NOTE: The New Arab published an abridged version of this post this week. Read it here. What will the future look like with hundreds of millions of people only thinking Reddit-approved thoughts? Can we answer the call for a decentralized platform to exchange free ideas, judged on their own merit instead of by a central […]
Tantura and the Israeli “Conspiracy of Silence” An Israeli Nakba massacre in 1948 aroused a conspiracy of silence which destroyed the career of an Israeli graduate student
Before 1948, Tantura was a Palestinian coastal fishing village of 1,500 residents located just north of the Israeli town of Zichron Yaakov. As war threatened and conditions worsened for Palestinian residents, the wealthier fled to Haifa. About 1,200 remained to tend to their farmland. Because Tantura was located along the coastal highway connecting Tel Aviv […]
How Hitler Killed Half the Jewish Diaspora and Zionism Projects Death of the Rest
I recently participated in an online panel that accompanied the screening of the film documentary, Yiddish: the Mama Loshn, for the Boulder Jewish Film Festival. I was not invited to the panel as a Yiddishist or professor of Yiddish or Jewish history (the three other panel members were). Instead, director Pierre Sauvage asked me to […]
Le Chambon: It Takes a Village…to Save Jews
Tonight, a small detour from my usual subjects. When I was a UCLA graduate student in 1978, I studied Yiddish with Prof. Janet Hadda. During that year, she asked the class if they would meet with a filmmaker who was planning a film on Yiddish in America. The director was Pierre Sauvage, a Franco-American documentary […]
