Blog / The Next Best Thing

Introducing The View from Gaza

December 8, 2024 - By Jim Hicks and Britt Rusert, for the editors

Every evening, in times like these, there are tough choices to be made, a great number of commitments to honor, and multiple places where one ought to be. So, of course, not even all our local supporters were able to join us last Friday at UMass’s Old Chapel for our meditation and celebration of this year’s very special issue, The View from Gaza, featuring a video presentation from some contributors as well as a live reading by Amherst College poet-in-residence George Abraham and a performance by the Arabic music ensemble Layaali.

On the blog this week, we will bring you special moments from that celebration as well as other features related to the new issue, including an essay from Noura Kamal, titled “A New Generation is Emerging, and Gaza is their...

For Alon Confino

July 5, 2024 - By Darcy Buerkle

Editor's note: Alon Confino, director of the IHGMS at UMass, died on June 27, after a long illness. Professor Buerkle offered the following remarks at his funeral on July 2.

My name is Darcy Buerkle, I am a faculty member in the History department at Smith College and it is a great honor to be asked to say a few words about the work of my beloved colleague and dear friend.

Alon’s insights and contributions to the historical profession were singular, incisive, and undeniable: for anyone working on memory generally or in the field of German Jewish history in particular, he was and will remain a voice not only of erudition; his was also a voice of learned and emotional courage. An enormously accomplished scholar with many publications to his name, there was...

Reading for Refaat

January 15, 2024 - By Shailja Patel

Today, January 15, 2024, marks forty days since Israel assassinated Refaat Alareer, internationally renowned and beloved Palestinian poet, scholar, and professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza. Refaat taught and mentored a generation of young Palestinians in Gaza to tell their stories to the world in English. Publishers for Palestine has declared this day a...

The New Bicycle

November 6, 2023 - By Darcy Day Zoells

Excerpt from The New Bicycle. Forthcoming from Clavis Publishing, 24 pp., November 2023.

Recently Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, stated that, “Music is one way to bring people together—we are all equal human beings who deserve peace, freedom, and happiness.” Of course, we could say not only music, but all of the arts. Dialectically we read the Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said, “Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.” Does art stop the hopelessness? The act of creating or encountering something beautiful?

During these times of war and uncertainty, what is the role of the artist and the arts? Judith Butler asks to realize a world of freedom and equality,...

Avast Ye Hearties!

March 3, 2023 - By Ruth Ozeki

On Carole DeSanti’s work-in-progress: Plunder, The Exploits & Adventures of the Notorious Pyrates Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

It is my great pleasure to introduce our Elizabeth Drew Professor of English Language and Literature, Carole DeSanti, who will be talking to us today about pirates.

Now, I have known Carole for a very long time. Currently she is my colleague here at Smith. Before that, she was my editor at Viking Penguin, where she acquired my first novel when I was just starting out, and then over the next several decades patiently taught me how to be an author and build a literary career.

But before that, Carole was my classmate here at Smith. Now this was back in the late 20th century, when the mountains were still cooling. We were taking a...