Norman Cohen

“Between 1971 and 2013, Conservative Judaism went from being the denominational home of 41 percent of American Jews to representing only 18 percent. Along the way, the career of Jeffrey Myers would suffer the same fortunes as the movement.”
― Mark Oppenheimer, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood

“A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war. When other people start thinking about you, it’s to figure out how to torture you, that and nothing else. The bastards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they’re not interested! Princhard was dead right. In the shadow of the slaughterhouse, you don’t speculate very much about your future, you think about loving in the days you have left, because there’s no other way of forgetting your body that’s about to be skinned alive.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“In his Preface to the first edition of Peau noire, masques blancs Francis Jeanson tells how one day he wrote to Fanon asking for clarification of a particularly obscure passage in the book. An answer was duly furnished and Fanon added: "This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e., irrationally, almost sensually." Further on in his letter Fanon goes on to confess how he is drawn to the magic of words and that for him language is the ultimate refuge, once it is freed from conventions, from its voice of reason and the terror of coming face-to-face with oneself. "Words for me have a powerful effect. I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark." He went on to say that, like Césaire, he wanted to sink beneath the stupefying lava of words that have the color of quivering flesh.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Here are the main facts:1 Between 1980 and 2016, average national income per adult, expressed in 2016 euros, rose from 25,000 euros to just over 33,000 euros, or a rise of approximately 30%. At the same time, the average wealth held derived from property per adult doubled, rising from 90,000 to 190,000 euros. Yet more striking: the wealth of the richest 1%, 70% of which is in financial assets, rose from 1.4 to 4.5 million euros, or increased more than threefold. As to the 0.1% of the wealthiest, 90% of whose wealth is held in financial assets, and who will be the main beneficiaries of the abolition of the wealth tax, their fortunes rose from 4 to 20 million euros, that is, they increased fivefold. In other words, the biggest fortunes in financial assets rose even more rapidly than property assets, whereas the opposite should have been the case if the hypothesis of a fiscal flight were true. Moreover, this type of finding is a characteristic in the ranking of fortunes, in France as in all countries. According to Forbes, the top world fortunes, which are almost exclusively held in financial assets—have risen at a rate of 6% to 7% per year (on top of inflation) since the 1980s, or 3–4 times more rapidly than growth in GDP and of world per capita wealth.”
― Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021