Medaya Ocher has been named the new editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Previously, Ocher was the managing editor and senior editor at LARB, and currently hosts the magazine’s podcast.
In a preview from the forthcoming issue of The Drift, Julia Rock profiles Norman Finkelstein, the political scientist, longtime anti-Zionist, and author of the influential and controversial 2000 book The Holocaust Industry. “Finkelstein remains most comfortable on the margins,” Rock writes. “Ideologically aligned with a left that won’t always have him, platformed by a right that won’t always listen, and insulting them both.”
Over 600 writers have signed an open letter to PEN America, demanding that the organization “find the same zeal and passion that they have for banned books in the US to speak out about actual human beings in Palestine.” The signees urge PEN: “release an official statement about the 225 poets, playwrights, journalists, scholars and novelists killed in Gaza and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.”
Carl Swanson profiles Lucy Sante for New York magazine. Sante’s latest book, I Heard Her Call My Name, is a memoir of the author’s transition. Swanson writes: “In The Other Paris, Sante wrote, ‘Everything is always going away, every way of life is continually subject to disappearance, all who reach their middle years have lost the landscape of their childhood, everyone given to introspection feels threatened.’ Now, somehow, as Lucy, which is to say finally as herself, she has another chance — if not quite a do-over exactly, then a rereading, which seems appropriate.”
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