Rating: 
Summary: Was Cramer Duped or did he Lie?
Review: In his book, "How Israel Lost:The Four Questions" Cramer presents as fact a bogus anecdote about a "Sabbath buffet" in a Tel Aviv hotel--a story meant solely to ridicule the religious establishment in Israel. The refutation to the malicious story can follows. The question is--can a Pulitzer Prize winner be so ignorant as to be duped into believing this or does he have a more malicious motive?
Cramer claims that a halachic question was raised by a tourist regarding the kashruth of a Sabbath buffet in a large hotel in Tel Aviv, in which both dairy and meat meals were served. (Although not impossible, it would be highly unusual for a kosher hotel to serve both dairy and meat at the same time.) Specifically, the question was raised as to whether the steam of hot meatballs would render dairy blintzes across the room non-kosher. According to Cramer, "a terrible crisis ensued" and the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv personally got involved and consulted with the Council of Torah Sages.
This situation strains credibility, even accepting the highly unlikely premise that the hotel served both meat and dairy meals at the same time in the same place.
1) All kosher hotels are required to have rabbinic supervision, which includes the presence of an onsite kashruth supervisor (mashgiach). It is highly unlikely that if the situation Cramer describes were indeed problematic, it would go undetected and unaddressed by the supervisors until a lone tourist from Cleveland noticed it.
2) The issue raised is a straightforward halachic question of what constitutes a mixture of meat and milk and whether steam or vapor can be considered substantial. This is dealt with in the Jewish Code of Law and does not require the deliberation of the highest rabbinical councils. Questions of kashruth are dealt with by the hotel's kashruth supervisor or the local religious authorities charged with responsibility over kashruth affairs. They are not dealt with by the chief rabbi or the Council of Torah Sages who rule on policy issues. To suggest that the highest rabbinic authorities were asked to grapple with a simple question of kashruth is akin to having the Supreme Court directly adjudicate a simple legal question, bypassing the local authorities and lower courts.
3) Not only does the concept of meat steam drifting across the room to render a far-away dairy dish non-kosher seem rather implausible, but Cramer's description of the resolution of the issue is based on false premises-something that could only be contrived by someone who knows nothing about Jewish law or kashruth. The answer to the question raised is determined according to the halachic principles of how taste is imparted.. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the principle of whether something is fit for canine consumption. (That is a completely different theoretical halachic concept. pertaining to the consumption of items, such as medicines, containing non-kosher ingredients.) Cramer's anecdote mixes up two different halachic concepts that any kashruth authority would be able to differentiate.
5) Finally, Cramer's description of the actual experiment is preposterous. The halachic determination of whether an item falls under the heading of "unfit for canine consumption" is not based on a farcically staged "experiment" with a single dog, just as any modern day poll would not draw any conclusions based on interviewing one person.
Rating: 
Summary: The answer to Dershowitz et al
Review: Leave it to Richard Ben Cramer to write the definitive response to propagandists like Alan Dershowitz who pontificate ad nauseam about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that rare national struggle in which one side is all good and the other is all bad. Cramer (who is a pro-Israel Jew) makes a convincing argument that in recent years the struggle for Israel has been all about retaining the occupied territories and destroying Palestinian hopes for the future. Written conversationally, Cramer's revelations about the situation will leave readers gasping. This is not what we read in the American media! There are two sides to this story: not the Israeli side and the Palestinian side. The two sides are made up of those who understand that Israel's security can only be achieved if the Palestinians are treated justly and those who would risk the entire State of Israel to retain West Bank settlements and crush Palestinians. This is a remarkable book.
Rating: 
Summary: Four questions and one answer
Review: Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer knew in advance that his new book would be controversial. Anything written about the Middle East conflict would be considered controversial, he decided, and over the years, he had been aware how everyone perceived his own views as heretical. So he dived unabashedly into Israel and the Palestinian territories, areas which he had covered previously as a reporter in 1979, to tell the story in his own words, even if he ended up with "nasty conclusions." The result, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (Simon & Schuster, May 2004) lays out with rare candor, vividness and provocative insight the dangerous situation Israel finds itself in today, in the author's perspective. In the book, which admittedly reads well and is full of anecdotes and a very personal style, Cramer asks four questions, but in reality, he only asks one, central question and to that provides one sole answer. The four questions which account for the four divisions of the book are: Why do we care about Israel?
Why don't the Palestinians have a state?
What is a Jewish State?
Why is there no peace? Cramer contends that the reason Americans care about Israel was due to the highly competent Israeli public relations machine, which "convinced us that Israelis are like us." But after 35 years of occupying Palestinian territories, Israel no longer seems like home to many Americans. "Or to put it another way: somewhere along the line, we got the feeling, 'they aren't like us.' Or maybe we don't want to be like them. And this is just one of the ways - one big one - how Israel lost," Cramer writes. As for the Palestinians, Cramer is highly critical of Yasser Arafat and Arab governments. But, in Cramer's opinion, the Palestinians have no state today because Israel hasn't let them have one. Israel is responsible for the waves of suicide bombings as well, Cramer writes, because it was Israel that violated attempts for Palestinian cease-fires. Israel, the United States, and the world the world cannot ignore the extent to which the occupation is creating "factories for suicide bombers," as one Israeli journalist put it. Cramer jokes that everybody's going to hate him for explaining why there is no peace today in the Middle East. There is no peace, he claims, because no one in a position of power on either the Israeli or the Palestinian side really wants one. "Let's drop the gloves. It was a phony 'peace process' from the jump." Although on the surface the book gives answers to the four previous questions, Cramer is really asking only one central question all along. He reported from the Middle East in 1979, and for that he won a Pulitzer Prize. Returning to Israel 25 years later, he discovered that "the ground had shifted - something big was up." The book project, therefore, was born to answer the question: "What happened?" And for this central question, Cramer provides a simple, one-word answer: Occupation. According to Cramer, Israeli society hardened, and moral standards in public and personal life declined, all because of the occupation. Cramer suggests that the callousness in decreasing Israeli concern about the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians and even the many corruption scandals that have engulfed so many Israeli political leaders, all have their source in Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. "It seems to me a real loss," Cramer writes. "And as I've said (and shown, as my powers permitted) - I blame the occupation. It is corrosive." "The Palestinians are a nation - and they're in their country," Cramer lectures us. But Israel is the only nation in the world that can't see that Jews and Arabs should both be regarded as humans, with "an equal right to a place on the planet," he says. The way to end the Middle East conflict, to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Israel and its Arab neighbors, is very simple in Cramer's eyes. "No Israeli government has ever tried to make peace on the formula everybody knows is a winner: Give back the land," he writes. Unfortunately, before he arrives at this judgment, Cramer reaches some conclusions that are not exactly based in fact. Apparently not a student of history, he believes the first terror attacks on Israeli citizens followed the Six Day War. And he regards the statement that the roots of the conflict are religious as a myth. Perhaps he has never paid attention to the Arab media or listened to sermons of Muslim clerics. Cramer also has his facts wrong regarding the "separation fence," which the author determines is "not really a fence, but a massive concrete wall - about twenty feet high." And finally, Cramer concludes that Israel should end the conflict because the Palestinians "would give up their claims to their old homes in Israel." Cramer "has written an ignorant and hence irrelevant attack on a country and its people in a state of war," concludes journalist Elena Lappin in her review of this book in the New York Times. She suggested that "it would have been a different, far more honest book if it had contained his own personal truth: How Richard Ben Cramer Lost Israel." "See, I thought I knew the country - but it turned out, I didn't," Cramer admits early in the book. And for someone who doesn't really know what Israel is all about to lecture readers on "what happened" to Israel makes for a pretty sloppy case of reporting.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: Richard Ben Cramer never loses sight of the fact that ultimately the conflict is about people not about politics.
Rating:
Summary: a personable, accessible account of a terrible occupation
Review: Richard Ben Cramer, almost inspite of himself, has written a very hard book, after years as a mid east correspondent he has obviously had enough with the unbelieveable ignorance and misquided accounts of the Isarel-Palestine conflict available to most US citizens. The criticisms leveled at this book are to be expected in this country where there almost seems to be a conspiracy to keep people from knowing what most of the world already knows, that the palestinians are a mostly incarcerated people, this is a settler colonial occupation with the explicit intent of removing the Palestinians from their land and the US is directly responsible for supporting Israeli depredations against the Palestinians, indeed, Israel floats on a sea of US money and would not be a viable state save for the US. This could easily change, as Cramer points out, if there is a just peace and real normalcy returns to the region. Villifying the Palestinians in this matter is like villifying American Indians for attacking outpost families, 130 years later, almost everyone except for wacked reactionaries admit the terrible harm done to the Indians, too late of course. The problem here is that this occupation, and the main point of Cramer's book, is that this occupation is not only killing the Palestinians, but Israel too, its a terribly hard place to be and getting worse.
Rating:
Summary: A boor displays his boorishness
Review: The author of this book says that the Middle East conflict can be solved in five minutes by anyone with half - a- brain. Many veteran citizens of the Middle East, historians who have studied the subject for years, people of good will who have striven to make peace (among them the vast majority of the citizens of Israel) hearing this can only wonder if Mr. Cramer has any brain at all.
This book is a scandalous piece of defamation of a country which has struggled for its existence with great courage and decency ever since its founding. The author allies himself, wittingly or not with the most backward totalitarian forces in the world today in this unfair attack on the Jewish state.
Rating:
Summary: Baloney
Review: There has to be some rejoinder to the inexplicably positive reviews over this book. One place to begin is with Elena Lappin's review in the Sunday May 23, 2004 NY Times Book Review, page 15. In fact, on page 14 is a review of a book that I would recommend as an antidote to Cramer's claptrap, David Horowitz's "Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism." One may start Cramer's description of the NY Times as "the former house organ of American Zionism" Really? I regard the Times, which I read everyday, as viciously anti-Israel, a sentiment that is widely shared by fellow Jews inside Israel and New York.One's views of the Times aside, Cramer's polemic description of it is as out of place in a purporedly serious work as it is wrong. And that's only the warm up: the scandalously inaccurate accusations over the incidents in Jenin have been repeatedly refuted with pictures and retractions, but Cramer seems not to have the slightest interest in going beyond propaganda put out by Arafat and the Arab League at the time. Other examples of Cramer's shameless Arab fawning and ignorance are given by Ms. Lappin. This book is crap and should be called that. It is self-haters like Cramer that are lost.
Rating:
Summary: A cautionary tale
Review: This book by the wonderful writer and reporter Richard Ben Cramer is a highly readable, painfully honest introduction to a conflict that has confounded every US administration since Israel was founded in 1948. It is about the way in which the conflict has turned a cohesive, idealistic society into something else -- splintered, cynical, and tragic. And it is a cautionary tale for all of us here in the US -- a well-meaning country trying to occupy and police a people it doesn't understand. If this conflict has hurt Israel's standing in the world, it has also hurt ours. Read this and you will understand why. You will also enjoy Cramer's delicious stories of his experiences in Israel -- sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, always fascinating. He is a consummate storyteller and this is a terrific read.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Primer to Conflict
Review: This book explains the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by telling the individual stories of people living in Israel and the occupied territories. Written prior to Arafat's death, the author concludes that peace will not happen because it is not in the interest of the people in power in Israel and with the PLO. After reading this book, I have a much better understanding of news articles about the conflict.
Rating:
Summary: An extremely helpful book
Review: This book is a wonderful introduction to the conflict -- like having a knowledgeable friend tell you what's really going on. It's so hard to trust a lot of the rhetoric. So often any principled criticism of Israel is dismissed as anti-semitic, as you can see in some of the wackier reviews on this page, so it's hard to find out what's really going on unless you read the Israeli papers, which are a lot more fair. Richard Ben Cramer is a great writer and is hard on BOTH sides. He cuts through so many myths, and his writing is always a pleasure to read.
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