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This week on nybooks.com: How American Jews isolate themselves from Palestinian perspectives, Seamus Heaney as a teacher, Edward Snowden in Russia, America’s unemployed young people, why Obama can’t go it alone in Syria, cat people on Mars, Syrian refugees in Kurdistan, Berlusconi’s threat, Questlove’s memoir, L.S. Lowry’s landscapes, and a tribute to Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams.

“Who is wise?” asks the Jewish ethical text Pirkei Avot. “He who learns from all people.” As Jews, we owe Israel not merely our devotion but our wisdom. And we can’t truly provide it if our isolation from Palestinians keeps us dumb.

Seamus Heaney used to say that the poetry-writing hours of a poet’s day were the easy part; it was what to do with the rest of the day that was a challenge. He decided early on that teaching was something honorable to do with the rest of the day. He took his teaching very seriously, regarding it as a craft, something to be worked at, much like writing.

Over the summer, there has been much debate about whether Edward Snowden is a courageous whistleblower or a traitor. Even if he started out closer to the former, his protection by the Russians may increasingly make him appear a defector who fled one country in order to serve another. Kim Philby’s treatment after his defection to Russia fifty years ago does not bode well for what Snowden might expect in Moscow.

Our current employment crisis has less to do with technology or globalization than with the administration’s failure to adopt policies to support young workers.

Vote me out of jail, or I will bring the country down with me. This, essentially, is the message Silvio Berlusconi has sent to the Italian government.

Lao She’s Cat Country is one of the most remarkable, perplexing, and prophetic novels of modern China. On one level it is a work of science fiction—a visit to a country of cat-like people on Mars—that lampoons 1930s China. On a deeper level, the work predicts the terror and violence of the early Communist era and the chaos and brutality that led to Lao She’s death.

Is northern Iraq being drawn into the Syrian war? Iraqi Kurdistan has received one of the largest waves of refugees since the Syrian conflict began three years ago—40,000 people in less than two weeks, overwhelming the regional government and straining Kurdish unity.

Whatever the validity of a military intervention in Syria under international law, under the US Constitution only Congress has the authority to authorize military force.

Mo’ Meta Blues is a hip hop memoir, a now distinct genre within America’s wider memoir boom. But Questlove’s book is the first not by a rapper, and that is just one way that it stands out.