Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: Blaming the victim - again

This has been a bad week in Israeli-American relations - more accurately, Israeli-Obama White House relations. Three White House players who should know better (and probably do), dumped on the only democracy in the Middle East, boldly contradicting the president's boast to Jewish donors that he's the most Israel-supporting president in history. (Where does that leave Harry Truman?)

December 7, 2011

FIELDS: Sex, lies and politics

Once upon a time they called it the "double standard." Women were held to higher virtue than men. Then women learned to stoop to conquer. In a sex-saturated world, women could exploit their tales of sex for titillation and money. A woman no longer has to be the victim of a brute. She could be a damsel in the distress of others.

November 30, 2011

FIELDS: Filling in the generation gaps

Thanksgiving is the holiday that pulls families together, squeezing them around a table for a feast of turkey, tradition and togetherness. We encourage conversations meant to be personally relevant, but sometimes they turn into a horizontal Babel, with each generation speaking in a different tongue. It's a stretch to identify an entire generation by its tastes in fashion and music, but such tastes offer strong clues.

November 23, 2011

FIELDS: When manly virtue died

These are difficult and perilous times for boys. A distorted culture has robbed them of virtue against which to measure themselves. The good once associated with masculinity in a patriarchal society has been tossed out with the bad. This, alas, is the era of feminist ascendency.

November 17, 2011

FIELDS: Digging for gold along the campaign trail

The war between the sexes will never be easy to win because there are too many incentives for men and women to lay down their arms and call for a truce, if not a tryst. Nothing is more powerful than that image of Adam giving up all for Eve. He chose to leave paradise and work for a living rather than lose the woman he loved. (Besides, he couldn't spare another rib.)

November 9, 2011

FIELDS: Morass of sexual harassment

The accusations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain are so far small potatoes, and badly baked at that. On a scale of 1 to 10, they're hovering around 2. Looking back, the accusations of Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas weren't so weighty, either. They were about a few suggestive remarks about a movie and a hair on a can of Coke.

November 2, 2011

FIELDS: Women on the prowl still get caught

"The Ides of March," the slick new movie with George Clooney as an unethical presidential candidate is a morality tale for our time.

October 26, 2011

FIELDS: Turkey’s abrupt about-face

A young American man with black hair and dark brown eyes checked into a small hotel in Capadaccio, where visitors to Turkey flock to see the famous lava formations carved into the landscape.

October 19, 2011

FIELDS: Pizza man brings pizzazz to GOP

Some of the Republican candidates wanted to audition for Comedy Central the other night, aiming their one-liners at Herman Cain. But the pizza man is no joke. Mr. Cain is able, you might say. If his rivals are not taking him seriously, they should. Everyone else is.

October 12, 2011

FIELDS: Germany comes of age

United Germany turned 21 this week. Families celebrated a three-day weekend, with the children waving black, red and gold national flags in the bright sunlight of an unseasonal October summer in Berlin. In Bonn, the capital of West Berlin when Germany was divided into the Soviet East and free West, fireworks flashed across the night sky.

October 5, 2011

FIELDS: Mahmoud Abbas is no Anwar Sadat

It's the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is followed by Yom Kippur. We listen to that strange instrument called the shofar, made of a ram's horn, with long plaintive and short bleating notes resounding in synagogues around the world.

September 29, 2011

FIELDS: Nations united in annual Israel mugging

It's gang-up time on Israel again. Right on schedule, here come the huffers, puffers and pipsqueaks. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, arrived in New York to demand a seat at the United Nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right on cue, arrived from Iran in a cloud of bluster and bombast. It's all for show, of course, irritating in the way a noisy neighbor's drunken fight with his wife at 3 in the morning can be irritating. But the show, such as it is, makes a convenient backdrop for what looks like an authentic hope for change in American presidential politics.

September 21, 2011

FIELDS: Camelot revisited

Jackie Kennedy is back, but the world she knew as first lady is gone forever. The woman Mamie Eisenhower said looked "younger than Barbie," the fashion icon who didn't want to wear hats but capitulated at Jack's inauguration with a chic pillbox worn on the back of her head so it wouldn't ruin her bouffant hairdo, the widow who described her husband's administration as Camelot, a romantic notion as fanciful as the legend from which it was based, speaks again through a gossamer haze of prefeminist politics.

September 14, 2011

FIELDS: God and politics

God will not be mocked, as the Scriptures tell us, but the pundits and politicians keep trying. Rick Perry is bringing out both the believers and the scoffers. This is a phenomenon that seems to happen with the presidential cycles. Jimmy Carter was born again, Barack Obama was once the messiah, and his followers - millions of them - thought he could walk on water. Now not even Michelle is sure he could walk to Alexandria without getting wet to the knees. All that is gone with the wind, and Irene's rain.

August 31, 2011

FIELDS: Back to school: Helping boys man up in reading

Once upon a time, women complained that everything in the culture favored men, that it began when men and women were boys and girls. Boys got the advantage in kindergarten and kept it through high school and into their college years. Boys were more active than girls, and teachers called on them for recitation more often than girls.

August 24, 2011

FIELDS: Wanted: Ideas that work

If all politics were truly local, Tim Pawlenty might still be in the race. The former governor of Minnesota made the best offer to Iowans, promising to cook their dinner or mow their lawn. Of course, there was a catch. The winner of the dinner and a freshly clipped lawn had to come up with an example of something specific offered by President Obama to solve the economic mess.

August 16, 2011

FIELDS: Remembering the shame

We're all children of our histories. Some of us become victims, others reactors and rebels. Some of us just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Commemorations, celebrations and memorials become important, documenting what is, what was and what might have been.

August 10, 2011

FIELDS: The evil mind of the mass murderer

Nothing so focuses the mind on the nature of evil like mass murder. The numbers magnify a singular horror and become collectively unfathomable. Josef Stalin, who knew something about mass murder, showed his cold-blooded ruthlessness when he called one death a tragedy, many deaths a statistic.

August 3, 2011

FIELDS: In praise of racy tabloids

What would a world without tabloids look like? Not as much fun, for sure, if the tattletales and snoopers and others of irreverent ilk lost their voices on the printed page. Who would supply headlines such as "Headless body found in topless bar" (New York Post), "Ford to City: Drop Dead" (New York Daily News), or perhaps the pithiest of them all, the show-biz tab Variety on the stock-market crash that announced the Depression: "Wall Street Lays an Egg." Who among us doesn't get a touch of schadenfreude watching feet of clay crumble in shoes?

July 27, 2011

FIELDS: Inside the ring at last

Like it or not, Michele Bachmann is a contender. She triumphed over low expectations in the opening Republican debate. She advanced from flaky to crusty, from outlandish to charismatic, from beyond the fringe to inside the ring.

July 20, 2011