Last night I was in my car listening to a broadcast of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, one of my favorites,…
Sandal-Wearers and Gun-Toters
I recently picked up the summer 2010 issue of The Defenestrator, published in Philadelphia. Its masthead describes it as “a…
Memoir of an Ex-Jew 11: The Last Installment
What about anti-Semitism? Whoever asserted that U.S. foreign policy toward an entire region of the world was decisively shaped, against…
Memoir of an Ex-Jew 10
The Judaic religion and Talmudic Law contain many ugly elements: the atrocities proudly chronicled in Deuteronomy; the annual Passover celebration…
Memoir of an Ex-Jew 9
What is the relation between Zionism and Jewishness? Within Palestine, Jewishness is the problem—not the Judaic religion or the Hebrew…
Memoir of an Ex-Jew 8
A nation is commonly thought of as a group of people who share a language and culture and who have…
Learner-Centered Teaching
In 2005 the college where I teach joined with other local colleges in holding a day-long symposium, with speakers and…
Memoir of an Ex-Jew 7
On what basis could Jews around the world constitute a single people? Religious? No one would claim that today all…
Revolutionary Greetings
I wrote to a few old friends this morning, November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power: “Remember…
Go Down Moses
A Palestinian friend, Leyla, who lives in Baltimore, wrote me recently: My daughter is in the fifth grade. She came…