About Bernard Avishai

Barack Obama's speech at AIPAC was so winning, and his applause so warm, that it may be easy to overlook what a complicated task he had. (You may watch the video here.) AIPAC is nothing if not sensitive to what … Read More

Israeli journalists are pre-celebrating Israel's sixtieth with a big, compelling story, yet another police investigation of Ehud Olmert over possible bribes he accepted from an American Jewish businessman. But their tone, this time, is subtly different from the past. The … Read More

People enduring severe economic stress “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” Barack Obama privately told a group of fundraisers in San Francisco. For those who have been on the moon for the past … Read More

It would be understandable if Barack Obama were frustrated by responses to his candidacy in parts of the American Jewish community. Last Sunday, he met with a hundred communal leaders in Cleveland. He used the occasion to clarify matters, speaking … Read More

Last Saturday evening, I attended a memorial for Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig, a young scholar of democratic theory who was killed by a disturbed rightist’s grenade in February, 1983, at a demonstration in front of the prime minister’s office. … Read More

It is getting harder and harder to find leaders in the Kadima-Labor government who are not calling for a massive invasion of Gaza. Here, in this heartbreaking video, is Israeli Interior Minister Meir Shitreet, responding to the latest barrage of … Read More

In 1963, the young editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, wrote a strangely confessional article (the first intimation of what, full-blown, would become his style), which he called “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Its disquieting point, made the year of the March … Read More