Terrorism Archives - Public Seminar

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

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Kashmir’s Silent Suffering

New Anguish in the Midst of an Old Struggle

August 28, 2019 • by Bizaa Zeynab Ali

In the meanwhile, Kashmir has been placed on a Genocide Watch and the UN has publicly called out India’s “Draconian Blackout” as a “collective punishment” for the people of Kashmir. with numerous people being killed and more than 4,000 people, mostly young men, being arrested and held without recourse under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a controversial law ...

Blue Monday

Some Banal Thoughts About the Mutuality of Evil in our Midst

We Must Defeat Trump, Not Entreat Him

August 5, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

According to the Gun Violence Archive, these episodes are the 250th and 251st mass shootings of the year. It defines a mass shooting as “four or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” As USA Today noted: “The bloody 24 hours also ...

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The Moby Dick Problem of War: An Interview with Steve Coll

The NBCC nonfiction award winner on Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

May 2, 2019 • by Daniel Goulden

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by ...

The Moby Dick Problem of War: An Interview with Steve Coll

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Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

The President Plays with Fire, and The Rest of Us Get Burned

April 28, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

My mind was reeling. I was writing a column about Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis when I learned of yesterday’s (Saturday) synagogue shooting in California by a white supremacist. The connection between these two events was immediate and obvious to me, as I will briefly explain in ...

Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

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American Russophobia in the Age of Liberal Decline

Under President Donald Trump, US–Russian relations have entered a new phase

March 28, 2019 • by Andrei P Tsygankov

Accusations of Russian interference have become the primary route through which to undermine Donald Trump. In order to sustain public outrage, media and political elites provide a constant flow of leaks, rumors and conspiracy theories. Failing liberal self-confidence is to blame for the return of Cold War rhetoric, argues Andrei ...

American Russophobia in the Age of Liberal Decline

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A Wound that Needs Witnessing

Healing after Christchurch

March 20, 2019 • by Safiyah Rochelle

In the aftermath of the slaughter of worshippers in a sacred space, it is easy to be angry. The targets of rage seem endless: at callow politicians who peddle in the most basic of human emotions and sling hateful words that morph into weapons; at white supremacy ideologies whose violences ...

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Public Space, Public Art, and Public Memory

Responding to the Neo-Nazi Trial Verdict in Jena

August 3, 2018 • by Irit Dekel

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is off today. He has selected this piece on the complexities of public memory as this week's Gray Friday post. On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 the verdict of five of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) members was given in the Higher Regional Court in Munich. Beate Zschäpe, the ...

Public Space, Public Art, and Public Memory

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Making a Hostile Environment

Why the deportation of sex offenders matters

June 13, 2018 • by May Robson

The case of the “Asian grooming gang” from the Rochdale area of Greater Manchester is notorious. Over a two-year period, a group of nine men plied young girls with food, alcohol and drugs in order to sexually exploit them. The men were sentenced in May 2012, following a high-profile trial. ...

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On Incels

It’s a man’s, man’s problem

June 11, 2018 • by Haylee Millikan

Before Alek Minassian murdered ten people -- mostly women -- in Toronto by driving a van down a crowded street, he made a Facebook post that read “The Incel Rebellion Has Already Begun!” Once esoteric, this violently misogynistic ideology has now made its way to the mainstream. Incels, short for the “involuntarily celibate,” ...

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The Spy who Psychoanalyzed Me

Psychology’s long and shameful history with torture

May 28, 2018 • by Tristan Chirico

After a highly controversial confirmation process, Gina Haspel is now director of the CIA. At the heart of the controversy surrounding her nomination were Haspel's alleged ties to the systematic torture of terrorism suspects conducted at so-called “black sites” during the Bush Era -- one of which Haspel oversaw in ...

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The Scab

One who gives more value for the same price than another.

May 8, 2018 • by Jack London

"Such is the tangle of conflicting interests in a tooth-and-nail society that people cannot avoid being scabs, are often made so against their desires, and unconsciously" [Although the author of this paper has been chiefly known to the readers of the Atlantic as a writer of stories of the Klondike, he has given ...