Essays Archive - Page 70 of 131

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore

In the ghetto there was only black and white. Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered looking down from the bridge and seeing brightly-colored flowers at a market on the Aryan Side. She remembered, too, the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the ...

Migration

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Tyrone Chambers, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera I. Grant, Dan H. Shore, Tyrone Chambers, II and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with ...

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Migration

Creating Linkages

Witnessing the trauma of child separation

October 19, 2020 • by Arielle Rubenstein

In his three-volume work on the child’s tie to his mother, Bowlby includes this passage from a colleague’s description of the young child who has been separated from his mother. At the time, parent-child separation happened in routine circumstances, like the hospitalization of the mother or the child. Before it ...

Migration

The Universal within the Particular

October 19, 2020 • by Eneken Laanes

But the nagging question that has accompanied academic work on cultural memories of violence, apart from the historical knowledge it produces and helps to keep alive, is its relevance for our contemporary world, its ability to contribute to change. As much as the collage of Holocaust testimonies makes us painfully ...

Migration

The Counter

October 19, 2020 • by Erica Johnson Debeljak

Around the same time, I was watching the Netflix series Immigration Nation about the activities of the American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ICE, and also the short documentary film The Last Time I Saw Them featuring interviews of Holocaust survivors who had been separated from their families. Several things ...

Migration

Instead of Comparing

Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past

October 19, 2020 • by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

“History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can ...

Migration

Boy Number 84

October 19, 2020 • by Slavenka Drakulić

This is a photo of one of the children saved from the Jasenovac death camp in Croatia in 1942. Number 84 is already marked by hunger and negligence, beyond salvation. But who were these children? They were Serbian children from villages in Croatia whose parents, civilians, were killed by Croatian forces called ...

Migration

On the Uses of the Palm

October 19, 2020 • by Elaine Lingyuan Wang

In my case, she’s not really my sister. In 1980, a nationwide policy was introduced in China allowing every couple to give birth to only one child. At a population control symposium that spring, a group of rocket scientists at the Chinese University of Science and Technology used cybernetics – ...

Migration

Being Ahead of All Departures

October 19, 2020 • by Rahul Pandita

In Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway has returned from the bookstore run by the lovely Sylvia Beach, who is very nice to him, letting him borrow books without a deposit. It is with that goodness in his heart that Hemingway returns to his cramped flat and tells his wife about ...

Migration

Child Separation

A documentary poem reacting to a film about the separation of children from their parents in Nazi camps

October 19, 2020 • by Radu Vancu

The child Fred is told by his mother: “You must not look back.”And he did not look back – and he survived – and his mother did not.Orpheus was not as strong you were, Fred – he looked back, the poor thing.On December 6th, 1938, in the middle of the ...

Migration

Separation

Deserts, hurricanes, and classrooms

October 19, 2020 • by Brett Warnke

Personally, these stories brought to mind a student, Jonathan, who recently took my college writing class. He’s a first-year full-time student who manages a fast-food restaurant in City Heights, a dense refugee-packed neighborhood in San Diego. Four years ago, he was my strongest 8th grade English student in middle school. He ...

Migration

Memory’s Fragile Thread

Judaism’s view of – and response to – family separation as theological crisis

October 19, 2020 • by Jason Rubenstein

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 ...

Essays

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Tyrone Chambers, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore

Creating Linkages

Witnessing the trauma of child separation

The Universal within the Particular

The Counter

Instead of Comparing

Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past

Boy Number 84

On the Uses of the Palm

Being Ahead of All Departures

Child Separation

A documentary poem reacting to a film about the separation of children from their parents in Nazi camps

Separation

Deserts, hurricanes, and classrooms

Memory’s Fragile Thread

Judaism’s view of – and response to – family separation as theological crisis

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