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…
Category: Intellectuals
Dissidents
Glucksman says the role of the intellectual is to warn, to predict horrors, to be a Cassandra who tell us what is going on outside the walls of the city. I share this notion….I too…
Getting Free
I randomly picked up a book of interviews with Noam Chomsky off my shelf, and turned to a random page therein and found this, from 1983– There are a vast number of people who are…
Comfort the Afflicted, Afflict the Comfortable
At this stage, we have an obligation to make those who shield Israel from criticism feel uncomfortable—not because they are Jewish, but because they are complicit in the commission of crimes against a vulnerable people…
The Thread of One’s Anger — Jean-Paul Sartre
I always felt I had to stay in contact with the world, with my world. Ever since Marx, philosophy must lead to action. Otherwise it is irrelevant. So a philosopher does what he has to…
Facing the Facts
1. In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within American culture (with a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind it) without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. …
The Dissidents Had Time for Tennis
Allen Ginsberg once noted, “Appreciation is the sacrament.” So this, on Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, from Alice Walker.
A Mentsh
For years I read him to get a bearing On the atrocities the U.S. enabled in Central America I wrote my Master’s thesis on him On Israel/Palestine and liberation theology When I met him at…
This and That
Just heard from an attorney in Jerusalem that my book Elie Wiesel and The Politics of Moral Leadership Is in the Israeli National Library I hope it also carries Hedy Epstein’s Erinnern Ist Nicht Genug
Message from Elias
I’ve been reading a litte bit of Chomsky and thinking about you. Here is what I liked from Chomsky’s book: “…you do not do anything unless you’re aware that there’s something that ought to be…