Divided Soul

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — MARCH/APRIL 2008
Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white [...]

Disengaged: A Letter from Tel Aviv

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005

Jews don’t live in Gaza anymore.
For the first time since the Six Day War, the Jewish state has voluntarily picked up and left part of the territory that the Palestinians claim as their homeland — ending, de facto, a fraction of the occupation. Gaza, this grossly overpopulated, twenty-five-mile-long splinter of [...]

Why Don’t Journalists Get Religion? A Tenuous Bridge to Believers

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — MAY/JUNE 2004
Ash Wednesday was not a good day to eat breakfast and read the newspaper at the same time. Across the country, culture sections fronted a movie still of a man whose skin had the texture of raw meat, his palms nailed to a wooden cross, his head a bloody pulp [...]