Hannah Arendt is definitely one of the greatest 20th century philosophers. Her books, On Revolution, On the Origins of Totalitarianism, On Violence, The Human Condition are classics, as is her controversial coverage of Rudolf Eichmann’s trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Yet there is probably no book that is more relevant to the contemporary issue of anti-Semitism and the present conflicts between Jews, Arabs and the Islamic world than The Jewish Writings. Back in 1948, Arendt hoped for the creation of a binational Jewish-Arab confederation and opposed the creation of a “Jewish state.”
On the one hand, Arendt brilliantly and objectively analyses the historical genesis of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, she denounces the anti-Palestinian anti-Arab nature of Israeli Zionism as it originated in 1948… It is perhaps not surprising how few people seem to know of her December 1948 letter, signed with Albert Einstein and other notables, written during the Nakba (the catastrophe in which the Zionist movement expelled the Palestinians from their lands). Published in this volume, the letter protested a visit to the United States by Menachem Begin and denounced his Herut (Freedom) party as a “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” that had terrorized Jews, Arabs, and the British alike. And now history is somewhat similarly repeating itself in new variations.
Although Hannah Arendt is not primarily known as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic. When she was in her mid-twenties and still living in Germany, Arendt wrote about the history of German Jews as a people living in a land that was not their own. In 1933, at the age of twenty-six, she fled to France, where she helped to arrange for German and eastern European Jewish youth to quit Europe and become pioneers in Palestine. During her years in Paris, Arendt’s principal concern was with the transformation of antisemitism from a…
Memory for Forgetfulness is a powerful memoir of the siege of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and the August 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which, in many ways, represents the predecessor to the Israeli-Hamas, Israeli-Hezbollah conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon since the horrific Hamas attacks on Gaza on October 7, 2023 that in turn provoked such a democidal Israeli response. With a dark and sardonic sense of humor (one must forgive the translator for passages that must be nearly impossible to translate), the poem seeks to break through the boundaries of language in its effort to depict the clash between memory and forgetfulness, between feelings of hope and depression, and between efforts to understand the human world through objective observations and flights of fancy and misinterpretation that, like bombs, drop unexpectedly from the sky and then explode upon reality with deadly accuracy and inaccuracy…
One of the Arab world's greatest living poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in…
E. Ethelbert Miller’s poems, deceptively simple, short and pungent, are like pomegranate seeds that burst with sensual pleasure and delight—and rich in ironies and antioxidants. His book covers a humanity of themes: love and suffering, friendship and loss, betrayal and forgiveness, faith and non-belief. Playful, subtle, never clichéd, profound, his poems should be read and re-read. His work is a wake up call from our daily nightmares of forced migration, slavery, racism, bigotry and dictatorship—in the quest for personal/ social/ political peace and reconciliation.
Poetry collection by E. Ethelbert Miller, writer and literary activist. The editor of Poet Lore, Miller served as Director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. Awarded an honorary Doctor of Literature from Emory and Henry College, Miller has taught at UNLV, American University, George Mason University, and Emory and Henry College. A two-time Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow and the founder of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., Miller has authored several collections of poetry and two memoirs. He is the host and producer of The Scholars, which airs on UDC-TV. A 2015 Washington, D.C. Hall of…
In Year of the Horseshoe Bat, the sequel to my first novel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors, Chinese dissident Chia Pao-yu has escaped to France in fear that he might be sent to the Lao Gai prison camp after helping to organize the Beijing University pro-democracy protest from April to June 1989. In Paris, living under an assumed name, Chia meets individuals who suffered in the Soviet Gulag and who have peacefully opposed repressive governments throughout the world. A few years after working with activists for the Human Values Forever Foundation, he learns that its founder, Bereft LaPlant, who has been accused of “anti-Semitism” for inviting Palestinian speakers to lecture, and for making comments critical of Israel, has been manipulating the struggle for human rights for her own personal profit…
A dark satire, the novel raises the question as to what is the true “value” of human life if those who most fervently claim to support the cause of humanity do so for their own personal profit… Or, was LaPlante really one of the last hopes to at least try to give a real voice to the powerless—against the rise of a new powerful cast of anti-humanist mafia-like plutocrats of the Society for the Exploration of Cosmic Consciousness who pretend to support to cause of human rights, but who really care for no one—except perhaps for those can help them expand their membership?
