“I often ask myself whether all the cities of the earth, gathered in their civility and grace, could erase what my eyes have witnessed. I smile often. I offer careful English, rounded and polite. I watch faces shift when I say that I am Palestinian. That I am from Gaza.”
After the Holocaust, the moral architecture of German identity was built around a responsibility to Jews. Yet the redemptive philosemitism that has come to characterize that commitment flattens and warps Jewishness, creating the conditions in which a new, stealthier antisemitism has taken root.
What happens when Dutch literature erupts out of its tranquil domestic confines and is cast into a post-imperial world history littered with ruins? Safae el Khannoussi’s debut traces a Jewish-Moroccan dissident across “Oroppa” and back again to North Africa.
«Die Wüste ist auf dem Vormarsch», schrieb Schklowskij 1926 über einen Autorenkollegen, dessen Hauptberuf es war, sibirische Steppenlandschaften urbar zu machen. Heute schwebt Platonov wie ein meteorischer Fremdkörper durch die Literaturgeschichte. Seine politische Botschaft könnte klarer kaum sein.
“A first name is a talisman. It is the memory of the path traveled by all the others before oneself. That they endured so much pain before us lightens our own suffering. Therefore, yes, I affirm it: the well-named child is saved forever.” - a text accompanying Rayan Yasmineh’s art in our Reader 6
«Tod dem Schah» riefen in den 60ern Iraner:innen, die gegen die Diktatur ankämpften. Nach dem Januar-Massaker der islamischen Regierung an Protestierenden und mitten im US-israelischen Luftkrieg wünschen viele Exilierte sich den Schah zurück. Wie konnte die iranische Diaspora so nach rechts driften?
Frustrated with the prestige that Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value has amassed with ease, our critic argues that arthouse cinema has entered an age of “production value,” in which the mere aura of seriousness has replaced originality, and quality of execution is everything.