Amanda Unvarnished

Plus: Careening toward authoritarianism with eyes wide open.

The boatman cuts his outboard motor and the rusty launch drifts with the sluggish current of the Suriname River. Try as I might, even with the help of two Parbo Biers, I can’t conjure up a Jewish community along these green banks — much less a realm of Jewish autonomy where Shabbat-keeping plantation owners held sway over […]

In late December, the murder by Hamas of a Canadian-Israeli citizen, 70-year-old Judith Weinstein Haggai of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was confirmed. As has been their habit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly, and Canada’s ambassador to Israel, Lisa Stadelbauer, were all silent. I was not. My rebuke of the Canadian ambassador […]

A few months before I graduated from Oxford, I was interviewed for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s prestigious two-year journalist trainee course. This was the best way at the time to secure a job at Britain’s most respected news broadcaster. A committee of five interviewed me. The chair asked whether there was anything I would have […]

Immediately after news of Hamas’s October 7 massacres broke — before it was known just what had happened, before the shock of the cruelty had been absorbed (which will, perhaps, never happen) — instant, and astonishingly confident, analyses of the event’s “root cause” emerged. On October 7 itself, the Democratic Socialists of America, once the home of Michael Harrington’s […]

Why, more than two decades after 9/11, when Osama bin Laden attacked America in order to inspire and lead “the global jihad project” — the term is from the left-leaning Brookings Institution — do we see massive demonstrations on the streets of Europe and the United States in favor of the antisemitic, genocidal Islamist butchers of Hamas, who are […]

Adi Schwartz and I had just exited another frustrating meeting with a smug European diplomat. Turning to an exasperated me, Adi — co-author of our book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace — offered an odd sort of comfort by pointing out that, at a minimum, we are […]

You can't spell 'psychotherapist' without psycho.

The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,” runs a bizarre quip ascribed to the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex. To deconstruct it, consult Dr. Freud. “A convenient way to dispatch guilt,” he might expound, “is to project it onto your victim” — like a schoolyard bully who huffs that the fight started when the other guy […]

If I had only a glancing knowledge of American history, I would never guess that black Americans and Jewish Americans had ever clashed. After all, both groups understand what it’s like to be a despised minority, both groups have been reliable Democrat voters for the better part of the past century, and both groups share […]