Liel Leibovitz

Once upon a time, in a faraway place called Brooklyn, there lived a museum director named Anne Pasternak. Because she was a member of America’s self-appointed cultural elite, she liked to travel to trendy places like Aspen and make sweeping statements about art and society. If we don’t . . . . Continue Reading »

Good news, fellow Americans: It’s civil war time! The violence, praise the Lord, unfurls exclusively on the silver screen, where the tortured protagonists of Alex Garland’s new blockbuster—unimprovably named Civil War—watch America being torn apart in a hail of bullets. Who’s . . . . Continue Reading »

The central commandment found in American etiquette Torah is this old chestnut: Never discuss religion or politics. Do so, and you run the risk of offending those who hold different views. This is a grave sin, because polite society, after all, is an ideal predicated on the polite fiction that . . . . Continue Reading »

The other month, I attended a conference thick with members of the clergy. It had everything you would expect: bad bagels for breakfast, a hurried nondenominational prayer to kick things off, and meeting rooms stacked with priests, rabbis, and imams grateful for a day off from the pulpit. I didn’t . . . . Continue Reading »

Earlier this year, a Seattle-based journalist named Tariq Ra’ouf took to social media to explain the logic behind the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have been rocking American cities for months. “We are going to inconvenience every single person who doesn’t give a f**k until they give a . . . . Continue Reading »

Tis the season of “The Artist”: On screen, in print, and on stage, the man of the hour is the creative genius, the absolutist, the martyr, the suffering sinner redeemed only when he gives himself away, lovingly and without reservations, to his art. Just ask Hollywood, which is all aflutter at . . . . Continue Reading »

Addressing senior SS officers in Poznań on October 4, 1943, Heinrich Himmler was in a cheerful mood. The total extermination of the Jews, he told his minions, was going swimmingly; how unfortunate, though, that Nazism’s biggest triumph must be forever concealed. The mass murder, he said, was . . . . Continue Reading »

On Saturday, October 7, a band of Hamas terrorists breached an internationally recognized border and crossed into Israel. Over the next twelve hours, they committed unspeakable horrors against a defenseless civilian population. They beheaded babies and burned entire families alive. They raped women . . . . Continue Reading »

It was Lisa del Giocondo who first alerted me to the perils of photography. I’ve been visiting her for years at her spacious home in the Louvre, and I have always been bemused by the ritual of her admirers approaching her, camera in hand, clicking away furiously. But this summer’s visit, my . . . . Continue Reading »

The best movie you’ll see this year—or, if I’m being honest, this decade—is about two men having a protracted argument about God. If you merely watch the trailer, you may walk away with the erroneous impression that Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, is about the . . . . Continue Reading »