One of my favourite periodicals is the New York Review of Books. Scott Sherman has a piece that looks at the rebirth of this publication in a recent issue of The Nation. It's a good article and I didn't realize until I was reading Sherman's assessment of the NYRB that I agreed with most of it. (I first became a subscriber in 1984 while at the University of Guelph.)
“Let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that The New York Review of Books–which turned forty last fall–was there when we needed it most,” Sherman writes.
Sherman keys in one on contributor as sign of its re-birth: Tony Judt. Judt's essay “Israel: The Alternative” is a great example of the kind of provocative writing the NYRB is running these days:
“The problem with Israel,” Judt wrote, “is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”