Reviews
Books
How Come We Exist?
We meet in these pages eloquent summaries of how the evolution of the human mind may be the greatest mystery of all. Generations ago, modern physicists and astronomers informed us that “one of the stranger things about our universe is that we are present in it.”
Read more >>
Books
Our Exile: A Chilean Memoir of Dislocation
Ariel Dorfman is one of our era’s many citizens of nowhere, and Feeding on Dreams is the story of his exile from Chile. It was an accident, a gift of destiny, or a curse, that he was not at La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, on September 11, 1973, the day of the coup by General Augusto Pinochet. That day, Salvador Allende died and Dorfman received a permanent enemy to orient him in his disoriented life.
Read more >>
Film
A Polish Depiction of Genocide and Redemption
In Darkness, Poland’s nominee and a finalist for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, immediately plunges the viewer into an unrelenting world of thuggery and mass murder in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Read more >>
Film
Renouncing the Nuclear Idol
The film, The Forgotten Bomb, is a stark reminder of how we, as a people, have betrayed our trust in God and, for sixty-six years, have instead placed our trust in a nuclear idol.
Read more >>
War & Peace
A Hope for Empathy
On 9/11 we had the brief fortifying message from folk around the planet, “We are all Americans now.” Not blessed with a president who knew how wisely to respond to that world outpouring of empathy, we catapulted into a “war” against terror from which we have scarcely recovered.
Read more >>
Books
No Drawing: Art, Politics, and Gaza
A CHILD’S VIEW FROM GAZA Edited by Howard Levine Pacific View Press, 2011 Back in 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote her famous essay “The Personal Is Political” in response to the criticism that feminist consciousness-raising efforts were just “therapy.” In 2011, …
Read more >>
Books
Strategy and Memory for Progressive Believers
Gary Dorrien’s latest book, Economy, Difference, Empire, is an indictment of imperialist fantasies, enormous suffering visited on others, and the “shredding” of America’s reputation in “the war on terror.”
Read more >>
Books
The Rhetoric of Family in U.S. Politics
No Direction Home is a powerful and compelling piece of cultural and political history that fundamentally reframes the history of the modern American family. Whether you lived through the 1970s or not, you will not be able to think about that decade and those that followed the same way again after reading this remarkable book.
Read more >>
Poetry
Lamenter-in-Chief
Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”
Read more >>
Books
A Palestinian Peacemaker’s Story
Jundi’s coming-of-age story is chronicled in the illuminating book, The Hour of Sunlight, co-authored by him and his friend, former colleague and author/documentary filmmaker/playwright Jen Marlowe. The title derives from Mahmoud Darwish’s stunning poem, “On This Earth.” Like Darwish’s poetry, Jundi’s life is a tale of dislocation, of yearning, of delight in the details and a reverence for the written word.
Read more >>
Books
Early Days of the New Student Revolt
Springtime is a very good and very timely volume, even if so much has changed since last fall, when the final pieces were completed, that things look rather different. The outcomes remain in doubt, of course. The crises in education, mirroring the crises in society at large, make Education Under Fire (soon to be an MR Press book) useful in a complementary fashion, setting the structure and some of the backstory in place.
Read more >>
Books
Counterculture Hasidism
Holy Beggars is a page-turner that reads like a memoir and weaves together journalism, history, deep Jewish teaching, rollicking storytelling, and poetic tribute. It paints a cinematic panorama of the 1960s in San Francisco, explores the impact of the era of “tune in, turn on, drop out,” and describes Rabbi Carlebach’s expansive musical career.
Read more >>
Film
Turning to the Past to Envision a Different Future: Family Accountability in Eliaichi Kimaro’s “A Lot Like You”
When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s documentary A Lot Like You premier at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, one of my first responses to this moving and complex film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. The film brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.
Read more >>
Books
Treasures from the Trash
In Sacred Trash, husband-and-wife co-authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, who met while working on the editorial staff at Tikkun in the late 1980s, have produced a fascinating hybrid — part historical adventure, part bibliographical paper trail and scholarly prospectus, and part poetic meditation.
Read more >>
Israel/Palestine
Objective Historian or Staunch Ideologue?
Professor Benny Morris — a key member of the group of Israeli scholars known as the “new historians”– devotes almost the entirety of his latest book to shooting down the case for both one state and two states in all their variations.
Read more >>
