Word: hartman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Talk Show, a syndicated late-night half-hour, is homemade in a literal sense. The premise is a throwback to that old Mary Hartman spinoff, Fernwood 2-Night: a housewife (Cynthia Stevenson) in the little town of Derby, Wis., has turned her living room into the set for a nightly talk show. It's a homey affair: her brother-in-law is the announcer; gray-haired Mrs. Battle, her old school nurse, is musical director; neighbors drop by to chat. So do real-life celebrities such as William Shatner and Florence Henderson...
...matter currently of greatest moment in Israel, Hartman is anything but a dreamer. "I am not Gandhi," he says. "I know many Palestinians would prefer me dead. Nevertheless, I can live with a demilitarized Palestinian state because a Palestine without military power can satisfy Israel's security needs." But real peace, Hartman knows, will be impossible until the Palestinians realize that the Jews have come home permanently, that they are indigenous to their land, that they are more than a post-Holocaust phenomenon imposed out of the West's guilty conscience. This is why Hartman is so dismayed...
Reality -- or "facts on the ground," as Ariel Sharon would say -- has , mellowed Hartman. Impatient by nature, he now knows that his hopes for a radical change in national attitudes will require decades, perhaps centuries to be realized. But unless Judaism, Islam and Christianity discover new foundations for pluralism in their respective traditions, a paper peace will offer scant solace. The shabby state of Israeli-Egyptian relations teaches that a treaty grounded in political calculation rather than moral awakening is worth little (and can be abrogated easily). "If an Egyptian-style peace is all we ever get," says Hartman, then...
Almost everything in the Middle East argues for pessimism. The old animosities reach out of antiquity and recast themselves in modern terms. Yet Hartman presses on. With a sure sense of history but no fear of it, he is guided by an old Talmudic saying: "It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free not to take...
PROFILE: Philosopher David Hartman...