Few individuals in recent memory have had a more pervasive, lasting, or pernicious influence on the humanities than Edward Said. The life of the Columbia University English professor, who helped make anti-Semitism acceptable in the academy, is the subject of Places of Mind, a new biography by Timothy Brennan. Theodore Dalrymple writes in his review:

Founded in 2004 by IDF veterans, Breaking the Silence aims to expose the supposed wrongdoings of the Israeli military in the West Bank. In her recent Hebrew-language book Who Do You Think You Are?, Yuli Novak, who served as the group’s director until 2017, reflects on the internal turmoil she has experienced in the ensuing years and explains how she came to reject Zionism altogether. Einat Wilf finds the book cliché-ridden and solipsistic, while the author comes across as a “petulant child.” Moreover, writes Wilf, Novak’s argument rests on false premises: