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We can’t split something off when we’re surrounded by it. The same forces flattening Gaza are showing up here under different names—economic inequality, xenophobia, the rollback of human rights. I’m trying to bridge the divide between denial and collapse, to…
My first day volunteering at immigration court began with a medical emergency. A man had collapsed in his wheelchair while DHS officers surrounded his terrified family. When I identified myself as a physician, they demanded proof before allowing me to…
My brother, Mamoun, was murdered in Khartoum. I write as a Sudanese psychotherapist, sister, and witness, carrying a grief that lives in my bones. This war has ruptured not only bodies and homes but our sense of self and belonging.…
Every spring, my mother dreamt of Crimea, and that’s how we knew winter was ending. Now, exiled from those shores, I still dream of its herbs, its sea, its air. Eleven years have passed since I last returned. For those…
In late October 2023, Eyal and I began a correspondence. We generated two publications and a film about our histories. In the process, something began to cohere between us. Our dialogue revealed a common humanity. He was willing to understand…
In Gaza, we live in a state that feels like waking up after a long night of fragmented, restless sleep. It’s as if you’ve spent the night on the edge of fear—between the hum of drones, the echo of explosions,…
While the idea of “discovery” holds many meanings, I consider here the way it was and continues to be used as a colonizing concept. Christo-European monarchs used the Doctrine of Discovery to lay claim to land they deemed uninhabited despite…
The floors are red, not as a metaphor, not as a political statement; they are red. And this is what I ask myself: Is our blood even red? Are we made of the same substance, the same suffering, the same…
Such desires must be obfuscated. Indeed, in the face of blatant refusal to protect children, which amounts to relentless aggression against them, we find psychoanalytically curious invocations of protection amidst active harm, a phenomenon observable in abusive families and troubled…
Individual positions may be factually accurate or morally defensible. But the rightness of any particular position matters less than understanding how all positions function within an unconscious system that ‘works’ for everyone—allowing us to maintain our identities, our professional roles,…
I began having violent fantasies about walking through the halls with a duffel bag full of guns, shooting whomever I saw as well as throwing grenades into classrooms.
The astronauts on Apollo 13 had all piloted fighter jets and held jobs flying newer planes to ensure they were not prone to pitching and yawing and, you know, breaking up in midair. This kind of person does not dwell…
Hind tells me about the Israeli Ambassadors’ Forest (for diplomats to Israel) and how the planting of trees erases history, covers former villages and renders them antique, cloaks graveyards, uses up groundwater and destroys the delicate ecological balance, while also…
The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that…
I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single…
When I look at the reactions of us Germans to the Hamas massacre, I think I recognize a repetition of the structure so familiar to me from the process of coming to terms with the Nazi era. Feelings are not…
It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would…
Roy Cohn brought his style of aggressive attacks to our campus. I too often saw him, an unattractive, thin man, agitated and angry, standing on a platform, holding a megaphone, giving speeches to my fellow students in the quad, yelling…
… While the Declaration cannot tell us how to respond to tyranny in our time, it can perhaps encourage us as the actions of the Trump administration become ever more lawless and the danger in the nation mounts.
I realize now that I am composed of the full inventory of the slights and dehumanizing aspects of racism I have known. But why did this story return so suddenly? Was it because many people were talking about racism and…
