Mitchell Abidor, Author at Public Seminar

The Arts

Hope and Despair in the American Socialist Movements of the 1930s

Art for the Millions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

The MET's new exhibition, "Art for the Millions" shows the various ways that artists and left-wing organizations reacted to and inflected the social and political movements of the time. ...

Hope and Despair in the American Socialist Movements of the 1930s

Life As “The Blind Man”

I’m now a different kind of person in the eyes of the world

May 10, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s over a year now that I’ve navigated using a white cane, and if I had a dollar for every time someone helped me to cross the street, I’d have a dollar....

Film & Performing Arts

Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching Fauda

The elision of the difference between Jews and Israel is one of the tragedies of the Middle East conflict

March 20, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

In Fauda, the Palestinians are often driven more by personal pathology than an outrage at historic injustice....

Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching <em>Fauda</em>

The Arts

Edward Hopper: Solitude and Light

A new exhibition is at the Whitney until March 5, 2023

January 5, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

If there’s a sure thing in the art world, it’s that any Edward Hopper show will be both an artistic and audience success. The current exhibition at the Whitney until March 5, 2023, “Edward Hoper’s New York,” is certainly a success on both levels....

The Arts

Photography in the Service of Justice

Why it doesn’t matter that some war photographs are staged

November 2, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Consider Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the image of American heroism in World War II, taken in February 1945. As we now know, the photo was not taken of the raising of the first flag on Mount Surabachi, freshly conquered by the Japanese. There is ...

New York City

Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad

Did the sexual monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have cultural roots?

August 31, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Harvey Weinstein—like Jeffrey Epstein—was the product not of a liberated sexuality gone haywire but of a liberated sexuality that passed them by when it mattered most. ...

Reviews

James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100

An exhibition at the Morgan Library

July 8, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

One hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. This year, the Morgan Library in New York is celebrating with a remarkable exhibition, “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” on display until October 2. ...

Capitalism

Capitalism Uber Alles

After the collapse of Marx’s hopes for humanity, what’s left of the Left?

June 21, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Though dominant for centuries, capitalism formerly coexisted with other economic forms, once alongside forms of feudalism, later among forms of socialism. This is no longer the case; with the demise of the Marxist regimes, the sway of capitalism is now universal....

Philosophy

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

June 6, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

The philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) was an impossibly difficult man who strived to unite the impossible to unite. Taubes, a philosopher of religion and politics, spent his life straining to unite Saint Paul, Jacob Frank, and Sabbatai Sevi in an antinomian and chiliastic mix. His ultimate aims were the overcoming ...

The Arts

The World’s First Revolutionary Artist

Was Jacques-Louis David an opportunist? Or a passionate propagandist?

April 18, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Jacques-Louis David Radical Draftsman is a fitting exploration of the first great radical artist, a master of propaganda whose greatest triumphs were a result of his unflagging willingness to place his enormous talents at the service of his deepest political beliefs. ...

Democracy

The Phantom of the “Greatest Generation”

“Citizen soldiers” of America, unite!

January 26, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

With the greatest generation serving as their antithesis, it has become de rigueur to mock and attack the baby boomers: spoiled children of fathers infinitely better than they. But whatever the errors and failings of the post-war generation, it rose up against war and racism and stifling rules, all of ...

The Phantom of the “Greatest Generation”

Politics

France Unleashes its Racist Demons

How a Jewish writer of Algerian-Berber descent has become the nation’s most dangerous man

October 29, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor and Miguel Lago

The most dangerous man in France today is Éric Zemmour. A best-selling author and far-right polemicist, Zemmour seems to be an increasingly serious candidate to become the next President of France. Recent polls show him surpassing Marine Le Pen, the French far-right’s former leader—even though Zemmour has yet to formally ...