“The defense of human rights is a hard-ball endeavor, it is not about holding hands and singing kumbaya but about imposing consequences that shift the cost-benefit analysis behind governmental repression.”

“Just as Israel’s bombing and starving of Palestinian civilians have created an acute need for health care, most Palestinians have been deprived of it. They have also been left without more routine forms of medical attention, such as dialysis, cancer treatment, or maternity care, and have only limited, if any, access to basic medication.”

“Much American art after the rise of the abstract expressionists was regarded as slightly old-fashioned and out of it, and I remember discussions in which the abstract was promoted as a way for African Americans to escape what were thought of as the burdens of the representational. As if African American history were a limitation. ”

“If anything, the exhibition liberates the individual African American artist. It says how eclectic the past is in its artistic practices and styles. It is a history lesson, one that reminds us that we are as far from the beginnings of Modernism as Modernism was from the Romantic era.”

“The past has an integrity of its own, and historical knowledge can best serve the present by preserving this integrity, not least by widening the imagination and by insisting on the complexity of historical change.”

“I do not speak as a theologian but as a historian. We should remember that the people we study lived in a world crowded with invisible beings.”

“Novels shouldn’t read like movie treatments: they should behave, at least some of the time, in ways that are fundamentally unfilmable. Otherwise the writer isn’t really doing their job as a steward of their own tradition.”

“Haushofer . . . beautifully evokes what it’s like to become immersed in physical labor, especially slow, solitary labor carried out for days on end. The narrator tells us about her sore muscles, her growing strength, and her changing body, and about learning when to push herself forward and when to rest.”

“The only reason we didn’t descend into violence that day was that the students remained calm. They were the only adults in the room.”

“What if the Israeli flag—waved at pro-Israel protests on campus and draped over the shoulders of students sitting in class, even as the IDF has killed over twenty thousand Palestinians, wounded many more, displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population, and deprived it of fuel, food, water, and medicine—makes Palestinian students feel threatened or unsafe?”