The Truman No-Show
Frankfurt on the Hudson
Chic Radical
A Nation of Commentators
Disengagement
The pun in the title of Israel Is Real, the new book by Rich Cohen, is silly but not meaningless. The problem of reality, and how to distinguish it from fantasy, fear, and hope, has been with the Zionist project since the very beginning. The slogan "If you will it, it is not a dream," coined by Theodor Herzl in his novel Altneuland, was a way of acknowledging the sheer fantasy of the Zionist idea--to recreate a Jewish state that had not existed for 2,000 years. READ MORE >>
Disturbances of Peace
Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology Translated and edited by David Hinton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 475 pp., $45) Du Fu: A Life in Poetry Translated by David Young (Knopf, 226 pp., $16.95) READ MORE >>
American As Apple Pie
Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity, the innovative and deeply researched new book by Lila Corwin Berman, put me in mind of an old joke about elephants. As the story goes, scientists from around the world were gathering at a conference to present their research on elephants. READ MORE >>
Eastern Exposure
That the State of Israel has an ethnicity problem is the opposite of news: hardly a day goes by without some report on the hostilities between Jews and Arabs. But We Look Like the Enemy, the impassioned, often self-righteous new book by Rachel Shabi, draws the reader's attention to an easily overlooked dimension of that old conflict. What if you are an Israeli Jew who is also, in some ways, an Arab? READ MORE >>
The Deadly Jester
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 504 pp., $34.95) Violence by Slavoj Žižek (Picador, 272 pp., $14) I. Last year the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj READ MORE >>
Over Easy
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins (Random House, 172 pp., $21.95) READ MORE >>
