Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie
I am thinking of Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie, and how they are quite similar. Not on the surface, for who could more dissimilar: A young college student and an august former statesman. But I can…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Good Human Material
Review of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II by Yosef Grodzinsky. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2004. First published in the Journal…
Allen Ginsberg: What’s More Important than Hope
Via email I received an essay by Bay Area activist and founder of Middle East Children’s Alliance, Barbara Lubin. In her conclusion on her 20+years of activism on Israel/Palestine, she writes the following… And what…
Fear and Hatred in Postwar Poland
Review of Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. New York: Random House, 2006. 303 p. $25.95. Forthcoming in Shofar. In Fear, historian Jan Gross explores a seemingly baffling phenomenon. How is it that there was…
Remembering the Palestinian Catastrophe
Today November 29 marks the passage of the 1947 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181. By the deliberations of this body, historic Palestine, which had most recently been under a British Mandate, was to pass…
Remembering the Nakba
Recently the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC sponsored an unusual exhibit, “Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?” Photographic images of the genocide in Darfur are flashed to incredible size at night outside on…
Kurushindeta: A Response to The Book of Mev by Clara Takarabe
Dear Mark, I’m at Schiphol. I started your Book of Mev again and read it in about 7 hours. After p. 251, I cried through nearly every page. p. 303 nearly killed me. At the wake, p….
Israel’s Rampage and Our Complicity by Mark Chmiel & Andrew Wimmer
Recent violent storms have given St. Louisans a taste of the destructive power of Mother Nature. The awesome winds that brought down tree limbs and power lines caused extensive property damage throughout the area and…
Deploying the Holocaust
Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, by Idith Zertal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cambridge Middle East Studies 21. 208 pages. Biographies to p. 216. Glossary to p. 222. Bibliography to p. 230. Index…
Reputation
On Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope (With Azadeh Moaven) But a personal story is more powerful than any dry summary of why a given law should be changed. To attract people’s…