Novelist Maaza Mengiste discusses the erasure of women’s war stories, photography as a weapon of subjugation, and her new book, The Shadow King.
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: A Bold and Dangerous Family by Caroline Moorehead. Harper Collins, 2017, 432 pages. IN THE MONSTROUS hecatomb that was Europe from the 1930s through 1945, the murder of the Italian anti-fascists Carlo and Nello Rosselli can and does pass unnoticed in histories of the era. So we owe […]
Read MoreInternational socialist activist Angelica Balabanoff died in Rome on this date in 1965. She was born in 1878 to a wealthy, privileged Jewish family in Chernigov, near Kiev, in Ukraine, but found the privilege unbearable and rejected it to become a social activist in Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Russia. Balabanoff was fluent in several languages and held […]
Read Moreby Marty Roth Discussed in this essay: For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian. Published in 1934, now translated by Philip Ó Ceallaigh into English, 2017, Other Press, 256 pages. ARTHUR MILLER said that the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) wrote like Chekhov; Philip Roth that Sebastian’s Journal 1935-1944 deserves to be on the same shelf as The […]
Read Moreby Sparrow Overheard on the Bus “We used to be Republicans, but now we believe the chaotic improvisations of Donald Trump.” Rumors The rumors that Donald Trump has a prosthetic anus (made of gold) are false.
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray. Melville House, 2017, 259 pages. MARK BRAY’S Antifa can perhaps be considered the definitive statement of the movement that leapt to the front page after the events in Charlottesville. Widely though not deeply researched, Bray’s book clearly lays out the historical […]
Read MoreWHY IT MATTERS by George Salamon “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.” —George Orwell, “What is Fascism?” Tribune (UK), 1944 ORWELL’S SUGGESTION survives unheeded today, as “fascist” and […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee, NYRB Classics, 2017, 221 pages, and And Then, by Donald Breckenridge, David Godine, 2017, 101 pages. SEVERAL YEARS ago, my wife and I were in Venice, and in an effort to avoid the omnipresent crowds, we […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor MY INBOX is full of emails referring to “resistance” to Trump, his regime, and its measures. Jewish Currents’ Blog-Shmog has a piece by the veteran activist Richard Greeman entitled “Popular Resistance to the Trump Regime.” I received an email this morning from CAIR –- the Council on American-Islamic Relations — laying out […]
Read Moreby Richard Greeman THE MASSIVE, SPONTANEOUS, popular resistance to Trump that poured into the streets in the giant post-Inauguration Women’s March had been welling up since election night. With Trump and his ruthless, racist, reactionary White House gang now in power, our diverse, multiform, self-organized resistance has its work cut out for it. The Trump […]
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