BY: VIC MATUS Weekend JUN 2026 ---------------- With Independence Day just around the corner, it’s worth remembering that no country should have to defend its right to exist. Of course, only one does. Professor Eugene Kontorovich reviews Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law by Roy K. Altman. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dzW6!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3fc41079-a72c-4d12-8103-6c92684fa33d_703x491.jpeg Altman “provides excellent distillations of the abundant archaeological evidence for Jews’ indigeneity in the Land of Israel. He also shows how this has not impeded their willingness to make repeated territorial concessions in the name of peace. Altman details six occasions on which the Jews agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state, only to have the Arabs reject it. His longest and most thorough chapter shows that ‘if anyone has colonized the Land of Israel, it has been [a] succession of Muslim armies.’ This is particularly important to recount now, as arguments challenging the authenticity of Jewish historical claims have started to sprout up on the political right, transmogrified into crank theories about how today’s Jews are not the real Jews (a pet theme of Tucker Carlson’s). “Many have heard of Israeli ‘settlers’ living in the supposedly Arab city of Hebron, but do not know about the Arab ban on Jewish entrance into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—800 years ago. They have heard of ‘Palestinian rights,’ but not Napoleon’s proclamation recognizing Jews as the ‘rightful heirs of Palestine.’ Altman’s quick tour through history is crucial for a generation that, at best, knows about the past from podcasts and social media.” “Altman analyzes the accusations with a legal methodology, closely examining the evidence presented for each—and marshaling the facts to the contrary. But unlike in a courtroom, Israel’s ‘acquittal’ is not enough. The accusations are so sensational and passionately made that many neutral observers would conclude that even if they are off the mark, Israel must be guilty of some lesser included offense. Proof is not necessarily the point of these criticisms as much as creating a taint. Dreyfus’s acquittal surely did not convince his accusers that he was entirely honorable.” No doubt Harold Bloom read about l’affaire Dreyfus. The question is: What didn’t he read? Joseph Epstein reviews The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, edited by Heather Cass White. “Born in 1930 to émigré Jewish parents, Harold Bloom was by his own account—more hyperbole?—precocious beyond reckoning. He claimed to have learned Hebrew by the age of 3 and to have read Moby-Dick before the age of 10. His parents’ original plan was for him to become a rabbi, a Talmudic scholar. By the age of 16, however, he had decided on an academic career, one he would eventually achieve by his appointment to the English Department at Yale. An old anecdote has Cleanth Brooks remark to Robert Penn Warren, ‘I wonder if we were right to grant Harold Bloom tenure?’ “A slender volume of just over 200 pages of ample-sized type generously spaced, The Man Who Read Everything includes the correspondence of Harold Bloom with six contemporary poets, the critic Northrop Frye, and the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. Professor White writes that ‘in all cases I have edited the letters to focus on Bloom’s work rather than his personal life. My interest is in Bloom as a reader, so that has been my guide in deciding what to publish.’ And yet, contrary to this claim the personal note, which is often sounded in these letters, rings more emphatically than the professional or strictly literary one. “We learn, for example, of Bloom’s antipathy to T.S. Eliot, the Eliot who viewed criticism as correction of taste, felt that the critic needed to be disinterested, impersonal, and objective in his own criticism. As for his own critical writings, Bloom, in a letter to John Hollander, noted: ‘Lord knows what I am—not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher, or theosophist—but a worthless melange of the gang of it.’ He added: ‘Sometimes I get gloomy and believe it is because I’m not smart or learned enough or because I can’t keep any philosophy in my poor head—in a few good moments I feel that way only I will say things I’m going to say and then I feel someone should say them anyway. But often I wonder.’” Often I wonder how many more books can be written about George Orwell. Thank goodness we have the foremost expert on the renowned author to enlighten us. New Weekend Beacon contributor D.J. Taylor reviews George Orwell: Life and Legacy by Robert Colls. “Brief, impressionistic, and not wholly uncritical, Colls has a happy knack of not only establishing Orwell in the contexts of his time, but foregrounding him amid the 21st century debris. That reputation, he observes, has gone beyond writing and now expresses itself as ‘a sort of Puritan glamour, an intellectual mystique, a “cool” more often bestowed on rock stars than writers.’ “The ‘Puritan glamour’ that Colls finds in Orwell’s work isn’t the only contradiction on display here. In fact, Orwell’s inconsistency is one of the chief stanchions of his appeal. A paid-up Marxist ideologue would doubtless be appalled by the sight of this onetime denouncer of the English public school system telling a friend that he intended to put his newly arrived adopted son Richard down for Eton, but that, whether ideologues like it or not, is how the average human mind works. It is the same with Orwell’s famous run-in with the correspondent of the left-wing weekly newspaper Tribune, where he worked as literary editor from 1943-45, who complained that his liking for the rambler roses that grew in his Hertfordshire garden was ‘bourgeois.’ “Colls appreciates and to a certain extent revels in all this, while observing that some of Orwell’s inconsistencies in the realm of social class are much more revealing of the kind of person he was. As in George Orwell: English Rebel, he has a field day with Orwell’s trip around the ‘distressed areas’ of the north of England that produced his travelogue The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), demonstrating along the way that while Orwell sympathizes profoundly with the out-of-work miners and the slum-dwellers he meets in the course of his travels, he knows little about the circumstances of their lives and tends to judge them by standards to which they can never match up. “Thus, staying with a trade union official and his wife, and noting that the beds are aired and the food good, he automatically assumes his hosts to have risen up the social scale into a world of middle-class comfort; the working-classes, according to Orwell’s scale of values, merely frowst away in poverty. On the other hand, confronted with the genuine squalor of a flyblown lodging house run by a couple named Brooker, where the dinner table is so long unwashed that you could ‘get to know individual crumbs by sight,’ he simply walks out.” On the occasion of Father's Day, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives by Darby Saxbe. “Looking at two societies in the Congo, researchers found that in one, the men regarded as the best fathers were those with lower levels of testosterone, those who cared for children and were willing to share resources. In a neighboring village, though, the high testosterone fathers who are not involved with small children but who spend time teaching teens ‘how to fish, farm, hunt and clear farming plots in the forest’ are regarded as the best fathers. “The biological changes associated with fatherhood seem to be both a cause and effect of a father’s relationship with his partner as well as the role he is playing in the lives of his children. Even the highest testosterone fathers experienced a drop when their children were born. And interestingly, ‘the lowest levels emerged in fathers who spent at least three hours a day with their children, diapering, bathing, playing and co-sleeping with them.’ Spending more time on these tasks changes men physically and these changes encourage spending more time on these tasks. “Saxbe is walking a fine line, trying to write about the distinctly biological aspects of fatherhood at a time when many of her potential readers think gender is a social construct. She tries to set expectations early in the book, explaining that ‘I can’t write about dads without acknowledging the reality of biological sex and the influence of gonadal hormones on brain and behavior.’ She even notes the ‘sexes evolved with different reproductive systems, requiring different choices and tradeoffs.’ But then again, she says, ‘biology is not destiny,’ and that there is more variation among women in certain traits than between women and men. “So far so good. Until you get to the part where Saxbe interviews a trans woman about their experience and the reader learns ‘the idea of a pregnant man no longer seems shocking or even particularly newsworthy.’ (Well, maybe to some.) And she compares human beings ‘parenting outside the gender binary’ to seahorses where the male can become pregnant ‘by virtue of a brood pouch that attaches itself to their tale or abdomen.’ Saxbe may persuade readers that a person’s environment and social cues can affect their hormone levels and even the way their brain functions, but most will still be reasonably certain that men can’t get pregnant.” Is it alright for a dad to dislike Toy Story 5? John Podhoretz reviews the latest from Disney Pixar. “There was nothing even remotely conventional about Toy Story. It was the first fully computer-animated film, and so it looked different from everything that came before it. And though it was a cartoon, nobody sang the way characters always did in Disney pictures. Pixar’s first full-length movie was something entirely new, and wonderfully fresh. The movies that have followed it in the subsequent three decades stopped featuring plots about the conflicts between the characters and rather became about the threats posed to them by the real world—especially, the effect of a toy owner’s approaching adulthood, which the startlingly emotional third Toy Story depicts as a terrifying death in a fiery furnace. “So now we have Toy Story 5, and it’s a charming piece of work. But over the three decades since the release of the original, Pixar has undergone many changes, among them the realization that its movies had lost their connection to younger audiences. By the time Pixar made Soul in 2020, about a middle-aged music teacher who never had the career as a jazz musician he wanted and deserved and then actually dies, this cartoon-making company had become the nation’s leading cultural mouthpiece for baby boomer solipsism. It began a process of renovation and reform, and Toy Story 5 is an important part of its effort to get itself back on track as the most reliable provider of animated entertainment for all ages. “Alas, in doing so, the franchise has become so defanged in its approach and so determined to be winsome that it has lost its punch. That’s too bad, because director Andrew Stanton has come up with an inspired idea at its center: He literalizes the danger posed to childhood itself by internet devices in the form of a tablet dubbed Lilypad. It is gifted to a very shy little girl and immediately takes the place of the toys that formerly provided her solace and an outlet for her imaginative play. The toys need to find a way to save her from becoming a screen-addicted zombie.” Happy Father’s Day. Vic Matus Arts & Culture Editor Washington Free Beacon Thanks for reading the Washington Free Beacon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.