Photograph by Matt Gross.

Theodore Ross is the features editor at Men’s Journal and a former associate editor at Harper’s Magazine. When he was nine years old, his mother moved him and his brother from New York to Mississippi and attempted to erase all traces of the family’s Judaism, identifying them as Unitarians to their new neighbors. Ross wrote about the experience in a 2009 Harper’s essay titled “Shalom on the Range.” In his just-published book, Am I a Jew?, he tracks the history and evolution of American Judaism, detailing his efforts to reconcile with his childhood alienation from his heritage by traveling to Jewish communities across the U.S. and Israel. I asked him six questions about the book over non-kosher beverages near his apartment in Brooklyn: [MORE . . .]

I know, it’s not very funny. Neither was Barack Obama’s noneffort last night. Nor am I joking about his performance being the worst in the history of presidential debates. In fact, it was the worst debate by any candidate in either the presidential or the vice-presidential debates. And I include Dan Quayle’s performance in 1988, and that poor, befuddled admiral who was running with Ross Perot. [MORE . . .]

In other words, he intends to cheat, by bringing a foreign-policy issue into a domestic-policy debate. [MORE . . .]

“One hundred pages into his absorbing new memoir, written entirely in the third person, Salman Rushdie declares that ‘Friendship had always been of great importance to him,’ since so much of his life had been spent separated, physically and emotionally, from his own family. ‘Friends,’ writes Rushdie, ‘were the family one chose.’

“The conceit of third person remove can be annoying, but I understand why the author chose it for Joseph Anton, the title of the book and Rushdie’s assumed name during his long period in hiding after the Ayatollah ­Khomeini sentenced him to death. As author of the allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s unhappy tale required telling through another character, since his own identity — his very life — had been stolen, first by the reactionary Iranian theocracy that wanted him punished and then by the liberal western establishment which purported to defend him but wasn’t always up to the job. [MORE . . .]

• Governor Romney, your party adamantly denies that global climate change is occurring, or insists that, if it is occurring, it isn’t man-made, and that there is nothing we could or should do about it. Much of your party also refuses to believe in evolution. Given the number of scientific disciplines related to these subjects, most of your supporters must per se believe that the vast majority of the world’s scientists—biologists, paleontologists, climatologists, geologists, etc.—are engaged in massive, decades-long hoaxes designed to fool the rest of the population. Do you agree that they are indeed perpetrating these massive frauds?
   
• President Obama, we keep hearing that any sort of “grand bargain” aimed at closing the budget deficit will include an agreement to raise the age at which Americans can retire, and to reduce their benefits and compensation upon retirement. Isn’t this squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle? If senior citizens really are required to work additional years before they can retire, won’t this mean that that many more young workers will have to wait longer to find a place in the workforce? Or, alternatively, won’t this mean that employers are all the more likely to fire older workers and replace them with young people who will work for less—and thereby leave these older workers scrambling to find employment while they wait for their Social Security and Medicare benefits to kick in?
   
• Governor Romney, it is now a common belief among Republicans that entitlement programs cause dependency. Do you agree that programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security have made older Americans dependent?
   
• President Obama, the National Defense Authorization Act, which you signed into law this year, specifically “affirms” that you as president have the right to have the military detain indefinitely any person, including American citizens, who you deem to have supported terrorists targeting the United States. When you signed the bill into law, you issued a signing statement saying that your administration would not keep any such suspects indefinitely detained without trial, and that you had serious reservations about these provisions. But aren’t you just handing over this authority, which you think may be unconstitutional, to the whim of future presidents?
   
• Governor Romney, you’ve said repeatedly that you intend to offset some of your planned tax cuts by filling in various unnamed loopholes and deductions in the federal tax code. Leaving aside for a moment just what those loopholes are, do you really expect them to stay plugged up? Wasn’t that the same grand bargain President Reagan supposedly worked out with congressional leaders such as Senator Bill Bradley in 1986—a flatter but simpler federal tax code? And yet innumerable deductions and loopholes have somehow found their way back into the code. What plan do you have for ensuring that this time is different?
   
• President Obama, you endorsed the “card check” method to make union organizing easier when you ran for president in 2008. Yet once in office, you did nothing to support card-check policies or otherwise to facilitate union organizing. Meanwhile, you’ve maintained what is at least a neutral position in regard to all unions, private and public, refusing to throw your administration’s support behind Wisconsin’s municipal unions, and actually supporting an attempt to fire every teacher at a Rhode Island high school. Are there any major union goals you can see yourself actively supporting in a second term?
   
• Governor Romney, your party platform calls for the privatization of Amtrak’s Northeast corridor, along with most other inter-city public transportation. Do you support these ideas? And if so, why, given that the Northeast corridor is the one profitable section of the Amtrak system—and one that replaced bankrupt private rail companies more than forty years ago?
   
• President Obama, you, like most other presidents and presidential candidates, have actively encouraged all young people to earn a college degree. Yet the percentage of the population with college degrees has increased from about 5 percent to a little over 25 percent since the end of World War II. This is a tremendous increase, yet it was achieved only with massive government financial support—support that has declined in real dollar terms in recent years. Given that 25 percent is still well short of 100 percent, is it realistic to expect that all young Americans will earn college degrees anytime in the foreseeable future? Given the amount of indebtedness that earning such degrees entails, is it wise for them to even try? And don’t these facts speak to the overwhelming need to restore America’s manufacturing base?
   
• Governor Romney, one of the major scandals to break during the Bush Administration was the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, which effectively ended the political career of House whip Tom DeLay, among others. The worst abuses uncovered in the investigation of the scandal involved the exploitation of workers in an American commonwealth in the Pacific, the Northern Mariana Islands. Mr. Abramoff was able to keep in place for years a sweatshop system in which thousands of young Asian women were recruited from their homelands, often cheated out of their pay, and routinely forced into prostitution—a setup that included forced abortions at special clinics near the factories where the women worked. For his part in this and other scandals, Mr. Abramoff spent almost four years in jail. Yet his two longtime lobbying partners in this endeavor remain at large. One of them, Ralph Reed, is a leading fundraiser for your campaign, and a key advocate for you among evangelical Christians. The other, Grover Norquist, seems to now dictate party tax policy. Considering their long and involved business partnership with Mr. Abramoff, why are these individuals leading figures in your campaign and your party?
   
• President Obama, considering how ubiquitous marijuana use is in our society today, and how easily the criminal penalties for it are elided under the medical-marijuana laws many states have adopted, why is anyone still doing jail time for selling or using pot? Isn’t it true that this drug is no more harmful—and probably a good deal less destructive—than alcohol? Hasn’t it been used by almost every American from high school age on up? And wouldn’t we really be better off, as some critics have urged, legalizing cannabis and taxing the profits?
[MORE . . .]

An American mastiff.

World leaders gathered for debate at the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly. As protests continued across the Muslim world over an online video mocking the prophet Mohammed, Barack Obama spoke to the General Assembly about the importance of freedom of speech. “As president of our country,” he said, “I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day.”^[1] The United States delegation boycotted a speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while other Western nations instructed their emissaries to leave if he said anything offensive. “Previously we’ve walked out because of his anti-Semitism, threats against Israel, and 9/11 conspiracies,” said a European diplomat. “This year his only crime was incoherence.”^[2][3] Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a felt marker and a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate the “red line” Israel would prevent Iran from crossing in its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.^[4] U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-Moon answered a prank call from a pair of comedians claiming to be Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. “Perhaps this was not the best use of his time,” said Ban’s spokeswoman.^[5] Omar Khadr, the only remaining Westerner to be held captive at Guantánamo Bay, was repatriated to Canada.^[6] The number of American military deaths in Afghanistan reached 2,000.^[7] Syrian government authorities sent a text message reading “Game over” to opposition forces, who mounted a major assault on the army’s Damascus headquarters.^[8][9] Following a controversial call by replacement officials that gave the Seattle Seahawks a last-second victory over the Green Bay Packers and cost bettors as much as $250 million, the National Football League brokered a deal to end a lockout of its referees. “It’s time to get the real refs,” said Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. “It reminds me of President Obama and the economy.”^[10][11][12] Mitt Romney vowed to fight Lyme disease in Virginia, American voters said they associated Romney with Monopoly and Obama with chess, and Madonna gave the president her endorsement. “We have a black Muslim in the White House,” she said. “That’s some amazing shit.”^[13][14][15] [MORE . . .]

Well, I like the president too. What’s not to like? Or at least, I think I’d like the man, if I knew him. Which I don’t. The only part of him I can know, of course, is the public man who, in Professor Lilla’s own description, filled our ears with “hollow rhetoric” during the campaign. [MORE . . .]

Some have begun to detect a literary current in Mitt Romney’s seemingly mindless ramblings—a stream-of-consciousness that reflects, perhaps, the romantic wistfulness of the middle-aged man facing his own mortality. Or maybe that’s just me, being a middle-aged man and everything; my co-blogger Jack, for his part, tends to think of Romney’s gaffes as perfect near-haikus: [MORE . . .]

Has Wall Street made up its mind on this election? One analyst, Jeffrey Kleintop, has divined just who the investment class believes will be president by developing one of those magic election-year metrics. (Double the price of a bag of groceries in St. Louis, divide by each candidate’s favorability rating in the Rust Belt, and voilà—the winner!) Kleintop’s Wall Street Election Year Index (.pdf) looks at specific stocks that are enjoying an uptick. The theory goes that a certain basket of stocks traditionally does better under Democratic presidents and a different basket does better under Republican presidents. Check to see which basket is doing better in the run-up to the election, and you know who Wall Street thinks will win. [MORE . . .]

Mother Jones magazine posted online a leaked video in which Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney tells guests at a fundraising dinner that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on federal aid and see themselves as victims. “My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney says. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Romney also reminds guests that his father was born in Mexico: “Had he been born of Mexican parents I’d have a better shot of winning this,” he says. “I say that jokingly, but it’d be helpful to be Latino.”^[1] Two days later, Romney was accused of appearing in “brownface” for an interview on the Spanish-language TV channel Univision. “If we can’t win this election,” said Obama campaign co-chairman Ted Strickland, “God help us.”^[2][3] As violent protests against an American film mocking the prophet Muhammad spread throughout the Muslim world, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo published cartoons depicting the prophet naked, including one captioned MUHAMMAD: A STAR IS BORN, in which a prostrating man displays his genitals and anus. “What are we supposed to do when there’s news like this?” asked editor-in-chief Gérard Biard. “Are we supposed to not do that news?”^[4][5] The French government closed schools, embassies, consulates, and cultural centers in 20 countries, Interior Minister Manuel Valls banned domestic demonstrations, and the Louvre opened a new wing dedicated to Islamic art.^[6][7] In Pakistan, at least 20 people were killed at rallies honoring a new national holiday, Love for the Prophet Day.^[8][9] Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argued that America’s protection of derogatory religious imagery as free speech is “clearly a deception,” and Iran’s government planned to block access to Google and build the country’s own internet.^[10] A court ordered New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to display controversial ads sponsored by conservative blogger Pamela Geller in the subway system. “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man,” read the ads. “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” “We recognize the free-speech issues,” said a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “And her right to be a bigot and a racist.”^[11] [MORE . . .]

Just before Mother Jones posted the now-famous video revealing that Mitt Romney thinks almost half the country consists of hopeless “victims and dependents,” and that his life would have been easier had he been born to Mexican immigrants, some friends of mine were maintaining that he really could be a good president, based on his excellent record of containing sprawl in Massachusetts and passing proto-Obamacare there.

 [MORE . . .]

Weighing the soul, 1875.

The release of a 14-minute YouTube trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims, which portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a homosexual womanizer, triggered mass demonstrations and riots across more than a dozen countries.^[1][2][3] Egyptian protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and lowered the American flag, replacing it with an Islamist banner, and in Libya Islamist militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades stormed a U.S. consulate compound, killing four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. “The people in Benghazi, I think,” said Fathi Baja, a Libyan politician, “are very sad right now.”^{[4][5][6][7][8]} Hundreds of protesters in Jakarta threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police, who retaliated with tear gas; 4,000 protesters in Kabul burned cars and chanted “Death to America!”; and thousands of protesters in Kashmir called for the film’s creator, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, to be put to death. Nakoula, who has served time in prison for counterfeiting checks and has used pseudonyms including Kritbag Difrat, P. J. Tobacco, and Sam Bacile, went into hiding. “Sam said that he was a cancer victim and was gonna die,” said Jimmy Israel, a member of Nakoula’s film crew. “It gave us a lot of sympathy for him.”^{[9][10][11][12][13][14]} One Innocence of Muslims actor claimed she thought she was shooting scenes for Desert Warrior, about a tribal battle that breaks out after a comet hits Earth.^[15] A murderer serving a life sentence in Oregon sued for the right to die by lethal injection after Governor John Kitzhaber issued a moratorium on executions until the future of capital punishment was decided. “This is my constitutional right,” said the prisoner. “You know, we need to put this to sleep. That’s probably the wrong expression.”^[16] [MORE . . .]

In the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, I detailed the travails of the rebel-held Syrian town of Taftanaz, which had suffered a two-day massacre at the hands of the Syrian army. Hundreds of homes were demolished and whole families slaughtered—yet somehow the revolutionary movement survived intact. In the months since my April visit, the story remains much the same: perseverance in the face of a bloody stalemate. Taftanaz lies only a mile or so from an important government airbase, which exposes the town to almost daily shelling. Indeed, in the early summer months, shells tore through civilian homes with brutal regularity, adding more destruction to an already devastated city. Then, in July, troops from the base stormed the town center, demolishing a mosque in the process. By August, the shelling and helicopter strafing runs had grown so intense that most of the townspeople fled, leaving behind only rebel fighters and some hardcore activists. [MORE . . .]