The following is an excerpt from Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson. The importance of vegetarianism to [Isaac Bashevis] Singer was evident in the interview he gave in his Manhattan apartment on August 9, 1964. After Singer and the two interviewers finished covering a wide range of topics, including Singer’s early years as a writer [...]
As long as humanity continues to be the ruthless destroyer of other beings, we will never know health or peace. For as long as people massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. –Pythagoras Compassion, in which all ethics must take [...]
Originally published in the New York Times Opinion section on 11/22/2009 LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner? [...]
An understandable resentment can come from the sense that the uniqueness of one’s own group’s experience with suffering is appropriated to fit the experience of another group. One group’s experience with suffering is unique, but not in such a way that it precludes comparisons or analogies with the suffering of other groups. For this reason, [...]
Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family — those who stayed behind — were killed in the concentration [...]