Blog / Our America

SHAME ON THE DNC!

August 22, 2024 - By Michel Moushabeck

It is ludicrous that keynote speakers for a party campaigning on freedom and democracy would be silent about the genocide in Gaza, where Palestinians are being subjected to daily bombardment and unimaginable suffering. It’s infuriating that the DNC would ignore the children of Gaza, who are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. How can the DNC disregard the massive mobilization of protests around the country and on university campuses? And there hasn’t been a peep about Israeli apartheid, which the International Court of Justice confirmed in its recent ruling, where it demanded that Israel end its occupation of Palestinian lands. The ICJ also ordered the dismantling of Israel’s illegal settlements.
 

The DNC...

The Jim Foley Story

August 19, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

Today is the tenth anniversary of the murder of the journalist, educator, and humanitarian James W. Foley. As his mother, Diane Foley—founder of the Foley Foundation, an NGO that has developed a safety curriculum for journalists and advocates for the release of US citizens held captive abroad—wrote yesterday in the New York Times, bereaved mothers “don’t need anniversaries for things [they] can never forget.” The rest of us, however, would do well to take a moment and reflect on the life of James Foley, a decade after his death—to remember who he was and how he chose...

Restoring the Radical Imagination: Shatz v. Harris

August 9, 2024 - By Kerry Sinanan

I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
From the root of the old one
A new one has sprung

                  Epilogue, Grace Nichols

(Please donate to the Grenada Disaster Fund)

Caribbean hybrid identities are characterized by survival and creativity out of monumental loss, including various languages from Arawakan, to...

James Baldwin's Presence

August 2, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

Many are the privileges and rewards that come from being an editor. All the more true when you’ve been called into service for a magazine with a storied and lengthy history like the Massachusetts Review. Despite fifteen years in the trenches, I only recently became aware of a conference that had taken place at UMass on April 22-23, 1988, the spring after James Baldwin had passed. His colleagues here had planned a symposium for that semester: they wanted to celebrate having Baldwin together in Amherst with their former colleague, Chinua Achebe, who had been back in Nigeria in recent years.  When Baldwin died that planned symposium became impossible, and the meeting was instead reconceived as a collective tribute to the man, a more formal (and no doubt less hurried)...

#BeingRevolutionary

July 26, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a member of the US Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the U.S. committing genocide in Gaza. A recent essay by Nan Levinson in TomDispatch examines the media reaction to this extreme act, with a focus on how quickly the press discussion swerved away from the political justification that Bushnell himself offered towards amateur psychoanalysis and a focus on the airman’s upbringing. (Masha Gessen, per usual, offered an important corrective to this particular media bandwagon.)

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