Written yesterday, posted today on Achgut (the title isn’t mine, but the editors’, and I won’t comment on the comments): https://www.achgut.com/ A sad story. A disaster for the people of Iran. Fortunately, the current U.S. president is known for his dubious jokes. Gestern geschrieben,
Have you ever noticed that Jew haters—or anti-Semites, or whatever you want to call them—are always humorless? I saw a video clip in my Facebook stream in which the American right-wing critic of Israel, Tucker Carlson, interviews the leftist Israeli Gideon Levy, a notorious columnist for
Most Israelis find it impossible to view President Trump’s “Iran deal” as a sensible political move. We have seen on several occasions how American presidents have betrayed their allies in the Middle East—and this time, if it actually comes to that, it would be a particularly serious case.
A non-political day, as I’ve been busy with other things since 7 a.m. Sent the essay “Desertification” as a Global Challenge: Literary Transformations of a Landscape to an American journal. Phone calls regarding various matters; at noon, I had a two-hour Zoom conference with publisher M.
We are actually having pleasant, peaceful days, bathed in clear azure skies, as busy as ever, quietly rejoicing in the prosperity of our brave people. Yet we know that at any moment we could be attacked with rockets by the fractured but fiercely determined Revolutionary Guards or the barefoot Houthis.
Our synagogue is different from those in Europe: it’s completely open. You enter through a glass door—no bulletproof glass, no police officers, no security at all, and the prayer hall has a huge window front facing the desert. I sit right by the windows, and when we sing
Today I read excerpts from my as-yet-unpublished novel, "Immortality", an amusing, grotesque story set entirely in Israel. My Munich agent, L.K., one of Germany's most successful literary agencies, offered the novel to more than 30 German publishers a few years ago, all of
Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip have beaten, maimed, and publicly executed dozens of Palestinians according to a United Nations report published yesterday. “These cases involved executions, kneecapping, and bone-breaking with metal pipes or cement bricks and were framed by the perpetrators as punishments for alleged collaboration with Israel,
What a wonderful spring. No travel looms. I confess that I've completely lost my desire to travel. My friend John, who lives out in the desert in Sde Boqer, in a beautiful house on the crater rim, says: "I'm a homeboy. I like to be
Cancel culture can target the wrong people. Israeli director Nadav Lapid was excluded from a prestigious French film festival under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists. Three hundred “filmmakers” protested this decision in an open letter, but they did not speak out against Israel-hatred or anti-Semitism; rather, they objected
A few hours in Beer Sheva this morning. The city now has nearly a quarter of a million residents—four times as many as 30 years ago when we first arrived—not counting the more than 100,000 Bedouins who have settled in the surrounding area, living in the open,
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At 5 a.m., after a sudden awakening, I read the proofs of my story "Via Appia," which is to appear in the upcoming issue of the literary journal "Sinn und Form" in Berlin. The short story had been "in my drawer" for ten