How nice to see someone not kowtow to this clichéd and fatally flawed movie. It asks us to care for a kid devoted to beauty pageants we as a culture have been taught to loathe for the way they twist young children and turn parents into egomaniacal monsters. It thinks we'd believe a grandfather would teach such a risque and age-inappropriate routine to his granddaughter, and then halfway it completely violates its own reality when a death that would require only a phone call for all steps to be taken (it was "pre-arranged" according to the script) becomes a--supposedly--comic plot device to crank up the voyage. It even makes a book on Proust (!) a national bestseller, and the list goes on. Dumb, dumb, dumb--and it's a sign of desperation that critics have been crawling up this movie's ass. As a writer, I found the script banal, dishonest, and frantic. I thought the script writers were hacks, but clever ones, because they seem to have convinced everyone they're terrific.

Let's hope the second two hours of this season are filled with nail-biting suspense, Heather, because the first two were duds, with too much set-up. Not just duds, but bad enough to make me long for Kim and the cougar. Well, almost.

Yes, Jack is superhuman and cartoonish and I buy that. Yes, 24 is wild, frantic, over-heated and sometimes silly, but doesn't usually pile up so many weaknesses and incongruities, like

1--weak dialogue. "I'm not some idealistic flag-burning--" Who talks like that, and what the hell does it mean, and how did it apply to the point at hand?

2--No FBI agent would arrest the President's sister, sorry. Not believable.

3--Jack is always right. All the other characters who have interacted with Jack before know this. Why didn't they listen? Just for the sake of moving the story along. Tacky.

4--What administration would make a deal with terrorists without looking more deeply at their motives?

5--What administration would give its intel and security info over to terrorists without some kind of back-up?

6--Two doors are kicked open in this first two hours with just one kick. Front doors of houses? Jive jive jive.

I'll keep watching, but I'm worried that the show's amazing success has turned the heads of its writers.

Vivian Gornick said "What happens to the writer isn't important. It's the arger sense that the writer makes out of what happened that matters. And for this an imagination is required."

This piece lacks imagination or at least an imaginative treatment of the story. It happened, big deal, so what?

The letters piling up aren't about the piece as much as they are about the issue, which is perpetually controversial.

What would you expect from the Jew-hating trolls who visit these pages but "the Senator from Tel-Aviv" comments?

They are delusional. How could civil war, growing regional chaos, and a brand-new thriving center for terrorism in the region help Israel?

Democracy and stability are what would help Israel and all Near Eastern nations, not their reverse.

I couldn't agree more with what Douglas Moran and others have said about the tired, cliched and intrinsically bigoted dichotomy of OT=Hate, NT=Love. It's a battle I've been fighting for twenty years as a Jewish author and public speaker. It's a losing battle, unfortunately, and the fact that Salon let this piece go through unedited is proof. It's not the first time, either.

Christianity committed one of the greatest heists in history by hijacking the Torah, reordering the books, mistranslating them, and finding patterns and texts there that supposedly point to the NT ("typology"). For centuries, Christians have been telling the world what the Torah says and what it means, so much so that plenty of Jews I meet have absorbed these hateful distortions and even use the term "Old Testament." Sure there's violence in the Torah and tribalism. But there's no love there, charity, understanding, kindness? What about the Golden Rule? What about the calls for justice from the prophets? What about the concern for impartial trials, the love shown for strangers, widows, orphans? I could write a much longer list, but doing Judaism for Dummies for so many years wears a person out.

For a start, I'd like to see writers like Kamiya call those books by their correct name: The Torah. Hebrew Bible or Hebrew Scripture would do just fine, too. We call your books by their proper name: The New Testament. How about returning the favor; it's only an act of respect, how hard could it be?

I'd like to see Kamiya and Joan Walsh or whoever edited this piece actually do some research and look at these texts from a myriad of Jewish perspectives and see how Jewish tradition reads and understands them. Then, perhaps, you'd have a much better idea that even when the Torah was redacted, many of its proscribed punishments were considered too harsh. How was this dealt with? Why not take the time to find out, rather than let received "wisdom' just get regurgitated by authors and in fora that should have higher standards.

I read a lot of memoirs, but I would never pick up Pollack's book if this is a sample. I was tempted to skim through much of it, but kept going. The dialogue struck me as unbelievable and crass when it wasn't stiff, and I found it difficult to sympathize with anyone here (except for the baby). Pollack might have been better off filtering this material into a short story, but as a memoir, it doesn't feel reflective or original enough, just a series of gripes, written about in very unmemorable prose.