Pankaj Mishra’s (2024) essay in the London Review of Books, “The Shoah after Gaza”, is essentially a call for ‘ordinary Jews’ to become ‘exceptional Jews’: to learn the correct lesson from the Holocaust, which is to become extraordinary human beings. The problem, for Mishra, is that most Jews, inside Israel and beyond, are ‘ordinary Jews’ […]

The transcendence of the principle of “everything is permitted” into the realm where “everything is possible” is the hallmark of totalitarianism – so understood Hannah Arendt (1962) in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Indeed, until that moment in human history, there were no parallels between life in the German and Russian concentration camps of totalitarian power. […]

TV fictions and AWL reality (Sean Matgamna): “AWL’s adverse reputation in the ostensible left arises from the fact that we try to be consistent democrats and socialists on questions such as Israel-Palestine; from the politically decomposed state the left is in; from the prevalent unreason and displaced emotion on the left on such questions; and […]