Category: Red Army Faction

  • The Value of a Broken Heart

    The Value of a Broken Heart

    These are the remarks I shared during Yom Kippur services 5778 at Kolot Chayeinu at the request of the dear Rabbi Ellen Lippmann. This was part of the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer that talks about the Book of Life and the sacred power of the day. The Rabbi and I discussed sharing my experience (with my […]

  • Rejecting “Us versus Them” in the Aftermath of Paris

    Rejecting “Us versus Them” in the Aftermath of Paris

    The day after the attacks on Paris, I had a spaghetti dinner in Prenzlauerberg (a neighborhood in the former East Berlin) with a German man I am just getting to know. We talked about our concerns that these deaths would lead to more escalation in political violence, especially actions by the U.S. and member states of the EU that could lead to more deaths. But we are an unusual pair of people to be having this conversation. He is a former member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), and I am an American whose only brother was killed by the Red Army Faction in 1985 as part of an attack on the US airbase on Rhein-Main (my dinner partner was already serving time in prison for other deaths at the time). For the two of us, the pain of families in Paris, Beirut, Syria, and many other places in the world torn by political violence is not abstract.

  • What Would My Mother Have Said About Birgit Hogefeld’s Clemency?

    I was working away from home when I heard that Birgit Hogefeld had been denied clemency again via a Yahoo News story. It’s strange to me that it’s even news here in the U.S., since my brother Eddie was murdered by the Red Army Faction almost 25 years ago, but then I could see from […]