Robert Zaretsky

1 week ago | forward.com | Robert Zaretsky

Earlier this month, a French rabbi confessed to having been silent for too long. "I often felt the injunction to remain silent, sometimes stifling the urge to speak so as not to encourage the dangerous rubbish said by others and who demonize an entire people in the name of helping others." But, she continued, "it is urgent to start to speak again."What she said afterwards caused a political earthquake in France. The rabbi was Delphine Horvilleur.

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Robert Zaretsky

NowIsrael kills 32 Palestinians waiting for food at US-backed Gaza aid sitesTroops gun down starving crowds, capping a deadly first week of operations for the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel has killed at least 32 Palestinians waiting to get food at two aid distribution sites in Gaza, leaving more than 200 others injured. Israeli tanks opened fire on …5 hours agoThe Blogs: Greta’s Greenwashing in Gaza: Climate Justice or Political Theater?

1 week ago | theamericanscholar.org | Robert Zaretsky

Seventy-five years ago, on January 21, 1950, Eric Arthur Blair died of complications from tuberculosis at the age of 46. Months before his death, Blair, under the pen name George Orwell, had completed Nineteen Eighty-Four, a grimly prescient novel that has haunted the world ever since. And although Orwell spent his final days in a London hospital, he had hammered out the manuscript, in a desperate race against death, on the island of Jura.

2 weeks ago | forward.com | Robert Zaretsky

Over the past week, a new front has opened on the war in Gaza. It is not, however, along the banks of the Jordan with Israelis and Hamas pitted against one another, but instead along the banks of the Seine with French and Israeli governments trading salvoes of accusations. This battle of diplomatic slights and slurs, of course, is a sideshow to the unspeakable tragedy unfolding in Gaza.

2 weeks ago | forward.com | Robert Zaretsky

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the key figures behind this world-shattering event was the mathematician and physicist John Von Neumann, a member of the Manhattan Project. Though his name might not be familiar, we live in a world that he helped shape.