Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: Republican courtship of the Jews

"The Merchant of Venice" is back and plays for relevance just in time for 2012. The Shakespeare drama is being staged in the nation's capital, set in a troubled America struggling with cultural extravagance in New York City before the Great Depression. Al Pacino stars in a movie version, inviting reflection on the ambiguities of prejudice and greed, as familiar in 21st-century Washington as in 16th-century Venice. There's enough corruption depicted in the play to indict an entire wasteful society. The famous "pound of flesh" is but a metaphor for all kinds of excesses of thinking and action. Anti-Semitism is only a part of it.

July 13, 2011

FIELDS: Shaping citizens, shaping souls

A neighbor of mine, age 15, left a picnic on the Fourth of July expecting to set off fireworks in the family. He had a declaration

July 6, 2011

FIELDS: The right ruling on video games

Children can do terrible things. They can bully and maim, even murder. In our lifetime, we've seen young people arm themselves and shoot down classmates and teachers. We shake our heads in shock and wonder. How can such things happen? So we look for reasons - sane, rational explanations for violent behavior and ways to curb it.

June 29, 2011

FIELDS: Don’t know much about history

First the good news: The nation's eighth-graders are doing better in history class. Now the bad news: They're not doing much better. Gains in test scores are small, made by the lowest performers, and just 17 percent of those tested are "proficient," or competent.

June 22, 2011

FIELDS: Return of bad times for Jews

In the wake of the celebrated Weiner roast, Jewish jokes are in. The congressman's surname doesn't help. Some of our funniest comedians are Jews, in a long line stretching from the Borscht Belt through vaudeville to Hollywood. Jews love to laugh at themselves. They aren't so happy when others laugh at them. They see the Weiner episode, for an example, as another "good Jewish boy makes a fool of himself."

June 15, 2011

FIELDS: David Mamet turns right

Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a "brain-dead liberal." Now he's a wide-awake conservative. Sometime after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson.

June 8, 2011

FIELDS: The Frenchman has no clothes

The war between the sexes is never-ending, but the battleground is dotted with the white flags of uneasy truces. Men and women have embraced such a truce when discussing what Dominique Strauss-Kahn is said to have committed in a Manhattan hotel suite. Not only are both men and women arguing on the same side, but so are liberals and conservatives, prudes and libertines, Francophiles and Francophobes. He has ruined whatever remained of the reputation of the French lover.

June 1, 2011

FIELDS: Opportunities and obstacles on the campaign trail

In his campaign mode running for governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels referred to his marriage as something of a romantic comedy, in the tradition of Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well." He referred to an earlier time in his life when his wife Cheri left him, moved to California, divorced him and married an old sweetheart. Their four daughters, aged 8 to 14, remained with their father. Cheri's second marriage was short and apparently not so sweet, and four years later she was back home again in Indiana to marry Mitch again and raise their daughters together.

May 25, 2011

FIELDS: Defining deviancy down - way down

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan caught the decline of the culture two decades ago, observing that we're "defining deviancy down" - lowering the bar for what was once considered deviant behavior, giving a pass to things society once scorned. Not much has changed over 20 years. The senator was talking mostly about criminal behavior, but it applies now to just about everything. Raunchy, obscene and scatological subjects, once taboo, are the stuff of prime time.

May 18, 2011

FIELDS: Fanfare over a birthday and a birthplace

The line between life and death is always a thin one and never more so - literally and symbolically - than in the tiny state of Israel, which celebrates its 63rd birthday this week. (That's a lot of bar mitzvahs.) No sooner had the sirens sounded across the promised land of milk and honey, marking memorial day for the soldiers who have died fighting for Israel's survival, than fireworks splashed across the heavens, recalling that moment in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The two commemorations are not unrelated.

May 11, 2011

FIELDS: Snapshots from a watershed weekend

What a weekend. A wedding and a funeral. Love and war. A duchess anointed, a terrorist assassinated. It's the stuff of epics: Of arms and the lady we sing. Of Navy SEALs and British nuptials, firefights and flower girls, warriors brave and kisses sealed. Rejoicing takes place after nine years of courtship, 10 years of searching. Celebration follows rejuvenation.

May 4, 2011

FIELDS: Eichmann’s evil no longer banal

Angela Merkel's Germany is losing its edge politically as her party suffers setbacks in local elections and is sidetracked by France's assertion of leadership toward the Arab Spring. Culturally and intellectually, however, Berlin is still the European capital pushing the envelope. Berlin drives the engine for thinking and rethinking Germany's past.

April 28, 2011

FIELDS: A melting pot gone cold

Our British and European cousins are wrestling with a problem we don't have - yet. How far can the state go to require religious beliefs to conform to basic law? You don't have to be a civil libertarian to feel a chill down your back in even putting the dilemma in such blunt terms.

April 20, 2011

FIELDS: Math lesson for Pelosi and other Barbies

Nancy Pelosi was howlin' mad, eager to lead the charge on behalf of women everywhere (whether they wanted her to or not) against the Republican congressional regiments "at war with women." She sees a battlefield littered with bloody female bodies.

April 13, 2011

FIELDS: Crashing into college

The college acceptance letters have landed. Hysterics have subsided. No more tearful sessions of "what if?" Parents have come to terms with their disappointments that their achieving, well-adjusted child didn't get into her first choice because she had only an A-minus average, good but not great SAT scores, and was merely a reporter for the school newspaper. She may be able to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, and read all of "Moby Dick" (including the whale blubber descriptions), but that simply wasn't enough.

April 6, 2011

FIELDS: Teen sexting

Revolutions are always unpredictable, depending on the way always unpredictable people adapt to them. That's true of high-tech revolutions as well as revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and a lot of other places. Humans are curious creatures.

March 30, 2011

FIELDS: Dressing like little prostitots

Many Americans were disappointed when President Obama devoted a Saturday radio address to a celebration of the progress of women in society. Most of us were more interested to hear about the progress (or lack of it) in dealing with the crisis that threatens to become a new war in Libya. The president was excited about a new White House report on the status of women, the first such report in 48 years. John F. Kennedy assigned Eleanor Roosevelt to explore the subject on that occasion.

March 24, 2011

FIELDS: Celebrate Frank Rich

Conservatives love to hate Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist who wrote his last political column on Sunday, but they owe him an accolade or two for recognizing what the relentless production of opinion was doing to his writing. (Other pundits, please copy.) "That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambitious conclusion," he wrote in his farewell to rage and all that. He's moving to fresh adventures at New York magazine, where he hopes to rediscover nuance, which he displayed in thoughtful abundance in "Ghost Light," his memoir about growing up in Washington, D.C.

March 16, 2011

FIELDS: Tina misses the story

Tina Brown wanted to create a big splash with the first issue of the "new" Newsweek - the magazine Sidney Harman bought for a dollar and put her in charge of returning it to relevance. What could be more original than putting a fresh face on the cover? So here's Hillary Rodham Clinton, 11 years older than the last time Tina Brown launched a magazine, called Talk, and put her there.

March 9, 2011

FIELDS: Bargaining over a ruined product

If teachers unions would use their collective-bargaining rights to do good for their students rather than doing well for themselves, they could make a stronger case for themselves. The good teachers, if they provide a little evidence, might even make a credible argument for getting paid more money. But no. They're talking "me, me, me."

March 2, 2011