Niall Ferguson’s first volume of Henry Kissinger’s biography, which deals with his formative years, is masterful. It’s a difficult read, heavy with research and documentation. Kissinger was without doubt a brilliant man. Perhaps the most influential political advisor in the USA of the late twentieth century. He served across the divide as advisor and Secretary of State, employed most notably…
Experimenter
I recommend a recent film called Experimenter, a dramatization of the work of the American Jewish psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), released this past October by Magnolia Pictures. It stars Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, along with other stars. The series of experiments conducted by Milgram at Yale University concerned the way people respond to and obey figures of authority. They…
Factory Farming
Those who work in education delight in their successes and regret the failures. Very often those one expected to shine burnt out and those one expected to struggle shone. One of my pupils was such a disaster academically at school that I wrote on one of his reports that “he was heading like a lemming to disaster”, and indeed at…
Yossi Sarid, Frenemy?
I was in Israel when Yossi Sarid died. Who was he? Most Jews in the diaspora have no idea. On the face of it, he was another left-wing secular Israeli politician, a former Knesset member and government minister. But he was also a weathervane of Israeli society. He witnessed the transformation of Israel from a European, secular Zionist, socialist experiment…
Puddingstone
Puddingstone is a novel by Mark Mirsky about a Jew growing up the area near Franklin Park in Boston in the 1960s. It’s a world where young Irish bullies torment young geeky Jewish boys. The main character is Maishe Ostropol. Hershal Ostropol was a popular figure in Yiddish humor, and the name “Maishe” is the Lithuanian accented Hebrew version of…
Chanukah Mixed Messages
The Chanukah story is a good example of how a religious culture can develop over time and why. It is, in fact, based on historically documented events, corroborated by several sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The bare bones of the narrative are that after Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE his empire was carved up amongst rival generals. The…