Richard Cohen

Doubts are raised about the story of the Ground Zero police officer who died on the day his son attended the State of the Union speech with Hillary Clinton.

Richard Cohen said Hillary should have questioned the administration better before her vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

Mike Bloomberg has proposed millions of dollars in cuts to education, child and health care programs despite a $3.9 billion surplus.

Eliot Spitzer will support plans for the Freedom Tower, a project he criticized earlier.

In explaining why Spitzer is criticizing fellow Democratic lawmakers, his spokesman said, "He's using the system the way it was meant to be used."

Joe Bruno said the governor must be "hallucinating" if he thinks the Democrats will take over the Senate.

A Pataki holdover working as deputy secretary of state was fired from his six-figure job.

The state Republican chairman blamed the recent loss of a state Senate seat in Nassau on the Democratic governor's popularity and the Republican president's unpopularity.

And Karl Rove says that the early 2008 campaigning is excessive.

-- Azi Paybarah

The AJC's report on "Only Self-Hating Jews Don't Like Israel"—it's actually called "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism"—is officially an embarrassment. I say officially because the report's theme that it is "illegitimate" for Jews to question the nature of the founding of Israel, that such inquiries represent a "betrayal" of Israel, based on "tangled psychological" motives, is being criticized in the mainstream press around the world, as it should be. The Op-Eds pile up one after another. The report has exposed the Jewish leadership's underhanded methods: smearing intellectuals as "self-haters."

It has also got the AJC into a fight it doesn't want with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a longtime friend of Israel, who is named in the report because of his column last summer saying the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned "mistake." Cohen is upset.

Among the first to call me after the Times piece appeared was the AJC itself. It apologized. It did not mean to include me with the others, and it would, its representative told me, soon set matters straight. It issued a news release saying that Rosenfeld's characterization of me does "not reflect the totality of [my] occasional writings on the Middle East."

Well, the AJC has not set matters straight with Cohen. It is still fiddling. On its website the AJC crows that it got the Times to run a correction of its characterization of the AJC as a "conservative" group. This is a pure expression of vanity (Jewish groups like to think of themselves as liberal). In the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, the AJC's director, goes on for several paragraphs about the good news that he obtained a correction, and then seeks to justify the report: "[T]he individuals [author Alvin] Rosenfeld mentions are on the political fringes in asserting that Israel has no right to exist and should either be destroyed or morphed into a so-called binational state, which means the end of Israel as we know it."

Harris then says this is not true of Richard Cohen, but he has nonetheless made "disturbing" comments about Israel.

This is called digging yourself deeper into a hole.

Today in the American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg echoes the charge that the AJC is unfair to Richard Cohen—while by and large defending the report, by adding his own attack on anti-Zionists and non-Zionists:

They affirm the right of Palestinians to return to a remembered homeland, but negate Jews' right to repatriate themselves to their remembered homeland. Jewish nationhood alone is a scandal. Morally, this is no different than deciding that everyone but black Africans has the right to self-determination...

Gorenberg's analogy of the Palestinian refugees' claims to the claim of, say, a former Diaspora Californian like himself to emigrate to Israel out of ideas he studied in a yeshiva that include religious messianism (as he states in his book The End of Days) is highly problematic. I think Gorenberg, a wonderful journalist by the way, is wrong.

Cohen undertakes a broader defense of the AJC's targets: "It's sad that the American Jewish Committee commissioned and published Rosenfeld's report. I can't imagine what good will come out of it. Instead, it has given license to the most intolerant and narrow-minded of Israel's defenders so that, as the AJC concedes in my case, any veering from orthodoxy is met with censure... Shame." Cohen gets at the great (backfired) achievement of the AJC paper and its coverage in the Times. It has ennobled the critics, and not just the critics Gorenberg, who made aliyah, wishes to defend.

Zionism's DNA is being examined by American Jews. Tony Judt and Alisa Solomon are at last being heard widely, in their call on the American Jewish community to examine the religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence in the Middle East. Liberal integrationists like myself, who chose not to make aliyah, are at last being heard. Call it poison, call it illegitimate: the world seems interested in what we have to say.

So pundits can't seem to take their eyes off of Ed Klein's Hillary book, even as they dismiss it as a work of trashy fiction. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen tries a sarcastic take on Klein's real motivations for writing the book. "Klein set out to expose the right wing for the gullible nincompoops they are," Cohen writes. "He has succeeded, and vast riches await him." Here's the key passage: His book is flying off the shelves -- more than 350,000 shipped. The other day was No. 4 on Amazon's bestseller list and was sold out at my sedate neighborhood bookstore when I checked. It has become a Rorschach of conservative madness -- proof that they will buy anything, no matter how badly done, that attacks the Clintons or liberalism. Klein's book is just the most recent example. He looked at conservatives the way P.T. Barnum looked over his audience: "There's a sucker born every minute," Barnum said. Ed is nodding all the way to the bank. Okay, so let's review: Someone creates writes a Hillary expose so ridiculously slanderous that conservative columnists rush out to condemn it. The book promptly becomes a best-seller anyway, prompting liberal columnists like Cohen to dismiss it as "conservative madness." Does this strike anyone else as an instructive preview of Hillary '08, if not ‘06? Speaking of which...  read more »

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