Новости за 08.04.2016

On Thursday, I traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the promise of Ted Cruz and matzo, which, somehow, felt like an imaginary fairy tale made up by some publicity Tinkerbell bent on putting a New York-sized stamp on this already whacked-out presidential election.

In Plato’s Republic, the tyrannical man is ruled by an unruly desire, an eros, that pulls him toward gruesome, shameless acts, like sleeping with one’s mother and murder. In a proto-Freudian move, Socrates explains that everyone has such desires, since they occasionally emerge in our nightly dreams when our rational faculty is not on guard; only the tyrannical man allows these desires to surface while awake. “Under the tyranny of erotic love,” Socrates explains, the tyrant “has permanently become... Читать дальше...

I have never been one of those people wowed by all the budding and blossoming and frolicking that goes on now that spring is in the air. But things are different now that I’m a father and have a budding, blossoming, frolicking little girl who, even as I type this, is climbing all over my head.

On Thursday, with the New York Republican presidential primary looming on the horizon, Texas Senator Ted Cruz visited a local matzo factory to reach out to the state’s many Jews. Surrounded by children and bakers, Cruz, the son of an evangelical pastor, attentively rolled the dough for the Passover flatbread, and joined the assembled in festive song. At the close, Cruz consumed his prize:

Gayle Kirschenbaum is the documentarian behind My Nose, a short film about her mother’s demands that she get a nose job, and A Dog’s Life: A Dogamentary, about her dog Chelsea, her own romantic life, the aftermath of 9/11, and unconditional love. (“Sex and the City Meets Best in Show,” Kirschenbaum called it.) Her newest film, Look at Us Now, Mother!, is a tragicomedy about her troubled relationship with her mom. It opens today in New York City and Los Angeles, and then has screenings in other cities and film festivals. Читать дальше...

Earlier this week, I attended a conference organized by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. The topic was Israel and the media. Maybe it was that 14th cup of coffee, or maybe the superabundance of smart people congregating to discuss our shared obsession, but as the panels progressed and breakfast turned to lunch, I began having hallucinations.

On March 9, the U.S. District Court in the southern district of New York reached a default judgment ordering Iran to pay some $10 billion to the relatives of victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as well as to an insurance company. A default judgment is not a determination of guilt, or even a finding on the merits. But the ruling hints at one of the myriad risks of empowering an unpredictable regime with a violently anti-American ideological bent.

Why does the Showtime series Dice, which premiers this coming Sunday at 9:30, even exist?

On Tuesday evening, the Stanford University Student Senate debated a resolution that would commit the school’s student government to combat anti-Semitism. Ironically, what transpired in that debate underscored just how sorely needed the resolution was in the first place.