Posts

Yoni Goes to Work

Image
"I'd tear like a wolf at bureaucracy / for mandates my respect's but the slightest / To the devil himself I'd chuck without mercy every red taped paper" - Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Soviet Passport, 1929 Reflections on the One-Month-iversary of my new job, and working full time again for the first time in two years Image of uncertain origin. Researchers believe it to be from Moscow, 1917 Last time I worked full time, I lasted five weeks before getting burnt out and quitting. By week three at the previous job, an immigration law center where I was helping undocumented immigrants file for legal status, I found myself regularly nauseous in the mornings before going to work, often puking or on the verge of puking as I contemplated another day ahead of me in the stuffed office in downtown San Francisco. The thought of one more day and one more day and one more day of bosses and supervisors stacking piles and piles of papers on my desk, spreadsheets without end highlighted...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Dad's Favorite Day of the Year

Image
Thoughts and Reflections: Day 847 of Israel's Genocide in Gaza My Dad's Favorite Day of the Year Yom Ha'atzmaut. Israel's Independence Day (or so I called it at the time).  I remember my Dad attaching the miniature Israeli flag to the window of our silver Toyota Prius. Letting it stream in the wind as he drove me to school in the morning. Rare that he would drive me to school. Rare that he would let something hang out of the window while we drove -- not worried that it would fly off, get caught on something. But this wasn't any regular day. It was Yom Haatzma'ut. The rules were different. Bringing home falafel and shawarma wraps from Max's, the kosher restaurant in Silver Spring, and a Spring mango nectar. My favorite meal. The usual restriction on sugary drinks magically lifted. None of the typical lectures about the benefits of water compared to soft drinks, or the price advantage of tap water. It was one of the only times he seemed happy to make us happy....
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: Perfect Victims by Mohammed El Kurd

Image
                    Iranian missiles light up the Tel Aviv skyline during the June 2025 Israel-Iran war "After they have burned my homeland, my friend and my youth / how can my poems not turn into guns?" So muses the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, whom Mohammed El Kurd quotes from in " Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal ." El Kurd returns the to this refrain a number of times throughout the book, elsewhere writing: "it's hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun (189)." Fair enough. But as far as books do go, this is a good one. And it blows out of the water a lot of other writing about Palestine, at least compared to other books that circulate in mainstream, Western circles. Anyway, these are the notes I scratched down after finishing the book, which I read while skulking around my girlfriend's parents vacation house in Colorado, miserably trying to explain to my girlfriend the connections between chr...
Post a Comment
Read more

What happened to 1993? / Book Review: "Killing a King" by Dan Ephron

Image
You know that Israel is nothing but stolen Palestinian land. But some times you really crave a chicken schnitzel in a Pita. What are ya gonna do? My friend in DSA likes to joke that we should have dress down days once a week where we allow ourselves to have mainstream, milquetoast liberal attitudes towards things. And then Monday will come and we will go back to being anti-imperialist Marxists who have hardline opinions and do not for a moment entertain such naive and misguided outlooks. I've really been feeling that lately. Especially as I have been reading through "Killing a King, The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the remaking of Israel," by Dan Ephron. I understand that Israel was founded through the Nakba, and that Rabin was a violent colonial ruler and upholder of apartheid. But as horrifically violent as Israel's creation was, one cannot help but look back at certain key moments that may have offered a chance of an off ramp and a path towards justice and re...
Post a Comment
Read more