Eric Alterman | The Nation

In this Sunday, April 22, 2012, photo, Israeli flags fly over the Ulpana neighborhood in the West Bank settlement of Beit El near Ramallah. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

My "Think Again" column is called “Jews Are Still Liberal” and it’s here.

I’ve got a piece in the Times Arts and Leisure section on Joseph Alsop called “A Newsmaker in Every Sense of the Word” and it’s here.

In other Alterman-related news, The Daily Beast had nice things to say about The Cause, here, and forbes.com published an interesting response to the Springsteen excerpt published in The Nation here.

My new "Think Again" column is called "John Bolton and the Problem with On-the-One Hand Objectivity." Read it.

By way of introduction to Reed’s post, I was up at Yale last week to give a talk to Jewish students there and it happened to be the day when the International Relations program through which I got my master’s there was celebrating its reception of Henry Kissinger’s papers, which I assume must have been inspired either by a great deal of money or by Henry’s desire to poke Harvard in the eye. John Lewis Gaddis (who appeared deeply unhappy to see me) talked about how great Henry was and then Henry moderated a panel on China with Robert Rubin, Jonathan Spence (its only China expert) William Burns, deputy secretary of state; Michael Mullen, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was said during conference was off the record, it was repeatedly announced, but the let the record show that the words “democracy” and “human rights” were not spoken a single time until I was invited to ask a question from the audience. I see this as legitimate to mention because 

a) I am not reporting on anything that was actually said at the conference;

My new "Think Again" column is called "The End of Newspapers and the Decline of Democracy."

Alter-reviews:
Though I was shocked to see it at first, I supposed it should have come as no surprise to me that Judith Miller is at least as discerning a theater critic as she is when it comes to weapons of mass destruction and Bush administration lies, deception and folly. Her pan of Mike Nichols’ revival of Death of a Salesman, starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann, is one of the most wrong-headed pieces of prose I’ve read since her parroting of Dick Cheney’s nonsense about yellowcake uranium, though to be fair, few people are likely to die as a result. More optimistically, few people are likely to do anything at all as a result, given the deservedly unreserved raves the production received in New York and The New Yorker. I vaguely recall seeing both the George C. Scott and Dustin Hoffman versions of the play and while it was too long ago for me to make any sensible comparison, I can hardly remember being so riveted (often painfully so) by any performance anywhere as watching this magnificent play. Much of it is cliché today, but here is where the cliché was invented and, seen in context, these clichés take on added power for the truths they reveal about life in a capitalist country and what it does to men. I actually left the theater speechless and since I saw it just before opening night, I sent a few emails out to friends suggesting that they buy the tickets before the reviews came out; even friends who lived out of town. Hoffman’s performance is one for the ages, but the rest of the cast has the right combination of explosiveness and tenderness you’d want in this play. I’ve been writing about Arthur Miller for my next book, but I’ve never “felt” the power of what made his reputation live so long and travel so far and wide until I saw Nichols’ Salesman.