Jewish Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

October 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...

Feature

On Race and Repair

A Güero Reads Plato in Jerusalem

August 15, 2019 • by David Stromberg

I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood with mostly Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan kids, along with a few from Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, and Korea. In some cases, their parents or grandparents had come as migrants to America, where they had been born, and in other cases they had themselves ...

Feature

The Subtext of a Recent International Scandal

Part One: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

April 17, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

In Paris, on February 22nd of this year, a conference entitled “The New Polish School of the History of the Shoah” (NPSHS) began. The conference was meant to be a celebration, particularly a celebration of all the research done over the past 15 years on the role that non-Jewish Poles played ...

The Subtext of a Recent International Scandal

Democracy

Democracy in Israel/Palestine Today

Ethnic Democracy or Ethnocracy?

February 27, 2019 • by Shaul Magid and Yehuda Magid

During a roundtable debate on Israeli television in the last election cycle, the major candidates, excluding the two major parties Likud and Labor (as is the custom), offered final word after a vigorous exchange of ideas. Centrist Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid (“There is a Future”) party began his ...

Education

A Multi-Campus University in Exile

Then and now

February 21, 2019 • by Judith Friedlander

The New School opened on February 10, 1919 in the name of academic freedom -- a cause it heroically defended a second time when Hitler rose to power. In April 1933, Alvin Johnson, the New School’s director, called on American intellectuals to protest the dismissal of hundreds of professors in ...

Feature

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

Feature

Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

A review of Steven Zipperstein’s new book

July 5, 2018 • by Marci Shore

Steven Zipperstein’s new book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, is uncannily timely: today in particular we might appreciate the irony of fate that American anti-racism can trace one line of origin to a backwoods region of the Russian Empire. This region, Bessarabia, is among those parts of Eastern Europe ...

Feature

Call For A Yell-Ceasefire Around The Polish Pogroms

September 30, 2016 • by Bogdan Bialek

A few weeks ago at 7/9 Planty Street in Kielce, Poland, we of the Jan Karski Society launched a permanent exhibition devoted to the Kielce pogrom, a tragedy suffered by a local community of Holocaust survivors for whom that city became a place, not of peace and security, but of ...