Another strange Thanksgiving Day is on the horizon. They’ve all been strange though. It’s always been a day in which descendants of European colonists enjoy gorging themselves in banquets and eventually, watching football games, but one in which indigenous people in North America reflect on how their generosity was repaid…

Israel, the land of nine million Eichmanns who can’t grasp that Palestinians rightly feel for them the emotions that survivors of the Holocaust felt for the worst of the Nazis, and that those feelings are spreading to people all over the world, but especially in the Global South. …

I’m reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, possible even rereading it. I owned a copy in my twenties and thought I’d read it but it now seems obvious to me that I didn’t. There are several translations available but the one I’m reading seems inadequate to me. I have a graduate degree…

Today, the destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of women and children, the aged and the infirm by people from whom one would expect empathy and decency based on their own experiences appalls the decent among us. But who speaks for those who suffered the same fate over three…

The ubiquitous calls for a ceasefire in Palestine miss the mark. What is required is the fulfillment of the promises hastily made at Nuremberg following the second war to end all wars as victors vengeance disguised as justice took its toll and a promise was made: “Never Again!” A promise…

I woke up this morning dreaming of the “ The Bells of St. Mary’s “, a film starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman that I probably first watched as an eighth grade student at St. Gerard de Magella, a Catholic school in Hollis, Queens, a neighborhood in New York City…

As of October 29, 2023, nearly 3,500 Palestinian children had been murdered by Israeli military personnel and an additional 1,000 are missing, presumably buried in the rubble of Gaza during the preceding three weeks. An additional 6,000 Palestinian adults were also liquidated and an unknown number are missing, while almost…

Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the premises on which World War II has been judged. After all, apparently the problems with genocide and ethnic cleansing which purportedly differentiated the two warring camps may have had more to do with the methods with which those two purported crimes against humanity were…

For someone who seeks linguistic exactitude, third person pronouns sometimes cause quandaries requiring that they be avoided in order to minimize confusion, take the following reflection, for example: So, he reflected, the title should really have been “The Steppenwolf” rather than just “Steppenwolf”; but what a horrible translation by Basil…