My Salon column this morning on Joe Biden and the Jews has generated a lot of conversation, at Salon, on Crooked Timber, and on my Facebook page and others. I want to address here four objections to the column that have been made. 1. A few commenters have claimed that I completely misinterpreted Biden’s comment. Biden wasn’t saying, they claim, that American Jews have no guarantee of their safety save Israel but that Israeli Jews have no such guarantee. What’s more, I alone have come up with this far-fetched reading, ignoring for my own reasons—a desire for “clickbait,” one commenter said—the more obvious interpretation of Biden’s remarks. There’s a few problems with this claim. First, and most obviously, Biden’s remarks were first reported by […]

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 […]

I’m happy to announce that today I begin a new gig as a columnist at Salon. I’ll be writing a bimonthly (or is it biweekly: I can never get that one straight) column on the kinds of things I write about here. Here’s my first column, on racism, privilege talk, and schools. Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white. In her […]