Two instances do not constitute a pattern.

Two instances do not constitute a pattern, and it may be that I have simply move swiftly into unusually bad luck, if it be not that it is disconcerting that the one and the other critiques to which I have been enthralled in FIRST THINGS during the last year or to such a degree have grievously misrepresented what I wrote First, my volume on Lubavitch messianism was savagely attacked through David Singer for an argument that it did not make ("The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Heresy Hunter" May 2003) and now Richard John Neuhaus, in a more moderate piece ("Anti-Semitism and False Alarms," Public Square, August/September), compresse several significant distortions of