On Ginsberg’s HOWL

It was a cri de coeur, an alarm, a vision. Its structure matched its energy which seemed the voices of many, not one. It was a rhizomic collage, just like life, a pastiche of the…

Face to Face with Elie Wiesel

This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993.  My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….

A Nation of Words

Miriam Weinstein’s Yiddish: A Nation of Words is a compelling book. Go to Amazon.com and type in “Yiddish” and many books will come up whose titles are cheap, sentimental, ridiculous, goofy.  Weinstein has a sense…

Poetry Lover

I’ve read it every day of my life since I was thirteen. It is, among the man-made artifacts, my primary source of knowledge of the stuff of this world and the next. Its limitless archive…

The Last Sentence of Middlemarch

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number…

Be Here Now

In one of Tolstoy’s parables, a peasant is plowing a field. The narrator asks the old man what he would do if he knew that Death was coming to take him away within the hour….

Remembering Kanafani

Fatima Rhodes sent me this message:  “Have you seen this, Remembering Ghassan Kanafani, or How a Nation was Born of Storytelling by Elias Khoury ? It was published around the time we read Men in the Sun together….

Patience

There are years that ask the question and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston