The Art of Resistance

We need to teach young people about the Holocaust—both the Jewish one and other “holocausts” in history and around the world—so that future generations will know where humankind’s worst instincts and political ideologies can lead

But I was also thinking of something Bertolt Brecht wrote in one of his plays: “Pity the nation that is in need of great heroes.” Senesh was a hero, and so were thousands of other people during the war. But why? Because the times required heroes. As long as there is hatred, intolerance, and hunger for power in the world, there will be heroes. We should dream of the day when they will no longer be needed

Time and time again, there was what I call “a confluence of circumstances” that presented me with a window of opportunity, or a moment to be seized

“Capitalist culture will never be overcome without a liberation of the imagination from the shackles of bourgeois consciousness. The revolution requires not only new economics but a whole new way of seeing the world.”

The mind which plunges into surrealism relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.”

“Things don’t happen … it just
depends on who comes along!”

The surrealists’ engagement with “sur-reality” was no arrogant pose, however. The First World War, the rise of fascism, the dislocation of ordinary life and ordinary reality that many sensitive men and women had experienced thus far in the twentieth century really did seem to challenge reality itself. These genuinely extraordinary people, who had dedicated their talents to imagining in visual and literary terms the implications of all the disruptions, can hardly have been expected to live and think in conventional ways. Their strangeness was a consequence of their inner commitment, and the hauteur they adopted to negotiate association with people whom they assumed were not aware of what they had allowed themselves to experience was perhaps not always amiable, but certainly understandable and to an extent honorable