It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12. “These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Continue Reading...

"A specter is haunting the world — the specter of American isolation.  Signs of a retrenchment start with Congress’ reluctance to authorize additional military assistance for Ukraine to defend it from a revanchist Russia. An aid bill finally made it to Biden’s desk for a signature this week, but it took the GOP-led House months to pass their version of the legislation, with many Republican leaders claiming the U.S. should focus instead on Continue Reading...

"LAST NOVEMBER, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) awarded Donald Trump its highest honor, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion. Nine days later, the former president dined with two of America’s most prominent antisemites, rapper Kanye West and white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes. Noting the proximity of the two events, The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked ZOA president Morton Klein an uncomfortable Continue Reading...

"It’s an Oscar tradition: a serious political speech pierces the bubble of glamour and self-congratulation. Warring responses ensue. Some proclaim the speech an example of artists at their culture-shifting best; others an egotistical usurpation of an otherwise celebratory night. Then everyone moves on. Yet I suspect that the impact of Jonathan Glazer’s time-stopping speech at last Sunday’s Academy Awards will be significantly more lasting, with Continue Reading...

"My father was something of a lapsed Jew. An ardent atheist, he thought all religion, including Judaism, was a dangerous anachronism. He couldn’t speak a lick of Yiddish, unlike his Russian-born father, and disliked most Kosher food. Borscht Belt humor was lost on him . . . " Continue Reading...

At a critical moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and, after presenting them with evidence of Russian tampering, asked that they uniformly condemn it.  GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others refused.  The evidence just wasn't there.  But it was.  And many of the same lawmakers eagerly condemned Hillary Clinton's perceived misdeed, as reported by the FBI.  So much for Continue Reading...

Liberal democracy faces grave dangers, most significantly, perhaps, from rapacious capitalism that unremittingly concentrates wealth.  Putin is another threat.  After consolidating his own power in Russia, he has stepped up a campaign against liberalism abroad, first in Russia's "near abroad" in Eastern Europe, and now the US.  Is Trump his latest trophy? Continue Reading...

For eight years, the GOP employed strategic obstructionism to stymie Obama's mildly progressive agenda, even when his proposals, such as the Affordable Care Act or the stimulus, closely aligned with their own.  Putting country first?  Nope.  This was pure partisanship in the service of partisanship.  And it worked! Continue Reading...

Is the so-called "liberal," "elite" media really as cosseted and cloistered as its critics suggest?  Actually, yes.  Like the Democracy Party, the media - defined here as the mainstream variety - largely comprises well-educated, coastal types who have little in common (and often disdain) middle-America, working class whites.  Little wonder it has earned the latter's ire. Continue Reading...

What happens when the purported party of the working class abandons its proletarian roots, while the other major party pushes crazed conspiracy theories, paranoia, and racism as an obfuscatory tactic to conceal its plutocratic agenda?  A virulent populism that threatens the republic.  Whose to blame for Trump?  We all are. Continue Reading...

How did a clownish buffoon rise from obscurity to lead one of the world's great civilizations that produced soaring art and culture?  Historians have been asking the question since the demise of the Third Reich.  Hitler confounds.  Here are some clues: cunning exploitation of nativist fears, exploitation of irresistible propaganda, and "bottomless mendacity."  Found familiar.  It should. Continue Reading...

If you can judge a man by the company keeps, then Donald Trump belongs in one of hell's inner sanctums given his longtime friendship with a truly evil man, Roy Cohn, a former acolyte of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy and amoral legal rogue.  Birds of feather fly together. Continue Reading...

Welcome to the modern Orwellian workplace, replete with bogus paeans to changing the world and congratulatory parties for being cashiered.  Labor has evolved over the decades and centuries, to be sure, but some thing never change.  Fundamentally, the worker is an expendable drone who must be plied with bogus moral-boosting empty gestures to hide that fiction.  The solution: be a trust fund baby and avoid peonage entirely. Continue Reading...

Why do they hate us?  That was the question de jour after 9/11.  A host of answers proffered relate to the West's many misdeeds in the Middle East: colonial machinations, shameless support for brutal regimes, brutal interventionism,etc.  But perhaps responsibility runs, at least to some degree, both ways.  Maybe "they" are also culpable for the lousy state of affairs in the Middle East and, more generally, the problem of Islamic Continue Reading...

Is the Republican "establishment" being trampled on by Trump?  Not really.  The GOP's elite has been selling Trump-lite - whispered bigotry - since at least 1964 when the party rejected that year's seminal civil rights legislation.  That Trump is hawking a plutocratic fiscal policy indicates that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree regardless.  Who better to unpack this than the redoubtable Frank Rich? Continue Reading...