Beauchamp's dispatches in TNR kicked up a big investigation by the U.S. military, which found no truth to any of his assertions. As Charles Krauthammer ably discusses here, the core of Beauchamp's latest article, that he mocked a woman in Iraq that had suffered horrible facial wounds, proved hollow, since Beauchamp remembered that the episode took place in Kuwait -- before he even reached Iraq. Krauthammer writes,

Amid these conflicting claims, one issue is not in dispute. When the New Republic did its initial investigation, it admitted that Beauchamp had erred on one "significant detail." The disfigured-woman incident happened not in Iraq, but in Kuwait.

That means it happened before Beauchamp arrived in Iraq. But the whole point of that story was to demonstrate how the war had turned an otherwise sensitive soul into a monster. Indeed, in the precious, highly self-conscious literary style of an aspiring writer trying out for a New Yorker gig, Beauchamp follows the terrible tale of his cruelty to the disfigured woman by asking, "Am I a monster?" And answering with satisfaction that the very fact that he could ask this question after (the reader has been led to believe) having been so hardened and brutalized by war shows that there is a kernel of humanity left in him. . .

Except that it is now revealed that the mess-hall incident happened before he even got to the war. On which point, the whole story -- and the whole morality tale it was meant to suggest -- collapses.

Feldman, meanwhile, caused an enormous stir with his essay "Orthodox Paradox," which kicks off with a story about how he attended a reunion with his non-Jewish fiancee and they got cropped out of a picture of the class together for not hewing to the Orthodox line and marrying outside the Tribe. Feldman takes off from there to opine on Orthodoxy and exclusion.

As with Beauchamp, the drama comes with a crippling asterisk: Feldman and fiancee were not cropped from the picture for evil, exclusivist reasons. As reported in The Jewish Week, Feldman

admitted this week that he learned before publication of his article that he in fact was not intentionally cropped out of his reunion photograph.

In the article, “Orthodox Paradox,” Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, asserts that he was erased from a newsletter’s photograph by his former yeshiva, the Maimonides School in Brookline, Mass., because he was standing alongside his non-Jewish girlfriend. The reunion anecdote led off the story in a dramatic way and the image of Feldman and his wife allegedly being stricken from the photo appeared central to his feelings of being left out.

The photographer, Lenny Eisenberg, told The Jewish Week Monday that he had difficulty capturing as many as 60 reunion participants within a single frame. Eisenberg ended up taking several shots from one side, then the other, and several people on the far side — not just Feldman and his fiancée — happened to be out of the picture when it finally appeared in the newsletter.

Later in the story, Feldman explains why he let the story run the way it did. Hey, it supported the narrative:

Asked why he didn’t rewrite the story to reflect the newly discovered photo, Feldman responded: “When I first wrote it I was doing it from memory. When [the photographer] turned up the contact sheet there was no contradiction at all, as far as I could tell. They had several photos to choose from and they chose one that I wasn’t in. There’s no question that one could offer other explanations for what happened,” other than that it was intentional. “It’s not as if [the photo] was an outlying event. It fit right in with the other things [refusing to print his lifecycle notices]. This was a memoir of my experience.”

One could offer another explanation, but one didn't.

Meanwhile, the most compelling piece on the Feldman furor comes from Allan Nadler in the Forward, titled, "The Death of Genuine Dissent."