Новости за 08.03.2017

In part, the re-election Wednesday of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, whom Hillary Clinton once considered as a vice presidential running mate, could be interpreted as a sign of consolidation within the Democratic Party. When half the ballots had been counted, The Los Angeles Times reported that Garcetti, the city’s first Jewish mayor, had locked in a second term by winning 80 percent of the vote against 10 challengers, a landslide result that was largely expected.

For those who haven’t yet watched Love—a sharp Netflix comedy about modern dating in L.A. co-created by Judd Apatow, Lesley Arfin, and Paul Rust, who also stars in the show along with Gillian Jacobs—do so now. The first season of the show skewers romance, laying bare all of its beautiful, disgusting guts. The second season premieres Thursday at midnight on the streaming service; binge at your own discretion.

The last round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is remembered as a doomed, last-ditch effort at reaching a final peace agreement. But in a recent, widely discussed essay in The American Interest, veteran Israeli negotiator and retired IDF brigadier general Michael Herzog took aim at some pervasive conventional wisdom about the talks. He argues that the negotiations were not as disastrous as they appear, while highlighting an underrated reason for their failure—namely, the U.S.’s centrality to the talks... Читать дальше...

My connection with Blu Greenberg spans four generations. As a child, I often heard her maiden name (Genauer) mentioned in my home with great fondness. This stemmed from a long-term friendship between our parents that began in the years that her father and mine had shared as students in the Yeshiva of R. Yitzhak Elchanan (which later morphed into Yeshiva University) and continued during my father’s temporary stint as a teacher at the local Talmud Torah of Seattle, the Genauers’ hometown. Two years ago... Читать дальше...

We have lived through the age of modern revolution, and during these last months we have entered the age of counterrevolution, and this is true all over the world. The modern revolution got underway half a century ago and, for a long while, seemed hard to define. Its center was in the wealthier and democratic countries, but in those places, the revolutionaries indulged in an old and amusing tradition of insurrectionary behavior, originally identified by Karl Marx, which was to cloak themselves... Читать дальше...

When I was a refusenik teenager in Moscow I heard maudlin jokes about Jewish emigration. One of them told of a special voice recording created at the visa office. You dialed the main number and heard “zhdite otkaza” (“wait for your request to be denied”) instead of the conventional “zhdite otveta” (“wait for your call to be answered”). This hangman’s joke reflected the hopeless atmosphere of the early 1980s, when emigration was at a near standstill and about 1.7 million Jews remained in the USSR. Читать дальше...