Unpronounceable Words
George McGovern and William R. Polk, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now March 2007 Dear Andrew, I have finished McGovern and Polk’s primer on the catastrophe in Iraq and how to get…
Category: Intellectuals
When Simone Met Simone
Most interesting among [Alain’s disciples] was Simone Weil, the future author of Gravity and Grace, who was taking the same classes as the future author of The Second Sex. Simone Weil dressed oddly and always…
Three Hours in the Morning
In Talking with Sartre, U.S. professor John Gerassi explores a fascinating range of subjects with the French intellectual, writer, and activist. At the book’s conclusion, Gerassi writes, “What we must do instead, he said, is…
When It Comes to My Novel, Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, Elie Wiesel Took the Words Right out of My Mouth
I no longer see literature as an art or entertainment. For me literature must fulfill a certain mission in categories of history and justice. Literature is the art of correcting injustices. If there is nothing…
Not This Spotlight, Please!
Yet, one cannot but wonder whether incessant complaints about Bourdieu’s style and terminology are not a symptom of a deeper and different problem, since other “difficult” writers—Habermas, Foucault, or even Weber come to mind—do not…
A Witness to Power’s Mendacity
A while back I reread David Barsamian’s first collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, entitled Chronicles of Dissent. Actually, I first heard the material starting in the mid-1980s, listening to Barsamian’s cassette tapes of interviews…
A New-Old Saintliness
On Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion French intellectual Simone Weil has had many biographers, interpreters, and critics since she died in 1943. Brazilian liberation theologian Maria Clara Bingemer’s recent…
A New-Old Saintliness
On Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion French intellectual Simone Weil has had many biographers, interpreters, and critics since she died in 1943. Brazilian liberation theologian Maria Clara Bingemer’s recent…
Staying Human
Felicia Langer, An Age of Stone (Quartet Books, 1988) Trans. Isaac Cohen It is my simple belief that whatever happens to [the Palestinians], their future and their fate in the last decades of the twentieth…
The Way It Looked In 1968
Within a short period of time there will be no Jewish workers in Israel. The Arabs shall be the workers; the Jews shall be the managers, inspectors, officials, and policemen and mainly secret service men….