Yiddish Writers
H. Leivick I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… Sholem Aleichem…
Category: Intellectuals
Mentshes/1
Dear Shannon, I enjoyed our long conversation on Saturday afternoon at 6 North Coffee. I appreciate you taking the time to visit on such a busy weekend. After our chats, the strong impression I am…
Inspirations
[A Beggar in Jerusalem] is neither novel nor anti-novel, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither poem nor prose—it is all this together. — Elie Wiesel My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I…
A Hierarchy of Human Life?
Nawal El Saadawi, The Essential Reader In his poem “Cosmopolitan Greetings,” Allen Ginsberg urged: Stand up against governments, against God. This expresses the life and work of Nawal El-Saadawi. I am African from Egypt, not…
The Power of Footnotes
1. My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts. –Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones interview, 1987…
The Goal Is Justice, the Method Is Transparency
For those who would like to know a little more about the issues surrounding Julian Assange and Wikileaks, please take two minutes to read and ponder the following passages from Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler’s…
For So They Treated the Prophets…
Here’s Noam Chomsky–True prophets like Amos — “dissident intellectuals,” in modern terminology — offered both elevated moral lessons, which the people in power weren’t fond of, and geopolitical analyses that usually turned out to be…
There is Nothing Jewish That Is Alien to Me
Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays Schocken, 1976 Recently I’ve read works that deal with Jews and Judaism in crisis—those in the Yiddish-speaking world in the first half of the twentieth…
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…
Only Connect (and Hold It All)
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews Edited by Gauri Viswanathan Pantheon Books (2001) With four friends (from St. Charles, Troy, and Los Angeles), I am reading and discussing the recently published collection of…