Sunday Reads: Saudi Arabia’s dirty move against Iran, Norman Mailer’s Jewishness

US

Walter Russell Mead takes a look at the American left’s disappointment after witnessing the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter:

As the United States staggers toward the seventh year of Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, a growing disquiet permeates the ranks of the American left. After six years of the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter, the nation doesn’t seem to be asking for a second helping. Even though the multiyear rollout of Obamacare was carefully crafted to put all the popular features up front, delaying less popular changes into the far future, the program remains unpopular. Trust in the fairness and competence of government is pushing toward new lows in the polls, even though the government is now in the hands of forward-looking, progressive Democrats rather than antediluvian Gopers.

Assaf Romirowsky and Alexander Joffe believe that America’s Palestinian refugee policy is very problematic:

The new U.S.-UNRWA Framework is foreign policy by inertia. In 2013 that inertia cost $294,023,401, the amount of the U.S. contribution to UNRWA (in addition to $356,700,000 in aid to the Palestinian Authority). U.S. support to UNRWA kept Palestinians in stasis, promoted Palestinian rejectionism, and did not advance the cause of peace, or U.S. policy.

Israel

Gerald Steinberg writes about the problems behind EU’s Hamas ‘glitch’:

The failure of the EU to dedicate serious resources to the independent collection of data and analysis is endemic across many issues. Many of the EU’s policies regarding Israel and the conflict are made by cutting and pasting the publications and tracts of political advocacy groups, including on such complex and sensitive isues as Jerusalem, borders, human rights, Bedoiun land claims in the Negev, and the status of other Israeli minority groups. The claims of these groups, in turn, are usually based on hearsay (“Palestinian eyewitness testimony), and, as in the case of the Hamas decision in 2001, media reports and “the internet”.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie discusses American Jewry’s alarm at hearing some of Naftali Bennett’s remarks:

Nahum Barnea in this week’s Shabbat supplement of Yediot Aharonot quoted two unnamed Washington sources as saying that they hoped for a Bennett victory in the elections because his radical voice and presence in the coalition would make it far easier for the Europeans to impose sanctions on Israel for the settlement activity that Bennett so resolutely advocates. In other words, elements of both the Israeli right and the anti-Israel camp of America and Europe are rooting for a Bennett victory. It is safe to say that mainstream American Jews are hoping for a different outcome.

Middle East

According to Andrew Scott Cooper, the Saudis have crashed oil prices to undermine the Iranian government:

Riyadh’s real hope, if history is any indicator, is that escalated production will force Rouhani’s government to implement an austerity budget that will ultimately stoke underlying social unrest and once again push people into the streets. If this happens, it might not lead to an event as significant as the shah losing his grip on power — but it would reinforce the Saudis’ faith in oil as a potent weapon in the battle to dominate the Middle East. And oil floods, in turn, would likely continue their periodic, dangerous rattling of both the markets and the region.

Alex Vatanka examines the incentives Iran has to start accepting America's presence in Afghanistan:

Tehran’s Afghan policy is out of date. Security-centric, it mostly focuses on Afghanistan’s Shiite and ethnic Tajik minorities and lacks a long-term holistic vision. Worst of all, Iran policy has for too long been embedded in a zero-sum-game mentality that invariably pits Iran against not only the United States but also Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. For it not to fall behind the curve, Tehran first must come to terms with a lasting US interest in Afghanistan as serving Iranian interests on a number of fronts.

Jewish World

Michelle Boorstein writes about how her Jewish child had to wear a Santa hat at school:

Having covered religion in the United States for almost a decade, there are few things more obvious to me than the need for Americans to speak more authentically about their faith — and to listen well when others speak about theirs — throughout the year. But these holiday-winter-peace events matter intensely, too. As hokey and limited as they are, they’re one of the only times a big, diverse school like ours gathers for something that’s so personal to us all.

Adam Kirsch discusses Normal Mailer’s hitherto undiscussed Jewishness:

“I don’t believe anyone has ever understood my relation to being a Jew,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1985. And it is true that, of all the great Jewish writers who emerged to dominate American literature in the postwar era, Mailer is the one whose Jewishness seems least central to his work. Malamud, Bellow, and Roth were all obsessed with what it meant to be Jewish, returning to the question in book after book; but Mailer was much more obsessed with what it meant to be American and what it meant to be a man. Of course, these themes are hardly absent from Bellow and Roth, either, but for Mailer, the big questions had to do with what was happening here and now—from the Pacific war in The Naked and the Dead, his sensational, best-selling debut, to the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the CIA, and the sexual revolution. He was less nostalgic than his Jewish peers, less keen to romanticize his childhood or ponder his roots. Yet his background was quite similar to theirs: a parochial childhood in a Jewish neighborhood—in Mailer’s case, Brooklyn—which left him with a fierce desire to break out into the wider world. For Mailer, that ambition led to a place at Harvard, followed by enlistment in the Army during World War II.