Paul Berman

Bernard-Henri Lévy undid the top three buttons of his shirt as soon as he was done with his oration last night. “Now I’m free!” he said. “My love of freedom goes till that. I never wore a tie in my life. Even in very official circumstances, I never wore a tie. Which is very unusual for a Frenchman!”

Mr. Lévy, the dramatic French intellectual with the wavy hair and the persistently bare chest, was standing amid a circle of admirers at the 92nd Street Y, minutes after delivering the annual State of World Jewry address. The address had been mostly grim: Jewry is in peril, was the main idea, and Israel is really good. Also that Islamic radicalism is not to be tolerated, and that to do so is to betray the principles of liberalism.

The Jewish people have never been more “lonely, vulnerable and threatened” than they are right now, Mr. Lévy said.

About 1,000 people had come to hear Mr. Lévy talk about this idea, among them Isabella Rosellini, former New Republic owner Marty Peretz and someone important from the French consulate. Also, Maer Roshan from Radar was there; he sat in the balcony with Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici.  read more »

The November 8th issue of The New York Review of Books is online, and among other things, it features a sharply worded exchange between Paul Berman and Ian Buruma. The back-and-forth is only the latest installment in an ongiong feud between the two thinkers, which The Observer reported on earlier this month.

Mr. Berman, a self-described liberal who believes the intellectual left has abandoned its core principles, kicked off this round by submitting a letter to NYRB editor Bob Silvers in response to a review Mr. Buruma wrote in September of Norman Podhoretz's World War IV.  read more »

The debate, between some of New York’s most esteemed liberal thinkers—Paul Berman and Tony Judt of New York University, Mark Lilla of Columbia and Ian Buruma of Bard College—has captured the imagination of Europe.  read more »

The hero-worship Barack Obama experienced in New Hampshire followed by the endless references to JFK in the media are, as the Senator said, not about him, they're about us. And Iraq.

Americans like to think of themselves as idealists. I do. Yet our country has been dragged in the mud for years now by this filthy war that has brought untold suffering to the Iraqis. David Frum can rationalize the war all he wants on television; Americans don't like to think of themselves as the authors of this type of grisly desperation. Bernard Lewis and Paul Berman and Tom Lantos can talk about Arabs being the new Nazis till doomsday: but Americans want to think of the world in different ways. They're determined to. Part of the Obama hopefulness is the idea that we would be embracing progress,

This became clear during another emotionally-wrenching event on television yesterday: When Les Roberts of tk spoke fo the suffering in Iraq. He got smuggled into Iraq from Jordan in 2004 by a tough former intelligence officer, in the back of a car, and when they came into Baghdad the man broke into tears over the destruction of families. We have no idea what suffering we have caused for milions of people, said Dennis Kucinich, the leader of the panel. What is needed before anything, said Roberts, is a full accounting of the losses, and an acknowledgement of them, and American "contrition."

Roberts is going to be waiting for a long long time for such open gestures of contrition. That's not the American way. Voting for Barack Obama

My most frequent commenter, a Mr. Anonymous, calls me a "Judenrat" for noting that Leonard Greene, the inventor who takes out ads against the killing of Muslims, is Jewish. Anon goes on:

What difference does it make what religion Leonard Greene is? In the name of fair reporting, why not report the religion of every person mentioned in every article about the Middle East—like Mearsheimer, Walt and Rachel Corrie? Maybe you can put a little yellow star next to the Jews, and a red one next to the ones with "Jewish sounding names".

Anonymous has a good point. Issues should be discussed on their merits. Whereas I'm being ad hominem, talking about the man. This is a hard one to think through. Some answers:  read more »

On Monday night, Willa Paskin sat down for a three-hour session with the man who instigated a firestorm in Europe and the Middle East with the simple commissioning of cartoons.

"Those of you who have followed this story closely might know I was sent on vacation by my bosses," said Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Mr. Rose was the editor who commissioned that paper's infamous cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

Mr. Rose's American vacation hasn't been particularly relaxing. Hoping to create "some other point of reference to me for the readers, so I would not be Mr. Cartoon for the rest of my career," his editors have sent him on a sojourn across the U.S. to speak with public figures and intellectuals about the global political landscape. Mr. Rose has already conducted interviews with Newt Gingrich, Christopher Hitchens, Francis Fukuyama, and Richard Perle.

On Monday, April 17, in order to speak with author and intellectual Paul Berman, Mr. Rose found himself in a stuffy classroom on Washington Place—before Mr. Berman's class at New York University's journalism school.  read more »

To the Editor:In my few years in publishing, I’ve observed that it may be more agreeable—and muc  read more »