A collaboration with The New School & the European Democracy Institute
 
Category: <span>The Last Time I Saw Them</span>

Issue: The Last Time I Saw Them

An interdisciplinary issue reflecting on historical memory, family separation, racism, migration, and trauma through essays connecting past histories of violence and displacement with contemporary political and ethical questions.

Category: The Last Time I Saw Them

An interdisciplinary issue reflecting on historical memory, family separation, racism, migration, and trauma through essays connecting past histories of violence and displacement with contemporary political and ethical questions.

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

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A conversation between Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Dwayne Betts 9 December 2020moderated by Jeffrey Goldfarbintroduced by Marci Shoreorganized by Lala Pop Marci: As you know, the original impetus for this forum was horror of the children being taken away from their parents at the American border, and my saying to Stephen Naron that we should use material from the Fortunoff archive to prepare a film about parent-child separation during …

We’ve Never Been Global

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How local meanings mattered in 1900 and still matter now In the spring of 2020, I received an email from David Kenley asking me if I would consider contributing to Teaching about Asia in a Time of Pandemic, a book he was editing. I told the historian of China and Southeast Asia that I would like to be part of the project but did not have anything to …

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

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The Nazis tore apart Jewish families. They pursued the work of separating families because they perceived Jewish lives as having no value, and their family unit as carrying no integrity and sanctity. The history of family separation is a story of unspeakable emotional pain, as family members often bid a permanent farewell to their loved ones in confusing and terrifying circumstances. It is also a story that sheds …

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

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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 …

Empathy

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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, …

Creating Linkages

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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 …

Separation

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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 …

The Last Time I Saw Them- New Democracy Seminar Forum

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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 …

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

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Tyrone Chambers II, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore 21 September 2020 Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with people, …

Boy Number 84

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It is an old black and white, grainy photo of a small child, maybe a year old, perhaps even less. It is hard to tell because the face is very serious. His dark eyes are not looking into the camera, but downwards, towards hands neatly folded on the breast. The child doesn’t smile, his lips are pressed together. The expression on his face is worried, grown-up somehow. He …