Jews From The United States

"Basic technique is knowing yourself and knowing how to use yourself."

"To intentionally dream about the world in which the character lives is work which the actor must always do alone; it is then that he establishes the link between himself and the play. This is what I now recognize takes place in the actor’s personal dream space."

"There are three great teachers of acting - Life, Shakespeare, and Yourself."

"I was instructed to do everything I could to help her. My soul was now indentured to serve their relationship with Marilyn. At twenty-one, I felt that my career had already been erased."

"Chaos, doubts, and confusion is normal and signifies the beginning of the creative process"

"I could not imagine a life that way…I wanted to be like everybody else. You marry a man who supports you – it never occurred to me I'd have to earn a living, and nor did I study to earn a living."

"I really believe in the supreme court. First of all, I'm the youngest in my family and justice matters a lot – the littlest one gets pushed around a lot. And I trust the supreme court, I trust the constitution – so I feel a certain confidence that we'll win."

"It [the domestic partnership] was a symbol of who were to each other, no question...but it wasn't the same as the morning after we got married and woke up. There's a profundity that probably goes with the word altogether, but I think it's much more so for those of us who thought we could never have it."

"We told ourselves that it didn’t matter if there was no word to cement our reality…We were the ones that made it real. And yet, the sense of otherness loomed."

"That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men."

"As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys."

"Asking poetry to fulfil a (merely) political function would be a mistake. This tends to lead us to poetry that, however cleverly or inventively, can do no better than denounce the apparently evil and/or praise the good. Worse, we get something that is very much in fashion right now: the fetishisation and weaponisation of our own pain.…"

"The study and practice of poetry can equip you to 'boldly go where no man has gone before,' but it's not enough to go there—you have to be able to bear witness. Without witnessing, experience dissolves into nothing."

"Writing is a transformative act and writing the occult, which I interpret as writing what’s invisible, or apparently invisible, is inevitably connected to writing my desire as a woman…"

"I think that there's every reason for a young woman to feel very strongly that allying herself with a powerful man, regardless of how she has to do it, might be her path forward — might sometimes be her only path forward. And forming that alliance may be a decision she makes when she is less experienced, and a decision that she is able to recognize for how compromised it was later in life, but we still have to recognize that there's this whole baked-in social and cultural structure that's pointing her toward that decision. Just identifying all the "bad men" and putting them into a time-out isn't really going to address the ways in which sexism is baked into our society."

"Poetry shows up where language shows up – a mysterious supplement, to borrow or deform an old Derrida epithet, that we cannot do without, and that just might be the basis of the material world as we know it. Well, if not language as such, then sound…"

"I think the “disfigurement” that Japan inflicted was less the idea of disfigurement, and more the idea of mystery. I’ve managed to finish all that I’ve written because there’s always a mystery at the heart of it which keeps me interested. I think that’s why Japan was interesting, and it seems to me, still, like a strange mystery."

"I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue."

"The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…"

"Thinking abstractly about depression is so easy, but the experience of it is more like being in touch with something very, very deep that is a necessary part of the human experience. It keeps us grounded in our mortality. Depression is an intolerance to life, but it can also be profound. Maybe the trouble is that we don’t respect it enough…"

"(What’s the last great book you read?) ...Ottessa Moshfegh’s razor-sharp short stories “Homesick for Another World”"

"One challenge for me is in remembering what the process of writing the novel was like. For me, it’s a bit like childbirth (or so I hear) in that one forgets the pain as soon as it’s over…"

"What in effect looks like clear and directed writing took much chaos and anxiety. I felt like I was losing my mind toward the end."

"In order to write well, I need to have the ability to be honest with myself without it causing pain. When I’m really sad, honesty hurts, and I find myself not going to interesting places in my work. I guess you can be sad and strong at the same time. Writing requires strength, discipline, and a tolerance for loneliness. The longer I have a partner, the more loneliness I want, because I’ve lost it. But loneliness is also excruciating unless I’m writing. Yet you can only write so many hours in a day, and it takes a lot of effort to fill the void of not writing."

"Give "pro-peace" activists a microphone for long enough, and their pro-Russia slant comes out. It's not a coincidence that Max Blumenthal, a co-founder of Grayzone, a blog that follows the dictum that the United States is bad and anti-U.S. dictators are good, didn't heckle any Russian officials in Washington on the day Zelensky arrived, demanding that they do what they could to stop the war. Instead, Blumenthal and his comrades focus their efforts on denigrating Zelensky personally, while either denying or downplaying Russian atrocities."

"The White Helmets are not the only humanitarian group targeted by Russia and its cronies. Blumenthal has also vented his disgust at a charity raising money to "fortify medical facilities" in rebel held areas. Why do medical facilities need fortification? Because clinics run by Medicins Sans Frontieres and the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation are being bombed deliberately by the Assad regime and Blumenthal’s deployers in the Russian government. Again, the Geneva Convention is very clear. Every medic must be protected, regardless of whatever insinuated and baseless claim of to whom they swear allegiance."

"Max is a writer and self-declared "anti-Zionist," known for his active support of the BDS movement and his calls for the dismantling of the State of Israel. He trolls pro-Israel writers, as I can personally attest."

"Blumenthal went to Moscow on a junket to celebrate RT’s tenth anniversary [in 2015]. We don't know what happened during that visit, but afterward, Blumenthal's views completely flipped. He has attacked not only the White Helmets but also Bana al-Abed, a nine-year-old girl who lived in rebel-held Aleppo and ran a Twitter account with her mother. The man who once wrote an essay called "The Right to Resist is Universal," and attacked [Sharmine] Narwani as an "Assad apologist," now accuses anti-Assad Syrians of belonging to al-Qaeda and has claimed that the White Helmets were affiliated with the Islamist group."

"For raising questions about the efficacy and environmental cost of renewable projects like these, and proposing an explicitly solution to the corporate destruction of the planet, the makers of ' were steamrolled by a network of professional climate activists, billionaire investors and industry insiders."

"I used to think 'Zionist Occupied Government' was an antisemitic term. Now I'm forced to see it as a pretty accurate description of the reality we live in [...] One nation, under zog."

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle ... I'm going with B, everything."

"My wife gave me a gift at the end of her column when she left me that empty space, one I would like to offer you. A blank space to fill. The freedom and permission to write your own story. Here is your empty space. What will you do with your own fresh start?"

"In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant whose regime represented little more than the interests of a rich neoliberal business class and a fascistic security apparatus. Those who have thrown their intellectual weight behind his campaign of brutality have cast the sincerity of their commitment to popular struggle and anti-imperial resistance into serious doubt."

"The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin 'litterae,' you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means 'things made of letters."

"Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause, the Assad apologists have eagerly played the Al Qaeda card to stoke fears of an Islamic takeover of Syria."

"For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the info you need."

"I go on RT fairly regularly, and the reason I do so is because, while the three major cable networks are promoting bombing and sanctioning half the world, at least the non-compliant nations, RT is questioning that."

"I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet."

"We have to look at the bigger picture here, and realize this is the culmination of a long-standing, neoconservative attempt to reignite the Cold War for a variety of reasons. They want a massive arms buildup. The neoconservative movement really emerged from anti-Russian sentiment in the 1970s... They despise Vladimir Putin... because he is the main leader in the world who is challenging US hegemony... It has to do with NATO expansion, as you mentioned, it has to do with Ukraine. The failure of the US to put a NATO ally on Russia’s borders. All sorts of reasons. The failure of the US to enact regime change in Syria because of Russian intervention.... Through H. R. McMaster, they implanted Fiona Hill, who is known simply for being at the Brookings Institute and writing a book-length attack on Vladimir Putin. She’s now kind of the in-house Russia expert. ...the US has rejected Russian proposals to sign treaties against meddling in cyber attacks. So, the Cold War continues with total liberal consent."

"I tend to believe whatever you decide to look for you will find, whatever you beckon will eventually beckon you."

"Besides his business activities, Dr. Kaufman is active in a number of public and educational organizations, including New York University, Tel-Aviv University, the Institute of International Education, the Norton Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, the UJA Federation, the Animal Medical Center, the Economic Club of New York, and the International Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences."

"[F]inancial markets are... a microcosm of the people and societies they serve. ...The extremes of market movements reflect the extremes of human nature and human emotion—from optimism and elation to pessimism and despair. In financial markets—as in life—rationality prevails most of the time."

"[F]inancial markets can be considered one of the great wonders of the world."

"Dr. Doom is back—and age has done nothing to soften his views. ...In a speech on Wednesday evening to the National Economists Club in Washington... Kaufman argued that efforts to stabilize the financial system following the financial crisis may actually have heightened risks by encouraging more debt and increasing concentration among too-big-to-fail institutions. .. that financial innovations, such as securitization, have mainly spurred an explosion of debt, much of it for speculative purposes. ...As the quantity of credit has exploded, its quality has fallen... Deregulation fundamentally changed... from the era of clear divides between commercial and investment banking and government-set interest-rate caps. Regulation has been insufficient to balance “entrepreneurship and fiduciary responsibility,”... which was checked when Wall Street firms were partnerships, with partners’ net worth on the line."

"The federal made some efforts at regulation in 1900, by passing the Gold Standard Act, which allowed state banks to set up branches in small towns and ended the bimetalism debate by establishing gold as the only redeemable metal. Still, the vast majority of banks were local, single unit operations, and access to capital and credit... increasingly difficult as... business enterprises expanded rapidly."

"[R]icher nations have larger stock and bond markets than poorer ones, and the assets of financial intermediaries are much larger in relation to GDP."

"[A]n economy cannot grow and thrive without a strong commercial and investment banking infrastructure. Without the ability to create debt and equity instruments, the world's economies would not have advanced beyond their most rudimentary forms."

"In 1900, industrial workers toiled 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and earning an average of $375 dollars a year. ...[W]orking conditions were typically unsanitary, unsafe, and often fatal, and there were few protections—whether from unions (...a meager 5 percent of industrial workers), employers, or government. ...[S]tate and federal governments frequently trotted out their armed militias to help suppress striking laborers. ...[W]hites lived an average of only 47 years, blacks a mere 33."

"[T]he nation's middle class was about to embark on an educational revolution that would help boost incomes to unimagined levels over the next three generations. ...Along with the obvious benefits to... individuals, education yielded enormous social and economic returns. Economists have found universal public education in America to be one of the leading engines of economic growth."

"[F]inancial markets have evolved at least as dramatically as... manufacturing, work, technology, education, and business regulation since the turn of the previous century."