Navigate to News section

Sundown: Cabinet Grants Peace Now Request

Plus Chabon’s awesome new Nazi-fighting show, and more

by
Marc Tracy
March 08, 2011

• The Israeli cabinet ordered the demolition of all Jewish settlements built on private Palestinian land by year’s end. The move honored a Peace Now petition, and drew the ire of a top settlers’ group. [JTA]

• Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman’s tentative HBO show, Hobgoblin, will depict “a motley group of conmen and magicians who use their skills at deception to battle Hitler and his forces during WWII.” [Vulture]

• Tomorrow, the Palestinian soccer team will host Thailand for an Olympics qualifying match—the first such global athletic event in the West Bank since 1948. [NYT]

• An amazing trove of books about Wissenschaft—the pre-World War Two German-Jewish “Science of Judaism” discipline that formed the basis for contemporary Jewish studies—has been discovered in New York. [NYT]

• A New York rabbi has received a salary—$100,000 last year—since 1995 to serve as the state police’s liason to the Hasidic community. It is not clear whether this salary is merited, nor how for-real this rabbi is. [Albany Times-Union]

• At a recent debate on Israel featuring Rep. Anthony Weiner and New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, Gal Beckerman found “sanctimony” from the left and “gross lack of knowledge” from the right. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mideast debate! [Forward]

I won’t even attempt a tenuous Jewish connection, but this 1994 performance of “Change” by Blind Melon is notable for a. Its awesomeness; b. Lead singer/band genius Shannon Hoon’s farewell to Kurt Cobain afterward; and c. Hoon’s ad lib “I don’t wanna die,” coupled with the knowledge that he would be dead no more than two years later.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.