Dominic Green

Donald Trump is the Cyrus of our era. He is the most pro-Israel president the United States has ever had. He clearly likes and admires Jews. He’s more accepting of his daughter’s faith than most non-Orthodox Jews would be if their daughter went frum. Now, it may be that a philo-Semite is someone who got the memo but read it backwards. But after the bracing refresher course of the Obama years, I’ll take a philo-Semitic, Mar-a-Lago opening, pro-Israel, embassy-moving, Golan-annexing president any day. And so should American Jews. ‘I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat — it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,’ Trump said. He’s a studiously crude speaker and actor, and tremendously vain too, but he’s only pretending to be stupid.

Joe Biden possesses the elixir of ordinariness, despite the appearance of having picked his hair and teeth out of a catalog. One of the traits of ordinariness is inconsistency. Another is hypocrisy. These are pardonable flaws among the ordinary, but we expect our leaders to at least remember their lines. Biden’s performance this week shows why he might win the Democratic nomination, but still lose the 2020 election. On Wednesday, Biden and Cory Booker attended Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, to launch an opportunist attack on Donald Trump for, in Biden’s words, ‘fanning the flames of white supremacy’.

‘Janna Jihad’ doesn’t sound like a real name. It sounds like the nom de porn of an actress in some recondite cinematic genre in which the explosive belt is kept on, but not much else. Or perhaps the nom de guerre adopted by one of those Europeans who popped out to the shops one afternoon in 2015 and then turned up in ISIS territory ‘Janna Jihad’ promises a hybrid of the two great spectacles of our time, pornography and terrorism — a brand where Janna Hicks, American protagonist of spectacles like Sneaky Selfie Student and MILF Hunter, meets Abu Jihad, Palestinian protagonist of spectacles like the hijacking of a bus in Israel, which led to the murder of 37 passengers, 12 of them children. In fact, Janna Jihad’s name really is Janna Jihad.

‘They hate my views on Donald Trump,’ Alan Dershowitz says of the New Yorker. ‘They hate my views on Benjamin Netanyahu, and they hate my views on Israel.’ This week, the New Yorker ran a long-awaited hit piece on Dershowitz by Connie Bruck. Dershowitz wrote an article anticipating the attack here. It’s not clear why Bruck took a year to write her story. Its most damaging claim has circulated for several years: that Dershowitz, the erstwhile friend and lawyer of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had sex with Virginia Roberts, a teenager procured by Epstein. This story failed to get to court, despite Roberts, now known as Virginia Giuffre, engaging David Boies as her lawyer.

Why do dogs lick their own genitals? Because they can. And wouldn’t it be great to be able to do whatever you like? Only those at the very top and bottom of society have the license to live like that. Our culture lionizes them even after the grubby final reel. They’re the Gatsbys, the Scarfaces — but also the Jeffrey Epsteins. The rich are different, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said. The degree of difference may vary, but the ways of difference don’t change much. The degree of difference between the very rich and the merely affluent is wider now than at any time since the Gilded Age — and wider than it was in 1925 when Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, his groveling tribute to those who differ by having more money than sense. But the ways of difference remain much the same.