Columnist.
In the wake of the celebrated Weiner roast, Jewish jokes are in. The congressman's surname doesn't help. Some of our funniest comedians are Jews, in a long line stretching from the Borscht Belt through vaudeville to Hollywood. Jews love to laugh at themselves. They aren't so happy when others laugh at them. They see the Weiner episode, for an example, as another "good Jewish boy makes a fool of himself." So it wasn't a good week for Jews. They also take it personally that San Francisco and Santa Monica will vote this fall whether to ban circumcision, the ritual based on the Biblical covenant between God and Abraham.
Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Some time after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson.
The war between the sexes is never-ending, but the battleground is dotted with the white flags of uneasy truces. Men and women have embraced such a truce when discussing what Dominique Strauss-Kahn is said to have committed in a Manhattan hotel suite. Not only are both men and women arguing on the same side, but so are liberals and conservatives, prudes and libertines, Francophiles and Francophobes. He has ruined whatever remained of the reputation of the French lover.
In his campaign mode running for governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels referred to his marriage as something of a romantic comedy, in the tradition of Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well." He referred to an earlier time in his life when his wife Cheri left him, moved to California, divorced him and married an old sweetheart. Their four daughters, ages 8 to 14, remained with their father. Cheri's second marriage was short and apparently not so sweet, and four years later she was back home again in Indiana to marry Mitch again and raise their daughters together.
NEW YORK CITY -- The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan caught the decline of the culture two decades ago, observing that we're "defining deviancy down" -- lowering the bar for what was once considered deviant behavior, giving a pass to things society once scorned. Not much has changed over 20 years. The senator was talking mostly about criminal behavior, but it applies now to just about everything. Raunchy, obscene and scatological subjects, once taboo, are the stuff of prime time.
The line between life and death is always a thin one, and never more, literally and symbolically, than in the tiny state of Israel, which celebrates its 63rd birthday this week. (That's a lot of bar mitzvahs.) No sooner had the sirens sounded across the promised land of milk and honey, marking Memorial Day for the soldiers who have died fighting for Israel's survival, than fireworks splashed across the heavens recalling that moment in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The two commemorations are not unrelated. President Harry S. Truman, after days of bitter argument with his own State Department, announced just minutes after the declaration of Israeli independence that the United States would be the first to recognize the new state. As Israel took its first steps as a state, armies from four Arab countries marched in with guns ablaze, opening the first of several Arab-Israeli wars. This year's Israeli Memorial Day honors the 23,000 men and women who have died in those wars, and the 2,500 Jews slain by Palestinian terrorists.
What a weekend. A wedding and a funeral. Love and war. A duchess anointed, a terrorist assassinated. It's the stuff of epics: Of arms and the lady, we sing. Of Navy SEALs and British nuptials, firefights and flower girls, warriors brave and kisses sealed. Rejoicing now takes place after nine years of courtship, 10 years of searching. Celebration follows rejuvenation. Killing Osama bin Laden is enough to make Superman take back the American citizenship he renounced. This was the week we deserved. It was demoralizing to have the terrorist of 9/11 escape for so long. Now we learn that he lived the luxurious life in hiding, not in a cave with spiders and grubs, scribbling drawings on the walls for future archeologists to decipher. Instead, he enjoyed the comfort of a million-dollar mansion. Of course, it wasn't high tech -- and what did Osama and his house party do all do day if they weren't wired?
BERLIN -- Angela Merkel is losing her edge. Her party reacts to setbacks in local elections and is sidetracked by France's assertion of leadership toward the Arab Spring. But culturally and intellectually, Berlin is still the European capital pushing the envelope. Berlin drives the engine for thinking and rethinking Germany's past. A new exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which ran in Jerusalem for nine months beginning in April 1961, continues this critical rethinking. "Facing Justice -- Adolf Eichmann on Trial," at the Topography of Terror, which documents the Nazi apparatus in the Third Reich, brings it back for updated reflection, with photographs and videos of witnesses, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges.
Our British and European cousins are wrestling with a problem we don't have -- yet. How far can the state go to require religious beliefs to conform to basic law? You don't have to be a civil libertarian to feel a chill down your back in even putting the dilemma in such blunt terms. France has become the second European country, after Belgium, to ban the niqab, the Muslim sack that Sharia law requires women to wear to hide everything but their eyes from the sight of (horrors!) men. Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands are expected to follow. The larger question, for which no one has an answer, is how to assimilate an alien culture in the absence of the melting pot.
Nancy Pelosi was howlin' mad, eager to lead the charge on behalf of women everywhere (whether they want her to or not) against the Republican congressional regiments "at war with women." She sees a battlefield littered with bloody female bodies. It's mostly about abortions, of course, and whether the government should require everybody to pay for them. She's aiming most of her fire at Rep. Paul Ryan and his proposed budget.
The college acceptance letters have landed. Hysterics have subsided. No more time tearful sessions of "what if?" Parents have come to terms with their disappointments that their achieving, well-adjusted child didn't get into her first choice because she had only an A-minus average and good but not great SAT scores, and was merely a reporter for the school newspaper. She may be able to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory and read all of "Moby Dick" (including the whale blubber descriptions), but that simply wasn't enough.
Revolutions are always unpredictable, depending on the way always unpredictable people adapt to them. That's true of high-tech revolutions as well as revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and a lot of other places. Humans are curious creatures. The revolution in communications, for example, for all of its benign access -- and success -- comes with social consequences that continue to surprise and occasionally alarm. Nothing seemed simpler for increasing opportunities for adults to stay in touch with their children's comings and goings than the cell phone. The cell phone that seems to grow out of the ears on every teenager's head and allows them to reach out to their friends seemed harmless enough. At first.
Many Americans were disappointed when President Obama devoted a Saturday radio address to a celebration of the progress of women in society. Most of us were more interested to hear about the progress (or lack of it) in dealing with the crisis that threatens to become a new war in Libya. The president was excited about a new White House report on the status of women, the first such report in 48 years. John F. Kennedy assigned Eleanor Roosevelt to explore the subject on that occasion.
Conservatives love to hate Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist who wrote his last political column on Sunday. But they owe him an accolade or two for recognizing what the relentless production of opinion was doing to his writing. (Other pundits, please copy.) "That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambitious conclusion," he wrote in his farewell to rage and all that. He's moving to fresh adventures at New York magazine, where he hopes to rediscover nuance, which he displayed in thoughtful abundance in "Ghost Light," his memoir about growing up in Washington, D.C.
Tina Brown wanted to create a big splash with the first issue of the "new" Newsweek -- the magazine Sidney Harmon bought for a dollar and put her in charge of returning it to relevance. What could be more original than putting a fresh face on the cover? So here's Hillary Clinton, 11 years older than the last time Tina Brown launched a magazine, called Talk, and put her there. You've come a long way, baby. Talk magazine was all about Bill Clinton's infidelities. The new Newsweek shows how the former first lady has risen on the world stage and has become a formidable presence on her own. It's Women's History Month, after all, and this year's theme is "Our History Is Our Strength." Hillary is one of 150 famous females "who shake the world."
If the teachers unions would use their collective bargaining rights to do good for their students rather than doing well for themselves, they could make a stronger case for themselves. The good teachers, if they provide a little evidence, might even make a credible argument for getting paid more money. But nooooooo. They're talking "me, me, me." Unions were originally formed as a protection against exploitive employers, but teachers unions are often trying to exploit their employers -- the taxpayers -- even though most of us aren't happy with what we're paying for. The problem has many causes, but negotiating for ever-bigger salaries and more expensive pensions won't resolve any problems.
"If you want to send a message," Samuel Goldwyn famously told his screenwriters, "go to Western Union." He was determined that his movies would be about entertainment, not politics. Now you would have better luck trying to send a message by Pony Express, since the telegram has gone the way of buggy whips and high-button shoes. But via cell phone, e-mail or Twitter, the old movie mogul's point is still a valid caution. The movies nominated for the Academy Awards on Sunday are mostly about entertainment -- hot buttered popcorn, not hot-button politics. Two of the leading contenders for best picture, "The Social Network" and "The King's Speech," say more about changing mores and manners than about the price of oil or how to rein in out-of-control government spending. The revolution in how we communicate with one another is told in the stories of two men separated by nearly a century, one a college kid and the other a king, both flawed but triumphant in confrontation with the world.
It's not easy to perfect a formula to encourage human aspiration, but two very different women in the headlines think they've done it. Lady Gaga, who just won a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance, and the Tiger Mom, whose controversial book on "parenting" became an instant best-seller, are cut from the same cloth to make a splashy costume. Both have cleverly manufactured a personal story, sensationalized its message and packaged it in a way that sells to the insecure, the overanxious and the ill at ease. Superstar meets Supermom. Though backgrounds, methods and measurements for success may be different, they both understand that we live in an age where frustration is the mother of invention, and as with the oyster, irritation is crucial. They get a pearl even if it's fake.
Democracy is more than a word. The protesting Egyptians and the watching world are learning that between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood stand a lot to overcome. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got one thing right: "It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy." Hope and change are not the same thing. Big talk and big deeds are not the same thing, either, as our own experienced taught. Not everyone believed the great Philadelphia experiment of 1776 would succeed, an experiment born of hope not experience. Not everyone believes now that what was wrought then will endure.
We're moving swiftly into post-literate America, and more's the pity. Many of us can't write a coherent, straightforward, easy-to-read sentence. Nobody but a Tiger mother seems interested in teaching her cubs how to write clearly.
