Article Archives

Festival of Lights

Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday whose Hebrew dates are 25 Kislev - 2 Tevet, begins this year on the evening of December 11. It commemorates an ancient victory at once military, political, social, and religious. Militarily, the victory, which took place in Judea in 165 B.C.E., saw the routing of the forces of the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes by a rebel Jewish army under the leadership of Judah Maccabee. Politically, it ushered in a prolonged period of independent Jewish rule under the Hasmonean dynasty. Socially, it betokened the triumph of traditionalist Jews over the assimilating Hellenizers in their midst. Religiously,...

Asymmetric Lawfare

The Goldstone Report on Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on November 5, has taken on a life of its own in the court of world public opinion. Increasingly, both its enthusiasts and its detractors see it as a weapon, even more potent than the UN’s Zionism-Racism resolution of November 1975, in a campaign to render illegitimate the very existence of the state of Israel. So loud has the drumbeat over the Report become, and so widening its repercussions, that an entire website—cited in the first item below—is needed to collect the facts and to...

Hitler’s Last Laugh?

Loving it or hating it -- or both -- reviewers of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds have seemed most at ease deconstructing its artful camerawork or tracking its profuse references to other movies. Better that, perhaps, than grappling with the theme: a fairy-tale transvaluation of Nazi villains into the hapless victims of brutally avenging American Jewish soldiers, played largely for jokes and gore. According to one report, German audiences at sold-out screenings have taken the movie in the spirit of an uproarious if grisly entertainment. American critics, like the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor or Manohla Dargis in the New York...