In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
Was the reading public so stupid that they would reject a book simply because it contained short stories?
Source: Maya Arad, excerpt from Master of the Short Story (Oman haSpur haKatsar), translated by Jessica Cohen for World Literature Today‘s “New Hebrew Writing” feature.
Writing-related resources, news, and reflections to enjoy over the weekend. (more…)
Shabbat shalom, everyone.
Hi, everyone. It has been an exceedingly busy time, and I simply lack the focus (not to mention the minutes) to assemble a midweek post this week. I will do my very best to have a nice new post ready for you next week. Meantime, I thank you for your patience.
“Information changes when it moves from one context to another. To cite a recurring example in the kibbutzniks’ conversations at the time: it is one thing to remark that seeing displaced Palestinians in wartime reminds you of the situation of Jews in the Holocaust—meaning that you remind yourself of the Nazis—if you are speaking in Hebrew to other shaken Jewish veterans in a bomb shelter a week or two after returning from the battlefield. Saying the same thing, as this movie does, to a sated film-festival audience at Sundance or Cannes is something else. It is one thing to say this at a time when many Israelis were gripped by elation at their victory and when the plight of the Palestinians was largely ignored both in Israel and abroad; it is quite another to do so in 2015, when Israel has become singled out as the world’s most egregious violator of human rights, if not the new incarnation of Nazism. And it is one thing to draw a comparison with the Holocaust in a booklet intended for other kibbutzniks, which is what the soldiers believed they were doing in 1967—and quite another to say this in a movie co-produced by Germans.”
Source: Matti Friedman, “Israel and the Moral Striptease,” Mosaic magazine.