Free Republic

A major United States Holocaust Memorial Museum study of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy was put on hold last night after portions of the study given to Tablet were greeted with shock and harsh criticism by prominent Jewish communal leaders and thinkers. According to a publicity email sent by the Museum, the study was set to be launched at an event at the US Institute for Peace in Washington, D.C., on September 11 and was overseen by a former US intelligence and national security official under Obama, Cameron Hudson, now director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide....

Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at The New Republic for three decades who was preparing to unveil a new magazine next week, apologized on Tuesday for “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past” after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances. As those allegations came to light, Laurene Powell Jobs, a leading philanthropist whose for-profit organization, Emerson Collective, was backing Mr. Wieseltier’s endeavor, decided to pull the plug on it. “Upon receiving information related to past inappropriate workplace conduct, Emerson Collective ended its business relationship with Leon Wieseltier, including a journal planned for publication under...

SCENE LAST NIGHT: Less than a mile or so from Chabad Lubavitch's HQ at 770 Eastern Parkway, around 80 Hillary for America supporters gathered at the home of former White House Jewish Liaison Jarrod Bernstein and Hildy Kuryk, currently communications director at Vogue, to hear from the Clinton campaign's senior advisors including manager Robby Mook, vice chairwoman Huma Abedin and finance director Dennis Chang. SPOTTED: Recent Chairman of the Conference of Presidents Bob Sugarman, Obama mega-bundler Sarah Kovner, Tusk Ventures' Seth London, Anya Hoerburger of Intermedia Partners, Samantha Maltzman, Jill Strauss, Samantha Vinograd of Goldman Sachs and formerly at office...

Roughly two dozen staffers and contributing editors at The New Republic resigned on Friday as the result of what one of them described as an ugly cultural clash between a traditional journalistic institution and the Silicon Valley management style of its owner, a Facebook co-founder. The exodus marks the second time in recent months that a media venture backed by a tech industry tycoon encountered resistance from journalists who bristled over management’s new approach.

In a memo to staff yesterday announcing a masthead shake-up, New Republic chief executive Guy Vidra wrote that a reduction in the frequency of the 100-year-old magazine would require a staff “restructuring,” a common euphemism for layoffs. Well, that may not be necessary considering that a whole herd of staffers resigned en masse following the defenestration of top editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier. Have a look at the departures.... Perhaps the “restructuring” will now come in the form of a hiring spree to fill vacancies created by the newsroom-wide disgust with Foer’s firing. A group of...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Tim Graham. For its second season, the creators of the FX series "The Americans" have chosen a new source for insight into the Cold War during the Reagan years -- one Lt. Col. Oliver North. It's a dramatic reversal from the first season, and it has infuriated some hard leftists. The show began with the shocking promise from creator Joel Weisberg that the series' heroes would be KGB agents: "We're making them the sympathetic characters. I'd go so far as to say they're the heroes." It quickly became apparent that these characters could...

On the foreign policy front . . . I find myself 
wondering why we cannot regard another country, in this case Iran, 
as just that, as one more country which we would regard as neither friend nor foe, with whom we are prepared to deal on a day-to-day basis, neither idealizing it nor running it down, keeping to ourselves (here, of course, I am speaking about our government) our views about its domestic political institutions and practices, and interesting ourselves only in those aspects of its official behavior which touched our interests—maintaining in other words, a relationship with it of mutual respect...

A history of Jewish literacy remains to be written. It will be a colorful and complicated work, as befits the variegated linguistic history of the Jews, and for American Jewish readers of our day, I mean the honest ones, it will be a disturbing work. Whereas the Jews have always used many languages, Jewish and non-Jewish ones, and whereas complaints about the faltering level of competence in Hebrew appear in many medieval and modern sources, the awful fact is that Jewry of the United States has decided—it was a decision, even if it was never formally made—that the Jewish tradition...

Quite interesting discussion between more sane Left with less sane (some would say insane) Left. Leon Wieseltier does include some obligatory jibes at Bush/Chaney but otherwise provides a compelling argument  against reflexive blame Bush, "America made them do it" reaction of the crazy Left. Don't miss some interesting insights by a poster teplukhin2you down in the discussion area (at the TNR) on what might motivate Putin and his band of thugs.Excerpts and highlights are mine. Follow the link to the complete article.  ... My colleague John Judis has flabbergasted me with something he posted on these pages a few hours...