Letters
"…so one-sided it falls off my bookshelf."

Address correction
Unlike many other publications, the Magazine tends to assume an intelligent readership. It is clearly scrupulous in the facts it presents, perhaps aware that its readers are only too ready to pen letters in response. It is also a forum in which alumni can present their own points of view and debate those of their fellow alums in an atmosphere of respect.

This is why I was appalled to see the Magazine report the political content of an alumna's news as fact, when it belongs squarely in the realm of fantasy. In the June/02 "Letters," the editor apologizes for passing on the myth that people of the Middle Ages believed the world to be round, and yet the same issue propagates a modern fallacy that East Jerusalem is located in Palestine. ("Class News, The Schools, 1990s"). Whatever one's politics and opinions on the viability, advisability, and time-frame for the creation of a Palestinian state, a quick look at the roster of present-day states will reveal that there is no such thing today as a state of Palestine and that Jerusalem (East and West) remains the undivided capital of the state of Israel.

The most that could have been printed truthfully was that the alumna lives in an Eastern neighborhood of Jerusalem, in an area which the state of Israel conquered from Jordan in 1967 and that the Palestinians claim for the state they hope to have. I am not going to advocate the editing of alumni news for political correctness, but I am certain that alumni news is edited, not only for length and grammar, but also to prevent the inclusion of material that is vulgar, obscene, or otherwise inappropriate. Patent untruths certainly ought to fall in that category, given our collective pride in intellectual honesty.

Besides, should anyone wish to write to our fellow alumna, it would behoove them to use the correct address.

Myriam Arnold Miller, JD'94
Jerusalem