Category Archives: A Wondering Jew

What Arab Holocaust-Deniers Should Learn from Mandela

Haganah fighters take aim: Survivors of the camps arriving in Israel in 1948 having been denied anywhere else to go weren’t going to see the war as anything but a matter of physical survival No, this is not another one … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 86 Comments

In Nuevo Jork, Jew Doesn’t Always Mean Jew

Long live Juan Epstein, sitcom land’s archetypal Jewish Latino! “Shut up! Shut up!” The petulant and rather camp fellow with the long hair (whose tone suggested to me that he may be an off-duty drag queen) and whose superior attitude … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew, New York Moments | 10 Comments

Borat’s Not Funny

Most of the discussion about Borat and anti-Semitism misses the point. The ADL wonders if he’s not playing a dangerous game since “not everyone will get the joke.” But they may be missing the point: The prejudice that Borat is … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 53 Comments

Children of a Lesser God?

Birth pangs of a New Middle East? Imagine, on September 12 2001, Condoleezza Rice had jetted in to town to tell New Yorkers that the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and the two thousand lives lost there represented … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 66 Comments

Letter from San Quentin

Some months ago, I posted a piece titled “Are Jews White” that used the case of Stephen Liebb, a Jewish convict in San Quentin who is seeking to have himself racially reclassified from “White” to “Other,” to explore the question … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 14 Comments

Is This Zionism or Anti-Semitism?

What would you call a politician who said that the “national homeland” of French or American or Argentinian Jews was not France or the U.S. or Argentina, implying that they were properly part of another nation with its own homeland … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 9 Comments

How Jewish is Israel?

Israel is still largely shaped by the unresolved trauma of its birth My favorite Israeli newspaper Haaretz (the best paper in the Middle East, along with Lebanon’s Daily Star) asked me to contribute to a debate in their pages on … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 6 Comments

As the Rebbe Goes, So Goes Hamas

Satmar Hasidim bury Rabbi Teitelbaum in Williamsburg, Brooklyn The Hamas-led Palestinian government is facing all manner of economic and political sanctions because of its refusal to “recognize” Israel’s right to exist. (There’s an absurd quality to this discussion, both because … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 11 Comments

Toasting God’s Terrorism and Other Passover Themes

1. Passover is About Liberation; Not Simply About Jews In that hungry eternity of singing and praying in an alien tongue that spanned from your first taste of haroset on matzoh to the arrival of the matzoh ball soup, you … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 21 Comments

More Pro-Israel Than the Israelis

The news that Israeli officials are alarmed that the Israel lobby in the U.S. is going overboard in its response to the Hamas victory should come as no surprise. Ever since I first arrived here, I’ve been struck by the … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 14 Comments