Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be. (from "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying") - Adrienne Rich

I've said that "American Jews" have paid an intellectual and spiritual price for the narrowing of sight demanded by conformity and reliance on Israel as surrogate identity. Part of this price has been estrangement of many Jews from any Jewish affiliation. But, of course, in reality American Jews disagree like all other Jews, past and future.

Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, blind sorrow and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if?-the possible...Revolutionary art dwells, by its nature, on edges. This is its power: the tension between subject and means, between the is and what can be. (XXVIII: "What if")

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts. A distaste for the political dimensions of art, in this time and place, is a dangerous luxury. (p161, XIX: "The transgressor mother")