Gaza's Miscarried Future

In Gaza, the womb has ceased to be a sanctuary. Beneath the scorching plastic of displacement tents, surrounded by air thick with toxic dust from relentless bombardment, carrying new life has transfor...

libertiesjournal.com

The Antichrist Lectures

How much time do we have? That’s always the question — the one the disciples fumbled on the mount, the one my portfolio answers nightly in its decimals.   I’m the managing partner. I have come to talk...

libertiesjournal.com

Another Voice from Israel

The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and ...

libertiesjournal.com

America’s Exclusion Crisis

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. T...

libertiesjournal.com

Another Voice from Israel

The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and ...

libertiesjournal.com

Phallocracy All the Way Down - Liberties

The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselv...

libertiesjournal.com

From Vilnius to Vladivostok Through the Needle’s Eye

In April 1989, my mother went to the gate at O’Hare to greet Yukiko Sugihara. Yukiko was 75 and my mother turned 80 a few months earlier. Although they had never met before, they recognized each other...

libertiesjournal.com

Phallocracy All the Way Down - Liberties

The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselv...

libertiesjournal.com

Phallocracy All the Way Down - Liberties

The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselv...

libertiesjournal.com

Politics vs the World's Most Political Film Festival

I This year’s Berlin International Film Festival opened on a rare sunny winter’s day in the German capital. In the early afternoon of February 12, the international jury, led by its president Wim Wend...

libertiesjournal.com

The Life and Death of the Book Review - Liberties

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. As early as 1757, a contributor to Britain’s Literary Magazine complained that “critic is no longer an appellation of dignity,” becaus...

libertiesjournal.com

Tom Wolfe, Graduate Student!!! - Liberties

I. Live long enough and eventually people will come calling and start asking you questions. In the last decades of his very long life — ninety years, from 1898 to 1989 — the editor and critic Malcolm ...

libertiesjournal.com

Odious Art - Liberties

Is it possible to create an artistic masterpiece whose content is morally and politically loathsome? If so, what should we make of such art? I can think of one clear example: Birth of a Nation, the si...

libertiesjournal.com

Climate Change and the Primacy of Politics - Liberties

I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States ...

libertiesjournal.com

David Foster Wallace and Democracy

David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Desp...

libertiesjournal.com

Hamas Versus Palestine - Liberties

For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it cont...

libertiesjournal.com

Hamas Versus Palestine - Liberties

For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it cont...

libertiesjournal.com

ChatGPT, Martin Buber's I-It and Ours

In loving memory of Irwin Berl Nadler, 1952-2023 There are moments — small, almost absurd moments — when one realizes that one has crossed a threshold, a personal, religious, historical, or intellectu...

libertiesjournal.com

Ozu and the Fear of Death

Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and...

libertiesjournal.com

Climate Change and the Primacy of Politics - Liberties

I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States ...

libertiesjournal.com

Ozu and the Fear of Death

Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and...

libertiesjournal.com

Ozu and the Fear of Death

Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and...

libertiesjournal.com

Secretaries of the Invisible  - Liberties

“I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing.” Czesław Miłosz begins one of his poems with this evocative declaration of artistic vocation. In this spare statement, the poet abandons any pret...

libertiesjournal.com

Climate Change and the Primacy of Politics - Liberties

I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States says. It’s one of the cheapest. Donald Trump tells lots of dopey lies about wind. “If you have a windmill...

libertiesjournal.com