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Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states ...more

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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Th...more

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Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a ...more

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Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the...more

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When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

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How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

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Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do the...more

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Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister—that redolence of moral blackmail that...more

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In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates ...more

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God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and ...more