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Israel still doesn’t get economy
Originally published 29 Apr 2008 in The New York Sun

Israel’s elites—especially the chattering classes in the press and the academy—are hostile to capitalism because our universities’ social sciences and liberal arts departments are dominated by post-modernist and neo-Marxist professors.

Ideas matter. Hostility to capitalism exacts a great price from the Israeli economy and from its hapless workers.

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Getting beyond the teachers’ strike
Originally published 17 Oct 2007 in The Jerusalem Post

As long as education remains a government monopoly, it is bound to function like all other government monopolies, where union bosses fill the vacuum that lack of defined ownership creates, and monopoly power allows them to blackmail the public.

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Here comes the counter-revolution
Originally published 17 Apr 2005 in The Jerusalem Post

A group of neo-Marxists, anti-globalists and plain old-time socialists are seeking to found a new college “to create a cadre of people … able to engage in well-informed debate and critically challenge the prevailing neo-liberal and neo-conservative social and political trends” – that is, to militate against economic reform.

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Death of a salesman
Originally published 4 Feb 2005 in The Jerusalem Post

Arthur Miller’s death was the occasion for almost universal praise. Critics and writers ignored Miller’s common intellectual malaise of hating his own country because it failed to practice an abstract ideal of perfect justice, while condoning and even supporting extremely repressive regimes because they mouthed the right slogans about human rights, self-determination, equality etc.

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Dovrat Commission tinkers while education system burns
Originally published 5 Jan 2005 in The Jerusalem Post

Israel claims to offer free education, but in fact parents pay not only once, but twice: high taxes finance a bloated educational bureaucracy, then poor teaching and various fees create a costly “gray education”. The recently published Dovrat Commission report attempts to solve these problems, but no mere administrative and technical reform can save a system whose failure is rooted in misguided objectives and a faulty ethos.

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