Max Nelson

Sep 21, 2024 | nybooks.com | Max Nelson |Tareq Baconi

Seventy-six years ago, Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the war that established the state of Israel—a campaign of ethnic cleansing that came to be called the Nakba (catastrophe). Reviewing two memoirs of families haunted by that traumatic history in our October 3, 2024, issue, Tareq Baconi argues that in another sense the Nakba never ended.

Aug 31, 2024 | nybooks.com | Max Nelson |Claudio Lomnitz

In our September 19, 2024, issue, Claudio Lomnitz reviews Marcela Turati’s San Fernando, Last Stop, “arguably the most thorough and absorbing piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.” In the spring of 2011 Turati traveled to the northeastern city of San Fernando—where eight months earlier, Lomnitz writes, “the Zetas cartel had wantonly murdered seventy-two Central American migrants”—after authorities discovered almost two hundred corpses from...

Apr 27, 2024 | nybooks.com | Max Nelson |Nadia Abu El-Haj

On December 24, 2023, the NYR Online published an essay by Nadia Abu El-Haj about the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech at Columbia University and Barnard College, where she holds the Ann Whitney Olin professorship in the anthropology department and codirects the Center for Palestine Studies.

Sep 16, 2023 | nybooks.com | Max Nelson |Ben Tarnoff

In the Review’s September 21, 2023, issue, Ben Tarnoff reviews two recent books on the history of Silicon Valley, where “money begets money with an ease that would make Andrew Carnegie weep.” His essay ends with a reflection on the “neurotic character” of most of the region’s capitalists, who champion liberal parties and politics with one hand and preserve “a profoundly unequal social structure” with the other.

Feb 4, 2023 | nybooks.com | Max Nelson |Sam Huber

On January 26 Sam Huber reviewed My Name is Andrea, Pratibha Parmar’s documentary about the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, for the NYR Online. “The film is most valuable,” Huber writes, “for its conviction that Dworkin’s dual commitment to language and politics constituted a single thread running taut through the length of her life.”A lecturer in English at Yale and a senior editor at The Yale Review, Huber has written widely about poetry, queer politics, and the history of feminist thought.