From a letter she wrote to the Daily Princetonian, as a senior at Princeton reflecting on the 1980 elections: Looking back on last Tuesday, I can see that our gut response — our emotion-packed conclusion that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead and that there was no longer any place for the […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
Let’s Not Get Too Excited About Kagan
I agree with Ilya that Elena Kagan is the best nominee we are likely to get from a liberal president and a Senate with an overwhelming Democratic majority. But the excitement (among some on the right) and dismay (by some on the left) over her good relations with conservatives as dean at Harvard is exaggerated. […]
To a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail Dept.
From the bowels of the just-this-side-of-an-anti-Jewish-hate-site blog “Mondoweiss,” which is obsessed with the “Israel Lobby”: “The Kagan moment spells not just the end of anti-Semitism, but the end of Jewish responses to it, including the Israel lobby.”
Isn’t This a Bit Much?
The president went to Harvard, and barely defeated a primary opponent who went to Yale. His predecessor went to Yale and Harvard, and defeated opponents who went to Yale and Harvard, and Harvard, respectively. The previous two presidents also went to Yale, with Bush I defeating another Harvard grad for the presidency. And once Elena […]
Berkowitz on Harvard Law and the Email Controversy
Via Instapundit, my former colleague Peter Berkowitz has an excellent column criticizing Dean Minow’s response to the controversy. One point Peter highlights is that it was a Harvard 3L student who speculated about the genetic basis for racial differences in IQ, but it was Dean Minow who wrote that the student “suggested that black people […]
Quote of the Day
“White people really, really piss me off sometimes.” —Elie Mystal, in a blog post expressing his disappointment that many people do not agree with him that the much-discussed Harvard e-mail is plainly racist.
I Shouldn’t Take Brian Leiter’s Bait, So
I won’t. I could prepare a lengthy post on how he intentionally distorted what I wrote about taboos in elite universities like Harvard, or take him to task for a cheap insult, and so forth, but I’ll instead quote what Leiter himself has written to show why it’s not worth responding to him, and why […]
My Comment Policy
For a while I was leaving comments open on almost every post, but for the last week or so I’ve been mostly closing them. I thought it was therefore a good time to reiterate my comments policy: Comments are a blessing and a burden. The burden is that we have moderated comments on this blog, […]
Bernstein on Normblog
Back in January, Normblog featured a profile of me, consisting of my written responses to a series of questions on various topics. I never did get around to linking to it, so here it is, in case readers find it of interest.
The Sound of Crickets Chirping
So the New Republic published the most thorough critique to date of Human Rights Watch’s record on Israel this week. Contrary to its typical belligerency, HRW has not responded [beyond this tepid and largely unresponsive letter to TNR from a co-chair of HRW’s Middle East advisory committee, who is not an employee of HRW, but […]
Taboo and Not Taboo at Elite Universities
Anthropologists tell us that one window into a society is what is and is not taboo in that society. It’s interesting to look at America’s elite universities in this context. Let’s take examples of people and ideas that are not taboo, just from things that I’ve blogged about: Being the head of an enemy, terrorist […]
Some “Realism” About John Mearsheimer
I understand that John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby, was once considered a respected “realist” scholar of international affairs. If so, it’s a shame he’s gone more and more off the deep end into the Mondoweiss/Finkelstein–two individuals he identifies as Jewish heroes, along with such prominent foreign policy “realists” (not) as Noam Chomsky and […]
Birnbaum on Human Rights Watch and Israel
Benjamin Birnbaum’s investigative piece for The New Republic on Human Rights Watch and Israel is now up. The piece mentions, but does not dwell on, the various scandals that engulfed HRW last year—the fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia in which HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson invoked the organization’s hostility to Israel and the […]
My Ancestry–Fughetaboutit!
I signed up with the 23andme DNA service, just for fun, and discovered that my paternal DNA Haplogroup is G2c. Here’s what Wikipedia tells me: The most plausible scenario for the spread of G2c within Europe is an origin among Jews in Sicily, and a spread northward to Germany and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the […]
A Thought on American Jewish Demography
I attended my 25th year high school reunion last night. I graduated from the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn. When I attended, my class was approximately 55% Jews of Syrian origin. These Jews haven’t assimiliated into broader American Jewish society, but their religious lifestyles generally fall within the “Conservadox” to “Modern Orthodox” categories. About 25% […]