Staying Human
Felicia Langer, An Age of Stone (Quartet Books, 1988) Trans. Isaac Cohen It is my simple belief that whatever happens to [the Palestinians], their future and their fate in the last decades of the twentieth…
Category: Intellectuals
The Way It Looked In 1968
Within a short period of time there will be no Jewish workers in Israel. The Arabs shall be the workers; the Jews shall be the managers, inspectors, officials, and policemen and mainly secret service men….
Know Thyself
There are many intellectuals who call the world into question, but there are very few intellectuals who call the intellectual world into question. –Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis
Elie Wiesel and Worthy Remembrance
See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit: I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…
Bourdieu on Algeria
The somewhat exalted libido sciendi that drove me, rooted in a kind of passion for everything about this country, its people and its landscapes, and also in the dull but constant sensation of guilt and…
A Writer and His Readers
And nothing would make me happier than having made it possible for some of my readers to recognize their own experiences, difficulties, questionings, sufferings, and so on, in mine, and to draw from that realistic…
Lifelong Learning
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over…
The Way It Looked in 1970 (Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will)
What can we do to affect the events that are to come? First, we must not make the mistake of placing trust in the government. The large upsurge of antiwar sentiment can be an effective…
A Second Bible by Melech Ravitch
Why shouldn’t a second Jewish Book be put together and edited and canonized, on the lines of our Bible? 377 A Bible is not an anthology, nor a history, nor a collection of documents. It…
The Way It Looked in 1988
Take a look at this morning’s New York Times (I had fifty cents to kill, so I bought a copy). There’s story about Israel, John Kifner, a pretty good reporter, is reporting about attitudes in…