Reviews
Books
A Novel of Jewish Upheaval, Flight, and Transition
The Free World presents a sprawling cast of characters in limbo. Chronicling everything from pogroms to Soviet politics to 1970s Rome, Bezmozgis’s first novel depicts one family in the midst of monumental transition.
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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.
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Books
Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust
There is, on the face of it, no more need for a book on the Arabs and the Holocaust than for a book on the Africans or the Australians and the Holocaust. But Israel was created in the Arab world, and Israelis and Arabs have long been fighting a bitter war about both the nature of Israel and that of Arab opposition to Zionism.
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Books
Assimilation for Muslims and Jews?
Twenty U.S. states are considering laws that would prohibit courts from considering any “foreign law” in their deliberations. These laws raise the specter of fundamentalist Muslims turning the United States into an Islamic theocracy. There is no question that this perceived threat is absurd. And while Muslims currently bear the brunt of this fear-mongering, other groups’ religious practices may also soon fall under the scrutiny of these new laws, revealing seams in the supposedly flawless integration of Judaism and American life.
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Books
The Growth of a Global Community
Shanahan finds fault with the American Dream and our focus on purely economic growth. The focus upon prosperity has left Americans in a vacuum where meaning is concerned. Shanahan fears that this cycle has already infected not only other Western democracies, but also the many countries that are striving to achieve economic liftoff. This requires progressives to reexamine the foundation of their political philosophy, but also affords the opportunity for growth of a more satisfying and ultimately a more deeply human kind.
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Books
Our Saving Grace: A Relational Mode of Being
We need relationships; they provide meaning and context. Charlene Spretnak identifies the fallacies of modernity that have led to our current crises by highlighting one very basic point of reference underlying the predominant mode of living today: the mechanistic worldview. And she offers a way of moving beyond the limited and problematic mechanistic mindset.
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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.
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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.
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Books
Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss
Despite the many books and endless discussions on the Holocaust, Zimler offers a fresh voice, one that has endured anger and terror to offer us optimism.
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Justice & Prisons
How Super Is Superhero Justice?
To be sure, there are times when superheroes question the justice systems they supposedly serve, and it is precisely such exceptions that provide meaningful commentary on our own justice systems.
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Books
Educating for Wisdom
What Wilhelm and Novak have to say represents a light in dark times. They have written a book that is at once a sophisticated philosophical treatise on education and a radical guide for those who teach kids in the classroom.
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Books
Socialism in Civil Society
In this project Wright seeks to document, in a manner intelligible to a broad audience, the main problems of capitalism and the realistic possibilities for overcoming them.
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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.
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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, …
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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.”
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