Laura Tanenbaum

Israel has not “dragged the United Stares into war.”
An elite faction of the United States that identifies intensely with the interests of Israel has, with the complaisance of other factions, launched an aggressive war.
Israel figures heavily into Washington’s motives but the difference matters.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

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Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.

Absolutely shameful. If you can't denounce this immoral institutionalized mass murder, please dissolve yourself immediately.

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a lot of people who seem dumb are also really evil. becoming more and more religious about this

on one level erasure of a heroic Black woman and so not surprising. But also I think it's somewhat memory holed that in some instances there *was* more dem opposition to wars.

I felt the same way about Oedipus which I also saw too late to recommend

say what you will about callow stupid and overreaching incarnations of trauma discourse but apparently actual adults still believe that you can just do genocides, decimate populations, murder at scale abroad etc without that having any material or libidinal consequences whatsover

This is what I kept thinking about during the genocide in Gaza, which is not over. yes, too many Americans are propagandized but at root this is a part of the democracy crisis.

my HS had a post-prom tradition of running into the lake and running out polar bear plunge style *in May* that's how cold it is!

This is amazing. As a native Chicagoan, going into the lake at all in February is a huge feat of will, let alone treading water holding a stroller over your head

and now being extended to - if we go to war with Iran it is only because Israel is making us

our 14 yo loved it too. hoping it will be the rare movie 14 yo and 8 yo can agree on; given martian is one of the few others I'm hopeful.

thank you for reading!

In a very different register, I remember Mary Gordon writing about how the women of her mother's generation were all in love with priests because sexism and all they were the only men who would have serious conversations with women and believe they had inner lives

great read thanks. while the cases are very different, one similarity to my long engagement with Roth's work was that unlike so many of his peers he at least seemed *interested* in women

thanks! not sure how I missed this . .

Philip Roth (1933–2018) Philip Roth's work could only have been written by someone who came of age during the peak of postwar liberalism.

jacobin.com/2018/05/phil.... i didn't really go into it here, but Vivian Gornick's critique that post-war Jewish men acted out their feelings about class and assimilation via women seems . .. relevant, shall we say

I wrote an obit of Roth no one read, lol. I was pretty generous to him but when I was on a panel because of it I still got cast as the feminist scold 🤷my fellow panelist had written an obit where he pretended to be PR talking from beyond the grave

someone still needs to write the big woody allen piece about this, I think

interesting. I think they feed into each other as culturally specific misogyny is enforced by homo-social networks. like the specific misogyny of the Italian mobsters was not about Italianness or Catholocism but those identities shaped how it was formed and reproduced

agree 100% and also I think that's what Klion is saying? a little surprised at the vitriol against him from some but maybe I shouldn't be

JFC. Stay safe get organized and protect your people

I feel like he's everywhere! he talks directly to the public which is amazing, but it's not a national story unless he fucks up, I guess.

this sort of thing is why interviews with elders/community members is so valuable in teaching now - it's a great counterforce to both AI & assault on history; the human voice and these stories matter. my students have asked so many of their immigrant elders questions they were never asked before

am absolutely cherishing two very different works of creative nonfiction - Language City, Ross Perlin's love letter to polygot NY and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans, a love letter of a different kind

Special Saturday Triad: What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis The national media has moved on. Minnesota is still under siege.

"You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth. This is not a hypothetical."

"I'm not in the business. I am the business."