Social media companies say they ban Holocaust denial. Are they also blocking education?

(JTA) — In October, one day after Facebook announced that it would ban Holocaust denial, Izabella Tabarovsky received an unexpected message from the platform. A 2019 post of hers promoting an article she had written on Holocaust remembrance was being removed for violating Facebook’s “Community Standards on hate speech.” No further information was provided, and […]

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For Jewish burial societies, Surfside building collapse presents a grim and complex task

(JTA) — Among Rabbi Mayer Berger’s first thoughts on seeing the 12 stories of the Champlain Tower South pancaked upon themselves: This is like Sept. 11. Then as now, destruction of unimaginable proportions claimed many lives without warning, in a manner that rendered traditional practices for burying the Jewish dead impossible to perform. Those practices […]

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Inside the Dream of Another Country

I often look to poems for alternatives to the organized abandonments that structure this world. So when I first encountered Maryam Ivette Parhizkar’s “Inside the Dream of Another Country,” I assumed it would offer me a readymade otherwise. But the first line swiftly rebuked my facile utopian impulse. “Inside the dream of another country I […]

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The Insurrectionists’ Reward

ON SUNDAY, June 13th, people occupied the intersection of Lake Street and Girard Avenue in Minneapolis to hold a vigil for well-known community organizer Winston Smith, killed by sheriff’s deputies ten days earlier. Shortly before midnight, a car drove into the crowd at high speed, injuring several and killing Deona Marie Knajdek Erickson. The National […]

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Office Hours: Marilyn Golden

This interview appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. If you’ve taken public transit in the United States, you may have seen the bumpy yellow tiles on a subway platform. When you’ve crossed at an intersection, you may have heard an automated voice saying, “Walk sign is on” as the light […]

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Eternal Return

Discussed in this essay: Voices in the Evening, by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low. New Directions, 2021. 144 pages. Family and Borghesia, by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Beryl Stockman. NYRB Classics, 2021. 128 pages. THERE IS PERHAPS no greater archivist of the family lexicon than the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. As she recounts in […]

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