(An earlier version of this essay first appeared in the Algemeiner on December 30, 2013.) Now that the American Studies Association has passed its resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israel, universities and fellow academics all over the country are denouncing it. These and other critics of an academic boycott of Israel generally resort […]
Do You Give to the Ones Who Are Drunk?
Good friend Rivvy Neshama has written a book, Recipes For a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles, that is the accumulation of a life’s gained wisdom. Panning through the grains of the sad red earth, we see the fool’s-gold sparkle, often, of the oh-so-smart, not so much the glimmer of the precious stone that is […]
A Second Look: Thinking Through the Iranian Dilemma
I posted the following on March 19 of last year. Nothing that has transpired since, not even the recently achieved, yet still not implemented short-term deal – which I think a basis for justified future military action just as it is, more hopefully, a foundation for peaceful resolution – has changed the balance of views […]
The Trope Dope: “Check Your Privilege”
In the final analysis, Madame Bovary is just another trope. Unknown academic wag. dope: an illicit, habit-forming, or narcotic drug; a stupid person; [slang] the inside scoop, the poop, the skinny, the lowdown Cant kills ideas. Leaves them dead in the field, their tongues swollen and hanging. Flies buzzing. (They fell in love too easily. […]
A Second Look: Abraham Lincoln on the “Mud-Sill” Theory of Labor
The movement to increase the minimum wage, and to tie it legislatively to the cost of living, is growing. The obscenity of low-wage employment among adults – full-time employment that does not offer a living wage – is increasingly apparent. As Arindrajit Dube pointed out in The New York Times: the evidence suggests that around half of […]