Glossary
Mentsh, Yiddish, noun; decent, upstanding person. –Michael Wex, Born to Kveetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (Saint Martin’s Press, 2005). Ekāgratā, Sanskrit, noun; one-pointedness, doing only one thing at a time,…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
“C’mon, You Can’t Really Be Serious with All This Buddhism-Shmuddism!”
Geshe Rabten & Geshe Dhargyey, Advice from a Spiritual Friend The faults we criticize in others are only our own projected onto them; if they were not, they would not bother us, and…
Share the Wealth with Elizabeth House: Stumbling Through the Writing Process Energized by Diet Pepsi and Peer Pressure
“You don’t know what you don’t know.” Elizabeth House was told this once while working in a facility where the residents were struggling with different areas of addiction. She learned in that experience, and many…
On-Going Introduction to Dear Love of Comrades
Yaele DiPlacido-Eastman questioned my title, which includes the trigger word–for someone who grew up in the Soviet Union–”comrades.” My choice of title stems not from apparatchiks of Stalinist oppression but from one of America’s greatest…
Inspirations
[A Beggar in Jerusalem] is neither novel nor anti-novel, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither poem nor prose—it is all this together. — Elie Wiesel My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I…
Back from the Soulless Void
Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians Campbell: But you have this: I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls…
Share the Wealth with Lois Aceto: “Committed to Truth and Compelled to Justice”
My friend Lea Koesterer suggested her friend Lois for one of our evenings, so I am glad to pass along the following from Lea– Lois Aceto, a Racine Dominican Sister, is a seasoned social justice activist. Her…
Epigraphs
This page is part of a book-in-progress, Dear Love of Comrades, which you can read here.
“Our Exposed Nerve”
October 12, 2002 This book is crucial to my work. Amira Hass is an Israeli journalist and child of Holocaust survivors trying to report accurately what has been transpiring in Gaza since the famous handshake….