most of our cultural narratives about the atrocity are actually Christian in nature, because they see suffering as providing a path to moral enlightenment; as Spiegelman writes: “that notion of suffering is a very Christian notion, that somehow you’re ennobled by it.”

Spiegelman is correct, but I would argue that he doesn’t go far enough

“An ordinary guy,” he said, “with ordinary dreams.” His son had worked as a baker before joining the Jenin Brigade in 2023. The thinner man pushed his phone in front of me to show me a photo of a young man who might have been sleeping except that his face and shirt were covered in blood. I asked the tall man what had led his son to take up arms. Some of his friends had been killed in an air strike in 2021, he said, one of the first to hit the camp since the end of the Second Intifada. He had seen them literally blown to pieces—“like we see in Gaza,” he said. “What effect would you expect that to have on him?” Not long before he joined the brigade, soldiers had raided their house. “They beat me, his father, in front of him. How would you expect a son to react?” Beyond any individual incident, though, the logic, he said, was easy to understand. The camp’s young men had seen enough to believe that they would be killed whether they fought or not. “So they started asking themselves, ‘Why wait for them to kill us?

After Nonviolence, in the West Bank

'Jeffrey Goldberg Dismissing Yemeni Deaths Is Why He Was in the Group Chat to Begin With'

My death row meal would be a lobster taco that I ate in Puerto Nuevo, Baja California

- Santiago Lastra 

 Page at the Whitney for their Ruth Asawa 'Through Line' exhibition last autumn through early 2024

2019 interview with Kiki Smith

Charlotte Mayer at Pangolin London

'The facts of the joint Anglo-Saudi assault on Yemen are beyond question.'

 OF COURSE IT'S NURSE LED WHO ELSE WOULD DO IT PROPERLY