Human rights Archives - Public Seminar

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

Gender

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

November 11, 2024 • by Ever Osorio

This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico's democratic history. As ...

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

Podcast

The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights

A conversation with journalist and historian James Traub about liberalism and his book True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America

March 12, 2024 • by Claire Potter

An interview with James Traub on his new book, True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America....

Colonization

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

If Israel chooses to continue its current course, it should do it alone, without our funding

February 13, 2024 • by Stephen Zacks

Whether or not it sways Netanyahu, we should certainly withhold military funding now and make our support contingent on clearly stated humanitarian objectives and an ultimate governing framework that conforms to our ideas of justice....

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

Activism

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war

October 16, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

For a long time many civilians, Israeli and Palestinian, have suffered, as their leaders have failed to bring about a civil, peaceful, and at least modestly just end to a long and violent conflict. I feel for them all, and particularly for the children who have grown up knowing nothing ...

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Politics

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics

October 4, 2022 • by Ed Pavlić

On the third Sunday after the march, September 15, 1963, six Black children were killed in three separate incidents—one of which was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—in Birmingham. That day marked the end of Baldwin’s brief career as a literary celebrity and the beginning of his radicalization, ...

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

Climate & Ecology

Why We Need to Care About Animal Ethics in a Time When Humans Suffer Too

Alice Crary and Lori Gruen share their “critical animal theory” in a conversation with Public Seminar

September 14, 2022 • by Claire Potter, Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

The division between “humans” and “animals” is not a natural division, but a conceptual one that privileges humans over animals, and not even all humans. This divide operates in a way that justifies the oppression of animals and humans thought to be “closer” to animals, which has often meant women, ...

Climate & Ecology

Crisis / Orangutans

A case study excerpted from Animal Crisis

September 14, 2022 • by Lori Gruen and Alice Crary

From 2000 to 2015, 150,000 orangutans on Borneo died as their forest homes were destroyed and they became exposed to humans. And orangutans aren’t the only creatures to suffer from this massive destruction....

Migration

At the Border

Going into Poland’s forests to help migrants gave me a sense of peace but the journey is far from over

December 17, 2021 • by Pawel Knut and Franciszka Sady

Before leaving for Podlachia I naively assumed that my trip would have a beginning and an end, that I would gain a better understanding of the ongoing crisis and the role people such as myself could play in it. I seem to have reached some geographical and symbolic end. However, ...

Interviews

In the Aftermath of War

What the post-1975 history of the Vietnam War should teach us about the days, months, and years after the United States leaves Afghanistan

August 27, 2021 • by Claire Potter and Amanda Demmer

_____ As the military situation in Afghanistan began to unspool at the end of July, and comparisons to the United States 1975 evacuation of Saigon proliferated, I wanted to know more. So I reached for Amanda Demmer’s After Saigon's Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) to think ...

Politics

Why “Naming and Shaming” Is a Tactic That Often Backfires In International Relations

Understanding a deeply paradoxical political process

March 11, 2021 • by Rochelle Terman

_____ In recent decades, scholars and activists have argued that international condemnation can improve human rights conditions around the world. “Naming and shaming” is now a preferred tactic of global human rights advocates. When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure ...

Why “Naming and Shaming” Is a Tactic That Often Backfires In International Relations

Democracy

On Repression and Resistance

December 8, 2020 • by Aysen Candas

I would like to start by thanking the New University in Exile Consortium, particularly the Consortium's marvelous director, Prof. Arien Mack. Thanks to Arien's persistent efforts, uprooted academics from all over the world find their voice in a new community of like-minded scholars. I would also like to thank Prof. ...

Human rights

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

The Bright Sunshine of Human Rights

A conversation with journalist and historian James Traub about liberalism and his book True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America

The US Should Only Support a Multiethnic, Nonsectarian Israel

If Israel chooses to continue its current course, it should do it alone, without our funding

Reflections on the War between Israel and Hamas

Voices of sanity are in danger of being drowned out by the rhetoricians of all-out war

Nonviolence, Black Power, and “the Citizens of Pompeii”: James Baldwin’s 1968

The radicalization of an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics

Why We Need to Care About Animal Ethics in a Time When Humans Suffer Too

Alice Crary and Lori Gruen share their “critical animal theory” in a conversation with Public Seminar

Crisis / Orangutans

A case study excerpted from Animal Crisis

At the Border

Going into Poland’s forests to help migrants gave me a sense of peace but the journey is far from over

In the Aftermath of War

What the post-1975 history of the Vietnam War should teach us about the days, months, and years after the United States leaves Afghanistan

Why “Naming and Shaming” Is a Tactic That Often Backfires In International Relations

Understanding a deeply paradoxical political process

On Repression and Resistance

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