Category: Israel

Remembrance of Teachers Past

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…

Surrealism as a Way of Life

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…

Righteous, Remorseful Jews

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…

From 7 P.M. to 7 A.M.

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…

Making an Impression

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…

This, That, and the Other

1. An excerpt from my 2015 novel, Dear Layla/Welcome to Palestine: Corporate Citizen/1 (Products/2) Some things changed and some didn’t on September 11 It shocked and angered us To see products we had built to…