The Israeli media is a-buzz with sarcastic talk of a "three state solution," Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Ehud Olmert, Israel's Prime Minister, who has taken his time in giving Palestinian President Abu Mazen the support and signals that he needs to have any chance of solidifying power, is now, all of a sudden, proclaiming that a newly constituted Palestinian government--minus Hamas--will get whatever it needs from Israel. The US will now release funds. Talk about too little too late.

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There is a wonderful story told by Tom Segev in his authoritative new history of the Six Day War where Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (and Labor Party leader) is trying to stave off a challenge by Moshe Dayan who is part of a break-away party led by former Labor Party chief and Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion by figuring out a place at the cabinet table for Dayan. There is pressure to make Dayan Defense Minister, a post that until then (and this is days before the 6 Day War), Eshkol held for himself. "And so the ministers flexed their political creativity, tossing out more and more ideas and suggestions and solutions to a problem that now seemed even more urgent than the war itself: what to do with Dayan," Segev writes.

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Thanks to Todd for his eulogy for Richard Rorty, one of the towering intellectual figures of our age, someone who defined the phrase 'public intellectual', and who never gave up on the ideals of the democratic left, in an era when that is all too easy.

As a philosophy grad student in the 1980s I struggled with finding philosophical writings that were applicable to today's dilemmas, beyond logical positivism. (reader...alas, I dropped out). Rorty always exemplified how to bring the academy into the real world.

I only saw him once, though he published often in Dissent magazine, where Todd and I both are on the editorial board. But, his appearance at a Labor-Scholar teach in at Columbia University soon after John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO, after ending the legacy of Lane Kirkland and returning organized labor to work in alliance with scholars and students, was memorable. Rorty was a featured speaker at standing-room only opening session in Low Library.

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