Is this a Jewish joke or a Gypsy joke? What do you get when a Jew and a Gypsy go into business together? A chain of empty stores. About fifteen years ago, a friend of mine opened a shop selling fabrics and other household staples in a Tuscan town. She was English, beautiful and an innocent in the ...
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. —H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1948 If the Reverend Terry ...
When a respected eighty-one year old scholar who has known Afghanistan since 1962 returns there in search of a way forward, he deserves a hearing. William Polk made his first Afghan mission as part of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, which he joined when he left his teaching post at ...
Sixty-six years ago this month, the American and Free French forces landed in southern France to liberate this half of the country, link up with General Eisenhower in the north and drive the Germans back to Berlin. After the US Seventh Army landed at Saint Tropez and nearby beaches, it famously ...
This is no time to be a journalist, especially if you happen to be a Kurd. Under assault from Turkey and Iran, Kurdish journalists are imprisoned, tortured and intimidated. An Iranian revolutionary court sentenced one Kurdish journalist, Adnan Hassanpour, to death last year for alleged espionage. ...
My old friend Norman Finkelstein has just written a foreword to a new edition of his first-rate book on the Gaza Strip, This Time We Went Too Far, in which he shares his fears of another Israeli war in Lebanon. Norman is usually right, but he is also usually a lonely prophet in the wilderness, ...
In October 2000 most of the children invited by Dr. Emma Williams to her son Archie’s seventh birthday party failed to turn up. Distance was not the issue, given that her house was only twenty minutes from the French lycée where her two boys were studying. The problem was location. In ...
At the end of the film Little Caesar, the gangster Enrico Bandello, played by Edward G. Robinson, is shot down by the police. As he dies in the gutter, he asks, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" Reading that the Catalan provincial assembly decided last Wednesday to shoot itself in ...
The Catholic Church raised me. The Immaculate Heart nuns who supervised my education from the age of six through thirteen were, for the most part, conscientious educators. They loved us, possibly as surrogates for the children they did not bear. Theirs cannot have been easy lives, cloistered after ...
It's only dire necessity That's taking me to war; And if I were a moneyed man I wouldn"t go for sure. -Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by John Rutherford), Penguin Books, 2000, page 651. The time has come to justify anew the war in ...
