S.M. Schwartz

“Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Education Arne Duncan has estimated that Chinese students spend 25 to 30 percent longer a year in school than their American counterparts.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Despite Israel’s great religious and historical importance, at that time it had few significant Jewish communities—by the mid-twelfth century, only a few Jews remained in Israel. The Jews suffered from the invasion of the Christian crusaders, who burned synagogues and killed or forcibly converted some Jews. Many towns no longer had Jews, but there were a number of small communities left, ranging from twenty to two hundred families. There were about two hundred families in Jerusalem, and Benjamin described Jews praying at the Wailing Wall.”
― Jeffrey Gorsky, Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain