Новости за 28.03.2016

Given his incoherency on just about every conceivable issue other than torture, one of the few interesting policy-related mysteries of Donald Trump’s flabbergasting campaign for the presidency is his exact definition of U.S. “neutrality” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a concept he endorsed during a Republican debate in February without bothering to explain what he thinks this actually means.

Well, well, well, well, well. Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald J. Trump—that New York-based real estate developer and self-proclaimed billionaire who has recently flirted with politics, as a few of you more Beltway-savvy folks may be aware—has given birth to a baby boy named Theodore. Ivanka and her husband, real estate scion/adept cheek dimple-displayer Jared Kushner, are now proud parents, making Donald a grandfather for the eighth time.

This month, we are lucky to publish a new piece by acclaimed writer and filmmaker David Bezmozgis, which appears in issue 2 of Tablet’s print magazine. Titled “Immigrant City,” it’s a perfect example of a feature that we think will soon become a reader favorite: “Aggadah.” Just as in the collection of Jewish exegetical texts by that name, this slot will present pieces without revealing whether they’re fiction or non-fiction. Legal requirements permitting, the editors may not even know.

Israel is a country founded on the idea of immigration—the return of Jews from around the world to their historic homeland. The very word used for such immigration, Aliyah, or ascent, constitutes a value judgment, combining the ancient religious imperative to settle the Land of Israel with a modern political implication that only in Israel can Jews live fully and freely. It follows that the phenomenon of yeridah—emigration or “descent” from Israel to other countries—is problematic for Zionism... Читать дальше...

My approach to clarity is to go to the ambiguous side, or to put it more high-mindedly, to turn to Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances.” “The Jews,” in other words, exemplify the sort of social entity Wittgenstein spoke of as “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.” There are, in the case of the Jews, as Wittgenstein said, “overall similarities,” and he went on: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’;... Читать дальше...