Erika Dreifus

“That cartoon was irresponsible and has great potential to ultimately do far more damage to Israel and [to the] Jewish people in general than it does to the policies Netanyahu or Likud.”
–Derek Kwait, “Collapsing Towers: Liveblogging My Quarrel with Haaretz” (New Voices)

“It is tough to say what is the most stomach-turning aspect of this. Is it that Hamas managed to bully and intimidate foreign journalists en masse for almost two months and get away with it? Is it the fact that this bullying and intimidation successfully prevented the world from receiving an objective picture of what this awful war was really all about? Or is it the fact that the principal correspondent of the New York Times either had no clue about what was happening, or instinctively desired to deny it, or both?”
–Jeff Robbins, “A Willful Ignorance on Israel” (The Times of Israel) (more…)

“But what has become even more stunningly clear in recent years is that even if the United States could fix the Palestinian issue and produce a two-state solution, that accomplishment alone would not stabilize the angry, broken, and dysfunctional Middle East. The region is already in the process of melting down for a tsunami of reasons that have nothing to do with the Palestinians. But talking about the consequences of not fixing the Palestinian issue, particularly in Chicken Little the “sky is falling” terms, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been wont to do, doesn’t help matters — it makes them worse.”
–Aaron David Miller, “It’s Not Washington’s Fault” (Foreign Policy)

“You can take for granted the way a grandfather feels for a granddaughter that has just been murdered,” he said. “You can see it.”
–Shimshon Halperin, grandfather to Chaya Zissel Braun, quoted broadly, including by JTA.

“The Met has the First Amendment right to present this opera, and people certainly have a similar right to attend. It is their choice.
Equally, all of us have as strong a First Amendment right to make our position clear and warn people that this work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt terrorist organization, and the state of Israel, a democracy ruled by law.”

–Rudy Giuliani, “Why I Protested ‘The Death of Klinghoffer'” (The Daily Beast)