Entry: Noam Chomsky
Interesting to find an entry for Noam Chomsky in The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia. The brief mention includes, “He rose to even greater prominence for his lifelong pursuit of radical leftist ideas, some mainstream (he opposed…
Category: Dissidents
Stephen Batchelor’s Gotama: A Dissenter, a Radical, an Iconoclast
Stephen Batchelor has been exploring for quite some time a Buddhism with overt religiosity stripped away. His thoughtful, engaging project reminds me of a similar one undertaken by John Dominic Crossan regarding the historical Jesus….
Hadji Murat and Noam Chomsky
1. “… when we came to the camp, Hamzat led the khan into the tent. And I stayed with the horses. I was at the foot of the hill when shooting began in Hamzat’s tent….
Morality 101
See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the…
The Way It Looked Fifty Years Ago
“The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction — all of…
Thinking for Oneself (and Then There’s the “More Sophisticated”)
The audience I try to reach, and to some limited extent do reach, is a different one: partly, activists of a less doctrinaire sort than the mainstream liberal intelligentsia and sectarian Marxists, partly the kind…
Sara Roy speaks to Germans
Your sense of guilt, if that is the correct word, should not derive from criticizing Israel. It should reside in remaining silent in the face of injustice as so many of your forebears did before,…
Is Murdered Journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s “A Russian Diary” Only Relevant to Russians?
Anna Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia Random House, 2007 … the Russian people gave its consent. Nobody stood up. There were no demonstrations, mass…
Assange by Andrew Wimmer
There are several journalists worth reading in order to understand what is happening with Julian Assange and what is at stake. I’d suggest, too, that you avoid all media coverage, at least until you have…
The Long Trail behind You
Shirin Ebadi, with Azadeh Moaveni, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope But a personal story is more powerful than any dry summary of why a given law should be changed. To attract people’s…