Two round-ups this Friday: One Egypt, one not. Right now: Not.
• Bernard Avishai on how to salvage the peace process. [NYT Magazine]
• The Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements in America are facing membership declines and internal upheaval. Must-read. [Forward]
• Russia stopped the loans of several importance pieces of artwork to various American museums due to a dispute with Chabad. [Jewish Chronicle/Vos Iz Neias?]
• Is Shas the Israeli equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood? [Haaretz]
• Radical chic rears its head in the Tel Aviv galleries, where kibbutz imagery is all the rage. [NYT]
• I am shocked—shocked!—to learn that Strat-O-Matic, which is basically a baseball video game for when before video games were invented, was invented by a Jewish man. [Kaplan’s Korner]
• There is an Al Hirschfeld-like caricaturist whose last name is Hirschfeld and who may or may not be related to Al Hirschfeld. Only in New York. [City Room]
• We all know Pope Pius XII was pretty bad for the Jews. But so was Pope Pius XI! [The Book]
• I hate Dan Snyder so much. [The Economist]
• Dispatch from the Yeshiva U. book fair, in one of the only publications that would care about such a thing. [NYT]
• Meet Danny Rosenbaum, a 24-year-old southpaw in the Washington Nationals’ farm system. [Kaplan’s Korner]
• Lisa Loeb! [The Kveller]
Is it just me, or are most iconic Gen X cultural artifacts about abandonment? Or wait, I guess that’s the point?
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.