In case this wasn’t clear, The Scroll and Tablet Magazine are publishing on a light schedule this week. Which means: Mega-midday-roundup!
• Over the weekend, Hamas reconfirmed its commitment to a cease-fire in an effort to head off tensions in Gaza during the two-year anniversary of Cast Lead. [NYT]
• In another instance of WikiLeaks telling us for certain what we knew was almost certainly true, a newly released 2008 cable authored by then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice confirms that Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. [JTA]
• Columnist Avi Shafran points out that President Obama has done pretty much every basic thing that typical pro-Israel American Jews have asked of him. [Jewish Standard]
• Henry Kissinger puts his 1973 remark, “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” “in context.” [WP]
• A must-read profile of longtime New Republic maven, owner, and editor-in-chief (soon to be editor at large) Marty Peretz reports that his controversial blog, The Spine, will soon be discontinued. [NYMag]
• Aid groups argue that the Gaza blockade is inhibiting them, not Hamas. [WP]
• Popular distress is building in Iran is building over higher prices, a result of slashed subsidies, in turn partly a result of Western sanctions. [WP]
• Hitch on Kissinger. I could read a new one every week. [Slate]
• Dov Halbertal polemicizes against Israel’s mixing of synagogue and state. [Haaretz]
• Recent revelations that even the ostensibly non-Nazi German civil service actively furthered the Holocaust and other crimes have shaken Germany of late. [NYT]
• After the Carmel fire, some are rethinking the whole everyone-should-plant-a-tree-in-Israel thing. [WP]
• The Mavi Marmara was returned to Turkey. [NYT]
• Dan Kurzman, a Washington Post foreign correspondent and historian of World War Two and the Israeli War of Independence, died at 88. [NYT]
• The argument that Cliff Lee is, in effect, a Philadelphian Jew strikes me as somewhat specious. Then again, anything to rub it in Yankee fans’ faces. [Jewish Exponent]
Donate to the United Jewish Appeal! Edward G. (as in Goldenberg) Robinson says so.
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.