In Defense of Universalism 
The squeamishness of today’s left has turned culture into the political terrain of the right.
Fall 2024
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In Defense of Universalism
Growing Up After Genocide
Is it possible to love a torturer—even, or especially, if he is your most intimate relation?
Neither Master Nor Subject: Zionism, Empire, and the Balfour Declaration
It was just a three-sentence letter, written 100 years ago—and many claim it’s still shaping the Middle East. But we should be careful about what we read into the Balfour Declaration.
The Pain of Others
It is sheer sentimentality to ask photographs to do the work of politics and to make the choices that we cannot.
Is a Left Zionism Possible?
The spirit of left Zionism, which was strong enough to build a country, has receded to the margins of Israeli politics. Can it be revived?
With a counter-argument by Joshua Leifer.
Letter from Berlin: Utopia or Auschwitz?
The German new Left was too close to the history it so desperately wanted to negate; it could not develop a sane or truthful relationship to the crimes and the cruelty of the Nazi era. Haunted by visions of the gas chambers, it believed that the only alternatives were the creation of a utopia or the recreation of Auschwitz.
Zionism and Its Discontents
Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Peter Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing.
Phantasms of Revolution
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin Princeton University Press, 2010, 391 pp. IT WOULD BE EASY—and perhaps entertaining—to write a history of Maoism in France that would …
What’s Right with This Picture?
S. Linfield: The Time Cover Photo
The War on Women: Afghanistan and Eastern Congo
Susie Linfield: The War on Women in Afghanistan
The Bleeding Wound: Zimbabwe’s Slow Suicide
Zimbabwe was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already …
A Remembrance of Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions—or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom. She was a fierce polemicist …
The Last Page
When I hear professional critics, or my students, bemoan the commodification of art, a wave of irritation engulfs me. Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other things, is bought and sold. This is …
The Dance of Civilizations
The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib
Memuna, Almost Smiling
Looking at a Photograph of Suffering
