When Diamont was ten he was frightened by a Nazi parade. He had grown up in Frankfurt, Germany, in a completely Jewish world. His family fled to Italy where he was safe until the Germans came in 1943. After that, it was a nightmare. But he survived the camps, as I say, and made his way to New York.
Here are his recollections about arriving in New York:
New York . . . looked to us like a madhouse. On the one hand we were exhilarated by the freedom of going around without carrying papers, without worrying about being stopped and asked for working permits. On the other hand there were things that frightened and disappointed me. I was an avid reader of newspapers and went through the New York Times on my way to work. I quickly found out about McCarthy and was really horrified because I saw overtones of the things I thought I had left behind. I remember one morning noticing that the man sitting next to me had hidden his Daily Worker [the communist daily] in[side] the pages of a New York Times. Coming from Italy, where everything was out in the open and there was freedom to discuss every philosophy and political possibility, I was not prepared to see people in free America scared of believing in some things.
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"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
