Democracy Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Resisting Cynicism and Neototalitarianism

The ideological dogmatism of left and right might dissipate within a radical center that is open and inclusive

May 28, 2026 • by Siobhan Kattago

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, Siobhan Kattago opens up another window on the concept of the radical center, noting that while the term “radical center” may sound like a ...

Resisting Cynicism and Neototalitarianism

Democracy

Thoughts on “the Radical Center” and the Defense of Democracy

On the limits of the limits of either/or thinking

May 28, 2026 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, Jeffrey C. Isaac suggests that this “paradoxical idea” (paradoxical, for how can “radicalism” be “centrist?”) is best defended by Goldfarb himself but that ...

Democracy

Understanding the Retreat of Democracy With Jeff Goldfarb’s Gray Is Beautiful

On creating a free space of exploration

May 27, 2026 • by Irit Dekel

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, series editor Irit Dekel reflects on how the book’s subtitle, Confronting the Retreat of Democracy From the Radical Center, poses the potent tensions that are crucial for attempting to solve the problems at hand, suggesting that ...

Understanding the Retreat of Democracy With Jeff Goldfarb’s Gray Is Beautiful

North America

Trump’s Way With Words

The metapragmatic presidency

May 20, 2026 • by Sanford Schram

Donald Trump has a kingly approach to his presidency—and to language. Yes, it is well-recognized that Trump does not command mastery of the basics of syntax and grammar of any language, including the one his supporters want to be declared the US national language, i.e., American English. No bother: Trump ...

History

The Waning of the American Illusion

And the virtues of democratic idealism

May 19, 2026 • by Sylvia Taschka

Was Ronald Reagan’s famous image of America as a “shining city on a hill” truly just an illusion, a Fata Morgana of the United States as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and moral leadership, a trick played on the world’s collective mind? In a podcast aired on January 14, 2026, Tucker ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

May 12, 2026 • by Rida Chaudhry and Areeb Zuaiter

A decade ago, filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter was glued to her screen watching the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza when a different kind of video interrupted her feed: smiling young men laughing between backflips as bombs darkened the sky behind them. The Nablus-born documentarian was partly curious and partly enamored with ...

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

Middle East & North Africa

The Political Perimeter

Francesca Albanese and the limits of international humanitarian law

April 15, 2026 • by Coleson Smith

In the wake of the Gaza War, a place in time that has become its own world-historical moment, the invocation of international law as a means of remedying Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians rings hollow. After all, did bombs not continue to fall on Gaza even after South Africa brought ...

Middle East & North Africa

Street Tulips

The outbreak of war has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora

April 13, 2026 • by M. B. Molavi

In search of a flower, I spent one day in early March going to plant shops and market stalls in central Malmö, Sweden. I was looking for something in particular: the laleh-ye vazhgoon, the inverted tulip. A reddish mountain flower that grows in the Zagros, the ancestral lands of the ...

Activism

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Documentary photographer Nancy Richards Farese captures the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the US’s shutdown of foreign aid

March 9, 2026 • by Nancy Richards Farese

In Przemyśl, a small city on the Ukrainian–Polish border, the train station has become something of a moral center. Late one November evening, fluorescent lights glare against steel rails as the night train from Kyiv pulls in late—again. The delay is familiar now. Russian forces bombed the rail line earlier ...

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...

Activism

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

An eyewitness report from Israel

March 4, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

I spent the summer of 2025 in a state of rage about events in Israel. Every day, I read in the liberal daily Haaretz of settler attacks in the West Bank on Palestinians and the Israeli activists who were defending them. Rage has long been my normal state, but I ...

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

Colonization

A House in the Middle of the Road

The cannibal colonization of homes and roads during Palestine’s Great Revolt

March 2, 2026 • by Chris Harding

I spent the summer of 2025 in Bayt Lahm (Bethlehem), conducting archival research in the Jacir family’s historic dar, a beautiful two-story home built in the nineteenth century from Jerusalem stone. Taking a break one afternoon, I watched a short film, Mehdi Amel:The Colonial Mode of Production (2024), by the ...