Новости за 05.06.2017

Efforts to get Radiohead to cancel their July 19 gig in Tel Aviv have now taken on a bitterly personal dimension. On April 27, over 45 artists, including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, issued an open letter urging Radiohead to cancel their Tel Aviv gig. Yorke’s response, conveyed in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, was unequivocal. “There are people I admire [who have been critical of the concert] like [English film director] Ken Loach, who I would never dream... Читать дальше...

On Sunday, the LGBT contingent of the Celebrate Israel Parade—made up of five Jewish LGBTQ organizations and the only openly gay group present on this day—marched proudly in one of New York City’s largest annual Jewish gatherings. At one point, the soundtrack accompanying their contingent was a popular Jewish techno song by Israeli pop artist Hashem Melech, which was blared from the parade’s sound system. The group of about 90 participants waved Israeli flags overhead. Most of them wore pride... Читать дальше...

To my amazement and gratitude, I am turning 70 this year. While I don’t believe that endows me with any particular wisdom, I do find that the lessons of a life lived this long certainly add perspective to many experiences. For example, last year I attended the latest Broadway incarnation of Fiddler on the Roof. Having seen the original production in 1964, I enjoyed the new version—whose every song I had long ago committed to memory—but was struck by a different reaction to its denouement. Whereas... Читать дальше...

The Nobel Prize committee released today the transcript and audio of Bob Dylan’s acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize in Literature. It does not disappoint.

Terrorist attacks express hatred, and it would be inhuman, it would be foolish, it would be self-deluded, to respond with anything but a hatred of our own—not with a blind or crazed hatred, not with insanity, but with hatred nonetheless. I do not care what the life stories of the sundry London terrorists will turn out to be, just as I do not care about the life story of the Manchester terrorist. Has the Manchester terrorist had to suffer the indignities of being a Muslim living in a non-Muslim... Читать дальше...

Though few people grasped it at the time, the Six-Day War put the young state of Israel on an entirely new trajectory. Some see the war’s outcome as a historic triumph and almost messianic return of the Jews to their ancestral lands. Others, of course, view it as the start of a downward spiral that led to an oppressive occupation and internal political fragmentation. For proponents of both positions, and everyone in between really, the 50th anniversary of that war provides an excellent excuse to pause, evaluate, and conclude. Читать дальше...

Midway through Salt Houses—the stunning debut novel by Hala Alyan about four generations of Palestinian women navigating the travails of dispersion and diaspora—I had a disquieting realization of familiarity. I felt like I knew this story—and not because I knew the particulars of the story. Nor am I particularly well-versed in the history of Palestinian dislocation except as the aftermath, as the tragic countertext, of what I know and celebrate of Zionism and Israeli history.

If you tell Americans you’re going to the Golan Heights, they think you’re taking your life into your hands. It doesn’t matter if you say that inside Israel it’s been quiet for more than 40 years. They’re set on the idea. The place only gets mentioned alongside worrisome words like “annexation,” “international recognition,” “UN troops,” and formulations about “land for peace,” a quaint phrase that dates to the period before the greater region fell to pieces like a Byzantine mosaic.

The Dreyfus affair was an event with European, indeed global resonance. Chekhov and Mark Twain wrote about it. In the Swabian backwater of Hemmingen, Baroness Spitzemberg, the widow of Württemberg’s envoy to Berlin, noted in her famous diary after Dreyfus’s second conviction in 1899: “It is incredible how the question has whipped up feelings even in the lowest classes: Often the farmers come to the post office late in the evening to pick up the local papers and read the news of the trial, rather... Читать дальше...