Essays

         The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you.  We have killed him-you and I… But how did we do this?  How could we drink up the sea?  Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?  What were we…

During the Iraq War, many people asked, what is the UN doing? In fact, in a quietly significant way it was refusing validation for an action that Kofi Annan has called “not in conformity with the UN Charter,” or when pressed “illegal.” The actual United Nations is often slow and inefficient in activity. When it…

The rules of basketball have changed often over the years, so I hope no one will object if I offer a few modest revisions to make this truly wonderful game even better: First, I would charge an admission fee not only to watch the game but  to play in it. And the more one pays,…

Anyone who has walked along Chang’an Boulevard in Beijing in the last 15 years cannot help but be transported back to the spring of 1989. The ground still elicits the images of the tens of thousands of students and workers that gathered there to demand democratic reform of the Communist state. Even today, it is…

On November 17, 1917 Sir Arthur James Balfour, acting for the wartime British cabinet of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, issued what has historically become known as the Balfour Declaration. Promising a national home for the Jews in Palestine, the declaration established an alliance between the Zionist movement and the British Empire. For the Zionists…

Since September 11th we have heard the word “security” so many times (as in “national security interests,” “Office of Homeland Security,” etc.) that it set me to ruminating about its meaning. There are many ways in which the concept of security could be interrogated—“whose security?” is one question that might be asked—but I have been…

Like the loop of Brady Bunch episodes ubiquitously playing across the 500-channel wasteland of cable TV, the decade of the 1970s is a specter haunting the American popular imagination. It is the specter of cheese culture, the jelly-headed amiability of smiley faces, white polyester three-piece suits, and the most recent return of the repressed, Starsky…

In the 1980s, with several friends, I helped produce a radio program called “Europe-in-Formation” in the New York left-wing public radio station WBAI. This was a time well before the ultimate internal weakness of the Soviet Union became apparent and when a true or good or purified socialism remained a hope for many leftists. Our…

The February 2004 release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a major cultural event. Receiving a tremendous amount of advance publicity due to claims of its anti-Semitism and adulatory responses by conservative Christians who were the first to see it, the film achieved more buzz before its release than any recent film in…