Tag: Jews

Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures

Now that I’ve finished my Clarence Thomas book—it’ll be out in September, pre-order it now—I’m catching up on my reading. Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures wasn’t first on my list, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. Hecht was a screenwriter, the force, or one of the forces, behind films like Scarface, Notorious, Twentieth Century, and many other films. “He invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” said Godard. As Hoffman explains: Screwball comedy’s airborne patter; the brooding tones of the gangster saga; the newspaper farce and its hard-boiled banter—these were among Hecht’s signature modes, and whether or not he fathered these forms, he certainly played a major role in their upbringing. Hecht […]

Do the Jews Not Belong in the United States?

My new column at Salon on that crazy comment from Joe Biden that I talked about the other day. Only now I look a little further into it: A country that once offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world now tells its Jews that in the event of some terrible outbreak of anti-Semitism they should… what? Plan on boarding the next plane to Tel Aviv? It’s like some crazy fiction from Philip Roth, except that when Roth contemplated an exodus in “Operation Shylock,” it was to imagine the Jews fleeing Israel for Poland. … The reason no one has been ruffled by his statement, I suspect, has less to do with any special sensitivity to Jewish experience […]

Nietzsche, the Jews, and other obsessions

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I now have a Tumblr, where I post the short and sweet. Some themes seem to be emerging there, so I thought I might share them here.  One has to do with Nietzsche, the other with all things Jewish (Israel, the Holocaust, etc.) On Nietzsche, I’ve pursued my ongoing obsession with the relationship between his critique of value and the rise of marginal economics, particularly the Austrian School. One of my underlying questions is how does Nietzsche relate to libertarianism (beyond the fact that an inordinate number of adolescents seem to have cut their teeth on both topics simultaneously), a subject I’m writing about now and hope to be publishing in the near […]