A collaboration with The New School & the European Democracy Institute
 
Category: <span>Dispatches</span>

Dispatches

Category: Dispatches

What Hannah Arendt can teach us about today’s campus demonstrations

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Tomorrow marks the 54 years since the National Guard fired live ammunition on students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. For three incredibly tense days last week, my colleagues and students at Indiana University-Bloomington, had reason to worry that we might become “the next Kent State,” with Indiana State Police with high-precision assault rifles mounted on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union (the central building …

The Making of Anticommunist Memory Politics: From Paris to Prague, from the extreme left to the extreme right

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Many thanks to Gérard-Danial Cohen for his critical comments. This text results from a presentation at the workshop After Critical Theory? convened at Queen Mary University London by Eric Heinze, 2 February 2024. Many thanks to him, too, as well as to Jan Čulík, who originally published this piece in Britské listy. May 1968 in Paris must have been great fun. “Beneath the cobblestones lies the beach” claimed …

Understanding the Difference Between Anti-Semitism and Pro-Palestinian Activism

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We must be as clear as possible about what is anti-Semitism and what it is not, so that real political differences are not transformed into existential confrontations. This is not always easy to do, but it is necessary nonetheless. Photo: “Taken in Hyde Park at one of London’s largest protests in many years as tens of thousands walked along Piccadilly and then across Hype Park towards the Israeli …

The Democracy Seminar on the War Between Israel and Hamas

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On October 24th, participants in the Democracy Seminar met for our monthly get together. These virtual meetings are informal gatherings, without an agenda. We usually catch up with each other and discuss developments in our different locations around the world, in recent months: the apparently never-ending dangers of Trump and Trumpism in the USA, the victory of Lula in Brazil, the twists and turns of authoritarian rule in …

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas 

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Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war When violence answers violence in a growing frenzy that makes the simple language of reason impossible, the role of the intellectual cannot be … to excuse from a distance one of the violences and condemn the other … that role is clarify definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and to calm fanaticisms, …

Mini-pogrom in Poland

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On May 30th, in Warsaw, the Polish Sejm deputy Grzegorz Braun interrupted a lecture by Professor Jan Grabowski, a historian reporting on the state of research about the World War II extinction of Polish Jews. Braun climbed onto the rostrum, threatening Grabowski, and trashed the microphone and speakers – as if not only physically, but also symbolically taking away the lecturer’s voice. Since there are no longer any …

Teaching Hope Against Hopelessness

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The American University of Afghanistan and Me II Here is the second of a series of excerpts from the diary, recording my reflections on my online experiences with faculty and students in Afghanistan and exiled in Doha, Qatar, and around the globe. For the first entry see here. The Fall Semester, December 2022 My first semester is now winding down. I have been teaching one course, “Civic Engagement …

Afghan Diary: The American University of Afghanistan and Me

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  I have just signed a contract with the American University of Afghanistan as a University Professor. Last semester, I started working there as a visiting lecturer. Here’s the start of my ongoing reflections on this surprising turn of events, an introduction to a series of excerpts from my diary. Jeff November 2022 Until recently, Afghanistan has been a remote place on my mental map. Focused as I …

Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy and Its Culture

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The dangers of a new tyranny of a minority in our time This talk was presented at the New School forum “American Democracy in Crisis: Perspectives from Tocqueville, Douglass, Wells, Dewey, and Arendt” on October 13, 2022. The other talks and the discussion at the conference can be found here. I first read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a college freshman. I started reading it more closely and …

One Week, Two Portraits of Brazil

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The first two weeks of January 2023 let us see the recto and verso of Brazil. On Sunday, January 1st, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in for his third presidential term. A week later, on the 8th, self-proclaimed patriots attacked the buildings of the three branches of government. How do these two events help us understand Brazil at this critical moment? For almost a decade now, …