Israeli democracy

An important article in Tablet that spells out the obvious. I have a hard time explaining the difference between liberal and democratic in the phrase "liberal democratic" to my students.Bertrand Russell was a liberal democrat" ,a liberal by conviction and a democrat by necessity. His friend Gilbert Murray was a liberal but not a democrat, that is, he believed in "freedom of the press" but not in giving the vote to the uneducated.
In the United States democracy is a sacred term uttered with a reverential hush, but liberal is a dirty word to be used only as an epithet.
That liberal democracy can be an oxymoron is evident in the Middle East where the majorities are Islamist and refuse to endorse vital parts of liberalism, such as equality for women. This article suggests that Israel, because of its immigration policy is moving towards the same culture .The article ignores the strength of Israel's liberal institutions.Still new peoples,from the Middle East and now from Russia, that have had no experience of liberal institutions, have become a large majority and often despise the liberal institutions that Israel does support.
Ironically, the politician from Likud who built his party on an anti liberal majority Menahem Begin,always insisted he was a liberal,as did his mentor Jabotinsky.

Education

I began reading Martha Nussbaum's "Not For Profit" today and after some hesitation, will continue. My hesitation came when I saw that " Socratic Pedagogy" was one of its principal themes. Didn't we have enough of this in the sixties? Disillusionment with the Socratic Method was one of the sources of our current enthusiasm for rote learning. This, of course is a misinterpretation of Plato's Meno where Socrates ,questioning an uneducated slave ,shows that he has innate ideas of equality such as it is understood by geometry
But in those days the intellectual content of Socrates questioning was ignored and "Socratic "teaching" meant pulling the "real me" understood as a feeling. out of the the false socialization that has been imposed from authorities from the outside.
Though she sometimes writes this way this way this isn't Nussbaum's point.She is much closer to the real Socrates, whose method was focused on education as an ability to construct arguments. More to come