 | Rising Up in IsraelOctober 25th, 2011 1. Early in July, a group of young Israelis gathered in a small apartment in Tel Aviv to talk about the difficulties of finding affordable places to live in the city. They had come at the invitation of Daphni Leef, a video editor who was about to be evicted from the apartment and who had… Read This Article » Israel’s Holy WarriorsMarch 31st, 2010 1. One evening last October, several hundred new recruits to the Shimshon Battalion filed into the vast plaza adjoining the Western Wall in Jerusalem. At a site normally thronged with worshipers, the soldiers gathered to be sworn in to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), surrounded by parents and well-wishers who snapped pictures and recorded the… Read This Article » |
 | The AbortionistJanuary 20th, 2008 One morning in January 1991, Susan Wicklund arrived at work wearing a heavy coat of makeup and a curly auburn wig pulled over her half-inch-long gray hair. It was a get-up worthy of a double agent, and it succeeded in helping Wicklund slip unnoticed across enemy lines, though not without feeling as if she’d stepped… Read This Article » Family-Leave ValuesJuly 29th, 2007 When Karen Deonarain was discharged from Prince George’s Hospital Center in Maryland following the birth of her daughter, Razia, several years ago, the status of her job did not rank high on her list of worries. “My main concern was the baby,” she said one recent afternoon, as a heavy rain drenched the sidewalks outside the… Read This Article » Do Immigrants Make Us Safer?December 3rd, 2006 Although the midterm election failed to render a clear verdict on illegal immigration, the new Democratic Congress may enact sweeping legislation tightening border controls and allowing more guest workers next year. If that happens, the rancorous debate about how undocumented workers affect jobs and wages in the United States will be rejoined. So, too, will… Read This Article » Abortion, From a DistanceMarch 12th, 2006 LAST week, Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota signed a sweeping new ban on abortion. Some abortion-rights advocates raised an alarm: soon women in particular states will have to board buses and airplanes to have their pregnancies terminated, the way they did in the era before Roe v. Wade. The concern is understandable. But the… Read This Article » My Father’s Abortion WarJanuary 22nd, 2006 On Oct. 23, 1998, a Friday evening, at about 6, Barnett Slepian, an obstetric gynecologist from Amherst, N.Y., called my parents’ home. He was phoning because, that weekend, as on every third weekend of the month, he was scheduled to cover deliveries for my father. A few hours later, after attending a memorial service commemorating… Read This Article » Faith-Based FurorApril 1st, 2001 The first time Alicia Pedreira heard from co-workers that they had spotted her picture in a photo exhibit at the state fair in Louisville, Ky., she was baffled. ”I thought: Photograph? What photograph?” Pedreira said recently of the strange sequence of events that began in August 1998 and would soon upend her life. ”I had… Read This Article » |
 | How the Occupation Became LegalJanuary 25th, 2012 In 1979, a group of Palestinian farmers filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice, claiming their land was being illegally expropriated by Jewish settlers. The farmers were not Israeli citizens, and the settlers appeared to have acted with the state’s support; indeed, army helicopters had escorted them to the land—a hilltop near Nablus—bringing… Read This Article » Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right?March 11th, 2011 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute… Read This Article » Unarmed Protest: A New Palestinian Approach?June 14th, 2010 Four days after Israeli commandos stormed a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip, killing nine passengers and igniting an international firestorm, several hundred Palestinian demonstrators guided a nine-meter wooden model of the raided boat, the Mavi Marmara, on a march through the West Bank village of Bil’in. Adorned on both sides with the star and crescent… Read This Article » What Do Israelis Think of Obama?May 11th, 2010 “PRES OBAMA: SAVE ISRAEL FROM ITSELF.” So proclaimed a sign at a demonstration in late March in Sheik Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem where activists gather every Friday to protest the eviction of Palestinian residents from their homes. Among the demonstrators was the Israeli novelist David Grossman, with whom I struck up a conversation about Barack Obama, who is not generally… Read This Article » |
 | Tony Judt: 1948-2010August 8th, 2010 Last October, the historian Tony Judt was brought onstage at New York University’s Skirball Center in a wheelchair, his arms and torso wrapped in a blanket, his face partially obscured by a breathing tube. In this hobbled state, Judt delivered a bracing talk about the modern worship of the market, which he reminded his audience… Read This Article » Betrayal: On David GrossmanMarch 9th, 2009 In 1962, when David Grossman was an 8-year-old schoolboy in Jerusalem, his father handed him a Hebrew translation of Sholem Aleichem’s Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son, a collection of stories evoking the lost world of the Grossmans’ Yiddish-speaking ancestors. “Do you like it?” his father asked. Grossman was too young to understand it, but he… Read This Article » The New Suburban PovertyApril 13th, 2007 Rockingham County, North Carolina, has never been known for its opulence, but until recently most residents would not have hesitated to describe it as comfortably middle class. For several decades the county, a rectangular block of land in the north central part of the state, owed its prosperity to textile mills and tobacco plants, industries… Read This Article » In God’s CountryNovember 2nd, 2006 On November 4, 2004, two days after George W. Bush was narrowly re-elected President, the New York Times published a gloomy op-ed by historian Garry Wills titled “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” The United States, observed Wills, was “a product of Enlightenment values–critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences.” But, as… Read This Article » Neocon ManApril 22nd, 2004 Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station for an interview. Over the next twelve months,… Read This Article » Rebel With a CauseMay 23rd, 2002 Joseph Stiglitz is–as usual–running late. It is nearing 2:30 pm on a sunny afternoon in New York City and Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University, is standing on the corner of 103rd Street and West End Avenue trying desperately to hail a cab. He needs to get across town to the Guggenheim Museum, where in… Read This Article » |
 | Fouled OutJuly 30th, 2001 The story of a professor forced, because of his views on Bobby Knight, to act like a marked man When spring-term classes began at Indiana University last January, Murray Sperber was understandably on edge. Sperber has taught English and American studies at the university for nearly three decades, and until recently his life followed the generally peaceful… Read This Article » The Kept UniversityMarch 30th, 2000 Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education—disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies. By EYAL PRESS and JENNIFER WASHBURN IN the fall of 1964 a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley undergraduate named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and denounced his university… Read This Article » The Voice of Economic NationalismJuly 30th, 1998 IN recent years numerous writers have predicted that the global spread of capitalism will render the notion of economic nationalism obsolete. Yet in American politics globalization may be inducing the opposite effect. Although the American left has traditionally been wary of nationalism, over the past few years an array of progressive organizations, from the AFL-CIO… Read This Article » |
 | Can Block Clubs Block Despair?April 22nd, 2007 Why do some poor communities fall apart while others cohere? Community organization can help — up to a point. One bright spring morning, Peter St. Jean set out on an unusual scholarly expedition. St. Jean is a sociologist at the University of Buffalo who studies the relationship between concentrated poverty and crime. He drives a… Read This Article » Lead Us Not into TemptationDecember 19th, 2001 Shortly after George W. Bush announced the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives–launched on January 29 to facilitate a new era of partnership between the government and religious groups–the nation’s airwaves were filled with assertions about the unique capacity of religious organizations to solve our most intractable social problems. “Study… Read This Article » The Strange Case of Hany KDecember 19th, 2001 On October 26, some two dozen reporters crammed into a conference room on the 18th floor of a concrete high-rise in downtown Newark to await the arrival of Hany Kiareldeen, a 31-year-old Palestinian man who, shortly before midnight on the previous day, had been released from the nearby Hudson County jail. An immigrant’s release from… Read This Article » |
 | Death and Sacrifice in IsraelSeptember 1st, 2007 One evening the summer before last, in the fourth week of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, I had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Jerusalem with my cousin, Ronit, and her husband, Aryeh, a commander in the Israeli army. Aryeh had just returned from Lebanon, his second stint there. The previous day, he had attended the funeral… Read This Article » |
 | The Color TestOctober 1st, 2000 Does The Law Focus Too Much On Black Suspects-Or Too Little On Black Victims? EARLY LAST YEAR, ROUGHLY TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE CRAMMED into a third-floor conference room at the Open Society Institute in Manhattan to hear Professors David Cole and Randall Kennedy debate the issues of race, crime, and justice. The debate was timed to… Read This Article » The Passion of Roberto UngerMarch 1st, 1999 A HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR JETTISONS HIS PAST AND SETS OUT TO DESTABILIZE LATIN AMERICA On January 13, Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso stunned the world’s financial markets — and his own people — when he announced the devaluation of his country’s currency, the real. The announcement seemed to mark the precipitous end of one of… Read This Article » The Archive EatersApril 1st, 1998 ON CHRISTMAS EVE, 1989, the american ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock Jr., slipped inside the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow and posed a surreal question to Kremlin officials. Would it be possible, Matlock politely inquire d, for the Soviet Union to dispatch troops into Romania and assist the rebels attempting to overthrow Communist… Read This Article » The Free Trade Faith – Can We Trust the EconomistsJanuary 1st, 1998 This past spring, the journalist William Greider published One World: Ready or Not(Simon &Schuster), a bracing critique of global capitalism. The international economy is hurtling toward crisis, Greider warns, and a major reason is the astonishing spread of free trade, which has lowered wages, eroded national sovereignty, and led to a resurgence of sweatshops and other nineteenth-cenrury ills. To Americans who pay close attention to debates… Read This Article » Nightmare on Twelfth Street – The New School Falls Into ChaosAugust 30th, 1997 ONE AFTERNOON THIS PAST APRlL, a group of more than fifty students and faculty at the New School for Social Research filed into a room on the second floor of the graduate faculty building for an open meeting with New School president Ionathan Famon. For months, the students had been clamoring for a drastic revision… Read This Article » |