Mark Chmiel
Check out Norman Finkelstein at the Brooklyn Central Library for his lecture series, “Bracing for the Revolution: Landmark Documents and Speeches in American History”: Bracing for the Revolution is a free ten-week class offered as part of BPL’s Library School series taught by Norman Finkelstein. The US is at a crossroads. The status quo cannot endure … Continue reading For Friends in NYC: Norman Finkelstein Lectures
Regarding [Israel’s] methodical breaking of Palestinian bones, Wiesel courageously chose silence: ‘I refuse to see myself in the role of judge over Israel. The role of the Jew is to bear witness; not pass judgment.’ At any rate, on Jews. Wiesel does not miss a beat when it comes to passing judgment on Arabs, Russians, … Continue reading Prevailing in This Epic Struggle: A Finkelstein Collage
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 it our credo as well. We want to nurture a movement, not hatch a cult. The victory to which we … Continue reading Finkelstein/Chomsky
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 about Jews, Zionists, Israelis, and Palestinians. Norman Finkelstein is surely one of the forty honest humans the Scripture alludes to … Continue reading Finkelstein’s Gaza
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West. Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary maven of suspicion when it comes to such matters as the Holocaust Industry, Middle East scholarship applauded by the mainstream, and Israel’s policies that … Continue reading Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism
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 himself was “cancelled.” I was reminded of this when listening earlier today to a lively dialogue with members of This … Continue reading Victorious without Vanquishing
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 truth and standing for justice. He had his flaws and his guilt to overcome, for his younger years when … Continue reading Never Undemanding of Ourselves
Anyone who does not actively, constantly engage in remembering and in making others remember is an accomplice of the enemy. Conversely, whoever opposes the enemy must take the side of his victims and communicate their tales, tales of solitude and despair, tales of silence and defiance. –Elie Wiesel, Against Silence, v.2 [1977] … … Continue reading The Imperative To Remember
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 be accomplished by great and concerted effort. The thing to be remembered, however, is that nothing–and certainly not a colonial … Continue reading The Way It Looked in 1987
Hilene Flanzbaum, The Americanization of the Holocaust The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 The following note is from summer 1999 when I was reworking my dissertation to what would become my first book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership (Temple University Press, 2001). Hedy Epstein’s Erinnern Ist Nicht Genug: Autobiographie appeared in Germany in … Continue reading Remembering Is Not Enough
Hold It All 