Author Page: Marty Kaplan | Jewish Journal

Marty Kaplan

Eyeless in Gaza

Published on January 5, 2009

Where were all the people of Gaza rising up in outrage when Hamas used them as human shields?

Once in a lifetime

Published on December 31, 2008

I don't know about you, but I've had it up to here with once-in-a-lifetime events.

The average broadband offering in Japan is 10 times faster than the average service available to U.S. consumers -- at half the cost. People in countries like Finland, France, Korea, Sweden and Italy also pay less to get more.

All’s well that ends Zell

Published on December 10, 2008

The prospect of Zell's dumping Tribune assets at fire-sale prices has renewed speculation about the Los Angeles Times being returned to local ownership.

All the news that’s fit to neuter

Published on December 3, 2008

When the obituary for American journalism is eventually written, a milestone in the journey to its death rattle will surely be the column that The New York Times' ombudsman, Clark Hoyt.

We felt so safe there

Published on November 19, 2008

Maybe the only way you can put down roots in California is with the thought that every place has its own risks, its tornadoes and hurricanes and lightning, that driving on the freeway is even more dangerous than living on a fault line.

The kids are all right

Published on November 11, 2008

As I drove across Los Angeles on election night, I saw clusters of teens and kids in their 20s celebrating on random street corners, high-fiving drivers at red lights. They may not have marched on the Pentagon to end the war in Iraq, but they have given the nation a new president who has pledged to do just that. For the first time since the springtime of the baby boomers, they have become not just consumers to be marketed to, but a political force to be reckoned with.

Let bygones (not) be bygones

Published on November 5, 2008

So John McCain -- while claiming that not he's not impugning Barack Obama's patriotism -- impugns Barack Obama's patriotism, but we're supposed to understand that it doesn't really matter, because that's just what people do in campaigns.

Move over, Willie Horton

Published on October 27, 2008

According to KDKA News Director John Verrilli, it was Pennsylvania McCain spokesman Peter Feldman, in the absence of any confirmed facts, who told the media that the mugger saw a McCain bumper sticker on Ashley Todd's car, and that the B stood for Barack.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Colin Powell

Published on October 19, 2008

I couldn't help recalling that this was the same Colin Powell whose United Nations speech five years earlier had convinced me that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

Alan shrugged

Published on October 13, 2008

Wall Street's problem, in the president's mind, is not a systemic pathology, not an illness that comes on the same chromosome as the profit motive. Instead, it's the behavior of a frat boy on a bender, the reckless phase of a good-time Charlie rather than the symptom of profound disease.

Gotcha? You betcha!

Published on October 6, 2008

But there's also a less benign explanation for the media's negligence, and it's captured by something President Andrew Jackson said nearly two centuries ago: "If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."

The debates won’t matter

Published on September 28, 2008

Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." I think he had it half right.

Is our fate really sealed? Is change possible?

Published on September 24, 2008

Within the calendar that constitutes the Jewish cathedral in time, no days are more saturated with the experience of human nature, and with experiments in human change, than the Days of Awe. This is when we are asked, paradoxically, both to steep in our powerlessness to escape our species' fate, and yet also to try out behaviors that can rescue us from our destinies.

One-Day U

Published on September 17, 2008

You have to go back to Spiro Agnew and his bullyboy ventriloquists, Pat Buchanan and William Safire, to find this kind of sneering contempt for educated people.

Post-Palin Depression

Published on September 10, 2008

This is not just a Jewish phenomenon, though a few thousand years of expecting to be scapegoated, persecuted, exiled or killed certainly contributes to the melancholic gene Jews are known for carrying, the optimism of a Ben-Gurion or Sandy Koufax notwithstanding.

The Hollywood candidate is not Obama

Published on August 31, 2008

If John McCain wins this election, it will be because of Hollywood.

But he’s a Muslim!

Published on August 25, 2008

The Muslim issue is a way to talk about race without talking about race, and without having to squirm about saying that race is not an issue.

Happy birthday to me

Published on August 20, 2008

But by and large, despite those enticing pitches, adulthood turns out to mean acceptance -- of how you played the hand you were dealt, of mortality, of beshert -- even if it sometimes includes flashes of 40-f---ing-8-like fury at the way the world turns out to work.

In the quest for ‘the God particle,‘ mystics get a new machine

Published on August 13, 2008

If you listen to what cosmologists say about the origin of the universe, you have to put your mind in a place where mystics also dwell.

Welcome to the Orwell Olympics

Published on August 5, 2008

Why do I have the feeling that if hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of Chinese imports and of American business investments in China were not at stake, quiet diplomacy wouldn't be the slogan du jour?

On having your (political) heart broken—the Edwards scandal

Published on July 30, 2008

His follow-up message, in response to my away-from-my-e-mail auto-reply, vibrated in my pocket during dinner, where no one else at my table had a clue what scandal had erupted. I stole a look at the screen, my transgression, I hoped, concealed by the tablecloth.