The Weekender - The Portmanteau
If you didn’t catch it last weekend, we rolled out a new dimension to The Portmanteau. Meet The Weekender, a weekend digest that highlights just three reads from the week and why they’re worth your time.
Wednesday afternoon I sat outside. It was a little after 5pm, my workday had ended, the trees shone golden and green and vermillion in the Fall rays of the setting sun, and the crisp Denver night air began rolling in from the mountains. I watched my neighbors pull in from work, park in their driveways, and go inside.
I watched all of this from my front porch, which sits higher than the other houses on the street, and I read the following stories and cried.
The first story today comes from
, a former IDF soldier who reflects on his time guarding the Israeli border with Gaza. In the big picture, he writes,“…do I want to live in a world where 19-year-old Israelis don’t need to fire tear gas at 8-year-old Palestinians?
It is my dream.”
5 min read
The Free Press ran complimentary pieces earlier this week, the perspectives of both an American Jewish man and an immigrant to the U.S. from Palestine. The first is Jacob Katz’s piece above. The second is a heartrending account from Amjad Abukwaik about his family’s loss in the last two weeks and a return trip he made last year to show his son his birthplace.
5 min read
Moments in history, particularly crises, help clarify the moral clarity of movements, ideologies and people. As Hamas raped women and killed children, and celebrated that death and destruction, a slice of Progressives in the United States, especially in Academia and the Social Justice movement, celebrated the slaughter. It’s a reminder that there are, indeed, objective truths in life, and as Helen Lewis points out, many Progressives flunked the Hamas test:
“Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism?”
Lewis, the perceptive writer for The Atlantic, lays out a history of intersectionality and how it’s been hijacked, abused, and now used as a fig leaf for condoning terrorism in Hamas’ attack on Israel.
10 min read
The Portmanteau—essays and social commentary for everyone, even level-headed, curious, thoughtful people.
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