The Good News of Tablet!

Given some of my preoccupations over the decades, I am grateful to have recently discovered Alana Newhouse’s Tablet. The following are a few essays and interviews that focused my mindfulness and provoked my gratitude. Rokhl…

Finkelstein/Chomsky

The Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire once wrote, “There’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.” Late in life, when his political horizons broadened out, Edward Said would often quote this line. We should make…

Victorious without Vanquishing

Norman Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says About Nonviolence, Resistance, and Courage OR Books, 2012 Norman Finkelstein is working on a new book on the subject of “cancel culture.” Long before the phrase attained recent prominence, Finkelstein…

Never Undemanding of Ourselves

John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev:  The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman Wednesday 1 August 2012 Vasily Grossman represents an inspiring figure of engagement, and old fashioned Russian insistence on telling…

The Way It Looked in 1987

A huge amount of work obviously remains to be done, and as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza enters its third decade one realizes that the magnitude of liberation required can only…

Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets

Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…

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…