In Joshua Oppenheimer’s masterful film, The Act of Killing, perpetrators are invited to re-imagine their role in Indonesian anti-communist massacres in the mid-1960s. The killers, having fashioned themselves after gangsters from American films, are eager to relive the glory years. Speaking freely about their crimes, they reenact the killings before the cameras, acting out . . .
Read MoreEditor’s Note: Three weeks after the recent events in Paris, as an article in yesterday’s Guardian points out, it’s hard not to make comparisons. Tana de Zulueta, a former member of parliament in Italy and a board member of Articolo 21, an Italian NGO supporting press freedoms, comments, “After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo . . .
Read MoreEditor’s note: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 marks seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz. In a recent novel, the Italian writer Erri De Luca reflects on his visit to the camp during the ’90s. My Yiddish came from obstinacy. I first wanted to learn it after returning from the ceremonies marking the . . .
Read MoreIn this video blog, Massachusetts Review editor and translator Jim Hicks reads selections from the English translation of Erri De Luca’s A Dissenting Word. De Luca is currently being tried in Italy for expressing — during an interview on the Italian site of the Huffington Post — his solidarity with the Susa Valley’s NO TAV activists, a . . .
Read MoreYesterday morning Charlie Hebdo hit the newstands in France and sold out within minutes. The cover of this “survival issue”—the newspaper’s first since two armed gunmen slaughtered eight of its journalists, killing four others as well at its Paris offices—appeared with the title, “All is pardoned,” and featured a caricature of Muhammed wearing an . . .
Read MoreTo die with a pencil in your hand, a box of colors, as you sketch a pratfall for some tyrant or other, using the unrivaled instrument of the smile. From the page before them they must have raised their eyes toward the hooded assassins—the ones who didn’t dare show their faces. They . . .
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Cincinnati, OhioJanuary 2, 2015 Yesterday, January 1, 2015, marked the two hundred and eleventh anniversary of Haiti’s independence. In ten more days, January 12, 2015, Haiti, Haitians, and Haiti allies will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 Richter scale earthquake that left 316,000 people dead, thousands more injured, and an approximate . . .
Read MoreYou know the call, so here I’ll simply turn it to task: “Can we get a jury?” “Hell no!” “Can we get a jury?” “Hell no!” After these long years of hate, and after this, our nation’s latest failed Reconstruction, what else could we expect? Justice? Democracy? Some measure of public institutions . . .
Read MoreOf the dozens of posts I’ve written in the years since the magazine added this blog to its website, this is the first that has worked its way through three working titles. Having just returned from a grueling, difficult, and—I believe—essential two weeks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC . . .
Read MoreThe event in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 set the course for the twentieth century, yet its story reads like a political thriller straight out of Hollywood. Under the guise of national interest, a brilliant intelligence officer plans to create an international incident. He assembles, arms, and trains a team of outsiders . . .
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