Issues gathers thematic collections of essays, reflections, interviews, and reports exploring contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, political culture, and public life from diverse international perspectives.
Issues gathers thematic collections of essays, reflections, interviews, and reports exploring contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, political culture, and public life from diverse international perspectives.
I am a first-year teacher at a middle school outside of Baltimore. My school is one of the most diverse – and therefore most low income, underrepresented, and overpoliced – schools in my county. Many parents in this Baltimore district use false addresses just to remove their children from the city school system, and our middle school is a close option. It’s not hard to understand why the children in …
The only avenue in which humans can understand tragedy One of the hardest things about learning the stories of people who were in concentration camps in the Holocaust is that you feel like, especially for an American teenager, that you can never truly grasp what they went through. Even though I have family who were killed in the Holocaust, there always seemed to be a disconnect for me, …
Growing up, my sister and I often retained the same posture in our photos. She stood on the left side and nuzzled me up to her chest with her right hand. We used to spend every summer together at our grandparents’ apartment in Hefei, a wet, fragile city in southeastern China. I thought of her as I watched Sylvia and Frances – throughout their testimony, they couldn’t help …
Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past (1) “History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can call it a specific “chronotope”) with its own relationship …
In mid-September 2020, allegations surfaced in the media that Spanish-speaking female detainees in a privately-owned ICE immigration center in the American state of Georgia were being given hysterectomies without their consent. The claim, now being investigated, combines such an unholy and ghoulish combination of ingredients – women’s bodies, misogyny, racism, eugenics, immigration, incarceration – that it got my attention even in an endless news cycle saturated with unholy, …
Having dealt with memories of historical violence for the past fifteen years in my academic work as a literary scholar, the question of historical comparison is very familiar to me. In the past decade the field of cultural memory studies has been dominated by Michel Rothberg’s (2009) idea of the multidirectionality of memory and his suggestion that in order to be articulated publicly, memories of violence need the …
Judaism’s view of – and response to – family separation as theological crisis ב”ה Heda Kovaly’s memory of the day in spring 1941 when she was sent to the Gross-Rosen labor camp focused on an evanescent memento of her murdered mother: “My mother, I couldn’t think of anything except my mother, my mama, and I remember sitting on the ground and held out my hand, and there was …
Witnessing the trauma of child separation If a child is taken from his mother’s care at [the age of two], when he is so possessively and passionately attached to her, it is indeed as if his world has been shattered. His intense need of her is unsatisfied, and the frustration and longing may send him frantic with grief. It takes an exercise of imagination to sense the intensity …
Deserts, hurricanes, and classrooms These testimonies illustrate for me the personal stories of the twentieth century’s most terrifying examples of systemic collapse and failure. While no age is without shabby compromises, we look at the last century because of the scale of the human cost for failures of diplomacy and government. Personally, these stories brought to mind a student, Jonathan, who recently took my college writing class. He’s …
On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life This new forum engages authors and artists—from very different places and writing in very different genres—in an ongoing conversation on “the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life” (title stolen from Nietzsche). The idea initially arose in response to the American administration’s southern border policy of taking children away from their parents: might this not be a …
