Know Thyself
There are many intellectuals who call the world into question, but there are very few intellectuals who call the intellectual world into question. –Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis
Category: Intellectuals
Elie Wiesel and Worthy Remembrance
See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit: I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…
Bourdieu on Algeria
The somewhat exalted libido sciendi that drove me, rooted in a kind of passion for everything about this country, its people and its landscapes, and also in the dull but constant sensation of guilt and…
A Writer and His Readers
And nothing would make me happier than having made it possible for some of my readers to recognize their own experiences, difficulties, questionings, sufferings, and so on, in mine, and to draw from that realistic…
Lifelong Learning
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over…
The Way It Looked in 1970 (Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will)
What can we do to affect the events that are to come? First, we must not make the mistake of placing trust in the government. The large upsurge of antiwar sentiment can be an effective…
A Second Bible by Melech Ravitch
Why shouldn’t a second Jewish Book be put together and edited and canonized, on the lines of our Bible? 377 A Bible is not an anthology, nor a history, nor a collection of documents. It…
The Way It Looked in 1988
Take a look at this morning’s New York Times (I had fifty cents to kill, so I bought a copy). There’s story about Israel, John Kifner, a pretty good reporter, is reporting about attitudes in…
Responsibility
“But we all learn from the Midrash the essential lesson of human and social responsibility. True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. …
Dear Isabel (Letter/3)
Monday 22 June 2015 Dear Isbaelita Page 3 This page inspires me to offer you the following writing topics to add to your comprehensive list, unless you’ve already exhausted each of them by writing at…