A collaboration with The New School and the European Democracy Institute
 

Category: The Last Time I Saw Them

The Counter

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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, …

The Universal within the Particular

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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 …

Memory’s Fragile Thread

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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 …

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 …