How the Syrian Government Helped Create Islamic State
And kept it afloat by buying its oil.
July 23, 2021
Saul Bellow, Cancel Culture, and the Dangers of Setting Limits on Imaginative Freedom
It’s a cop-out to explain away a novel’s improprieties on the grounds that they are of another age.
To the delicate sensibilities of the early 21st-century, the treatment of race relations in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet is, to put it politely, “highly problematic.” One could say the same of Bellow’s literary treatment of women. And that’s not to mention the works of his younger contemporary, Philip Roth, a biography of whom itself caused a scandal in the literary world. Howard Jacobson reminisces about his first encounters with Bellow’s fiction (“Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it has to be said, was not an encouraging novel for a first-time visitor to New York”), and the fate of Bellow’s work in our censorious present:
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Login or SubscribeJuly 23, 2021
Calling Israel an “Apartheid State” Has Its Roots in Soviet-Style Disinformation Techniques
And Jewish groups have been duped.
How the Bible Gave the World the Idea of Human Equality
Why the Torah appropriates images from pagan Egypt in describing God’s revelation.
Saul Bellow, Cancel Culture, and the Dangers of Setting Limits on Imaginative Freedom
It’s a cop-out to explain away a novel’s improprieties on the grounds that they are of another age.
The 7th-Century Massacre of Arabian Jews, and Its Legacy
“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews.”