By Nahed Habiballah, October 25th, 2010 
A note from Jeff:
Nahed Habiballah, a Ph.D. student at the New School, works on the sociology of religion in the public sphere. We first met in Jerusalem at a conference on the politics of small things in Israel and Palestine. After the conference, she took me, and also Elzbieta Matynia, to visit the city of Ramallah and her family home (on the other side of the Wall); the wall built by Israel under the pretext of security that appropriates more Palestinian land. She is a Palestinian holding Israeli citizenship. Her father came from a small town near Nazareth, but she was born and raised in Jerusalem. She later spent her undergraduate years at the University of Haifa, working as an archeologist after graduation with the “Israeli Authorities of Antiquities.” The paranoid politics of Israel-Palestine insists upon clarity, where complexity such as hers is the general rule. I asked her what she thinks about recent events, particularly about a recent op.ed. piece in The New York Times.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, recently published an op-ed piece in The New York Times arguing that the failure of the peace negotiations is a result of the Palestinians and/or the Palestinians Authorities’ refusal to recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state. Oren backs his argument by saying that the United Nation created a Jewish state in Palestine in 1947. He failed to mention, though, that the resolution to which he refers, Resolution 181, the Partition of Palestine, created at the same time an Arab state in Palestine, more over that Palestine was divided almost equally between the two states, and Jerusalem was to be under International jurisdiction. Now Israel occupies 78% of Palestine, and Oren is only interested in one half of the resolution, ignoring the other.
To be sure, the Palestinians have already made significant concessions in the pursuit of a peaceful settlement. The Palestinians have recognized the existence of the state of Israel as mandated by the Oslo agreement signed in 1993 within 1967 . . .
Read more: In Israel: A Two-sided Problem Needs a Two-sided Response
By Virag Molnar, October 21st, 2010 
I bumped into my colleague Virag Molnar the day before yesterday in our sociology department office, and asked her about the news coming out of Hungary. To my shock, she revealed that she had a special connection to the disaster. She also had telling insights about how the crisis is connected to major developments in the region and to particular struggles in Hungary. I thought it would be important for her to share her observations with DC readers. -Jeff
Frankly, I would have never thought that my home town – a non-descript place of about 30,000 people in Western Hungary that was established as a socialist new town in Hungary’s postwar rush to build up heavy industries virtually from scratch – would become front page news in the New York Times and other international media outlets. But two weeks ago, during my early morning routine of drowsily surfing the Internet for my daily dosage of news I was confronted with surreal images of a rust-red landscape that looked like a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert or a sci-fi movie set on Mars but turned out to be pictures of the very region I come from.
My home town and the surrounding area became the site of Hungary’s worst environmental disaster when a reservoir containing toxic red sludge, the byproduct of aluminum production, burst and flooded several neighboring villages and small towns. The events are baffling and astonishing on multiple levels. The accident seemed unreal because in our quiet “Second-World” and EU-member complacency we have come to believe that this kind of environmental disaster occurs only in “less developed” regions where such disasters are enabled by a combination of cheap labor, lax regulations, disregard for the environment, outdated and dangerous technologies, complicit states and powerful multinationals.
The Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 in India, the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986, or most recently the Baia Mare cyanide spill in Romania in 2000 that devastated the ecosystem of the River Tisza and parts of the Danube have all clearly exhibited most or all of these . . .
Read more: In Hungary: The Politics of Toxic Sludge
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 11th, 2010 
Elzbieta Matynia is an expert on democratic movements, and here, reflects on the recent Nobel Laureate, Liu Xiabo and the chance for Chinese democracy. -Jeff
The air in Johannesburg (Joburg to the locals) is full of discussions on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. When I heard about Liu Xiaobo, I thought about events that took place in Poland 30 years ago, and about a message written by workers on strike in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980.
One of their most prominent graffiti, written in huge, uneven letters on cardboard and mounted high up on a shipyard crane, was the statement, uncontroversial elsewhere, “A Man is Born and Lives Free.” This year’s Nobel Peace Prize given to a Chinese political prisoner brings the spirit of this graffiti to China, re-inserting it in a landscape “freely” filled with billboards advertising Western luxury brands like Lancôme or Mercedes Benz. Will the Chinese notice the message?
There are those moments in history when the Nobel Prizes turn out to be truly performative.
When Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry was forbidden in communist Poland, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980, it seemed to lend further legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of the workers as articulated in the Gdansk shipyard. The poems of Milosz had only been published underground and the workers had come to know them through their strike bulletins. And now the workers, who had demanded a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, press, and publication, won their strike, and the poems — arrested till then in the Office of Censorship — became widely available. I have no doubt that the award given to the poet who wrote about freedom and captivity further encouraged the human rights agenda of the Solidarity movement, and contributed – even if only for the 16 months of Solidarity’s legal existence — to the unprecedented sense of emancipation in the country.
Those 16 months of Solidarity were a time when Poles experienced the dignity of personal freedom. They were months of intensive learning that paid off in 1989 when the society launched a . . .
Read more: From Liu Xiabo: A Seed of Strength for Chinese Political Protesters
By Daniel Dayan, October 10th, 2010
Daniel Dayan is a French sociologist and an expert in media. -Jeff
 Once, I heard an American journalist condemn Fox News. The condemnation was deserved, in my opinion. However, the argument meant to justify it was frightening. Why – did the journalist ask – should Fox News be allowed to exist while its position contradicts that of all other American journalistic institutions?
In my view this journalist was not attacking Fox News. He was challenging the very possibility of debate. He was pointing to a consensus and requiring that dissenting voices be silenced. Obama was perfectly right in stressing that they should not (while still being critical of their position in a Rolling Stone article. Obama’s point is essential to the very existence of a democratic pluralism. Obama was no less correct in noting: “We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated.” This tradition is also ingrained in European journalistic traditions, and, in particular, in the French.
Interestingly, it is not this tradition that retained the attention of some of the most radical media critics. (I am thinking of such thinkers as Roland Barthes or Stuart Hall.) For them, the real danger lies not with those media discourses that flaunt their ideological positions, hoist their flag, advance in fanfare, scream their values. Such discourses are unmistakeably partisan. They are too strident not to be instantly spotted .
The real danger is with these other discourses that are so persuasive that they can be conflated with “reality.” It lies with discourses that seem neutral, balanced, fair, often intelligent . The real danger is with discourses that seem “self evident.” Such an evidence – present in the consensus that the journalist in my first paragraph pointed to — speaks of the power enjoyed by those groups who become the “primary definers” of the social world (Hall); of the power of constructing reality, of multiplying ‘effects of real‘ (Barthes); of the power that stems from ideology, understood not as a discrete doctrine, but as an almost spontaneous “way of seeing“ (a spontaneity that begs, of course, to be deciphered).
I . . .
Read more: Voice of Dissent Should Always Be Welcome in Debate
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 1st, 2010 
 Elzbieta Matynia is a historian of ideas and a sociologist of culture, with special interests in performance both in theater and beyond. She has written incisively about the making of democracy and works actively in the support of free intellectual exchange.
She, the director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School, is currently a Fulbright research scholar in Johannesburg, South Africa. We at the Center saw her off at our annual beginning of the year party, as I reported in a previous post. I asked her to periodically send us reports as she researches the tragedy of the assassination of Chris Hani, a former head of the South African Communist Party (aligned with the African National Congress) and a widely admired anti-apartheid leader seen as a potential successor to Nelson Mandela. I have just received her first impressions.
Elzbieta and I first met in her native Poland when I was studying theater, an artistic form that created cultural and social alternatives in a repressive state. It’s strange to receive her note. Now she is in the position I once was, an outsider trying to make sense of a difficult political situation. Her most recent book, Performative Democracy, is in dialogue with my most recent, The Politics of Small Things. She starts, appropriately, as Tocqueville or Montesquieu would, by setting the stage with a description of the physical environment, linking it to the hopes and fears of a country undergoing significant political challenges. – Jeff
Do you want to experience the most spectacular spring ever? Come to Johannesburg in late September: you can smell it, you can see it, and you can almost hear it. The African jasmine is in bloom, the fragrance of its star-like flowers fills every street. You can see the buds of camellias in the parks, and hear people talking about the purple-blue flowers of the . . .
Read more: In South Africa: A Young Leader Ignites Passion, Controversy
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 28th, 2010 
 Nachman Ben Yehuda is an old friend. We were graduate students together at the University of Chicago. He, his wife Etti, my wife Naomi and I have been friends ever since. He is now a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the author of books that explore the worlds of deviance and the unsteadiness of memory about things political. Jewish assassins, the “Masada myth,” betrayal and treason, and as he puts it talking about his most recent book Theocratic Democracy, “pious perverts” are the subjects of Nachman’s sociological curiosity. On their recent visit to New York, we got together for a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, to see the exciting Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 exhibit. While walking through the museum, I asked Nachman about the Park 51, about Cordoba House. Nachman is now back in Jerusalem, but emailed me his recollection of our discussion, which I thought would be good to share here.
A Conversation Remembered
He recalled our conversation:
The mosque. If I remember correctly our conversation, my argument was that officially and legally, there is no doubt that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the initiative to build the mosque where planned and that President Obama as defender of the American constitution did the right thing when he made his speech and supported it. My concern was as a hopeless symbologist and on the symbolic level. Hence, having said that legally Muslims are within their constitutional rights, I was concerned whether it was absolutely necessary or wise to have a Muslim mosque so close to where radical Muslims massacred thousands of innocent Americans. You put my concern there to rest.
In our discussion, I essentially made the argument I have been making in posts here, most crucially my first one considering the raw facts , but also my more recent post The tragedy of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. My key point, which convinced Nachman, was that the Cordoba House was actually a respectful initiative, made by people of good will, who sought respectful dialogue between Muslims and their fellow Americans. Yet, Nachman still . . .
Read more: Talking about Cordoba
By Andrew Arato, September 24th, 2010
 Andrew Arato is an expert in constitutions, a pressing topic in Turkey right now.
I read the news about the Turkish referendum on constitutional reforms with great interest. Turkey is a bridge between East and West. Europe meets Asia in modern booming Istanbul. It’s a place where the commitment to democracy and to an open Islam is the official policy of the governing Justice and Development Party. It’s a place of great hope and promise, where instead of the clash of civilizations, there is dialogue and reinvention. But it is also a place where people committed to secularism worry about the prospects for their modern way of life. I tried to follow the news reports about what happened, but they were unclear. I understood that a sweeping package of constitutional reforms were approved, that the referendum purported to bring the Turkish constitution up to European standards, but also that the opposition was claiming that the package was a systematic power grab. Is this a sign of democratic progress as the ruling party spokesman declared, or is it, as the opposition declared, a significant regression? I called my friend and New School colleague, Andrew Arato, a distinguished expert on constitutions, who has been working with a group of young scholars on constitutional issues in Turkey. He agreed to answer my questions. I opened by asking him whether the referendum results were good or bad news?
I think bad. The successful Turkish referendum of September 12 was ultimately about court packing. Not only is the manner of choosing judges for the Court now altered, but six new judges presumably friendly to the government will be added to the Court within 30 days.
This is a point missed by almost all Western commentary on the event. Court packing is always bad business. The way is now almost open for the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the ruling Party with leaders who have an Islamist, but are committed to membership in the European Union) to remake the country’s secular constitution entirely on its own.
 . . .
Read more: Politically Weighted Courts in Turkey “Bad News” for Democracy
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 19th, 2010
I have been developing DC for the last 6 months or so, at first, mostly, just thinking about it, but more recently, intensively working on it, trying to figure out exactly what the project will be, working with Lauren Denigan, managing editor, to give the blog precise shape, and writing posts that respond to the events of the day, trying to utilize my full intellectual range, establishing a pattern of what I hope DeliberatelyConsidered.com will become.
This Tuesday, we went a step further. I introduced the project to some dear friends and colleagues at the annual opening party of the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. The party was a pleasure, as it always is. I was especially pleased by the response to my developing blog, and the prospect that this will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship between TCDS and DC, a variation on an old theme.
TCDS and Me
The story of TCDS and my story are intimately connected. It’s an example of the politics of small things, in which I am one of the central actors. There is a long version and a short version. I’ll start the long by highlighting the short with some quick headlines, and hope that we can continue the story’s themes in this new setting.
 Elzbieta Matynia (who is the TCDS director) and I each worked on the sociology of theater in Poland, meeting there. More details about this time later, for now just note that a deep friendship between Elzbieta and my wife, Naomi, and me developed and has endured, through major international and personal crises, martial law in Poland, changes in our social and political circumstances. We developed parallel careers which met at the New School. When martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, Elzbieta’s one-year scholarship to study at our university became a lifetime relationship: first as a visiting scholar, then as an adjunct instructor, now as the Director of the Transregional Center and senior member of our Department of Sociology and Committee on Liberal Studies.
The seeds of TCDS were planted when she and I met in Poland. It was firmly rooted in the mid . . .
Read more: DC and TCDS: Going Public by Bringing It Home
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 8th, 2010 
This post is the third in a series. Read Part One and Part Two.
“The Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq,” of August 31, 2010, was a speech by the head of state, addressed to a nation, about a momentous event. The President had a responsibility to deliver the speech, and the Oval office was the place to deliver it. The President had things to say that went beyond partisanship, as I tried to show yesterday. He was applying his political philosophy to the task at hand, something he first did in his anti-war speech in 2002. He fully presented his general position in his Nobel Laureate Acceptance Speech, most directly basing it on “just war theory.” (see Michael Walzer’s book, Just and Unjust Wars) Sometime in the near future, I hope to post more on that, but today, after the last two posts on Obama on Iraq, we move from the consideration of the relationship between context and text, to the text of the speech itself.
The Speech beyond Cynicism
He opens by revealing the logic of the entire speech: “Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home,” and he then develops and applies the logic. We should note how clearly the speech develops the themes that were the basis of his anti war speech and how it is addressed to a broader audience, not only those who were against the war, but also those who favored it.
About Iraq, Obama is careful. He focuses on the service and sacrifice of the American military, the defeat “of a regime that terrorized its people” and “the chance for a better future for Iraq,” and underscores that he is delivering on the promise, which he made as a candidate and which was officially agreed upon with the Iraqis, of American withdrawal from the war. His language is subdued. He notes accomplishments and dangers. He . . .
Read more: From the Head of State: a Call to Action
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 23rd, 2010 The recent violent conflict over the blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel and the attempt of humanitarian organizations and political movements aligned against Israel to break the blockade reminds me of the fundamental nature of conflict. Amos Oz once summed up the situation as he understands it:
“[I]t is high time that honest people outside the region .. conceive of [the Palestinian Israeli conflict] as a tragedy and not as some ‘Wild – West Show,’ containing good guys and bad guys. Tragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of the Shakespeare tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies, and maybe there’s some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one, for the Israeli – Palestinian tragedy.”
I completely agree. A persecuted people, after centuries of oppression and exclusion in Europe, culminating in genocide, find a place for themselves in what they perceive to be their ancient homeland. A peaceful people are forced off their land, displaced, homeless, subjected to second class citizenship. As Israelis and Palestinians fight against each other in their pursuit of justice, justice is denied. The majority on both sides, at least at times, have even agreed on what they perceive as a just solution, a two state solution, with Jerusalem as the capital of two nations, but getting there from here has made the solution elusive, if not impossible. Repeated failure has led to despair and aggression. On both sides, majorities are convinced that the other side is not serious about a just resolution, not serious about peace. Against these majorities, some try to keep alternatives alive. Their activities remind me of small things I had observed in the U.S. and in East and Central Europe.
A most compelling example of people who work against the common sense about the other is The Parents Circle, a Palestinian Israeli organization of “bereaved families for peace.” I first met them at their Israeli headquarters outside of Tel Aviv when a student . . .
Read more: Looking at Gaza, Remembering Tragedy, Looking for Hope in Small Things.
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