Community News & Updates

2025: “A Year of Great Uncertainty”

Acknowledging this more optimistic description than I intended, fearing as I do, an annus horribilis, to Jason Clay and acknowledging the great impact he has on my life from the inception of the Institute in the 1980s when he was the Founding Editor of Cultural Survival Quarterly, and who most recently hosted my alumni to celebrate my 81st birthday among my D.C. alumni and friends.

Everyday, Remi accompanies me when I try to absorb the impact of the news of the day. Urging myself, and all of us, to look for the cracks that we can widen and leverage as the source of “the crack of where the light comes in.”— Anthem. Apologies to Leonard Cohen.

Our “New Years” card on the right. The picture was taken by Iris in January 2025 at Leonard’s home in Montreal.

Here is the current ceasefire and peace plan under consideration: it calls for the release of hostages and prisoners of war for Israeli withdrawal and the demilitarization of Gaza and the aspiration for a Palestinian administered Gaza without Hamas’s coercion. As I write we are two days away from the anniversary of the brutality of Hamas’s attack that occurred on October 7 and Israel’s ensuing invasion, sadly marked by vicious war crimes with scant respect for civilian life. I have posted in the community page many articles, analyses and first-person accounts of the last two horrifying years. I will continue to post such accounts under these two headings: Israel and Palestine. I find the proposal promising but still remarkably vague and I am tempering my expectations. The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank reveals much of the current messianic Israeli regime and if it ensures the continuity of both Trump and Netanyahu’s assaults on both the US and Israel’s dramatically fluid democracies, we have much to fear in the future.

These links will provide articles by members of our community and articles that I find important and compelling. Here is some of my work in MENA. I am joining and vigorously supporting the efforts and perspectives of Standing Together.

I have decided to consolidate some regular updates of things that I am consistently thinking about and presenting, or regular updates of working journalists in the field as in Christina’s recent remarkable series on Syrian prisons.

Below are two recent links to our community (as of October 5th). They speak to the eclecticism and power of our community, Shai Schubert’s Feromics and a wonderful New York Review of Books accounts of alum Jack Margolin’s Wagner Group.