Tom Hogan’s
Blog
The Holocaust: Antisemitism Perfected
In teaching the Holocaust, one question I encounter is a stumper: Why has antisemitism lasted so long? The earliest slurs against Jews dates back to the 3rd century BCE and graffiti on the walls of cities such as Alexandria. The New Testament authors certainly fueled...
The Holocaust: Teaching the Roots of Hate
In 1982 I was approached by a human rights organization to run a program to introduce the Holocaust to high school and college curricula. I knew a bit about the Holocaust, having lived in both Germany and Israel, but I was hardly a scholar. So I immersed myself in the...
So You Want To Be A Writer (Part 4): First Writing Jobs (Dirty Jobs)
My first paid gig as a writer—if you don’t count the $5.00 I won in 8th grade for my riveting story about racial prejudice in heaven (I was so much deeper then than I am now)—was writing for the travel book, Let’s Go: Europe. My assignment was writing the chapters on...
Editing Yourself (And Other Myths)
When I’m sick, I go see a doctor. When my car makes a funny noise, I take it to a garage. Butwhen it comes to my writing, which I often care more about than my body or car, I edit myself.After all, who knows me and my work better than me? Quick quiz: find the fallacy...
The Name Game
Naming, whether it’s your kids, your company, or your novel, is a tricky thing. For example, if we’d had children in our 20s, a boy would have (cleverly and ironically) been named Shemp (the much underappreciated fourth Stooge) and a daughter would have been named...
So You Want To Be a Writer (Part 3): You’re So Vain
Would-be authors are under the impression that there are only two routes to bringing their book to market: traditional publishing and self-publishing. But there is actually a third route. It’s a subset of the self-publishing route. Call it “vanity publishing.” Let’s...
So You Want To Be a Writer (Part 2): The Cost of Doing Business
Having published books going the traditional route and the self-publishing route, I can say that there are clear distinctions between the two. Having always had the traditional route held before me as ‘the valid way’ to get published, I’ve always tended in that...
So You Want to Be a Writer: Different Forms of Publishing
Prior to retiring to write full-time, I ran, along with my business partner, Carol Broadbent, a marketing agency in Silicon Valley that focused exclusively on positioning and launching startups (www.crowdedocean.com, if you’re keeping score at home). We launched over...
When to Take ‘No’ As An Answer
In a previous post, I talked about the happy beginnings of my novel, Left for Alive (available at Amazon) during my graduate studies. Being sponsored by the Nieman Foundation and listening to the praise for the novel (at that point called Scars and Bruises), I could...
Is Trump Our Hitler?
In 2015, when it was becoming clear that the Trump phenomenon had more legs than anyone could imagine, I found myself receiving emails from past students of my Holocaust seminar asking me to weigh in on the topic. Specifically, they wanted me to track and speak out on...
Left For Alive
Two brothers and their ex-con cohorts are investigated at every turn by press and police. Their violent mysteries start to unravel, until a final revelation gives one brother a new life while ending the life of the other.