A New York Times art critic, Holland Cotter, is also an expert on Israel. Oich mir a maven. A sardonic Yiddish phrase about experts. You can tell that Cotter is one because his review of an exhibit now at the Jewish Museum, "Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art," is full of indications that the presentation has not only disappointed him but plumb broken his heart. For example: "There is the cautious make-nice spirit of the show. It feels less like a critical report on pressing issues than a sightseeing tour with tensions and bumps." Now, let me admit that I have not seen the exhibition. But I have spent almost an hour examining, again and again, the photos that are on-line. For my part, the exhibit's curator, Susan Tumarkin Goodman, has gone overboard, in both her choice of pictures and through her written comments, in loading the show with the usual weighted baggage. Why is there not more Jewish guilt? My view is that Goodman's presentation and Cotter's expectations are themselves falsifications of Israeli life which is already sorely and bloodily burdened by the conflict with the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors. Still, it's not Israel's essence. The essential fact of life in the country is that Israelis have carved out for themselves a fragile but vibrantly normal and joyous life, probably the most normal and joyous life in the entirety of Jewish history. Some of you may recall my writings from Tel Aviv (seven years ago when we lived there and since) telling about the most "happening" city in the West, outside Barcelona. And, if you'll excuse me, that's what I think Herzl hoped for Jewish Palestine. Now, the cultures of dance (one of two or three most vibrant centers of dance in the world), of music, of theatre, of novels and poetry, of history, mathematics and science--real hard science--are for a country of seven million people (with 1.5 million Arabs and roughly the same number of ultra-orthodox Jews who are both out of it) are truly incandescent. In a year, when two months were devoted to a war of indeterminate outcome, the economy grew by 6% and is now growing by 8%. This is a miracle in the land, which until the Zionist Jews came was as desolate physically and spiritually as Mark Twain and Herman Melville described. And it's not just the high culture. In fact, this morning, I was catching up with the latest Jerusalem Report, an excellent English-language fortnightly. An article, "Son of a Beatle," about the unbelievably packed performance of Sean Lennon at the Tel Aviv port's Hangar 11, conveyed the spontaneous joy that ran through the crowd. And familiarity with the music, "his unique sound, which undulates between Revolver-era sunny Beatles and more modern indie influences." Frankly, Ms. Goodman's contemporary portrait of Israel showed none of the above, none of either the ordinary or ordinarily intense ways that Israelis live. That is actually the war that the Jews have won against the Palestinians. And if this does not quite appeal to brooding Susan or actually offends Holland Cotter, well, tough. Frankly, I am not surprised by Mr. Cotter. Maybe he has been to Israel and maybe he has not. Still, from what depth of knowledge is he so certain that Goodman's concession to other peoples' loathing of Israel is insufficient and self-censoring? Now, I have learned a decent amount from Cotter in his writings in the Times and in art journals. I've even read books by Oleg Grabar, who other experts tell me is the most subtle and learned art and architecture Islamiscist in the world, and I once audited (it is true, just off and on) a Grabar course at Harvard. (We saw each other when he lived in Cambridge, that is, until he moved to Princeton.) But I am surely no expert and, not knowing enough myself, I am left taking Cotter's words on Islamic art as the last word. Still, I am suspicious of his descent into the politics of Islam and the western reaction to its fiery provocations. In a Times review just a bit more than a year ago, "What Does Islam Look Like?," of a few exhibitions by Islamic artists, especially one at MOMA, he tells convincingly of the nuances and ambivalences of Muslim art. I saw the MOMA exhibit, and he articulated my own experience. But, then, he simply could not resist political judgments that the art neither prove or disprove. One instance: "The West and Islam are on a collision course. That's the best-selling fiction that many people are working overtime to turn into fact." Who do you think he means by "many people"? Muslims? Another: He refers to an artists' collective called Kakhana "which the artists formed as an activist gesture in response to the political and military aggression world wide after September 11." It's not Muslims to whom he alludes, believe me, its Westerners. Of the pieces in another show, he says, "They are evidence of the cosmopolitan world that political powers, intent on creating a myth of unbridgeable divides, want to bury." And who are these grave diggers? Again the West. And my last allusion to Cotter's blindness: "...the images of communal 'Muslim fury' spilling from the media." As if Muslim fury does not spill from Muslims themselves. Blaming Israel and Israelis and the Jewish Museum, moreover, for a photo exhibition that does not mirror his own prejudices and predispositions is an extension of the blame he pins on the powers and the media for seeing in contemporary Islam facts that only the blind fail to see.