Remembering and Forgetting
1. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. –Milan Kundera, Czech/French novelist 2. The Jews of my city are now forgotten, erased from its memory. Before, there were some…
Category: Israel
On Segev’s The 7th Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
The following is a short summary and commonplace passages with comments on Tom Segev’s book, The 7th Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. It’s one of the many books I examined when writing my first…
It’s About
As I offer to share a 250-page novel/collage (Dear Layla/Welcome to Palestine) With a friend here and there A typical question is– “What’s it about?” OK It’s about good mimesis It’s about memory, resistance and…
The Politics of Dispossession
for Sharifa Barakat “The climax to this campaign occurred when, in West Beirut, Israeli soldiers carted off Palestinian archives, destroyed the private libraries and homes of prominent Lebanese nationalists and Palestinian personalities, and literally heaped…
The Right of Jim Crow to Defend Itself
“We do not believe the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza,” [Hilary] Clinton told reporters at a news conference with the visiting foreign minister of the…
Taking a Stand: A Reflection on Elie Wiesel and Hedy Epstein
These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors. I met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at Blackberry Cafe in Clayton. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow…
Manifest Destiny
1. And that claim [to Oregon] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great…
Rashid’s Vision
… Rashid was one of the few Arab intellectuals to have first hand knowledge of Israel, of the heartlessness as well as the humanity of the settler people who have colonized Palestine and largely cleared…
A Policy of Terror
A Comment on Norman Finkelstein’s ‘This Time We Went Too Far’: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion (OR Books, 2010) We are approaching the second anniversary of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 into January…
Higher Law
Review of Steven V. Mazie, Israel’s Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State. Published first in Journal of Church and State, 2006. “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” This…