... he points to perhaps the clearest indication yet of a very different, less complacent, and, indeed, intransigent European position with regard to assimilation: the decision of the Sarkozy ...government in France to ban the wearing of headscarves in schools, which the French authorities had concluded was both an affront to women's freedom and a manifestation of political Islam. There are real problems in Europe. ... for decades, Europeans were blind to them; indeed, as Caldwell explains-and his anatomization of European political naivete and political correctness is the strongest part of his book, just as his description of the realities of immigrant life and the varieties of immigrant experience in Europe is the weakest-their actions greatly contributed to the present assimilation crisis.
If the hope for human progress and for a better world can be said to rest on anything, it rests on the great documents of international law that have been promulgated since the end of the Second ...World War. These include, first and foremost, theUnited Nations Charterand theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights. But while these two documents offer a global vision of what might be if humanity is lucky, it is the corpus of international humanitarian law, that is, the rules governing armed conflict, that have actually proved their utility over the course of the past half-century.
Remembering Susan Sontag Rieff, David
The Virginia quarterly review,
01/2007, Volume:
83, Issue:
1
Journal Article
In thinking of my mother now, more than a year after her death, I often find myself dwelling on that startling phrase in Auden's great memorial poem for Yeats-words that both sum up what small ...immortality artistic accomplishment sometimes can confer and are, simultaneously, such an extraordinary euphemism for extinction.
From 1923, when he emigrated from Bucharest, to his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Benjamin Fondane made a unique and independent-minded contribution to the literary and intellectual life ...of Paris. One of the most significant pieces in Fondane's body of work is the long poemUlysses, first published in 1933. Fondane considerably revised his text during the dark years of occupied Paris, and it is this second "editionwithout an end," left unfinished at the time of his deportation, that is translated here. It is a moving testament to the poetic voice and philosophical engagement of this exceptional figure of the Paris avant-garde.
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