In 1955, The American Scholar published a discussion among influential writers and editors titled “What’s Wrong with the American Novel.” In the symposium Ralph Ellison remarked that “I just feel that we are called upon to do a big job, not because someone is going to give us a star on the report card, but…
Agnieszka Holland was six years old when she heard the word “Jew” for the first time. It was in Warsaw in 1954 — several decades before one of the films she directed was first nominated for an Oscar. She was playing with the local toddlers and one of the gang called her a “dirty Jew.”…
Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. J.D. Vance Where the elite meet. Margo Channing I “You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” So said J.D. Vance in his bootlicking acceptance speech at the Republican convention last summer….
Among the thousand currents of the university turmoil during these last several months, the tiny ripple that most securely caught my eye was a distinctly minor scandal at Harvard back in February, which caused not a single broken window or student riot or mass invasion by agents of the state. This was a scandal over…
Alexei Navalny was killed in the far north above the Arctic Circle, in the small town of Kharp, where the Ural Mountains are intersected by a railroad leading to the city of Labytnangi on the Ob River. This place of death, this scene of the crime, is not random. It puts a period to the…
Three months after its barbaric attack on southern Israel, Hamas published a memorandum explaining its actions. “The events of October 7 must be put in their broader context,” it said. That broader context, according to Hamas, is “all cases of struggle against colonialism.” Zionism is a “colonial project,” according to the memorandum, and Israel is…
Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium recently turned a hundred. When Knopf published this brashly youthful and original first book of poems in September 1923, the poet himself was hardly youthful, and he was known only to a few modernist cognoscenti from his poems in little magazines such as Poetry, Others, and The Little Review. Nor did Stevens…
On Easter Day, April 6, 1903, a violent mob attacked the Jewish population of Kishinev, killing forty-nine people and wounding hundreds. During two days of bloody massacre, about a third of the city was destroyed, leaving hundreds of Jewish families destitute, their meager belongings smashed, broken, torn, or stolen. Hospitals were overwhelmed with injured men,…
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Elizabeth Bishop You know everything will come to an end: the sugar, the tea, the dried sage, the water. Just go to the market and restock. Even your shadow will abandon you when there is no light. So just keep things that require only you: the book…
I wish I had a rescue plane to fly over Gaza to drop wheat flour and tea bags, tomatoes and cucumbers, to remove the rubble of the houses, to retrieve the corpses of my loved ones. I wish for a second rescue plane to drop flowers for children— the ones still alive—to plant on the…
Under the rubble, her body has remained for days and days. When the war ends, we try to remove the rubble, stone after stone. We only find a bone from her body. It is a bone from her arm. Right or left, it does not matter as long as we cannot find the henna from…
After Bob Kaufman The ceiling of my bedroom, my fridge and the stale bread in it, the notebook inside which I hid the love letters from my wife before we married, the foreign coins in my piggy bank , my expired debit cards and my brother’s death certificate, the pieces of shrapnel on or near…
