A Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation (Link to Part One) Ilan Stavans: I’ve often been asked if I believe in God. You know, Justin, I confess to keep changing my mind, not because I don’t believe in God—do I, really?—but because I like counting the various options my mind is able . . .
Read MoreA Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation Rabbi Justin David: In Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton says that “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell from heaven.” I want to talk to you about a number of perhaps disparate themes: God’s place in . . .
Read MoreEditor’s note: The interview that follows was first published on September 25, 2014 in Oslobođenje, the leading daily in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital city. The translation is by Una Tanović. After the comic “The Secret of Nikola Tesla,” based on a short story by Karim Zaimović, was published in the Massachusetts Review, we spoke with its author . . .
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May 20, 2014 Dear Erri, First off, I should wish you a very happy birthday! A big day… and, of course, there’s another one looming, just around the corner. I really wish I were in Italy now, so that I could participate more directly and stand together with everyone across the . . .
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Part OnePart Four V. On Torture Warrants and Kill Courts Jim Hicks: We can’t end this conversation without saying something about how Friel ends his book. The gesture of Dershowitz towards the authorization of torture courts is a way to get this discussion, he says, out into the open. The labeling of . . .
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Part OnePart Three IV. On the Subject of Apartheid Jim Hicks: In framing our next discussion around Friel’s useful comparison, and drawing out of the parallel, between apartheid in South Africa and the recent history of Israel and Palestine, because of the subject of Adam’s work, I was no doubt mainly thinking . . .
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Part OnePart Two III. The View from Outside Jim Hicks: In the questions I sent you both, I’m afraid I wasn’t very effective at framing the next topic, but what I’d like to ask you both is rather simple: how do you think Friel’s arguments might resonate outside the US? My sense . . .
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Part One II. The Metaphor of the Lion Jim Hicks: Well, we’ve already come close to a second point I wanted to discuss, because I find it really striking and deeply frightening—the characterization that Dershowitz uses to describe what he paints as the enemy, the metaphor of the lion. I thought that . . .
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Editor’s Note: After attending a launch event for Howard Friel’s Chomsky and Dershowitz: On Endless War and the End of CIvil Liberties, we asked a couple of friends of MR to sit down for conversation about the book and the crucial issues it raises. What follows is the first of a five-part discussion. I. The . . .
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Editor’s Note. When we first read “Night Man,” Bill Pitts‘s contribution to our current issue, we figured the backstory might be as good as the story. So we asked him to tell you about it. Crisp County’s prison closed in 1975, a few years after I was born, but I have been hearing about . . .
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