OOPS versus MOOCs
I first thought of writing this post over a year ago as a follow up to my piece “Against the Educational Uncertainty Principle.” I was struck by the way that recent interventions to address the various dimensions of higher educational crisis have made matters worse. MOOCs, Massive Open Online ...
Why Obama is Responsible for the Debacle of his Presidency
Chelsea Manning Performing Gender
From the Today Show to the Pride Parade
San Francisco’s Pride Parade will take place on 29 June and will bring together activists for LGBT rights under the rallying cry of "Color our world with pride." As usual, various officially recognized groups will take part in the march. But this year, among the multicolored sections of ...
Capitalism Never Ends?
Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables
The new always appears in the guise of a miracle
This is the prepared text answering the question "What do we really know about transitions to democracy?" for the General Seminar of The New School for Social Research, March 19, 2014.
It was a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that ...
Jonathan Schell Remembered
Letters from The New School for Social Research
Here are two remembrances of a distinguished colleague, Jonathan Schell, who died last Tuesday. Miller wrote his as a letter to the members of the Committee on Liberal Studies, where Schell once taught. Matynia’s is a remembrance of Schell’s public engagements as a writer and public actor, ...
John Dewey’s Encounter with Leon Trotsky
The 1930s was one of the one eventful and productive decades in Dewey’s life. He published more than a half dozen books including Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. It was during this decade that he sharpened his understanding of radical democracy and a renascent liberalism. He interrupted his ...
Have Europeans Learned from the 20th Century for the 21st?
This is a lightly abridged version of the keynote address to the conference of the Europe for Citizens Forum in Brussels on January 28th, 2014. Goldfarb was asked to address the question of the title. Siobhan Kattago, Irit Dekel, and Anna Lisa Tota also contributed to the ...
Hannah Arendt, Constitutionalism and the Problem of Israel/Palestine
The following was the keynote lecture at the XXVII Encuentro Internacional de Ciencias Sociales in Guadalajara, Mexico, December 5, 2013.
On October 3, 2013 the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that there is no Israeli identity, since there is “objectively” no Israeli ethnicity. The 21 litigants will have to continue ...
Writing Moves the Sky
“To write is to jump outside the line of the assassins.” – Franz Kafka
First of all I would like to thank the New School, and Edith Kurzweil who invited me to this eighth William Phillips lecture and gave me the opportunity to come to the prestigious New School.
My father Harold Kaplan was a great friend of William Phillips, who published his first short ...
Thought-Defying Evil
In the summer of 1945 Melvin Lasky, who was stationed in Germany with the American occupation forces, visited Karl Jaspers. Lasky, a correspondent for the Partisan review, mentioned the name of Hannah Arendt. Jaspers had lost contact with Arendt since 1938 and was stunned to discover that she was still ...