Irit Dekel, Author at Public Seminar

Democracy

Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

Jeff Goldfarb navigated–and worked through–the polar opposites that can define academic and political life

July 7, 2021 • by Irit Dekel

_____ Jeff Goldfarb has been my teacher, colleague, and friend: our conversations about culture, politics, democracy, and activism—through reading and writing, in public and private forums—have continued since I began as a student in the Department of Sociology at the NSSR. From and with Jeff, and by studying sites within which democracy ...

Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

Democracy

The Right Terror Threatens Us All

A Call to Uncover Right Extremist Networks In Germany

November 6, 2019 • by Esther Dischereit and Irit Dekel

The murder, on Yom Kippur (October 10th, 2019), of two German citizens in Halle, one outside the synagogue that was the perpetrator’s initial target and another by a nearby Döner bistro, echoed other terror attacks on minorities. These are always described in the German media as acts of an individual ...

Feature

A View from Berlin on the Mass-Shooting at Tree of Life

The anti-semitic and anti-advocate rhetoric surrounding the killings at Etz Chaim, Pittsburgh

November 3, 2018 • by Irit Dekel and Michael Weinman

We got the news of the massacre in Etz Chaim, the “Tree of Life” synagogue in Pittsburgh, while sharing an early dinner at home with friends. We were nine, and -- as it happens -- all Jewish: German, American, and with Israeli origins. The contradictory initial reports shattered the evening ...

A View from Berlin on the Mass-Shooting at Tree of Life

Feature

Public Space, Public Art, and Public Memory

Responding to the Neo-Nazi Trial Verdict in Jena

August 3, 2018 • by Irit Dekel

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is off today. He has selected this piece on the complexities of public memory as this week's Gray Friday post. On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 the verdict of five of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) members was given in the Higher Regional Court in Munich. Beate Zschäpe, the ...

Public Space, Public Art, and Public Memory

Feature

Kinneret Lahad Talks Singlehood and Time

An interview about her new book, A Table for One

October 1, 2017 • by Irit Dekel

What are you waiting for? Stop wasting your time. You will die alone. You will miss the train and stay on your own! These are just some of the questions and warnings that single women hear on a daily basis. Single women are constantly being asked whether they are ''still single,'' ...

Kinneret Lahad Talks Singlehood and Time

Uncategorized

Israelis in Berlin and The Elephant in the Room

Notes on migration, pudding, an island economy, and frustrating metaphors (with cream on top)

December 3, 2014 • by Irit Dekel

“Fight from Tel Aviv, not from Berlin,” demanded former Minister of Immigrant Absorption Uzi Baram in Haaretz, while the New York Times featured the infantile (or “still adolescent”) Israeli society as the center of frustration for many Israelis now clamoring to Berlin because of the impossible price of living. The coverage of ...

Israelis in Berlin and The Elephant in the Room

Uncategorized

Sleepwalking into the Future? II

Is there a European memory creating a sense of belonging and encouraging civic participation?

March 21, 2014 • by Irit Dekel

This is the prepared text of a contribution to a conference of the Europe for Citizens Forum in Brussels on January 28th, 2014.

The title of this discussion employs the metaphors that describe walking into the calamity of WWI, as framing both the ways Europeans remember the 20th century, and even ...

Uncategorized

Ariel Sharon (1928 – 2014)

Reflecting on the myth of a Zionist martyr and the reportage in Israel and beyond

January 15, 2014 • by Irit Dekel

Ariel Sharon was perhaps the last Israeli soldier-statesman whose life was framed with the Zionist myth of martyrology. Although there surely is no shortage of commanders who are mythical figures and became politicians in contemporary Israel, Sharon joins an exclusive club of those mythic figures of men in the history ...

Uncategorized

A Post on Laughter and Remembering in Berlin

Diversity, tension, relief, and the Stolpersteine

December 20, 2013 • by Irit Dekel

“...and this woman in the chic coat: is she going to clean also?”

Responding to advertisements calling for people to “actively remember,” on November 9 and 10, 2013, in Berlin and other German cities, the commemorative Stolpersteine (or “the stumbling blocks”) were physically cleaned. The Stolpersteine are little brass plaques placed ...