Making Sense of Place
Naming streets and stations in Berlin and beyond
When I was in primary school, there were two street names in my hometown that I always got wrong. My teacher looked at me with disbelief and worry when I called the street next to the school Wolgaster Straße.
My geography skills improved dramatically after 1989, when the street names finally ...
Ariel Sharon (1928 – 2014)
Reflecting on the myth of a Zionist martyr and the reportage in Israel and beyond
Ariel Sharon was perhaps the last Israeli soldier-statesman whose life was framed with the Zionist myth of martyrology. Although there surely is no shortage of commanders who are mythical figures and became politicians in contemporary Israel, Sharon joins an exclusive club of those mythic figures of men in the history ...
There is another world, and it is this one.
It’s All in the Mind – Or is It?
The power of the placebo
A recent New York Times article reports that a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients receiving one of the most commonly performed forms of knee surgery (arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus) did no better than those receiving a ...
Film and Myth
Analyzing Gravity and All is Lost with some Captain Phillips
Two films frequently cited together on the best films lists for 2013 were Gravity and All is Lost. As many reviewers noted, the films featured isolated individuals up against the cold, impersonal forces of the universe -- the dark void of outer space for Sandra Bullock in Gravity and the ...
RIP Madeleine Gins
The Once and Future Pope
How an imaginary 3rd Vatican Council report sparked public debate
Tears were welling up in my eyes as I finished reading the story. One of my old friends said he almost fell out of his breakfast nook from shock. Posts about the story have 10k+ shares on Facebook. People everywhere are either "liking" it or condemning it as an <a ...
Andrey Platonov’s Factory of Literature, Uncreative Writing and the Networked Book
Sweeping the Sand Out of the Desert: From Verwoerd to Prawer
Ethnic cleansing in the Negev
The Prawer-Begin Plan was shelved. But the idea that you can forcefully transfer an indigenous population and determine where it can legally reside – looks and smells like a plan pulled from the dusty drawer of Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of Apartheid South Africa. And that didn’t work out so well. ...
Hannah Arendt, Constitutionalism and the Problem of Israel/Palestine
The following was the keynote lecture at the XXVII Encuentro Internacional de Ciencias Sociales in Guadalajara, Mexico, December 5, 2013.
On October 3, 2013 the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that there is no Israeli identity, since there is “objectively” no Israeli ethnicity. The 21 litigants will have to continue ...