I took advantage of this recent MLK Day long weekend to reread Hamlet in light of the fascinating conversation I had with Seth Duerr, Director of the York Shakespeare Company, in New York City a few weeks ago. Among the many things we agreed on was that our opinion of Hamlet was fairly unenthusiastic, at least in comparison to some of the rest of the Shakespeare canon and in comparison to the play's iconic cultural status.

The Arab-American community is routinely subjected to political nonsense on the Internet and in many other media and forums. The most damaging form of nonsense is not bad analysis or angry idiocy, damaging though that certainly is, but factual inaccuracy and blatant falsehoods that are all too common and create serious confusion and misapprehension. If we don't have our facts right, there is no hope of coming to an accurate analysis. Without an accurate analysis, there is no hope of coming up with a workable strategy to deal with a situation.

The Obama administration deserves credit and praise for its determination to push forward with Middle East peace diplomacy. It is very reassuring that the administration has not regarded the frustrations and false starts of 2009 as evidence that nothing can be accomplished or that efforts are being wasted. It is vital that the United States continue to pursue progress towards peace on a variety of fronts, including at the diplomatic register.

The new TSA security directive following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit raises the specter of ethnic and religious profiling in the most direct way since the 9/11 attacks. The first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that the primary blame for all kinds of negative fallout from terrorist attacks -- whether they succeed in killing the innocent or, as in this case, are simply a halfwit setting fire to his own trousers -- belongs squarely with the terrorists themselves and with their sympathizers.

Yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri passed away at his home in the Iranian holy city of Qom, without question delivering another serious blow to hopes for internal reform to the Iranian political system. Montazeri leaves behind him a decidedly mixed legacy, and a very interesting set of questions about the immediate and long-term consequences of his absence from the Iranian political scene.

After my recent posting about anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta, I received a very kind invitation from Seth Duerr founder and director of the York Shakespeare Company which, I was surprised to learn, was staging rotating productions of the two plays at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. I couldn't resist. Last weekend I went to New York, saw both productions and had an extremely enjoyable and interesting dinner with Mr. Duerr.

Iranian internal politics appear to have arrived at a crucial turning point that has been inevitable since the election fraud and protests this summer. At the time, I wrote that the regime had given the population a straightforward choice: accept our repression or enter into a revolutionary movement with uncertain consequences. It's a high-stakes gamble, but thus far it seems to have worked.

Elizabethan England produced two great plays involving Jewish protagonists, and for most of the past hundred years or so it has been generally believed that one of these plays is essentially defensible although highly problematic while the other is simply and crudely anti-Semitic. The Merchant of Venice remains controversial, and with good reason, but it is generally defended and is and can be performed in the English-speaking world without much protest.

Pres. Obama probably had no choice at this stage of his presidency and under the present circumstances but to accede to the demands of his military commanders and commit tens of thousands of additional American troops to the Afghan war. It took him months longer to make the decision than it probably should have, and that's because I think it is both strategically and politically almost impossible to decide what the wisest course of action would be.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have produced another in a long series of articles for the New York Review of Books on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and this one is essentially a follow-up to a very controversial New York Times op-ed they published this summer which many people took to be an endorsement of a one-state agenda.