"Being from Israel, I've thought a lot about suicide bombing. It's disgusting, but then most forms of violence are disgusting. The thing with suicide bombing, though, is it sort of cuts off the revenge cycle. It simplifies things. It's basically saying, 'Listen, I know you're gonna kill me. I'm just going to kill myself so you don't have to worry yourself with finding me.' It's all very fine lines that we draw, and I think our classifications of what's OK violence and what's not undermine the fact that violence is terrible. It's a ridiculous statement, I know."

Freud and Marx, Einstein and Bohr, Mendelssohn and Mahler. The brothers Gershwin. The brothers Marx. Woody Allen. Bob Dylan. Franz Kafka. Claude Levi-Strauss. Bobby Fischer. Jews may take tremendous pride in their aristocracy, but we fetishize it at our own peril; to suggest that we’re chosen, rather than that we make our own choices, curdles quickly into a useful argument for anti-Semites who’d love to claim that the objects of their derision are immutable vermin. It can’t be an accident that the most aggressive debunkers of Jewish essentialism, including the participants in this story, are generally Jews themselves. The arguments come in handy when the ugly stuff is trotted out, too.

Rock duo the White Stripes will stage the first musical performance ever on Comedy Central's The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on December 1. "We've never had a musical performance on the show before -- not because we haven't wanted one -- but because we were holding out for a reunited Spandau Ballet. This will have to suffice," Stewart said in a statement.