I’m delighted to announce that Z Word has joined forces with the dynamic online political magazine, The Propagandist, which, in brazenly bipartisan fashion, bills itself as a venue “for political junkies, thinking conservatives and the anti-fascist left.”
From now on, you can read this blog at our new home - so please redirect your browsers accordingly.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be moving the entire Z Word blog archive to The Propagandist, as well as the seminal essays which we published during 2008 and 2009. Once that’s done, visits to this URL will be redirected to The Propagandist, but in the meantime, keep coming here for material from the Z Word archive.
As this is the final post on this site, I want to take the opportunity to extend my heartfelt thanks to the wonderful group of individuals who have supported Z Word in becoming a key voice in that fractious, polarized corner of the internet which we inhabit. They’ve done so by contributing, cross-posting, forwarding, tweeting and promoting our content in myriad ways.
First and foremost, my co-writer Eamonn McDonagh. Eamonn is someone whom I am proud to call a friend - a brilliant, combative, unshakably principled writer who has never pulled punches and never will. Eamonn will make occasional appearances at our new home. You are also encouraged to follow Eamonn’s writings at his personal blog.
Other regular contributors to whom I owe a profound debt of gratitude include Karl Pfeifer, survivor of the Shoah, hero of Israel’s independence war, a monumental figure in post-war Jewish journalism and one of the most important analysts of contemporary antisemitism today. Thanks, also, to the prolific Canadian journalist Terry Glavin; the consistently insighful columnist Petra Marquardt-Bigman; the cultural critic David Adler; the tenacious fighter against the academic boycott of Israel, David Hirsh, and all his colleagues at Engage; David T, Habibi, Gene and all the writers over at the esteemed Harry’s Place, which has served almost as a second home for our material; the academic and blogger Jay Adler; Mark Gardner and Dave Rich at the Community Security Trust in the UK, a vital defense body and trusted partner of Z Word’s sponsor, AJC; the Iranian-American writer and activist Sohrab Ahmari, aka ganselmi; the brave and witty bloggers at South African website, It’s Almost Supernatural; Anthony Julius, who honored us by choosing Z Word to publish advance sections of his titanic study of English antisemitism; Adam Holland, who authors the most important blog covering extremism in America today; Martin Solomon of the estimable Solomonia; Jonathon Narvey, editor of The Propagandist; Norman Geras, Eve Garrard, Bob from Brockley, Dan Tarman, Paul Berman, Michelle Sieff, Charles Small, Dan Yurman, Michael Weiss, Edwin Black, Grayson Levy at Pundicity, Rob and Gazelle at The Huffington Post, Modernity Blog, Lyn at Point of No Return, Samantha Karlin, Matthew Schwartz, Jim Schoenburg, Edward Joseph, Robin Shepherd, Rafal Pankowski, Elif Kayi, Anthony David, Julia Bertelsmann, Rhoda Kadalie and many, many, many more contributors, friends and supporters who linked our work or assisted us more generally.
Thanks, too, to our regular army of commenters, especially Fabian, Noga, J. Dyer, Lynn T, Boaz Tibon and Silke.
To my friends and colleagues at AJC, as this project enters its next stage of life with a new sponsor, I thank you for launching and supporting Z Word and for entrusting me with the role of editor. I am especially grateful to AJC’s Executive Director, David Harris; to Kenneth Bandler, AJC’s Director of Communications; to Kenneth Stern, Director of AJC’s Department on Antisemitism and Extremism; and to Shula Bahat, Doug Lieb, Yael Amit, Ellisa Sagore, Sarah Kupferberg, Alex Weininger, Kiersten Zweibaum, Harvey Belkin, Edward Rettig, Eliseo Neuman, Vicki Schonfeld, John Thomason, Rick Hyne, Rebecca Neuwirth, Lena Altman and Josh Siegel. Laura Anne Shay-Hupe, AJC’s webmaster and a major influence on our design and presentation, deserves special mention, as does Michael Geller, a dear friend who, with wonderfully understated panache, coined the name “Z Word” when we were wracking our collective brains for a title.
I want to close by recalling a sage piece of advice I once received from David Harris that I’ve flagrantly ignored here: if you are not one hundred per cent sure that you’ve thanked everyone by name, don’t thank anyone by name. If I omitted to mention you, please accept my humble apologies.
Perhaps the deepest expression of gratitude goes to you, our readers. We ask you to stay with Z Word as we transition to our new location. The battles we fight are not over. Neither are we.
Yours, as ever,
Ben Cohen