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In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
In this edition of Liberties ...
August 11, 2025
The people who are willing to admit Roman Polanski’s greatness as a filmmaker invariably point to his earlier films — Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown — as evidence. In other words, the ones he made before he was charged for — and before he admitted to — the 1977 rape of 13-year-old...
Read MoreAugust 6, 2025
Alfred Dreyfus is having a moment. This summer, French President Emmanuel Macron declared July twelfth a day of national commemoration for Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain whom a French military tribunal — in a notorious act of antisemitism — convicted of spying for Germany. Originally convicted in 1894, Dreyfus spent five years in a hellish...
Read MoreJuly 30, 2025
(The political journalist Sol Stern, who started on the left and moved to the right and ended up a liberal, died on July 11, 2025 at the age of 89. He left this essay unfinished when he died.) As a journalist I have written about Israel and the many threats to its survival for more...
Read MoreJuly 28, 2025
In 2005, I somehow or other surfed my way to the website of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial, and there I found my political conscience. Up to that point, mine had been a politics of breezy, amoral abstractions. Universal emancipation — the project to which I was committed as a college and...
Read MoreJuly 23, 2025
Americans don’t really talk about decadence. To the extent that the term has figured in conversation over the last few decades here, decadence has been invoked not to describe life in the US, but in Western Europe. It’s the “great” states on the continent — Germany, France, and the UK — that American pundits periodically...
Read MoreJuly 9, 2025
There’s a quote I’m fond of, falsely attributed to Lenin, that “ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” It was in fact coined by Gorky, and as with so many misattributed phrases, it is also misquoted. I had always quietly reordered the line in my mind, preferring to have aesthetics in the first position, and...
Read MoreJuly 2, 2025
“When I entered the room in Hôtel Drouot where [drawings] by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)] were exhibited, I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” This is what Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote to his brother, Theo, in June 1875, about one...
Read MoreJune 23, 2025
A woman in her late fifties, dressed in a black chador with a small sun hat, accompanied by her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter — a girl of about four or five years in a white floral dress — journeyed to Tehran to spend the Nowruz holidays away from the hustle and bustle of the pilgrimage...
Read MoreJune 18, 2025
For many people, a country is a source of identity: a constant, a flag, a constitution. But what happens when you live through a revolution? What happens when your life cracks open at history’s fault line? Since the fall of Assad six months ago, Syrians have been engaged in deep, wide-ranging conversations about the future...
Read MoreJune 16, 2025
My family and I are victims of this bloody conflict. Please help us find a safe way out of Gaza and save my family. Please share this message. This short plea was written on a battered phone from a makeshift tent in one of Gaza’s displacement camps — by someone whose only wish is to...
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