Face to Face with Elie Wiesel
This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993. My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….
Category: Activists
On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…
Spiritual Exercises (for Social Workers, Nurses, Parents, Teachers, Students…)
“To take flight” every day! At least for a moment, which may be brief, so long as it is intense. A “spiritual exercise” every day—alone or in the company of a person who also wants…
There’s Poetry and There’s Polemical Essays
Interviewer: Later this month you’ll be reading at the poetry festival, Split This Rock. Do you have an expectation for what you want the audience to take away from your reading? Alice Walker: A clearer…
Appeal for Gaza
Norman Finkelstein has been calling on people to make a donation to al-Awda Hospital in Gaza in the hopes of raising $100,000. Please consider making a donation of $10 if you can. One of the…
Beyond the Support the Troops Syndrome
I recently read a collection of essays in Brenda M. Boyle’s The Vietnam War: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature. Academics explored authors like Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), Michael Herr (Dispatches), Duong…
What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand/2
Overcoming Speechlessness is a short book on poet and novelist Alice Walker’s travels to Rwanda, Congo, and Palestine where she bears witness and attends to heartbreaking tales of atrocity, devastation, and cruelty. Yet, she is…
The Ultimate in Jewish Nightmares
I was sitting outside at RISE with a young Irish-Jewish American friend who asked me, when I showed her a particular chapter in Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, “Who is Abbie Hoffman?” It was a pleasure…
Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West. Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary maven of suspicion when…