Responsibility
“But we all learn from the Midrash the essential lesson of human and social responsibility. True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. …
Category: Intellectuals
Dear Isabel (Letter/3)
Monday 22 June 2015 Dear Isbaelita Page 3 This page inspires me to offer you the following writing topics to add to your comprehensive list, unless you’ve already exhausted each of them by writing at…
The On-going Task: Challenging Illegitimate Authority
At Northwest Coffee, I was having a conversation with Theresa Schafer about women’s ordination and clericalism, and I paraphrased what Noam Chomsky once said about any hierarchy or authority needing to justify itself. Later, I found…
The Way It Looked in 1996
The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
For L.K. Lapinski
When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: “Why do I care if my high school’s team wins the football game? I don’t know anybody on the team, they have nothing…
Voltaire
“What put me off studying the law,” [Voltaire] later told his friend the marquis d’Argenson in 1739, “was the vast amount of useless rubbish they wanted to load into my brain. ‘Get to the point,’…
On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…
Dissidents
Glucksman says the role of the intellectual is to warn, to predict horrors, to be a Cassandra who tell us what is going on outside the walls of the city. I share this notion….I too…
Getting Free
I randomly picked up a book of interviews with Noam Chomsky off my shelf, and turned to a random page therein and found this, from 1983– There are a vast number of people who are…