For those who would like to know a little more about the issues surrounding Julian Assange and Wikileaks, please take two minutes to read and ponder the following passages from Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler’s…
Here’s Noam Chomsky–True prophets like Amos — “dissident intellectuals,” in modern terminology — offered both elevated moral lessons, which the people in power weren’t fond of, and geopolitical analyses that usually turned out to be…
Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays Schocken, 1976 Recently I’ve read works that deal with Jews and Judaism in crisis—those in the Yiddish-speaking world in the first half of the twentieth…
The audience I try to reach, and to some limited extent do reach, is a different one: partly, activists of a less doctrinaire sort than the mainstream liberal intelligentsia and sectarian Marxists, partly the kind…
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews Edited by Gauri Viswanathan Pantheon Books (2001) With four friends (from St. Charles, Troy, and Los Angeles), I am reading and discussing the recently published collection of…
Your sense of guilt, if that is the correct word, should not derive from criticizing Israel. It should reside in remaining silent in the face of injustice as so many of your forebears did before,…
Edward Said was a voice of sanity and courage for literally millions of people around the world and made a brilliant contribution to modern culture and understanding. He was the most eloquent, knowledgeable, and thoughtful…
A huge amount of work obviously remains to be done, and as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza enters its third decade one realizes that the magnitude of liberation required can only…
I saw this book on my shelf, opened to a page, and found this– But that is the sort of thing we can expect from the Abstract Owl, the dried-up Western descendant of the Confucianist…
John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007 Almost twelve years ago I read this book, and the themes of Bildung and mastery were most…