@ miguel cervantes:
Uh-huh. And because Peretz stands behind a certain vision of Israel, it's of no interest that many of Peretz's colleagues, including intimates and proteges, including his alma mater and his own wife, have rejected him? You have this story completely backwards. The author, whom you seek to deride through your usual guilt-by-association tactics, has achieved something very difficult: Transform this near-universally reviled, isolated figure "in exile," into an object of sympathy, while grasping the kernel of Peretz-ism that his (and Israel's) critics cannot be ready to give up, or can give up only at a price. The only thing more difficult for, broadly defined, liberal internationalists than working through the irreducible Peretz inside them all would be actually detaching from it fully, since that would mean fully detaching from the whole milieu he represents as a typical exception as well as the whole idea of an intellectually and morally self-consistent defense of Israel and the West against its enemies.
@ miguel cervantes:
Apparently, you're referring to another piece by the same writer. Your problem, it seems to me, is that anything that doesn't immediately and exclusively embrace your knee-jerk judgments strikes you as biased in the other direction. This is why you are constitutionally attracted to all of these radicals: You are just like them, except you take a step further than most by assuming that anyone who doesn't offer black and white, bad guy and good guy judgments on everything is really black/bad.
@ fuster:
I'll take your correction, but the divorce is still part of the Peretz pathos evoked in the profile.
@ miguel cervantes:
Uh-huh. And because Peretz stands behind a certain vision of Israel, it's of no interest that many of Peretz's colleagues, including intimates and proteges, including his alma mater and his own wife, have rejected him? You have this story completely backwards. The author, whom you seek to deride through your usual guilt-by-association tactics, has achieved something very difficult: Transform this near-universally reviled, isolated figure "in exile," into an object of sympathy, while grasping the kernel of Peretz-ism that his (and Israel's) critics cannot be ready to give up, or can give up only at a price. The only thing more difficult for, broadly defined, liberal internationalists than working through the irreducible Peretz inside them all would be actually detaching from it fully, since that would mean fully detaching from the whole milieu he represents as a typical exception as well as the whole idea of an intellectually and morally self-consistent defense of Israel and the West against its enemies.
@ miguel cervantes:
Apparently, you're referring to another piece by the same writer. Your problem, it seems to me, is that anything that doesn't immediately and exclusively embrace your knee-jerk judgments strikes you as biased in the other direction. This is why you are constitutionally attracted to all of these radicals: You are just like them, except you take a step further than most by assuming that anyone who doesn't offer black and white, bad guy and good guy judgments on everything is really black/bad.
I didn't see any "slime" at all. I found it to be an emotionally rich profile of a flawed man near the end of his productive life.