My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975. I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The documentary is also riveting just as a cinematic experience. If you love the scene and soundscape of New York City film from the 1970s—from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Dog Day Afternoon—you’ll love this documentary. The archival footage alone will bring you back to the feel and time of another place. For me, the film was not just political (more on that below) but also personal. Figures […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Abe Beame, Albert Shanker, Buddy Beame, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford, Hugh Carey, New York City Fiscal Crisis, Svetlana Alexievich, Woody Allen, Zohran Mamdani
Increasingly, one hears the view that not only is Donald Trump a fascist but that he will be elected president. I don’t know what I think about these claims, but it seems to me that if we truly believe them, we’re obligated to ask the question: What will we do once Donald Trump is elected president? Woody Allen offered one answer in Manhattan. Whatever one thinks, I’m struck by the mismatch between the easy avowal, which you see around various precincts of the internet left, that the future looks bleak and the failure to consider the logical next question: What is to be done? It may be that I’m over-reading the discussion because I’m going through one of my periodic late-night reading binges […]
As someone who identifies as Jewish—who periodically goes to shul, celebrates some if not all of the holidays, and tries at least some (ahem) of the time to get off the internets for shabbos—yet opposes Zionism, I thought I’d heard all the charges that have been and could be made against me and my tribe. But yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic writer and one of the leading voices of liberal Zionism in this country, threw a new one into to the mix. In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an […]
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Categories
Middle East, Political Theory
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Tags Annie Hall, anti-Semitism, Bernard Lazare, Common Sense, Hannah and Her Sisters, Hannah Arendt, Israel-Firster, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jeffrey Shoulson, Robert Wistrich, Spencer Ackerman, Thomas Paine, Woody Allen