Abe Silberstein

"Equality and the exercise of citizenship were and are, always and everywhere, fragile, subject to substantial infringement if not outright abrogation. The process of emancipation continues into the twenty-first century."

— David Sorkin, "Jewish Emancipation" (2019)

Iran’s people stand to lose whether or not talks succeed Trump is not negotiating to ease the burden of the regime’s victims — and war will not make them safer

"The worst Trump can do is once again, as he did in January, dangle the promise of help when none is actually coming."

Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed Phylisa Wisdom, a progressive Jewish leader, to lead the Office to Combat Antisemitism.

An excellent choice.

I do not run in the same academic circles as her. The closest relationship I have is that one professor in my department was a student of hers as an undergraduate around three decades ago. But obviously there is an unstated hierarchy, even with someone who is now mostly a public figure.

It's not great that the former US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism is sharing Islamophobic conspiracy theories written by a "digital marketing professional." I left a polite reply asking her to reconsider disseminating this self-published article.

Lot of people saying “can’t believe QAnon was right” instead of “can’t believe the feminists were right about rape culture”, which feels suspicious tbqh.

Excited to learn that my proposal was accepted for the American Political History Conference in June! Apparently one of the most interesting and dynamic gatherings in the field.

Finkelstein's intense dislike of Dershowitz and general indifference to money really saved him—for once.

Yes! Erez Manela's book comes to mind. The complete indifference to the immense historiography on the Cold War and the Third World is appalling.

Someone sent me a PDF—it is otherwise paywalled. Not sure I will ever forgive them!

He says this as if he's established there are roots. The fact that the Soviet Union used the words "imperialism" and "colonialism" is not compelling. Are the words "freedom" and "liberty" irredeemably tainted by association with US foreign policy?

Well, if Joshua Muravchik says so.

It's just an incredibly lazy argument. I'm really astonished.

These are in fact seminal events in the history of the Bund that anyone who admires that movement would know. Does he realize how ridiculous this sounds?

It's true that Howe promoted the line of "revolutionary defeatism" during World War II. So did Irving Kristol—maybe something Tikvah/Mosaic readers would benefit from knowing. But that wouldn't help Klehr's anti-Left polemic.

This is quite egregious. You can't claim one group dropped its commitment to nonviolence by quoting the statements of a completely different group of people.

Yeah, the only reason anyone might refer to the U.S. as "imperialist" and Israel as "colonial" is because they are dupes of the Soviet Union. Incredible imagination on display here.

My God, this is a terrible essay all around. I am less than half-way through and I have already encountered the most hackneyed and uncritical reading of Marx's "On the Jewish Question," which also overstates its influence. @blbalthaser.bsky.social deserves better critics.

Is there any evidence for this rather inflammatory claim by Harvey Klehr? Not interested in "effectively" stretches.
ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essay...

Adam Shatz · Another Country: Visions of America America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is...

“Shame isn’t a pleasant emotion, but any honest reckoning with what my country has become has to start with it.”

One of the essential texts written in US History over the last 20 years. A must-read if you want to understand the dynamic at play here, which is not recent.

Is the Constitution ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’? | Laurence H. Tribe The difficulty of amending the Constitution does not mean that it is a flawed and outdated relic of a distant past.

I sense that Laurence Tribe's own faith in the Constitution is shaken, despite this wholly ungenerous review of Jill Lepore's new book. His citation of an Amy Coney Barrett interview on the role of the Ninth Amendment (post-Dobbs!) smacks of real desperation.

Opinion | Trump’s Brute-Force Approach to Power Is Wearing Thin

"The White House is caught in a spiral of its own making. The more it tries to repress and dominate its opponents, the more it loses ground with the public, and the more it loses ground, the more it leans on force and threats of force to save face."

Increasingly appears that signing up to the Trump protection racket might not be the best way to protect American Jews from antisemitism.

Liberalism’s Pianist | Nathan Shields Can Igor Levit restore classical music’s claim to cultural and political authority, or is it irrevocably lost?

Stellar essay by Nathan Shields on classical music's doomed search for a heroic and redemptive liberalism.

Marilynne Robinson: The killings in Minneapolis As American cities have been left reeling by ICE federal agents, the acclaimed novelist explores the deeper conflict behind Donald Trump’s show of force

"New Yorkers can amass in astonishing numbers, their worries and passions never becoming populism. Fairly or not, they are assumed to read books."

Good. With Vernikov at the head, this task force was never going to do anything remotely constructive. Now they won’t be able to waste anyone else’s time.

Gordon Brown was solid in office. The UK and the continent would have been much better off had Labour won the 2010 election under his leadership.

This is one of my old bugbears, but it's really unacceptable that a single passenger on the NYC subway has the ability to throw entire train lines into disarray by pulling the emergency breaks. This does not happen in London, Paris, or Berlin. There must be an alternative to this madness.

Israel went to extremes to return Ran Gvili's body. Why don't Palestinians get the same? | Opinion The State of Israel, That Abducted and Continues to Hold Hundreds of Bodies – Some Buried, Some Frozen for Months and Even Years – Is Willing to Charge Any Price for the Return of a Single Body

“The refrigerators and the cemeteries are full to the brim with the [Palestinian] dead, each one of whom has parents and children who long to give them a proper burial. But Israel is adamant: Only we have feelings. Only we are human beings.”