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I Think That I Shall Never See a Jew As Lovely As a Tree

January 29, 2015  •  Commentary

Every year, in midwinter, synagogue bulletins and Jewish Community Center emails are filled with announcements of organic Sabbath lunches, environmental lectures, and recycling drives. The impetus for this annual unveiling of the green—which, somewhat unusually, takes place across Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox institutions alike—is the commemoration on the Jewish calendar of Tu B'Shvat, classically known as the New Year for Trees.

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2015: The ObamaCare Crucible

January 2015  •  Commentary

The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, has had a tough run of it since being signed into law nearly five years ago. It has faced constitutional challenges, voters ousting congressional Democrats who supported it, and the disastrous rollout of its federal website in October 2013. This past fall, supporters launched a public-relations campaign dedicated to the proposition that things were finally going well for ObamaCare's 7 million sign-ups, but their campaign was derailed when the Obama administration admitted that it had added 400,000 dental patients to the roster of health-insurance enrollees to falsely claim it had reached the 7 million number.

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2014: A Year in Reading

December 31, 2014  •  National Review Online

One of the challenges one faces in reading a lot is selecting which books to read: There are just so many out there. For this reason, I not only read a lot of books, but book reviews as well. Alas, book reviews are fewer and farther between these days. The loss of the Washington Post's "Book World" a few years ago was compounded this year by the retirement of longtime Post book reviewer Jonathan Yardley. And it remains unclear what will happen to the "back of the book" at The New Republic now that Leon Wieseltier has left that post while that once-respectable magazine pursues clickbait.

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review of The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President

December 1, 2014  •  Commentary

The questionof presidential greatness has been an obsession and a plague since 1948, when Arthur Schlesinger Sr. conducted his first historians' survey ranking the presidents. After Schlesinger's death, his son picked up the mantle with a survey of his own in 1996. It ranked Ronald Reagan in the bottom half.

That alone should show just how questionable the entire enterprise is. Indeed, as long ago as January 1977, the estimable Nelson Polsby wrote in these pages the essay "Against Presidential Greatness," arguing that such an idea raised unreasonable expectations of what a president could achieve.

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Another ObamaCare Deception

November 17, 2014  •  The Wall Street Journal

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.

As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."

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Books by Tevi Troy