Sundown: Behind Enemy Lines
Plus the man who gave us Passover Coke, and more
April 22, 2011
A tell-tale yellow Coca-Cola cap.(mhaithaca/Flickr)
The Scroll will be dark Monday and Tuesday, the final two days of Passover.
• Despite a formal Palestinian Authority ban on the practice, 14.2 percent of employed West Bank Palestinians work in settlements—where, on average, they are paid twice as much. [JPost]
• The assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Palestinian-Israeli theater director and political activist, was almost certainly motivated by his art, not his politics. [Guardian]
• Tuvia Geffen: Brilliant rabbi, prescient anti-Nazi crusader, proud Jewish advocate … and the man responsible for the annual miracle that is kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola. Great piece. [NYT]
• A fascinating history of the Likud Party. Its prime ministers—Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon—have ended up enacting consequential policies that contradict the party’s maximalist ideology. Will the trend continue with today’s Likud PM? [Jewish Ideas Daily]
• Tablet Magazine contributor Justin Vogt reports from New Orleans on how David Simon’s Treme is imitating life—in the form of Simon’s clash with NOLA’s mayor. [Slate]
• Is Syria’s nuclear program still going strong? [TNR]
• At this point, according to experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller, the peace process is, literally, all talk. [Foreign Policy]
• Alfred M. Freedman, a psychologist who was critical to reversing the paradigm that treated homosexuality as a mental illness, died at 94. [NYT]
• Arsonists burned a synagogue on the Greek island of Corfu. [JPost]
Happy Good Friday and Easter to all our Christian readers. Here is one of our own with a tribute to, er, another one of our own:
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
