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Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the see...
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Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher,
repentance included three stages: confession, regret, and a vow not to repeat the misdeed.
Frankenthal had told him where the Parents Circle meeting would be: a suburban school in north Jerusalem.
It sounded so corny, so trite. All this talk of justice, of kinship, of reconciliation.
He would rather pledge his allegiance to cynicism.
ninth century the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.
first book to introduce the concept of algebra to E...
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The word algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, suggesting the repair of broken bones.
When Bassam went to the AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C., he was asked how it was possible to be an archivist for a country that doesn’t exist.
October of 1972, Wael Zuaiter, a poet and translator, was shot dead by agents of the Israeli Mossad.
One Thousand and One Nights. Zuaiter had adored the book since childhood and
begun to translate it from his native tongue into Italian.
current translations were a bourgeois dilution: they washed out the color and the wit and the charm of the texts,
a form of infantilization of the Arab mind which made it easier to dehumanize and occupy his people.
He was often seen strolling the streets, humming the partisan ballad Bella Ciao.
Zuaiter put his hands in the air and was shot thirteen times.
Twelve of the bullets hit him in the head and chest.
thirteenth entered the book still i...
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bullet passed right through the Tale of the Hunchback, Smadar’s favorite.
Zuaiter was first in a series of assassinations by the Mossad as revenge for the killing of eleven Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics a month earlier.
He was, they said, a member of the Black September
Zuaiter’s friends testified that he was a pacifist, his capacity for viole...
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assassinations—called Operation Wrath of God—took
subject of the Spielberg film Munich.
One Thousand and One Nights: a ruse for life in the face of death.
At AIPAC he looked out into all the stunned faces.
It was Occupation that got them. Just the word.
Beyond right and wrong there is a field, meet us there.
Invest in our peace, not in bloodshed. Spend ten percent of the money differently, five percent, one percent even.
Tonight I will walk along the Washington Mall and pass by the Lincoln Memorial and I will look up to the stars like I always do when I go back home to Jericho.
He settled the next day in the Senator’s office.
had only one thing to say, and when he said it he slid a photograph of Abir across the table,
You murdered my daughter,
Senator wasn’t even...
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The American rifle. The American jeep. The American training. The American tear gas. The American dollar.
Still to this day John Kerry keeps the photograph of Abir on the wall in his office.
He was on holiday in Tuscany with Nurit when he saw the sign. He was taken aback. The Wael Zuaiter Center.
In the Theresienstadt camp in 1943 Viktor Ullmann composed a one-act opera called The Emperor of Atlantis,
libretto written by another inmate, the artist Peter Kien.
Emperor of Atlantis—also called the King of Jerusalem—declar...
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Emperor tries to conscript Death to his cause.
Death goes on strike and, from then on, it becomes impossible for anyone to die.
1944 the Nazis saw a dress rehearsal of the opera
quietly closed it down.
Borges said that his despair as a writer came when he was unable to translate the limitless nature of the aleph: that point in space which contained all other points.
he himself was unable to find the metaphor for this timeless repository of everything.
Solitaire. Known as Patience in Britain, Success in France, Secrecy in Poland, Kabal in Norway, Serenity in Palestine.
when I began thinking about One Thousand and One Nights, I knew I had my structure.
