“We were nostalgic for yesterday’s prognostications: You could say that we succumbed to prognostalgia”
…by the ’70s and ’80s, we were just as interested in gazing longingly behind...
Monthly Archives: July 2014
“For a person whose suffering has been met with judgment, a sympathetic ear can make all the difference”
Given the ideology of parenting, it’s not surprising that we typically blame biology for...
“Our dilemma today is that at the very time that we desperately need an ideological linkage between powerful Israel experiences and the creation of robust Jewish communities for young Jews in America, Zionism is absent from the mix”
Our dilemma today is that at the very time that we desperately need an...
“Take young Jews, 18-26, on a free trip to Israel and they will return rededicated to Jewish life, says the conventional wisdom. This model would have worked a generation ago”
Take young Jews, 18-26, on a free trip to Israel and they will return...
How Greatly Different Relations Between Israelis & Arabs are Since Pre-Second Intifada
During the 1980s and ’90s, tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank...
“Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that”
Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.
Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine”, The New Yorker (23 June 2014), 36.
“The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines”
If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than...
“The problem is that death at the movies has died”
The problem is that death at the movies has died. The movie industry has corrupted one of cinema’s — if not all of fiction’s — most emotionally taxing moments into hollow formula, the kind of thing that passes in the blink of a plot point leading to a literal, if not figurative, explosive finale that takes up half the budget
Alexander Huls, “How Hollywood Killed Death”, The New York Times Magazine (20 April 2014), 44.
“When politicians talk about religious freedom, broad language often conceals narrower interests”
When politicians talk about religious freedom, broad language often conceals narrower interests. The result is laws that will inevitably be used in ways their proponents can’t predict, and may not like.
Kelefa Sanneh, “Blessings In Disguise”, The New Yorker (5 May 2014), 20.
“when Israel’s security barrier is described with preposterous obscenities like “apartheid wall,” we must make sure people know the facts”
…when Israel’s security barrier is described with preposterous obscenities like “apartheid wall,” we must make sure people know the facts: that 96% of it is a fence, that there are Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims on both sides of it; that it was erected as a last resort by a prime minister long opposed to doing so, after more than a thousand Israeli women, men, and children were murdered by suicide bombers in cafes, malls, buses, and Passover seders; and that Israel’s Supreme Court has ordered it moved when it caused unjustified privation. Whatever our views on the security barrier, settlements, and “the occupation,” we are morally obliged to make it clear: that Palestinian terrorism preceded them—they were not its cause; that they are not the conflict’s origins, but its manifestations; and that they will not be resolved by boycotts, denunciations, or unilateral measures, but only by a permanent peace agreement that the parties alone can achieve.
Rabbi Richard A. Block, “How Should Rabbis Speak About Israel?”, The Tower Magazine, Issue 14 (May 2014) {http://www.thetower.org/article/rabbis-speak-israel-2/}