Director’s Desk: Now More Than Ever

CAIR-Philadelphia Collage

These are moments I will remember forever: the eerie hush in this morning’s subway car, the only sound that of grown men and women sobbing. Whispered phrases float through the train: “This is worse than 9/11.” Silence. An older voice: “… like when JFK was shot …”

Fifty Years Ago. Reflections on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize and the 50th Anniversary of the Film “The Battle of Algiers”

CAIR-Philadelphia Collage

I awoke yesterday morning to hear the news on the radio that Bob Dylan had been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. To many in the post-war baby boomer generation, I am sure this news was met with near-rapturous joy, as it was by me. Dylan’s words and music were the soundtrack for the whole tumultuous decade of the Sixties -- his words perfectly and ecstatically capturing the zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”) of sudden cultural and political change unfolding before our eyes.