Remembering Is Not Enough
Hilene Flanzbaum, The Americanization of the Holocaust The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 The following note is from summer 1999 when I was reworking my dissertation to what would become my first book, Elie Wiesel…
Category: Power and Ideology
A U.S. American Voice, Laotian Voices
Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War (first published in 1972) If our country had decency, at the death of Fred Branfman there would have been coverage, interviews, retrospectives,…
To Have Been Exiled by Exiles
I was rereading Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which is a great collection of essays on literature and culture with exploration of the experiences of dislocation, exile, migration, and empire as well…
Our Only Salvation Lies in Words: On Arenas’s Before Night Falls
All dictatorships are sexually repressive and anti-life. All affirmations of life are diametrically opposed to dogmatic regimes. It was logical for Fidel Castro to persecute us, not to let us fuck, and to try to…
Giving No Peace to Those in the Country Who Are Violating All the Laws of Truth
She represented the honor and conscience of Russia, and probably nobody will ever know the source of her fanatical courage and love of the work she was doing. — Liza Umarova, Chechen singer Colleagues helped…
Three Views: Lévy, Golan, Chomsky
1. Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote a “Love Letter to Israel in Seventy Lines,” published in The Tablet under 70 REASONS TO CELEBRATE ISRAEL. He is a philosopher who lives in Paris, France. Here are a…
Who Is Learning from History?
1. Oscar Romero’s Letter San Salvador February 17, 1980 His Excellency The President of the United States Mr. Jimmy Carter Dear Mr. President: In the last few days, news has appeared in the national press…
The Preferential Option for the Rich
“[You in the Western countries] have organized your lives around inhuman values [which] are inhuman because they cannot be universalized. The system rests on a few using the majority of the resources, while the majority…
The World according to Chomsky: Winter Reading Group 2018
In recent years, I’ve known many people who ask themselves, “What can I do, given the state of the world?” In the past year, this question has been especially urgent, given the toxicity of…
Finkelstein’s Gaza
I just received Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. I noticed this blurb by Alice Walker: “This is the voice I listen for, when I want to learn the deepest reality…