Articles – Ellen Cantarow

Settled: Israel’s Victorious Settlement Movement

This is a reprint of the article posted at Tom Dispatch. The publication is the far-reaching Consortium News, and they added very telling photographs. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/15/settled/ COMMENTARY, ISRAEL, MEDIA, PALESTINE, UNTIL THIS DAY–HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON…

A Cancer on the West Bank: Settled – How the Israeli Extreme Right Has Achieved Victory

TOMGRAM Ellen Cantarow, A Cancer on the West Bank POSTED ON JULY 14, 2024 For obvious reasons, the devastation of Gaza has gotten so much of the attention recently, but life,…

HOW HARVARD RULES WOMEN

Feminism

The relation of Harvard to its women is similar to that of the missionary to his heathen. And your feelings, if you're a woman who has made it to America's…

ON THE DEATH OF ED BLACKWELL, OCTOBER, 1992

Poems

Master of silences, his drums cajoled and commanded, muttered and sang. First came the bass, steady as pulse, august as antelopes against the horizon, laying down heartbeat.

Big Energy Means Big Pollution

Fracking

More than 70 years ago, a chemical attack was launched against Washington State and Nevada. It poisoned people, animals, everything that grew, breathed air, and drank water. The Marshall Islands…

Music Lives in Palestine

Israel and Palestine

5:30 on a Wednesday in late November. Our Ramallah master class at The National Conservatory of Music (Palestine) has just ended and ten-year-old Taher, a young flute-player, is practically jumping…

Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape

Israel and Palestine

Late afternoon, October 16, 2009. Nasser Ghawe, 46, barrel-chested, with an expressive face and a ready smile, calls out to his little girl when she strays too far down the…

Catching the Palestine Bug: Notes on Journalism and Enlightened Tourism in Palestine (Journal of Palestine Studies, 1982)

Israel and Palestine

In 1979 The American Colony was one of the most beautiful hotels I'd ever seen. Its low buildings, which rose among lush gardens, were made of Jerusalem stone. Just beyond…

Gush Emunim: The Twilight of Zionism? (published by The Village Voice, 1979)

Israel and Palestine

Late afternoon. I have just taken the jolting hour and a quarter bus ride from Jerusalem into the West Bank, my destination Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement smack up against…

Gaza is a Concentration Camp

Israel and Palestine

Gaza is an immense concentration camp -- 1.5 million people squeezed into 140 square miles hemmed in on all sides by 25-foot-high walls separated by a vast expanse of bulldozed…

I Could Not Save a Single Child in Gaza (2009)

Israel and Palestine

When I was a child my mother used to cry, “I couldn’t save a single Jewish child.” Now I am my mother: I cannot save a single child in Gaza.…

“Why Teach Literature?” in The Politics of Literature

Other

“Why Teach Literature?” in The Politics of Literature, ed. By Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter (“Why Teach Literature?” By Ellen Cantarow, Chapter 1

Apostrophe

Poems

Hail to thee, apostrophe! Our language’s sign in written word that the song is the bird’s the bark is the tree’s the waves are the seas.’

Sudan Portrait: Kordofan

We leave at dawn: by ten the sun glares whitish-copper on the desert. Dwarf-trees shrivel their branches against the pitiless sky. In the vastness toils a human form with jerry…

Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Israel and Palestine

Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a…

The Downwinders: Fracking Ourselves to Death in Pennsylvania

Fracking

More than 70 years ago, a chemical attack was launched against Washington State and Nevada. It poisoned people, animals, everything that grew, breathed air, and drank water. The Marshall Islands…

Letter from Khartoum

Sudan

Nur’s name – it means Light — was brilliantly apt. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful – tall, slender, with a chiseled mouth that kept breaking into smiles, the…

Catching The Palestine Bug

Israel and Palestine

Before me as I write this essay is Palestine & Palestinians, published by the Alternative Tourism Group in Beit Sahour (www.atg.ps). It embraces landscape, geography, buildings and monuments; history; flora,…

Blowback Crude: Big Oil Makes War on the Earth

Fracking

Consider Goi, a village in the Niger Delta. It is located on the banks of a river whose tides used to bring in daily offerings of lobsters and fish. Goi’s…

The Great Wall of Israel

Israel and Palestine

To grasp what the gate really means, though, you’d have to stay, as I did, at least a night with a farmer in Jayyous at harvest time. You’d awaken with…

Girls! Music! Palestine!

Israel and Palestine

In Salfit district in the northern West Bank, the women’s educational organization Women for Life with its girls’ spin-off, Flowers Against the Occupation, in 2005 conceived the idea of a…

Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (Women’s Lives, Women’s Work) Paperback – January 1, 1993

Feminism

During the second decade of this century, my grandmother was an activist. A woman in her thirties, she was part of a feminist movement that was nearly seventy years old…

Beita

Israel and Palestine

Before April 6, 1988, Beita (pronounced BAY'tah, pop. 7,500) was known, when it was known at all, for its fine olive crops and its beauty. It is a white, stony…

The Right to Recreational Sex

Feminism

On March 6, 1977, at about 8:30 pm, a fourteen-year-old woman approached a man in his twenties on a street near Time's Square in New York City. Let us imagine…