Violence is a part of America. I don't want to single out rap music. Let's be honest. America's the most violent country in the history of the world that's just the way it is. We're all affected by it.
I just think it would be unrealistic to suggest we're going to eliminate every last domestic insurgent in Afghanistan. Certainly the history of the country would indicate that's not a very realistic objective and I think we have to have realistic objectives.
We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.
Jews have a special relationship to books and the Haggadah has been translated more widely and reprinted more often than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy not a prayer book user's manual timeline poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
The past always seems somehow more golden more serious than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.
With the perspective afforded by the passage of time where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families innocents going about their lives suddenly and brutally murdered no other day can ever matter as much.
World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner I think if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.