Free Republic

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious. A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She...

My wife kicks my leg under the dinner table whenever guests rail against anti-Netanyahu and Israel critics. The U.N. and college students are also favorite targets. "Save your contrarian opinions for your articles, not the dinner table," she reproaches me. I'm pretty black and blue, as you might imagine. This abridged dinner talk reflects the mounting impatience Israel advocates have because of a siege mentality set in among Israelis and Anglo-olim (immigrants). It incubates from the politics of fear, and they are just not taking it any longer. I have noticed a palpable shift in attitude in the six years...

There are no pleasant, constructive or even likeable human beings in this gigantic book, written by an American Leftwing atheistic Yiddishist, living, significantly, in Berkeley, California. There is no vigorous and lively State of Israel in Chabon's imaginary world; there is no thriving American Jewry in the most prosperous and tolerant country on earth; the world of Christian Americans and other religions barely appears, and then only as cardboard cutouts. Instead, the novel is set in an imagined Pale of Yiddish Settlement, Jozef Stalin's "solution" for the Jews in the early Soviet Union. Instead of Siberia, the Jews are transplanted...

It was the kind of headline that sells. "Michael Chabon's Holocaust Hoax," read the cover of the April-May issue of Bookforum. Inside, the article, by Paul Maliszewski, suggested that Mr. Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, had exceeded the bounds of poetic license in a lecture that he has given perhaps half a dozen times since 2003. In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Eldest Son's Name Is Napoleon," Mr. Chabon recounts a version of his childhood, laced with some tall tales (saying, for instance, that he has encountered several golems, the clay monsters of Jewish lore),...

FUTURE SOUNDTRACK FOR AMERICA Barsuk Records is set to release a fundraising CD compilation, titled future soundtrack for america, a joint project with MoveOn.org and Music For America, on August 10th. The compilation will include R.E.M.'s "The Final Straw (MoveOn mix)." McSweeney's Publishing is also releasing a book with similar fundraising goals that will include a copy of the CD; the future dictionary of america features contributions from an astounding group of almost 200 writers, from Paul Auster to Michael Chabon to Jonathan Franzen to Joyce Carol Oates to Kurt Vonnegut to Wendy Wasserstein. One hundred percent of the proceeds...