From Lea Goldberg’s Diary
The greatest and only crime: spiritual laziness. And within that spiritual laziness, one doesn’t even acknowledge it, making it seven times worse. –Peter Cole, Hebrew Writers on Writing
The greatest and only crime: spiritual laziness. And within that spiritual laziness, one doesn’t even acknowledge it, making it seven times worse. –Peter Cole, Hebrew Writers on Writing
Dear Max, The following passages are from Susie Linfield’s book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. While the focus is on Middle East matters, you may see some…
“Make the impossible possible, the possible easy, the easy elegant.” –Moshe Feldenkrais
Recently, the Persian scholar and poetry translator Matt Miller sent me condolences upon the death of one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh. I mentioned to him that the several of the teachers I first…
Elie Wiesel, Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends This is Elie Wiesel’s third of four installments thus far on his favorite Hasidic teachers, the ones whose tales enchanted him in his childhood, the…
Robert Johnson played last night at that café on Sugar Street. Walt Whitman was detained after chanting “Song of the Open Road” at the Huwarra Checkpoint. Dorothy Day was photographed again just sitting in the…
As my 61st birthday approaches, I’ve noticed that I have recently been going back to authors and works I read many years ago. For example, I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, William D. Miller’s…
Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth Schocken paperback, 1988 I first read this book eighteen years ago. So much time has passed since those Maryknoll days when I thought I wanted to…
Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Oneworld Publications, 2007 This is a profound meditation on truth, unpalatable as it will be for many supporters of an expansionist Israel. Pappe cuts through the decades of Nakba…