“Our Exposed Nerve”

October 12, 2002 This book is crucial to my work. Amira Hass is an Israeli journalist and child of Holocaust survivors trying to report accurately what has been transpiring in Gaza since the famous handshake….

Raising the Alarm, Or Not

I just finished the book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom  by Ariel Burger and found this interview segment on Wiesel and Palestinian Rights. Burger quotes Wiesel as follows, which reminds  me of Israeli journalists Gideon Levy…

Dear Randa

6 September 2009 Dear Randa, Given how busy you must be, I can’t imagine that you would have brought along with you Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. I…

Compromismo (Touching a Nerve)

On a summer day in 1944 My mother was herded from a cattle car Along with the rest of its human cargo Which had been transported from Belgrade To the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen She…

The Way It Looked in 2010

When we define the struggle against foreign rule as nonviolent or violent, it’s as if we have asked the occupied to prove their resistance is kosher (or not). And to whom? The very foreign rulers…

Journalists (Monitoring Power)

Thought of the day from journalist Robert Fisk from his The Great War for Civilisation: “I suppose, in the end, we journalists try–or should try–to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any…

The Worthy Dispossessed

This past week saw much coverage and commentary on Israel’s “pull-out” from the Gaza Strip.  It was only a matter of time, I thought, before Elie Wiesel would weigh in on this “historic” occasion. Now…

A Jewish Theology of Liberation

A review of Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, 3rd expanded edition, by Marc H. Ellis.  Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004.  First Published in the Journal of Palestine Studies (2005). At the 60th anniversary…

Righteous Jews

for Hedy Epstein A reflection on Roane Carey and Jonathan Shanin, ed., The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (New York: The New Press, 2002). 1. When I came back from Palestine after working…