From the Editors Archives - Page 57 of 170

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In a Tragedy Always Look for the Helpers

A rabbi rushes to Pittsburgh looking for ways to help and finds that he is one of many

November 4, 2018 • by Avram Mlotek

On Saturday night, my family danced the end of Shabbat away with song. It had been a full Shabbat: celebrating an upcoming marriage, a baby just birthed, welcoming guests, Jews and non-Jews who have never experienced the Jewish day of rest, around our table. Isolated from the outside world, our ...

In a Tragedy Always Look for the Helpers

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Upstaging the Trump Reality Show

How Montana’s socialist ‘Plaid Shirt Guy’ hacked a Trump rally

November 4, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

It isn’t easy to upstage Donald Trump, but Tyler Linfesty -- a 17-year old high school student from Billings, Montana -- managed to divert attention away from the president at a recent Trump rally in his hometown. Linfesty became an immediate internet sensation on September 6 as he stood on the ...

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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

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Why Americans Aren’t Always Free — To Vote

A Short History of Voter Suppression in the United States

November 2, 2018 • by Amanda Brickell Bellows

As the 2018 midterm election approaches, several states have passed new laws regulating voter identification, poll locations and hours of operation, and voter registration and eligibility. Advocates of these laws argue that such legislation is necessary to prevent voter fraud or simplify the voting process, while opponents contend that these laws restrict voter access and reduce turnout. Debates ...

Why Americans Aren’t Always Free — To Vote

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Remember Baudrillard

On the Ecstasies of Posthumous Communication

November 2, 2018 • by Dominic Pettman

The last thing I expected was a reply. After all, he was dead. I emailed Jean Baudrillard one intoxicated evening, when the world was feeling too much for me. The idea came to me as a dark whim; somewhere between a compulsion and a negative epiphany. We had exchanged a couple ...

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‘To the Angels and the Sparrows’

A review of John Gray’s, Seven Types of Atheism

November 1, 2018 • by Alexandre Leskanich

It was incomprehensible to Pascal, who lived in horror of perpetual oblivion and staked his happiness on the immortality of the soul, that an individual could be ambivalent in respect to eternity. Such a person, ‘indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness’, ...

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By Land and By Sea

Salvini’s war on immigration

November 1, 2018 • by Enrica Rigo

The decree recently approved by the Italian government restricting the right to asylum is the terrestrial counterpart to the criminalization of NGOs operating in the Mediterranean. The climax to Matteo Salvini’s ongoing campaign against humanitarianism, it will have a fundamental impact on the management of migration within the country. Salvini’s war ...

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We, the People, Must Vote

However imperfectly, the framers of the Constitution imagined the vote, not guns, as our most powerful right

October 31, 2018 • by Claire Potter

We the People of the United States… I have always been stirred by this phrase that begins the preamble of the United States Constitution: we, the people. What it meant was that this new chapter in politics would not be an extension of divine will and ruled by hereditary office ...

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Under Attack in the Time of Trump

We have a terrorism problem in this country, and its name is white supremacy

October 31, 2018 • by Zach Strassburger

There’s an old joke that if there are two Jews, they will build three synagogues: one for one of them to join, one for the other, and one in which neither will step foot. For our queer Jewish family, Tree of Life was the Pittsburgh synagogue that didn’t fit. Of ...

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A (Liberal) World We Have Lost?

What we can learn from Arendt’s insights into an earlier crisis of liberalism

October 31, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...

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Constitutional Courts and the Project of Democratic Defense

Courts should make the defense of democracy a priority

October 30, 2018 • by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq

In the wake of the Kavanaugh nomination, a debate has erupted on the broadly progressive left about the role of constitutional courts in advancing valuable social ends. Samuel Moyn’s broadside against the “juristocracy,” and Andrew Seal’s response here reflect two potential positions. That debate has been so far focused on the relationship ...

Constitutional Courts and the Project of Democratic Defense

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Hannah Arendt’s Crises, and Ours

The “worldlessness” of our time manifests itself in right-wing populism

October 30, 2018 • by Christian Volk

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...