Monseñor
The Violence of Love (reprint). By Oscar Romero. Translated and compiled by James R. Brockman, S.J. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Pp. xvii, 214. Notes. $15.00 paper. Monsignor Romero: A Bishop for the Third Millennium….
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
An Influential Neurotic Bodhisattva Bard
A few months after Mev died, I read all of Allen Ginsberg‘s poetry and several volumes of essays and journals. Somehow, his spirit cheered me. Recently, I’ve read several books about Ginsberg and what follows are…
Truth Speaks for Itself by Lynn Lassalle-Klein
Dear Mark, I read The Book of Mev last summer while we were in Twain Harte for a summer vacation on the lake. Well, there is no way to sum up all the feelings I experienced. I…
Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie
I am thinking of Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie, and how they are quite similar. Not on the surface, for who could more dissimilar: A young college student and an august former statesman. But I can…
Good Human Material
Review of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II by Yosef Grodzinsky. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2004. First published in the Journal…
Allen Ginsberg: What’s More Important than Hope
Via email I received an essay by Bay Area activist and founder of Middle East Children’s Alliance, Barbara Lubin. In her conclusion on her 20+years of activism on Israel/Palestine, she writes the following… And what…
Fear and Hatred in Postwar Poland
Review of Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. New York: Random House, 2006. 303 p. $25.95. Forthcoming in Shofar. In Fear, historian Jan Gross explores a seemingly baffling phenomenon. How is it that there was…
Remembering the Palestinian Catastrophe
Today November 29 marks the passage of the 1947 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181. By the deliberations of this body, historic Palestine, which had most recently been under a British Mandate, was to pass…
Remembering the Nakba
Recently the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC sponsored an unusual exhibit, “Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?” Photographic images of the genocide in Darfur are flashed to incredible size at night outside on…
Kurushindeta: A Response to The Book of Mev by Clara Takarabe
Dear Mark, I’m at Schiphol. I started your Book of Mev again and read it in about 7 hours. After p. 251, I cried through nearly every page. p. 303 nearly killed me. At the wake, p….