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Tough Self-Love

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
January 20, 2011

Columnist Michelle Goldberg has a must-read profile of Philip Weiss, the Jewish proprietor of the popular anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss, today in Tablet Magazine. Fascinatingly, Weiss came to the Mideast issue well into his middle age and, without the baggage most American Jews carry, has felt no obligation to defend the necessity of a Jewish state or to attempt to square what increasingly seems to be an at least somewhat curved Zionist shape; as a new edition of the Goldstone Report co-edited by him comes to publication, he may be riding—and shaping—the Zeitgeist. At the same time, Goldberg, no Likudnik herself, is unhesitant in labeling Weiss’s broad theories of American Jewish conspiracies “outrageous.”

But there is no denying the fundamentally Jewish nature of his enterprise. “Weiss,” Goldberg writes, “has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions.”

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.