Words of the Week

“Israelis can listen to the views of dissenters. They are used to it. But they also want to trust that their dissenters are still a part of the family.”
Shmuel Rosner, “Who Killed the Israeli Left?” (The New York Times)

“The presumption that Jews must choose between liberalism and Zionism—and always had to—turns each into a kind of historical cartoon. Zionism is not just tribal primacy, and liberalism is not just an empathy for history’s dispossessed.”
Bernard Avishai, “Is Liberal Zionism Impossible?” (The New Yorker)

“Something feels different now.”
Marjorie Ingall, “Anxiously Sending Little Jews to School” (Tablet)

“The swarm of foreign reporters who focus mostly on Israel’s mistakes and who pile on the attacks think they’re being courageous. They’re not. There’s no courage in beating up someone who’s already beating himself up. You want courage? Report on Hamas.”
David Suissa, “The Media’s Tragic Obsession with Israel” (Jewish Journal)

“Did you, like me and many other supporters of Israel, cringe on reading the other day that the Jerusalem government had laid claim to nearly 1,000 acres of land in the West Bank, presumably for settlement expansion?”
Gary Rosenblatt, “Israel’s West Bank Grab” (The Jewish Week)

“It’s not censorship to suggest that faculty avoid offensive statements that could make the classroom toxic to students and dishonor their roles as public intellectuals.”
“The Salaita Scandal” (The Forward)

“The truly disturbing thing, then, isn’t how far the BDS organizers at CUNY were willing to go to rig the vote; it’s that their actual statement betrays such profound intellectual dishonesty, such utter lack of context and subtlety, and such willful disregard for key, meaningful facts. For all of these reasons, the organizers of the DCS anti-Israel vote are a disgrace to any academic institution that takes its mission seriously.”
Liel Leibovitz, “CUNY BDS Group Schedules Anti-Israel Vote for Shabbat” (Tablet)