And a lot of us still want those things.

 

Let’s be clear: being a feminist does not, as Patton implies, mean believing that there is something “incongruous about educated, ambitious women wanting to be wives and mothers.” Most of the single – and married – women I am close with identify as feminists and consider themselves to be thoroughly modern and empowered. None of them think that being a wife or a mother is a bad thing, some don’t want to be either wives or mothers, and many are single and still want both. Not spending every waking moment wishing for an MRS. degree or looking at every new man who enters our lives as a potential sperm donor, doesn’t preclude a desire to find a life partner or have a baby.

 

But the most important thing you need to understand, Susan Patton, is that we single women choose not to define our ultimate worth by our relationship status. Yes, we are single. Yes, we are spending Valentine’s Day without a romantic partner (probably not crying into our takeout sushi). We may or may not feel satisfied with those things. But we are also so, so much more.

Roving Sea Peoples May Have Settled in Transjordan. By Ilan Ben Zion.

Left: captive Philistine warriors from a wall relief at Medinet Habu, Egypt, 1185-1152 BC. Right: an artist’s conception of a Philistine warrior. Image credit: John Shumate.

Roving Sea Peoples may have settled in Transjordan, archaeologist says. By Ilan Ben Zion. The Times of Israel, February 13, 2014.

Cultural connections with Europe found in ancient Jordanian settlement. By Thomas Mellin. University of Gothenburg, January 16, 2014.

Tell Abu al-Kharaz: New Finds from “Sea People” Settlement. Sci-News.com, January 28, 2014.

Medinet Habu: Oxcarts, Ships, and Migration Theories. By Robert Drews. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3 (July 2000).


Ben Zion:

New evidence unearthed at an ancient site in the Jordan Valley suggests that the Sea Peoples — a group which includes the ancient Israelites’ nemeses, the Philistines — settled as far inland as the Transjordan, a Swedish archaeologist argues. Not everyone in the archaeological community, however, is convinced by the finds.

 

The find, made by a team digging at Tell Abu al-Kharaz, also strengthens the ties connecting the Sea Peoples and the Aegean — reinforcing the theory that the Philistines were among a number of tribes of non-Semitic peoples who migrated across the Mediterranean and settled in Canaan in the early Iron Age alongside the emergent Israelites.

 

Evidence of Sea Peoples inhabiting areas east of the Jordan River would lend credence to a seeming anomaly in the Bible — the location of Philistines far from their historic homeland along the shores of southern Israel in I Samuel 31. According to the book of Samuel, the Philistines raided northern Israel and settled in the abandoned Israelite cities “that were on the other side of the valley, and they that were beyond the Jordan.”

 

Sea Peoples is the name given by the ancient Egyptians to the populations of a massive maritime migration to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean in the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE. During the reign of Ramesses III, hordes of seaborne people bore down on the kingdom, were thwarted by the Egyptian armies and settled along the Levantine coast.

 

Among the names of the groups mentioned in the reliefs of Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu are the “Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, and Weshesh.” Scholars link the name Peleset with the Bible’s Philistines, who established the cities of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath and Ekron in the coastal plain of modern Israel and Palestine. Other Sea Peoples settled as far north as Ugarit and Alalakh in modern Syria.

 

Dr. Peter Fischer of Gothenberg University said his team has discovered pottery and cylindrical loom weights from around 1100 BCE whose design matches that of contemporary material culture from Philistia, Cyprus and southern Europe. His team also unearthed a massive multi-story building 60 meters long, suggestive of strong centralized authority and planning. The cooking pots and everyday items found at Tell Abu al-Kharaz were not imported, Fischer explained in an email, but may be indicative of a migration of Sea Peoples as far inland as the Transjordan.

 

Tell Abu al-Kharaz, located just opposite Beit Shean on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, is associated by some archaeologists with the biblical city of Jabesh Gilead, the place where the Bible says King Saul fell on his sword in a battle against the Philistines. The site is over 100 miles inland from the Philistine heartland along the Mediterranean coast.

 

He pointed to one item in particular, a large ceramic jug painted white and decorated with red lines. Such a style, known as bichrome ware, is commonly found at Philistine archaeological sites, and numerous examples of it are on display at the Israel Museum. Fischer argues that the presence of the jug indicates the presence of Sea Peoples — not necessarily Philistines — at Tell Abu al-Kharaz.

 

The clay pots and loomweights “appear very suddenly around 1100 BCE (or a little before that date) at Kharaz and existed there for some generations until they were replaced by the wide-spread local type again,” Fischer wrote. “Cooking pot types represent a certain tradition of preparing meals which may have arrived at the site with newcomers.”

 

Another pot, “a type which is known from the Aegean and Philistine sphere of culture,” also leads Fischer to believe that during the early Iron Age there was an “arrival of a new ethnic group which was strongly connected to the Sea Peoples” at Tell Abu al-Kharaz.

 

“I am not saying that they founded a colony there but they became integrated with the local population,” Fischer explained.

A late Bronze Age cooking pot from Tell Abu al-Kharaz. (photo courtesy

 of Dr. Peter M. Fischer).

 

Not all scholars are convinced of Fischer’s hypothesis, however.

 

“If I didn’t know better I’d say it’s a forgery, because it combines kind of a Canaanite jug form with a rim that’s not Philistine” and decorative motifs that are “reminiscent of Philistine material,” Dr. Seymour Gitin said after viewing a photo of the Philistine-style jug Fischer published online. Gitin, director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, headed the excavation of Tel Miqne, the ancient Philistine city of Ekron.

 

The cooking jug has Cypriot cognates, he said, but “it’s not something that we find in any of the Philistine cities, like Ashkelon, Ashdod or Ekron.”

 

“If you only have a few pieces, you can’t talk about a Sea Peoples population,” he said.

 

Dr. Amihai Mazar of Hebrew University said that it was possible that there were small groups of Sea Peoples — not necessarily Philistines — who inhabited northern Israel. He said that during his excavations at Tel Rehov, only a few kilometers west of Tell Abu al-Kharaz, he also found ceramics and loom weights indicative of Sea People migration to the Jordan Valley.

 

Dr. Eran Arie, curator of Iron Age and Persian Period Archaeology at the Israel Museum, concurred, saying that one or two pieces of pottery do not a Sea People settlement make. Arie, who took part in the extensive excavations of Megiddo, said pottery similar to that found by Fischer at Tell Abu al-Kharaz was found in Iron Age levels at Megiddo as well.

 

“I see nothing Philistine here, aside from that one loom weight,” he said in a phone interview. “Philistine cooking jugs may have influenced the [style of] this jug [from Tell Abu al-Kharaz],” but Philistine pots have flat, not rounded, bottoms, and the soot marks from cooking are found along the side, not the base.

 

“You can’t find one or two vessels and say it’s really Philistine,” he added.

Reconstruction of the 3,100-year-old building unearthed at Tell Abu al-Kharaz. Image credit: University of Gothenburg.

Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events. By Nicholas Wade.

Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events. By Nicholas Wade. New York Times, February 13, 2014.

A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History. By Garrett Hellenthal et al. Science, Vol. 343, February 14, 2014.

Abstract:

Modern genetic data combined with appropriate statistical methods have the potential to contribute substantially to our understanding of human history. We have developed an approach that exploits the genomic structure of admixed populations to date and characterize historical mixture events at fine scales. We used this to produce an atlas of worldwide human admixture history, constructed by using genetic data alone and encompassing over 100 events occurring over the past 4000 years. We identified events whose dates and participants suggest they describe genetic impacts of the Mongol empire, Arab slave trade, Bantu expansion, first millennium CE migrations in Eastern Europe, and European colonialism, as well as unrecorded events, revealing admixture to be an almost universal force shaping human populations.

The Origin of “Liberalism.” By Daniel B. Klein.

The Origin of “Liberalism.” By Daniel B. Klein. The Atlantic, February 13, 2014.

Dan Klein: The emergence of “liberal” as a political term. Lecture in Stockholm, January 8, 2014. Video. Ratioforskning, January 16, 2014. YouTube.

Is Hillary Clinton Too Old to Run? By Charlie Cook.

Is Hillary Clinton Too Old to Run? By Charlie Cook. National Journal, February 14, 2014.

Four Reasons Why Israel Must Be Recognized As a Jewish State. By Ari Shavit.

Four reasons why Israel must be recognized as a Jewish state. By Ari Shavit. Haaretz, February 13, 2014.

Shavit:

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan thinks the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is nonsense. But it is not nonsense – it is the most natural and justified demand imaginable. For four different reasons we must support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who are placing the demand at the top of the diplomatic agenda.

 

The first reason: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not start in 1967 and does not revolve around the occupation and the settlements. It is a deep national-religious-cultural-social conflict, whose foundation is blindness. For decades Zionism refused to see the Palestinian people and in doing so refused to recognize its right to establish a Palestinian state. To this day the Palestinian national movement refuses to see the Jewish people and recognize in this way its right to a Jewish state. This double and continuing blindness is what ignited the 100-year war between us and them. That is why, in order to end this war, we must recognize their nationalism and their state, and they must recognize our nationalism and our state. Just as peace is impossible without a Palestinian state, peace is impossible without a Jewish state.

 

The second reason: The great achievement of the Oslo Accords was in their bringing the Israelis to recognize the fact that there is a Palestinian people in the land of Israel with legitimate rights. The great achievement of the Camp David peace summit was in Israel recognizing the need to establish a Palestinian state. The cumulative result of Oslo and Camp David was a revolution in Israel. The people living in Zion finally saw that there is another people in this land and admitted that it is entitled to a different state, which will express its right to self-determination. Thus, there is no reason that the people residing in Palestine cannot open its eyes finally and see that there is another people in the land, and that it is entitled to a different country that will express its right to self-determination. Reciprocity is not a sin. Symmetry is not a war crime. Those who believe the Israelis and Palestinians are equal have a moral obligation to demand from the Palestinians exactly what they demand from the Israelis.

 

The third reason: The Palestinians will not give up on the demand for the right of return. The trauma of the Nakba is their foundational trauma, and the experience of the refugees is the experience that molded them, and there is no Palestinian leader who will declare that the Palestinians will never return to the cities and villages they lost in 1948. If there is any solution at all to the refugee problem, it will be a superficial and insignificant one. But because it is actually impossible to demand from the Palestinians that they change their spots and convert their identity, it is required to demand they recognize this: that the Jewish people is a people of this land, and it did not arrive here from Mars. It is necessary to demand of them to admit that the Jewish people has a history of its own and a tragedy of its own and its own justification. The Palestinians must concede that the Jews are not colonialists but legal neighbors. There will not be peace if the children growing up in the Deheisheh refugee camp will not know that the country across the border is a legitimate Jewish state of a true Jewish people, whom they are decreed to live with. It is those who give up on the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state who are actually giving up on peace.

 

The fourth reason: An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is to a great extent a one-sided agreement in which Israel gives and the Palestinians receive. Only the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would turn the longed-for agreement into a two-sided one. While Israel will transfer concrete assets to its neighbor, territory and rights, the Palestinians will give the only gift they are capable of giving: legitimacy.

 

Meir Dagan is an Israeli due a great amount of respect. His biography is a heroic one of “by the rights of power.” But peace is not made by the right of power but by the power of right. Without the Palestinians’ explicit recognition of our name, identity and rights, there will not be peace.

Judah Magnes to Chaim Weizmann on His Rejection of Political Zionism.

Judah Magnes to Chaim Weizmann, September 7, 1929. Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes. Edited by Arthur Goren. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 276-278. Also here.

Toward Peace in Palestine. By Judah L. Magnes. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 2 (January 1943).

J. L. Magnes and the Promotion of Bi-Nationalism in Palestine. By Rory Miller. The Jewish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 48, Nos. 1-2 (2006). Also here.

The Binationalist. By Daniel P. Kotzin. Journal of Transnational American Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2012). Also here.

Judah L. Magnes: A Pacifist Leader Who Was More Prophet Than Politician. By Laurence Zuckerman. The Jewish Daily Forward, January 5, 2011.

Binationalism and the sad story of Judah Magnes. By Jim Denham. Shiraz Socialist, May 7, 2012. Includes Benny Morris’s discussion of Magnes from One State, Two States, pp. 50-56.


Magnes:

To Chaim Weizmann

 

London

 

Zurich, September 7, 1929

 

Dear Dr. Weizmann,

 

You asked me over the telephone last night to write you my views on the present situation. I wanted to have a long talk with you, and for that reason had been trying to get in touch with you for several days. Writing is a poor substitute for an oral exchange of opinions, and I shall try to be brief.

 

I think that the time has come when the Jewish policy as to Palestine must be very clear, and that now only one of two policies is possible. Either the logical policy outlined by Jabotinsky in a letter in the Times which came today, basing our Jewish life in Palestine on militarism and imperialism; or a pacific policy that treats as entirely secondary such things as a “Jewish State” or a Jewish majority, or even “The Jewish National Home,” and as primary the development of a Jewish spiritual, educational, moral and religious center in Palestine. The first policy has to deal primarily with politics, governments, declarations, propaganda and bayonets, and only secondarily with the Jews, and last of all with the Arabs; whereas the pacific policy has to deal first of all with the Jews, and then with the Arabs, and only incidentally with governments and all the rest.

 

The imperialist, military and political policy is based upon mass immigration of Jews and the creation (forcible if necessary) of a Jewish majority, no matter how much this oppresses the Arabs meanwhile, or deprives them of their rights. In this kind of policy the end always justifies the means. The policy, on the other hand, of developing a Jewish spiritual Center does not depend upon mass immigration, a Jewish majority, a Jewish State, or upon depriving the Arabs (or the Jews) of their political rights for a generation or a day; but on the contrary, is desirous of having Palestine become a country of two nations and three religions, all of them having equal rights and none of them having special privileges; a country where nationalism is but the basis of internationalism, where the population is pacifistic and disarmed—in short, the Holy Land.

 

The one policy may be termed that of militarist, imperialist, political Zionism; the other that of pacific, international, spiritual Zionism; and if some authorities will not choose to call the latter idea Zionism, then let it be called the Love of Zion, or the Return to Zion, or any other name that you will.

 

We have been toying with the words “Jewish State,” “majority,” “Jewish Palestine,” “politics,” “Balfour Declaration,” etc., long enough. It is time that we came down to realities. We have passed resolutions concerning cooperation with the Arabs, but we have done very little seriously to carry them out.

 

I do not say that this is easy of achievement nor do I absolutely know that it is possible. The Palestine Arabs are unhappily still half savage, and their leaders are almost all small men. But this policy of cooperation is certainly more possible and more hopeful of achievement than building up a Jewish Home (National or otherwise) on bayonets and oppression. Moreover, a Jewish Home in Palestine built up on bayonets and oppression is not worth having, even though it succeed, whereas the very attempt to build it up peacefully, cooperatively, with understanding, education, and good will, is worth a great deal, even though the attempt should fail.

 

The question is, do we want to conquer Palestine now as Joshua did in his day—with fire and sword? Or do we want to take cognizance of Jewish religious development since Joshua—our Prophets, Psalmists and Rabbis, and repeat the words: “Not by might, and not by violence, but by my spirit, saith the Lord.” The question is, can any country be entered, colonized, and built up pacifistically, and can we Jews do that in the Holy Land? If we can not (and I do not say that we can rise to these heights), I for my part have lost half my interest in the enterprise. If we can not even attempt this, I should much rather see this eternal people without such a “National Home,” with the wanderer’s staff in hand and forming new ghettos among the peoples of the world.

 

As you know, these are not new views on my part. I was read out of the Zionist Organization of America in 1915 because among other things, I contended that the Jews should ask for no special privileges in Palestine, but should be content with equal rights. When the Balfour Declaration was issued and the Mandate signed, I did not rejoice. I wrote two modest newspaper articles and delivered a speech (which is printed) in the sense of the views as given above. When you and Felix Warburg and I were discussing matters in Palestine, you with your usual keenness referred to me as believing Zionist policy was altogether too political. I have, as you also know, done what little I could to help bring about a united front for Palestine ever since the beginning, and I must confess that I had hoped that the non-Zionist members of the Agency might give the whole movement a non-political, non-imperialist turn. But your great persuasiveness has carried them with you on the political issues also, and it was mainly on this account that I could not accept the invitation to participate in the Agency. It is also for this reason that I have resolutely tried to keep the University entirely distinct from the political organization.

 

All these years I have kept silent, not wishing to obtrude what appeared to me my minority views, and I had thought that by devoting myself wholly and without deflection to the University, I could make a contribution to my kind of Zionism. But I cannot keep silent for Zion’s sake in these tragic days, and I want to do what little I can to give voice to the views to which I have been trying hitherto to give expression through work alone.

 

You said you would want to convey my views to the meeting of the Actions Committee, and you are at liberty to read them this letter if you think it worthwhile.

 

I am sending a copy of this letter to Felix Warburg.

 

I sympathize with you in the fearful burden you now have to bear, and I can only pray that you may be led to walk in the right path.

 

Yours truly, JLM

Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Talented Leading Man Exits. By Ben Shapiro.

A Talented Leading Man Exits. By Ben Shapiro. National Review Online, February 2, 2014.

Ben Shapiro Actually Blames Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Death on “Broken Leftist Culture.” By Matt Wilstein. Mediaite, February 3, 2014.

SodaStream and Scarlett Johansson: Three Comments. By Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch.

SodaStream and Scarlett Johansson: Three Comments. By Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch. The Huffington Post, February 10, 2014.

Hirsch:

Three comments on SodaStream and Scarlett Johansson:

 

One:

Scarlett Johansson has given a clinic on how to stand up to bullies.

 

The world is filled with people who preach love but are full of hate. They project humility but are full of arrogance. They are consumed with passionate intensity – but for the wrong things. They prostitute words and pervert values. They say they are for peace, but their actions promote war.

 

Roger Waters, the legendary Pink Floyd rocker, criticized Johansson for giving him the wrong impression that she believed in truth, human rights and the law of love. They are Comfortably Numb to truth, human rights and the law of love. Under the guise of tolerance and humaneness many of them are really the most intolerant of people. Under the guise of liberalism many of them are really the most illiberal preachers of a fundamentalist philosophy.

 

And Scarlett Johansson showed the proper response to these folks. When Oxfam wagged its big moral finger at their global good-will ambassador, warning Johansson that Oxfam opposes trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank and that she should reconsider her relationship with SodaStream if she knows what’s good for her, it was Johansson who reconsidered her relationship with Oxfam. In a rather stunning turn of events, it was she who terminated the relationship, citing “a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.”

 

In effect, this Scarlett said to Oxfam: “Frankly, I don’t give a damn.” What a relief; what an inspiration.

 

Two:

Boycotts of Israel are absurd.

 

BDS (Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions) activist, Omar Barghouti, makes no attempt to hide the true objective. As he asserts: “The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were displaced and dispossessed in 1948.”

 

Leave aside that the Palestinians are the only group in the world whose refugee status is transmitted automatically to subsequent generations – that the grandchild of a Palestinian refugee who might be a native-born accomplished and wealthy citizen in any country in the world – can, nonetheless, be considered a refugee by the United Nations: under that definition millions of Americans whose grandparents escaped Europe could still be considered refugees;

 

Leave aside that the reason many Palestinians became refugees in the first place was that the Palestinian Arabs joined surrounding Arab states in a war of extermination against the infant State of Israel in 1948, a war that they lost; leave aside that Israel came into possession of the West Bank in the first place because of a war of extermination that three Arab states launched against Israel in 1967 and lost;

 

Leave aside that the PLO launched a vicious war against Israeli civilians in the heart of Israel that killed a thousand and maimed ten thousand – and lost – and as a result of that – the security barrier and other security measures were implemented; leave aside that they launched this war after rejecting President Clinton's Camp David proposals, accepted by Israel – and that they rejected two additional peace proposals primarily because they refuse to sign an end-of-conflict provision that would settle all outstanding claims against Israel once and for all; leave aside that every day Palestinians try to inflict terror on Israel and that the reason they don't succeed is Israeli security measures;

 

Leave aside that Omar Barghouti, himself, is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and the university resisted a world wide petition to expel him, upholding the values of free thought and speech, awarding him a Masters degree in philosophy;

 

Leave all that aside: the return of millions of Palestinians to Israel is code for ending the State of Israel. It is anti-Israel venom wrapped in the honey of human rights rhetoric.

 

Those who support boycotting Israel are often blinded by hatred. They single out Israel as the world's worst oppressor. They do it to delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world. As a small country surrounded by enemies and dependent on international trade, Israel is vulnerable to this pressure and Israel haters know this.

 

A hundred miles from the SodaStream factory there are millions of Syrian Arab Muslim refugees; over a hundred thousand have already been killed. If you are a humanitarian worker where would you advise Palestinians that they are better off – Aleppo, Homs, Damascus, Cairo, Beirut, Riyadh, Tehran – or Ramallah?

 

None of this implies that Israel cannot do more to bring about a two-state solution; it does not excuse Israeli wrongdoings. But frankly, the Palestinians, too, have done many wrongs.

 

And where is the context? Where is the proportionality? The Middle East is burning with the fires of anti-Western, anti-democratic anti-humanitarian savagery, torture and anarchy and SodaStream is the cause of all evil in the world and the primary preoccupation of those who supposedly advocate for truth, human rights and the law of love?

 

How wonderful it is to sit in London and to boycott Israel, the only reliable Western ally left in the Middle East. Oh what feelings of self-satisfaction and high principle. There is no need to think about Palestinian excesses and Palestinian incitement.

 

Things might look a bit different from Sdereot, but never mind. There are no good Israelis and there are no legitimate Israeli concerns, so what do I care if Israeli children cannot go to school because they are fired upon indiscriminately by Palestinian terrorists? It is their own fault. Israel was born in original sin and therefore, by definition, is the problem of every problem.

 

Three:

Partial boycotts are boycotts.

 

Oxfam’s official position is that it is not in favor of boycotting Israel (despite troubling reports that it is funding BDS organizations), only Israeli products that have even the smallest connection to the West Bank. Scarlett Johansson pointed out the hypocrisy of this position. She did not distinguish between partial boycotts and BDS. She called it for what it is: A partial boycott is a boycott.

 

To advocate for a policy of partial boycott is to speak the language of boycott. It is to place yourself with those who call for boycotting all of Israel. It is to give aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies. It is to legitimate the delegitimizers. It also takes the Palestinians off the hook, as if they are merely potted plants and not independent actors who could end this struggle quickly if they really wanted to.

 

Partial boycotts are also unworkable in practice. It is impossible to limit such a boycott to products beyond the Green Line. More importantly, it often undermines those who are in favor of compromise and coexistence – the very thing that the partial boycotters say they want.

 

SodaStream is a perfect example. Its main manufacturing plant is in Maaleh Adumim, which under any conceivable arrangement will remain within the permanent borders of Israel. SodaStream employs there approximately a thousand people. Five hundred of them are Palestinians who receive equal benefits and equal pay. There is a mosque on the premise.

 

The Palestinian workers, themselves, do not want SodaStream boycotted. What is Oxfam’s solution: To close down the factory and send five hundred well-paid Palestinians into unemployment and poverty? If SodaStream were to pick up and relocate would this would further the interests of the Palestinian workers, and better promote coexistence and peace?

 

What should we who believe in truth, human rights and love be doing? We should continue to support and advocate for a two state solution. We should continue to promote coexistence. We should continue to support those in Israeli society who believe in territorial compromise and continue to urge them to make the necessary compromises for peace. We should continue to support those in the Palestinian community who believe in territorial compromise and continue to urge them to make the necessary compromises for peace.

 

If you own an I-Phone made in China; if you wear high fashion made in Asian sweat shops; if your home is heated with oil from Russia or the Persian Gulf, you may want to reconsider these purchases first. They affect millions more people than SodaStream.

 

And you may also want to reconsider the next contribution to Oxfam.

Asking About the Palestinian Culture of War. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Asking About the Palestinian Culture of War. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 12, 2014.

Tobin:

Almost all of the focus in the mainstream media on the Middle East peace process tends to be on the decision taken by only one of the parties involved in the negotiations. The perennial question from pundits and even veteran kibitzers like the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman is whether or not the Israelis are ready to take risks in order to achieve peace. That was the conceit of his latest column, “Israel’s Big Question,” and if it seemed familiar to readers, it was no accident. Friedman has been writing the same column for decades in which he asks Israelis whether they will leave the West Bank in order to retain both the Jewish and democratic identities of their nation. If they don’t, and Secretary of State John Kerry’s initiative fails, Israel’s doom is, he says, sealed.

 

There are two problems with his reasoning and they are the same that apply to every other stale Friedman article on the subject that has been published since the Clinton administration. One is that Israel has already tried to trade land for the promise of peace and failed. The Palestinians turned down three offers of statehood in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem. And there is every indication that they will turn down a fourth offer of up to 90 percent of the West Bank that is being mulled by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. Israelis have made the decision to take risks and make peace several times in the last 20 years and seem prepared to do it again if real peace—which means the end of the conflict rather than merely a pause in it—is on the table.

 

But the part of the equation that Friedman and the rest of the foreign-policy establishment always ignore is whether the Palestinians are ready to make peace. They’ve made it clear they won’t recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn and won’t give up the “right of return” for the 1948 refugees. But Friedman’s assumption—as well as that of many of Israel’s critics—is that if the Israelis are sufficiently forthcoming those problems will disappear. Instead, they should be asking what it is about the political culture of the Palestinians that makes such intransigence not merely possible but inevitable. The answer comes in two separate stories that touch on what it is that both the PA’s negotiators and Hamas believe. Both make for instructive reading for those who treat the question of peace as one that is solely to be decided by the Israelis.

 

In Gaza, the Hamas government of the strip has apparently rejected the textbooks provided for schools by UNRWA, the United Nations agency that serves Palestinian refugees and their descendants. UNRWA has hired Hamas terrorists as staffers and has been rightly accused of helping to perpetuate the conflict by not seeking to resettle refugees so as to keep them in camps as props in the long Arab war against Israel. But while the textbooks they’ve published for Gaza schools apparently accept the Palestinian narrative of victimization and the illegitimacy of Israel, they are also seeking to encourage non-violence. The Hamas education ministry is particularly angry since the books emphasize the examples of peaceful protests. As the Times of Israel reports, Education Minister Mu’tasim Al-Minawi had the following objections:

The vast majority of examples [in the books] refer to [Mahatma] Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Helen Suzman, the Soweto Uprising, the Magna Carta and Apartheid, even though Islamic-Arab-Palestinian alternatives exist,” Al-Minawi said. “There are many models which could be used which are closer to the students’ understanding.”

 

But perhaps worst of all, the books focused on “peaceful resistance as the only way of achieving freedom and independence.” The entire eighth grade curriculum, Al-Minawi lamented, is “not dedicated to human rights but to domesticate the psyche of the Palestinian pupil, fostering negative feelings toward armed resistance.”

This tells us that Hamas is educating the children of Gaza not just to hate Israel and Jews but also to reject the Western frame of reference about human rights, even in the context of support for anti-Israel activism, which was clearly the intention of the UNRWA curriculum.

 

Also instructive is the mini-controversy inspired by Saeb Erekat, the man who represents the Palestinians in peace talks with the Israelis. Earlier this month at the Munich Security Conference, Erekat told his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni that asking him to recognize the Jewish state was impossible since it would force the Palestinians “to change their narrative” about their history. Not satisfied with that, he claimed that his family—and the rest of the Palestinians—has a prior claim over the land to the Jews since they are descended from the biblical Canaanites and were there when Joshua Bin Nun “burned my hometown Jericho.”

 

The patent absurdity of this claim is such that even anti-Israeli academics have been slow to pick it up. Suffice it to say that there is no evidence that Palestinian Arabs have any connection with the inhabitants of the country prior to the Arab conquest that occurred in the seventh century C.E.

 

This can be dismissed as irrelevant to the problems of Israelis and Palestinians today. Like the debate about whether a separate Palestinian Arab identity is a 20th century invention, it is a moot point. Like it or not, the Jews returned to the land and aren’t leaving. By the same token there are millions of Arabs there who call themselves Palestinians and their aspirations must also be taken into account if the conflict is ever to be ended.

 

But if even Erekat—whom we are told by the media and the U.S. government is a man of peace—is determined to cling to a historical narrative that is based in rejection of Jewish rights to any part of the country, then what hope is there for peace?

 

Both Fatah and Hamas continue to educate their peoples in a culture that is not only steeped in hatred of Jews and Israel but in a worldview in which the rejection of Zionism is integral to Palestinian identity. The question Kerry, Friedman, and others who continue to hound Israelis to do what they have already tried several times to do—make peace—should be asking is when will the Palestinians give up their culture of hate and embrace one that would give peace a chance? Both the Hamas education ministry and Erekat show us that that such a decision is nowhere in sight.

The B.D.S. Threat. By Roger Cohen.

The B.D.S. Threat. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, February 10, 2014.

Roger Cohen’s Zionist Take on BDS. By Charles H. Manekin. The Magnes Zionist, February 10, 2014.

NY Times’ Roger Cohen “is a bigot, not a liberal,” says Omar Barghouti. By Ali Abunimah. The Electronic Intifada, February 11, 2014.

West Bank Boycott: A Political Act or Prejudice? By Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, February 11, 2014.

Omar Barghouti, who helped found the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005, said activists had every right to pick their causes and where to focus their energy.

 

“He can say anything he wishes, but immoral? Resistance to his immoral policies can never be immoral,” Mr. Barghouti said of Mr. Netanyahu. “The litmus test is are you boycotting a group of people based on their identity, or are you boycotting something — an act, a company, a business — that you disagree with.”

NYT Reporter Treats Israeli Boycott as Immoral and Anti-Semitic, Reminiscent of Nazis. By Philip Weiss. Global Research, February 12, 2014. Also at Mondoweiss.

BDS on a Roll? Not So Fast. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, February 12, 2014.

Cutting through the BDS BS. By David Gerstman. Legal Insurrection, February 14, 2014.

NY Times plays Sympathy for the BDS. By David Gerstman. Legal Insurrection, February 9, 2014.

Boycott supporters plead for Universities to ease pressure on American Studies Association. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, February 7, 2014.

Jacobson:

This is just more of ASA and the boycotters refusing to accept that American civil society rejects its anti-Israel boycott. Playing victim is just a way of trying to turn the debate around.

John Kerry’s loose lips may sink peace ship. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, February 6, 2014.

With All the Boycott Israel Talk, What Is BDS? By Marc Tracy. The New Republic, February 2, 2014.

Tracy:

The best argument for BDS is that it is a response to the occupation that originated in Palestinian civil society and is physically nonviolent. (This distinguishes it from a religious liberation, sometimes-violent movement such as that espoused by Hamas, which governs Gaza.) The best argument against it is that, at best, BDS is not clear about what its endgame is, and at worst its endgame would go well beyond ending the occupation and toward ending Israel itself—something supporters of a two-state solution should obviously want to avoid.

 

“BDS does not take any position on the political outcome or resolution of the question of Palestine,” Barghouti told me. Barghouti said he personally supports a single democratic state. That evinces a keen understanding of the movement, whose position on refugees almost forces it to oppose the continued existence of the Jewish homeland.

 

BDS is tied inextricably to the demand for the right of return for the roughly five million Palestinian refugees, most of whom descend from those created in and around 1948. Barghouti confirmed this to me, writing, “The BDS movement upholds the basic rights of all Palestinians, including the right of return.” Or, as he put it in one interview, “‘If the occupation ends, would that end your call for BDS?’ No, it wouldn’t. . . . The majority of the Palestinian people are not suffering from occupation, they are suffering from denial of their right to come back home.”

 

Practically, the return of all Palestinian refugees would almost certainly spell the end of the Zionist project. As prominent liberal Zionist Gershom Gorenberg has explained, “Implemented without restriction, [the right of return] would make a two-state solution meaningless, since Palestinians would reclaim property in West Jerusalem and throughout Israel, creating a new class of displaced Jews in a bi-national state. (When peace negotiators on either side are realistic, they dicker about what limited number of Palestinians would return to Israel, in a symbolic acknowledgment of the Palestinian tragedy.)” Similarly, the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now acknowledges that the Palestinians would “agree to find solutions for the Palestinian refugee issue largely outside the borders of the state of Israel” as part of a series of tough compromises by both sides on the path to a two-state solution. It is telling that both APN (the sister organization of a prominent left-wing Israeli group) and J Street are American liberal Zionist organizations that support a two-state solution and oppose BDS, while the more left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace supports BDS and is officially agnostic on whether there should be two or one states.

Russia’s Right Turn. By William S. Lind.

Russia’s Right Turn. By William S. Lind. The American Conservative, February 11, 2014. From the January/February 2014 issue. Also here.

What is the Real BDS Endgame? The Elimination of Israel. By Ehud Rosen.

What is the Real BDS Endgame? The Elimination of Israel. By Ehud Rosen. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, February 12, 2014.

The Boycott Industry: Background on BDS Campaigns. NGO Monitor, February 3, 2014.

BDS is a long term project with radically transformative potential. By Ahmed Moor. Mondoweiss, April 22, 2010.

Moor:

Ok fine. So BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state. But can’t I see the value in reaching across the aisle, so to speak? The movement may be burgeoning but remains too small. Why shouldn’t we indulge in ad hoc partnerships to get things done? Richard Silverstein, Richard Goldstone, and many other self-proclaimed Zionists have done an immeasurably positive amount of work in skinning the Zionist cat (That’s a deliberate analogy. I don’t kid myself about how difficult it must be for a Jewish person to criticize the Zionist state), shouldn’t they be asked to join the BDS movement?

 

To be sure, I’m not dogmatically against cooperating with people whose views I find objectionable. If it came down to it, I’d be happy to work with the racist up the street to get the city to fix a neighborhood pothole.

 

Likewise, I’d work with a liberal Zionist to break the Zionist siege of Gaza, whose people really have no use for protracted ideological jockeying. There is an immediacy there that demands action from any quarter.

 

But I view the BDS movement as a long-term project with radically transformative potential. I believe that the ultimate success of the BDS movement will be coincident with the ultimate success of the Palestinian enfranchisement and equal rights movement. In other words, BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown.

 

This belief grows directly from the conviction that nothing resembling the ‘two-state solution’ will ever come into being. Ending the occupation doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t mean upending the Jewish state itself. That’s because, as Yair Wallach writes, “The occupation appears increasingly as a de-facto permanent feature of the Israeli system of government, rather than as a set of temporary policies and security measures. And inevitably, the occupation involves the disenfranchisement and denial of collective political rights for the Palestinians.”

 

Therefore the success of the BDS movement is tied directly to our success in humanizing Palestinians and discrediting Zionism as a legitimate way of regarding the world.

Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination. By Henry Giroux.

Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination. By Henry Giroux. Tikkun, February 11, 2014.

Good Riddance to Sykes-Picot. By Selim Can Sazak.

Good Riddance to Sykes-Picot. By Selim Can Sazak. The National Interest, February 12, 2014.

Secretary ScarJo. by Bret Stephens.

Secretary ScarJo. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2014.

Demonizing Israel; Demonizing ScarJo. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, January 28, 2014. With related articles and video.


Stephens:

Last month the Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic blew himself up as he tried to open an old booby-trapped embassy safe. When police arrived on the scene, they discovered a cache of unregistered weapons in violation of international law. Surprise.

 

Then the real shocker: After prevaricating for a couple of weeks, the Palestinian government apologized to the Czechs and promised, according to news accounts, “to take measures to prevent such incidents in the future.”

 

As far as I know, this is only the second time the Palestinians have officially apologized for anything, ever. The first time, in 1999, Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian children. Hillary Clinton was there. Palestinian officialdom mumbled its regrets.

 

In other words, no apology for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. No apology for the 1973 murder of Cleo Noel, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his deputy, George Moore. No apology for the 1974 massacre of 25 Israelis, including 22 schoolchildren, in Ma’alot. No apology for the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, where 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were killed.

 

And so on and on—straight to the present. In December, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas posthumously bestowed the “Star of Honor” on Abu Jihad, the mastermind of the Coastal Road attack, as “the model of a true fighter and devoted leader.” Dalal Mughrabi, the Palestinian woman who led the attack itself, had a square named after her in 2011. In August, Mr. Abbas gave a hero’s welcome to Palestinian murderers released from Israeli jails as a goodwill gesture. And Yasser Arafat, who personally ordered the killing of Noel and Moore, is the Palestinian patron saint.

 

I mention all this as background to two related recent debates. Late last month Scarlett Johansson resigned her role as an Oxfam “Global Ambassador” after the antipoverty group condemned the actress for becoming a pitchwoman for the Israeli company  SodaStream. Oxfam wants to boycott Israeli goods made—as SodaStream’s are—inside the West Bank; Ms. Johansson disagrees, citing “a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement.”

 

The second debate followed rambling comments on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from John Kerry at this month’s Munich Security Conference. Israel, he warned, faced a parade of horribles if talks failed. “For Israel there's an increasing delegitimization campaign that’s been building up,” he said. “People are very sensitive to it. There are talks of boycotts and other kinds of things.”

 

So here is the secretary of state talking about the effort to boycott Israel not as an affront to the United States and an outrage to decency but as a tide he is powerless to stop and that anyway should get Israel to change its stiff-necked ways. A Secretary of State Johansson would have shown more courage and presence of mind than that.

 

But Mr. Kerry’s failure goes deeper. How is it that Mr. Abbas’s glorification of terrorists living and dead earns no rebuke from Mr. Kerry, nor apparently any doubts about the sincerity of Palestinian intentions? Why is it that only Israel faces the prospect of a boycott? When was the last time the U.S., much less the Europeans, threatened to impose penalties on Palestinians for diplomatic or moral misbehavior?

 

In 2011 the Palestinians defied the U.S. by making a bid for statehood at the U.N.; then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice warned there would be “adverse negative consequences” for the Palestinians. Of course there were none, and the administration fought behind the scenes to make sure there wouldn’t be any. Type the words “Kerry condemns Abbas” or “Kerry condemns Palestinians” into a Web search and you’ll get that rare Google event: “No results found.”

 

No wonder one Israeli government minister after another has taken to calling the secretary “insufferable,” “messianic” and “obsessive”—and that’s just what they say in public. The State Department has reacted indignantly to these gibes, but this is coming from the administration that likes to speak of the virtues of candor between friends. Its idea of candor is all one-way and all one-sided.

 

This is a bad basis for peace. If one expects nothing of Palestinians then they will be forgiven for everything. If one expects everything of Israel then it will be forgiven for nothing, putting the country to a perpetual moral test it will always somehow fail and that can only energize the boycott enthusiasts. It all but goes without saying that the ultimate objective of the BDS movement isn’t to “end the occupation” but to end the Jewish state. Anyone who joins that movement, or flirts with it, is furthering the objective, wittingly or not. One useful function of an American diplomat is to warn a group like Oxfam that it is playing with moral fire.

 

Instead, the job was left to Ms. Johansson. How wonderfully commendable. “One gorgeous actress with courage makes a majority,” said Andrew Jackson—or something like that. We could do worse with such a person at State.

Israel’s Big Question. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Israel’s Big Question. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, February 11, 2014.

Israel May Pay for Tolerance It Shows to Killers. By Alan Howe.

Israel may pay for tolerance it shows to killers. By Alan Howe. Herald Sun, February 10, 2014.

Banking While Russian. By Masha Gessen.

Banking While Russian. By Masha Gessen. New York Times, February 11, 2014.