False Dichotomies

Reviewing a book is always tricky. Reviewing a book when you’re mentioned throughout its pages is even trickier. As for reviewing a book that’s dedicated to you, you can understand my reluctance to put my fingers to the keyboard. Can I Bring My Own Gun? might not be the book to break the unique voice that is Seth Freedman to the world (that will surely happen with Binge Trading, due in a couple of months), but it’s a text so inextricably linked to my story, not to mention the story of anyone who’s made aliyah, that to avoid passing comment would have been plain cowardice. Read more

False Dichotomies is proud to present a new feature – Friday Thoughts. This is off-the-cuff reflections on the week gone by. As such, I won’t be doing so much fact-checking or linking, so please forgive the inevitable errors.

Julian Soufir, a French immigrant, did Shlav Bet the mahzor before me. Then he cut the throat of an Arab taxi driver in Tel Aviv. This week a Tel Aviv District Court ruled that he was unfit to stand trial, as he had been insane at the time of the murder. Instead, he will be locked away in a psychiatric institution. Read more

1. What does Obama think about what’s happened? An interesting piece in Slate suggests one of the reasons for leaking candidates’ names before finalising them is to gauge opinion on the prospective appointment. The Freeman appointment got a lot further down the road than a leak, of course, but the principle still applies. Could Obama have been using the National Intelligence Council position as a barometer to test how the interested parties would react? Or is that granting him too much foresight? Certainly, he’s already got into trouble in making appointments, partly because of a lack of foresight and partly because of the difficulties in having to make so many new appointments (one of the strange quirks of the American system). In any case, I’m not sure it means much vis-a-vis policy, given that the role of the NIC director – properly understood –  is to dispassionately deliver intelligence assessments and then let the policy-makers do their stuff. Read more

A new weekly feature – the highlights of what I’ve been reading and watching on the web…

1. The trailer for Disgrace, an adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s seminal Booker prize winning novel, starring John Malkovitch.

2. The final moments of the NYU ‘occupation’. Its strange to see activists borrow the language bequeathed them by oppressors, but the lack of irony is a common theme, as you’ll see. Extraordinary to think that it isn’t a parody.

3. The Jewish-Kashmiri dialogue group has finally made it to Facebook. You can join here.

4. The New Yorker is the best magazine out there, period. See why with this brilliant piece on David Foster Wallace.

5. A Dalek found submerged in a pond. If anyone knows where my Dalek is, please let me know.

6. Dabke with Ismail: Reflections on Gaza from the makers of Waltz with Bashir.

7. A rare piece of self-criticism from the good folks at Kabobfest.

8. This piece on ‘writers on writing’ gave me my latest e-mail signature. Drop me a line to find out what it is…

9. The perfect response to Carol Churchill’s play.

10. Marry my daughter. If you’re having problems getting hitched and fancy going the biblical route, this site is for you.

Tzemah Yoreh was the youngest PhD in the history of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Humanities and is currently a Professor of Bible at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. You can find out more about his work at www.biblecriticism.com.

Every composition of a book is in a way the autobiography of the author, even if the book is not really a book but a website and the work in question is the most technical of scholarly treatises. The author’s life story is hidden in invisible nuggets between the words, only discerned by the most astute readers. If the book puts forth a daring new hypothesis, as this one does, then it stands to reason that the voyage of discovery involved momentous events in the author’s own life, even if they were mainly cerebral. In this short forward, I wish to share with the reader a precious nugget in my voyage of discovery.

When I was 21 I killed Isaac. Oh not literally, I didn’t invent a time machine – that would have been really exciting. I discovered that the original Genesis narrative told a story in which the angel did not stop the knife from coming down but let it cut through Isaac’s tender flesh, severing his head and the narratival continuity between Abraham and Jacob. I sat the traditional seven days of mourning for Isaac who was no longer my father, and for Abraham whom I had disowned, and then gave a lecture / eulogy on it at the World Congress of Jewish Studies. Read more

My essay on the future of the two-state solution can be read here, in the Spring-Summer edition of Democratiya.