More in ‘The New Republic’

Predictably, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier’s broadside against blogger Andrew Sullivan over Israel has prompted lots and lots (and lots) of responses, including from Sullivan himself. They all seem to agree with the following propositions: Wieseltier may not explicitly call Sullivan an anti-Semite, but that is the unavoidable implication of his argument (and, indeed, ...

• A Palestinian Authority police officer killed an Israeli soldier, in an area of the West Bank controlled by Israel. Twist #1: the Israeli was a Druse. Twist #2: the victim’s name was Ihab Khatib, the killer’s name was Mahmoud al-Khatib; they are unrelated. [NYT]
• Today Iran observes the anniversary of the founding of the ...

“What instruments we have agree/The day of his death was a dark cold day”: W.H. Auden wrote that about W.B. Yeats, but we tend to think it true of most poets, and Avrom Sutzkever, the 20th Century’s greatest Yiddish poet, seems no exception. Born in modern-day Belarus Smorgon, a shtetl located in what is now ...

Sad news from the Upper West Side: talented young poet Rachel Wetzsteon was found dead, apparently a suicide. Tablet Magazine book reviewer Adam Kirsch, an expert on 20th-century poetry who moreover worked with Wetzsteon at The New Republic (where she was poetry editor), had this to say about her: “at 42, she was one of ...

Writer Jonathan Chait of The New Republic has a Semitically inflected theory of what explains Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and his seeming compulsion to throw a wrench into the Democratic policy agenda whenever he can—most recently, in the case of health-care reform. (Last night, Lieberman told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that he would not, ...

• Mikvehs, ritual baths traditionally used for conversion or by observant women after their periods, are becoming more amenable to “alternative immersions” for occasions such as a birthday, a divorce, or an empty nest. Cheap spa day! [JC]
• Nation columnist Eric Alterman lets loose a screed against editor of The New Republic, Marty Peretz, whose ...

The “Cash for Clunkers” concept is nothing new, technology historian Edward Tenner wrote the other day in blog post for The Atlantic. It was an idea employed already a century and half ago by Isaac Merritt Singer and Edward Clark, the duo that founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Flush with confidence in the quality ...

Until recently, British author Claire Messud had only written about Palestine as a vogue political issue that interrupts—but remunerates—the life of quiet contemplation being fitfully led by Murray Thwaite, the liberal newspaper columnist who features prominently in her novel, The Emperor’s Children. Murray blows off a planned speech at a fundraising dinner for a Harlem ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a much-awaited speech yesterday at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in which he endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state, provided it is completely demilitarized and its leadership recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. It marked the first time the Likud politician conditionally endorsed the ...