RUTHFULLY YOURS

P. David Hornik is one of Israel’s best journalists and commentators who has made the case for Israel in the most articulate and elegant prose. His book Choosing Life in Israel is an inspiring account of his life as an immigrant in a homeland far removed from the relative security and comfort of America, detailing the trials, tribulations, and ultimate pride and pleasure of life in his adopted country.
He has written a novel, Beside the Still Waters, which takes place in America and Israel. His protagonist is a writer, Steve Sandorsky, who is introduced to the reader as a kid growing up in a rural area near Schenectady, New York. Steve is the child of a brooding and uncommunicative father whose parents were Holocaust victims, and a mother who is not Jewish. When Steve learns at age eleven that according to Jewish religious law, as someone with only a Jewish father, he’s not considered Jewish, he’s profoundly shocked and feels himself from that point on, for a number of years, to be drifting in a no-man’s-land without a real identity.

But Steven’s romantic encounters, bouts of depression, fringe alcoholism, and marital stress increasingly propel him toward Zionism and identification with Israel, until he takes the huge step of moving there. And it’s in Israel that the second part of the novel takes place.

Is it autobiographical? I don’t know, but the spirited description of Israel’s dilemmas, and Steve’s staunch defense of his adopted nation as an emerging journalist, are reminiscent of the author.

A great deal of this highly engaging and readable novel consists of dialogue in various forms–conversations, phone calls, emails. In all of these the reader hears the voices–the angst, the joys, the disappointments, the disillusion and the doubt, of all the very vivid and varied characters.

Ultimately the novel is both romantic and an introduction to Israel, a nation of outsize contribution to the world despite a largely hostile environment. It’s powerfully affecting in both dimensions, most of all when they start to mesh as Steve confronts his true challenges.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

History allows us to marvel at our own time with renewed perspectives. For example, how rich and easy our lives are – despite a freshman Congresswoman telling a Newsweek interviewer that “an entire generation [millennials] came of age and never saw American prosperity” – compared to the hardships experienced by early pioneers, like those along the Ohio River.

David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, in his new book, follows several families, including those of Manasseh Cutler and his two sons, Ephraim and Jervis, along with Joseph Barker and Samuel Hildreth, from the founding of the Ohio Company in 1784, through the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, to 1863, when the Territory had become five states and all the founders were dead.

In 1783, as a condition for signing the Treaty of Paris, John Adams insisted that Britain cede rights to what was called the Northwest Territory, an area west of Pennsylvania, east of the Mississippi River, north of the Ohio River and south of British Canada. It consisted of 265,878 square miles – an area larger than France, an area from which five states would eventually be carved: Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837) and Wisconsin (1848). In 1800, the U.S. Census recorded a population of 51,000 in the Territory. By 1860, those five states had a population of seven million.

The land they first settled in 1788, where the Muskingum River meets the Ohio, became the town of Marietta. It was named after the French Queen, Marie Antoinette. Marietta was settled by forty-eight pioneers led by General Rufus Putnam, a Revolutionary War veteran and friend of George Washington. It is in the southeastern part of what is now Ohio, bordering on Virginia (now West Virginia). The passage of the Northwest Ordinance gave ownership of the land to the U.S. government which, via the Ohio Company, sold land to pioneers, including Revolutionary War veterans – men, as Joseph Barker later wrote, who “had been disciplined to obey, and learned the advantage of subordination to law and good behavior in promoting the prosperity of themselves and the rest of mankind.” Traits needed by those who would venture west included, Mr. McCullough writes: “fortitude, perseverance, patience, resolution and good sense.”

Baltimore is in the news! Is it a sin to tell the truth about Baltimore …Or is Baltimore getting badmouthed with ulterior motives? Hard to say, if you’ve never been there.Do you know any writer, besides Edgar Allan Poe,that ever lived in Baltimore? Yes. The author of So Courage & Gypsy Motion

So Courage & Gypsy Motion

by Nidra Poller

AVAILABLE IN KINDLE  AND PAPERBACK

— I know what that’s about. That’s what he does to a woman… he’s so damned ro-man-tic, your dream come true, looking deep in your eyes and holding your hand across the table, candlelight and all that shit, but he did it goo-ood! Movie star lover… and then there’s something stone cold at the center of him, a falseness… no, it’s deeper than that … he doesn’t even know himself… but I dig. Do you know what he told me? He was madly in love with a chick but she was married and turned him down so he went out to get drunk… all the way to Baltimore down by the docks he ended up in this Greek place and he met this Barbara and he started in courting her you know sort of to get revenge against the other one, but she took him serious and before he knew it they were living together and so he said now he thinks he fell in love with her … So they’re still together?

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/190729

Since 9/11, writes Tabitha Korol in her riveting book, “Confronting The Deception: Inflamed by 9/11, fired up by eight bad years,” the United States, Israel, and cultures that still value our freedoms have been fighting a battle of survival on several fronts.

The primary battle, Korol explains, is with the ideology born out of the Islamic attempt to claim Ground Zero as its Caliphate – and from there, literally to conquer the United States of America.

The religious-political-supremacist system of Islam was invented in the seventh century and has since led a relentless drive to take over the world, establish a caliphate ruled by Shariah Law – the law that mandates cutting off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, throwing homosexuals off roofs to their deaths, engaging in “honor killings” of teenage girls whose behavior they disapprove of, and killing all Jews. That sharia law.

It is no surprise that this megalomaniacal goal has captured the imagination of leftists worldwide, including in our country, who share Islam’s goals, particularly of destroying America – the “Big Satan” – and Israel, the “Little Satan.”

This is a battle being fueled by the Shadow Government of the United States of America, specifically those forces – many from the Muslim Brotherhood – that have been implanted in the highest reaches of our government – including Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the State Department, even the Oval Office – by the Obama regime, many of whom remain quite stealthily in their positions today.

In the 1930s and ’40s, there were any number of American communists so enamored of Joseph Stalin and the shining tomorrows he promised that they would do anything for the Soviet Union, disdaining payment of any kind.

David Karr was not one of them.

Karr, writes Harvey Klehr in his riveting biography of the man, was something else entirely: He was the young American communist on the make, his eye “ever alert for the main chance,” his hand ever open to Soviet largess. Born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of Jewish immigrants, he gained access to power—and methodically amassed a $10 million fortune—by his wits, intelligence, radiant personality and, above all else, a matchless talent for Soviet-American networking. His early career was that of an idealistic sympathizer, working first as a freelancer for communist and far-left periodicals, including the Daily Worker. His later career, however, saw him assume an array of overlapping, ever-shifting personae, “from muckraking columnist to public relations flack, from corporate raider to corporate executive, from moviemaker to hotel executive, from business fixer to Olympic Committee confidant.”

According to some sources—and to stories unverifiable because the corroborating evidence remains classified or kept from public view by his former associates—Karr was also an “arms smuggler, . . . protector of Jewish emigrants from Russia, [and] behind-the-scenes political fixer.” Throughout it all, writes Mr. Klehr, “Karr cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies, tried to act as a middleman between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. on several issues, and attempted to get close to American officials and politicians at the behest of the KGB.” He had an uncanny ability to befriend major American business figures, including corporate raider Art Landa, health-care innovator Henry Kaiser and Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer. He knew or met with every president from FDR to Gerald Ford and was a trusted adviser to many politicians, including Sargent Shriver, Scoop Jackson and Jerry Brown.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/review-the-notorious-ben-hecht-iconoclastic-writer

Julien Gorbach’s The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is the second book to come out this year on the reporter, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, novelist, polemicist, and pioneer of the gangster movie and the screwball comedy. Hecht is a more remarkable character than any he created in his hugely successful Hollywood career. (It has received far less attention than the first biography, Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, largely because she beat him to market.)

Gorbach’s focus is different from that of any other Hecht biographer. All the others, including Hecht’s own autobiography A Child of the Century, devote no more than a fifth of their space to Hecht’s “Jewish period.” Gorbach turns the customary allotment on its head, devoting four fifths of his biography to this phase of Hecht’s life. The disproportion is warranted, both because the other aspects of Hecht’s life have been well-covered by previous biographers and because, in the end, Hecht will be best remembered for his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust and for his support of the Irgun, the underground organization in Palestine that deserves chief credit—as Winston Churchill himself attested—for driving the British from Palestine.

For most of his life Hecht was an assimilated Jew, indifferent although never hostile to his Jewish roots. Hecht wrote that he “turned into a Jew in 1939.… The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, brought my Jewishness to the surface.” When he thought of the Jews being slaughtered in Europe, he thought of his own kin, cherishing the memories of his warm, Yiddish-speaking extended family, which “remained like a homeland in my heart.”

As Hecht became more politically aware, he wrote columns for the newspaper PM. In one, titled “My Tribe Called Israel,” Hecht said, “I write of Jews today, I who never knew himself as one before, because that part of me which is Jewish is under a violent and ape-like attack.” It was these columns that caught the attention of Peter Bergson, who led a small group of Palestinian Jews recently arrived in the United States to build support for a Jewish army to fight Hitler. After some coaxing, Hecht joined their effort.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/while-we-all-have-mueller-on-the-brain/

You might want to get hold of Andy McCarthy’s timely and terrific forthcoming book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, which you can pre-order from the publisher, Encounter Books, here (its official release date is August 13th). While we’re at it, here’s a snippet from Andy’s introduction:

As for collusion, that word we’ve heard so incessantly from pundits and leaky government officials, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has rendered his judgment that there was none — at least, not the collusion he was hunting for. There really was a collusion plot, though. And it really did target our election system. It absolutely sought to usurp our capacity for self-determination. It was just not the collusion you’ve been told about. It was not “Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia.” 

Here is the real collusion scheme: in 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment. This scheme had two parts: Plan A, the objective; and Plan B, a fail-safe strategy in case Plan A imploded — which all the smartest people were supremely confident would never, ever happen . . . which is why you could bet the ranch that it would. 

Plan A was to get Mrs. Clinton elected president of the United States. This required exonerating her, at least ostensibly, from well-founded allegations that were both felonious and politically disqualifying. 

Plan B was the insurance policy: An investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he were elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton campaign– generated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage. An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump un-re-electable under the guise of building an impeachment case.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/07/29/a-herd-has-no-mind/

Funny thing about my new book: I had begun shopping around the proposal for writing it long before my brief period of employment with that other magazine and the subsequent witless chimp-brained media freakout and Caffeine-Free Diet Maoist struggle session that followed and climaxed with my being fired by Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg on my third day of employment there and after a good deal of stink eye from some seething young woman with an unfortunate All-Lesbian World Bowling Champion haircut loitering glumly in the coffee room. I was, for a few days, a writer who was much more read about than read. After the ninth (or so) New York Times denunciation of my soul and my work, my professional dance card began to fill up with pleasing speed.

That’s the upside of being in the controversy business: I always get paid. Hooray for me.1

But why was I flogging this book way back before I got involved in what I must with some genuine disappointment characterize as only the second-most-infamous episode involving a shady right-winger and the Watergate complex?2 There were good reasons. A number of disturbing sociopolitical meltdowns combining deep stupidity with casual authoritarianism already had taken place: the firing of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for his views on marriage, and the IRS’s criminal leak of the National Organization for Marriage’s confidential tax documents in the service of a campaign to harass and attack its donors; the firing of James Damore for the crime of being stupid enough to believe that his po-faced ham-souled Caitlyn-haunted superiors at Google were being anything like halfway serious when they asked for dialogue about diversity in the firm; the campaigns against Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss at the New York Times; the “deplatforming”3 of conservatives and other nonconforming voices on social media; the violence and firebombings targeting unpopular speakers at Berkeley and other college campuses; and much more. The blackshirts and the American Association of Outrage Professionals were as creepily tumescent as Anthony Weiner cruising a Hello Kitty boutique, and there was outrage-porn aplenty, rampant, unapologetic, depraved — but my little book proposal was met with almost no excitement until I became, for a couple of weeks, the headline in the story.

I revisit that tawdry little episode in the book, to the extent that it is necessary to the story, but it isn’t a memoir. My subject is not the life and times of Kevin D. Williamson.4 My subject is what Coriolanus5 called “the beast with many heads” — mob politics, on social media and in what passes for real life, which increasingly is patterned on social media — and its effects on our political discourse and our culture. It is the most important political issue of our time. Discourse — the health and character of that discourse — is a force that exists above and outside the specific policy questions of the day; it is the master issue that will determine how every other issue is talked about and thought about — and whether those issues are thought about at all.