“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Nations do not care if you believe in them or reject them. We live within their domains of alliances and enemies and must choose accordingly – either in rejecting their supremacy and finding a way to live with that choice or to make a choice to accept our nation’s (every nation’s) often egregious actions and act within that world. What is possible? What is merely an implausible dream? For […]
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“The mysteries of artistic creation are such that even the artist may have only the foggiest notion of what the work is aiming to be. A poem ends up on the page. But it’s not an utterance like a message or a telegram. In this respect, every poem is susceptible to Prufrock’s refrain, “That is not what I meant at all.” What The Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made […]
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For a very long time, for decades really, but especially since 2016, I’ve been trying to figure out how ordinary people united by a cause or by a point-of-view, can arrive at a point where they can believe absurdities and do terrible things. So let me begin with a story about a conspiracy and about the power of belief in changing a mind. Sometime in the summer of 1969, my […]
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Every Saturday before Services, private security arrives to take their places at the doors, and a police car sits, conspicuously, close by. After Tree of Life , after Colleyville , after Charlottesville , after countless MAGA attacks on George Soro s and the dog whistle references to ‘ cosmopolitan elites ’, after Trump’s attacks on American Jews , after tranches of threats, after who knows how many individual attacks , this is how the congregants’ worship at a friend’s synagogue. Anti-Semitism, always an undercurrent in American life, has […]
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