By Mark Frazier, May 22nd, 2013 
When I’m in China, conversations with friends and colleagues often begin with their asking about the name of my university: Why is it called “The New School?” Most are not familiar with the university, but when I mention the name of John Dewey and the intellectual spirit associated with the university’s founding in 1919, there’s an immediate connection. Dewey traveled and lectured in China beginning in 1919, just as The New School was being established, and just as Chinese intellectuals were engaging in unprecedented forms of public engagement and education.
For Chinese intellectuals and students today, 1919 invokes the stirrings of the “New Culture Movement” and the foundations of the Chinese revolution more broadly. The New Culture Movement is closely associated with what became known as the “May Fourth Movement,” so named for the student protests in Beijing on that day in 1919 to reject the humiliating outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. The protest was over the terms that allowed Japan to retain territorial concessions that had been negotiated before the war by a discredited president of the fledgling Republic of China. (The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911-12.) But the May Fourth Movement was less about geopolitics and much more about the vibrant intellectual pursuit and experimentation with new ideas–anarchism, Marxism, socialism, and much else.
John Dewey arrived in China just a few days after May 4, 1919, and would spend the next two years teaching and lecturing at Chinese universities. Dewey had been invited by his former student at Columbia, Hu Shih, by then a prominent leader in the New Culture Movement. Hu, like others in the movement, advocated the wholesale rejection of Confucian culture and practice–first and foremost the educational precepts that stressed the close engagement with Confucian and other classical texts. In its place, Hu and those who would become the presidents and chancellors of China’s leading universities adopted many of Dewey’s ideas about education and its roles in constituting citizenship, democratic practice, among much else.
Several scholars have examined closely Dewey’s China lectures and his writings from . . .
Read more: John Dewey in China
Last week, Adam Michnik returned to The New School and gave a provocative lecture, “After the Election of Pope Francis: What Paths for the Catholic Church?” In his talk, more about the Church and democracy in Poland than about events in Rome and the Catholic Church as a whole, the renowned Polish intellectual highlighted the two different paths taken by the Church in current public debates: the increasingly popular fundamentalist approach, termed “Integralism,” resistant to the recommendations of openness formulated at the Second Vatican Council, and the marginalized liberal approach, termed “Progressivist,” adopted by the liberal-oriented Catholics. Michnik worried that Pope Francis would be on the wrong side of this debate, or on the sidelines, given his ambiguous at best relationship with dictatorship in Argentina. The talk addressed pressing issues in Poland. Michnik, as usual, was bold in his presentation. It has broad implications beyond Polish borders, which I appreciate. Yet, I also have a question. For, I think Michnik misses a crucial point, concerning Poland, and also concerning the Pope and the Catholic Church and the need to address religious fundamentalism.
Michnik pointed out that the integralist and the progressivist paths emerged as part of the Catholic Church’s struggle for power to shape public debate in post-1989 democratic Poland. To his great dismay, instead of strengthening the Church’s liberal voice, open to the new issues that the newly democratic country had to face as it opened to the outside world, the Church has become dominated by simplistic conservative and nationalistic arguments, which reinforce hostile attitudes toward all that is unfamiliar or strange. As a consequence, the church has fostered a destructive divide between “us” and “them,” which cuts across Polish society. According to Michnik, a significant role in disseminating the fundamentalist message is played by “Radio Maryja” and “TV Trwam.” These media outlets, owned by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a controversial Catholic priest often accused of promoting xenophobia and anti-Semitism, are widely popular in small towns in Poland.
Michnik did not have a simple answer to his question, “What Paths for the . . .
Read more: Adam Michnik on The Church: The Opening of a Polish Dialogue
Before the peace process, during the peace process, and after the peace process appears to have collapsed, the conflict between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians has persisted. Try as the principals may to imagine a solution, often with considerable agreement about its basic contours, as was envisioned in the Geneva Accord, there seems to be no way to get from here to there, no alternative to the injustice of the way things are, no exit.
It is within this maze that we respond to the latest news: the surprising results of an election, in which the ruling party has been humbled, and once again a centrist party has emerged from nowhere, followed by Obama giving a moving speech on his first official visit to Israel, also once again, one of his best. The more things change, the more they stay the same?
It does indeed seem that nothing changes. I, thus, especially appreciate how Deliberately Considered contributors, Michael Weinman, Hilla Dayan and Nahed Habiballah have pushed themselves to provide independent critical perspective (see here , here, and here). Though they hold different positions, I am struck more by their common sensibility, their pursuit of the normal as a realistic though perhaps utopian project. Their differences are marked, but of less significance. I think that perhaps it is their common sensibility that might be the basis for common political thinking and acting against despair.
Weinman observed the most positive side of the election. He doesn’t approve of “the winner,” Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid (“there is a future”) Party, but he thinks there was hope in the election results, a suggestion of a possible future:
“Let me be clear: I am no fan of Lapid, I wouldn’t have voted for him in January had I had the chance, and I haven’t liked him on Facebook, either. But I do recognize that he represented . . .
Read more: No Exit? Israel – Palestine
By Nahed Habiballah, April 30th, 2013 
As my partner and I were taking what has become our routine journey (twice a month) from my parents’ home in Al-Ram (between Jerusalem and Ramallah) to the Sheikh Hussein Bridge heading for Amman-Jordan, he raised an interesting question. Noting that the State of Israel has devoted so much energy and resources to “protect” itself through occupation, the separation wall and check points, he wondered whether Israelis foresee a solution, or do they believe that the current situation is a final solution? Our bi-weekly trip to the bridge provides the context for this question.
My parents’ home is on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which under normal circumstances could have been a natural expansion of Jerusalem. It could have been a desirable suburb in a normal setting, as it has access to the northern exit, making a northern trip swift. This was a plus when my father decided to buy that plot of land, as he is originally from the Nazareth area, and we used to make the trip up north almost weekly to visit family.
With the continuing Palestinian Israeli conflict and the resulting decision by the Israeli government to build the wall, Al-Ram neighborhood was one of the areas that suffered. To make matters worse, the State of Israel has an Industrial zone (“Atarot”) opposite our neighborhood, which means that they needed access to it. As a result the “Wall” was erected in the middle of the street dividing it into two parallel streets and declaring one side of it as Israeli and part of Jerusalem while the other side as Area B. (Area B: The Oslo II Accord of Sep. 28th 1995 has created three “temporary” distinct administrative divisions of the Palestinian territories thus creating what have become areas A, B and C. According to Oslo Accord, Area B is Israeli controlled but administered by Palestinian Authority.)
This arrangement meant that we no longer have the convenient access of the northern route and now in order to leave our neighborhood and reach Jerusalem, we have two options. The first is Qalandya checkpoint, the . . .
Read more: The Israeli Future? A View From Both Sides of the Wall
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 26th, 2013 
Aristide Zolberg was a leader in our shared long standing intellectual home, The New School for Social Research, as he was a path breaking, broad ranging political scientist. He also was, crucially, a good man. In this post, Kenneth Prewitt, Michael Cohen and Riva Kastoryano join me in remembering a great scholar and gentleman. -Jeff
Ary started his career as an Africanist, whose work on the Ivory Coast stands as a classic in the field. He became famous as a stellar essayist, whose sharp creative insights could illuminate in elegant strokes great puzzles of the human condition, including perhaps most significantly his “Moments of Madness,” a deeply learned piece reflecting on the telling question he posed: “If politics is the art of the possible, what are we to make of the moments when human beings in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible’?” And then there is his great achievement: A Nation by Design, his magnum opus. It is both a crucial account of an under examined part of the American story, while it is rich with comparative insights, as Riva Kastoryano describes in her reflections. It is a classic for reasons that Ken Prewitt underscores.
Ary was a disciplined scholar, as Michael Cohen highlights, who crossed disciplines freely, a tough – minded empiricist with great imagination. He was also a man who experienced a great deal, both the good and the bad life offered in his times. A Holocaust survivor, whose memoirs of his childhood await publication, he was married to the great sociologist of memory and art, Vera Zolberg. (For my appreciation of my intellectual relationship with Vera click here)
Ary and Vera, co-conspirators, together for sixty years, they were a beautiful team, and as a team they contributed to family (their children Erica and Danny and many more), friends, colleagues and students, and the world of arts and sciences broadly. “The Zolbergs” hosted innumerable New School events, as well as informal dinners, in their beautiful . . .
Read more: Aristide Zolberg, June 14, 1931 – April 12, 2013
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 18th, 2013 
“At the time the circumstances of my arrest in Poland seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of how things were then and what has since come to be.”
With these words, I opened my book After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I used a description of my brief detention in Lublin at a student theater festival to reveal the struggle for a free public in Communist times. I used my memory of the event to open my exploration of the relationships between public and private, and how the relationships formed the bases for the pursuit of democracy of post communist Central Europe.
In today’s post, I return to my experience in 1974 (drawing from the report in my book) to further my dialogue with Dayan Dayan, as we explore together the relationship between “monstration” and power. I report here first my recollections of my “trivial day” and why what seemed so unimportant at the time was of practical significance in Poland back then. I close by highlighting what I take to be the theoretical significance of my little story.
The Arrest
Disorientation is what I remember about that April afternoon in Lublin, when the People’s Militia detained me for a couple of hours. I was attending a Festival of Youth Theaters. The bulk of the theater presentations in Lublin that week were not very interesting. Some of the best theater groups of the Polish youth movement were not represented in this relatively minor festival, and others of mediocre quality were in great number. Veteran theater critics, journalists, directors, and actors were generally dissatisfied, particularly with one performance I attended, billed as a “happening.” It took place in a gymnasium and involved little more than a rock soundtrack, a colorful slide show, and some student actors playing with an orange and yellow sheet. When it ended, a group of Polish journalists . . .
Read more: My Arrest in Poland and the Ironies of Consequence
By Lukasz Pawlowski, April 12th, 2013 
On November 28, 1990, the entire world could see Margaret Thatcher crying. The Iron Lady of British politics, who for over a decade had been whipping her domestic and foreign opponents into line, was now standing in tears in front of 10 Downing Street for the very last time. After more than 11 years as the British Prime Minister she was leaving politics forever. The impact she had on it can be seen to this day.
How did it happen that the first woman in British history to run a government also became the longest-serving Prime Minister in the twentieth century? Political genius – say her supporters. The unique confluence of lucky circumstances – reply her opponents. Both groups have strong arguments to support their claims.
Gravediggers on strike and a tragicomic war
When in 1979 she took over as the Prime Minister, Great Britain was the “sick man of Europe.” At the end of 1978, still under the Labour Party government, strikes broke out one after another starting what would later be known as the “winter of discontent.” Blackouts became a part of everyday life, garbage littered the streets and in Liverpool even gravediggers refused to do their job. Inflation and unemployment soared. The Conservative Party campaign slogan – “Labour is not working” – aptly reflected the public mood. Thatcher won decisively but was it her own strength that secured victory or just the weakness or her opponents?
When a year after her government was formed the economy only got worse, Mrs. Thatcher – despite a growing pressure from her own party – refused to change the course and carried on with even larger spending cuts and even faster privatization of public wealth. Her popularity plummeted and the conservatives would probably have lost the next election if it had not been for a stroke of luck brilliantly played out by the Prime Minister. On April 2, 1982, Argentine attacked the Falkland Islands – tiny British archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. Hardly anybody expected a military response but Thatcher accused Argentinian military junta . . .
Read more: Margaret Thatcher: Strokes of Genius or Strokes of Luck?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 10th, 2013 
Tomek Kitlinski informed me yesterday about a new round in the continuing story of the escalating cultural war in Poland. This one hits close to home for me. I have a tragic sense of déjà vu. The greatest of the student theaters I studied in the 1970s, Teatr Osmego Dnia (Translated as Theater of the Eighth Day, or The Eighth Day Theater), continues to face official repression. A theater that combined the theatrical insights of Jerzy Grotowski with deep exploration of the existential problems of “socialist youth” continues its critical journey in the post-Communist order, revealing that some things haven’t changed: their challenging artistic excellence, the intolerance of authorities to alternative sensibility, opinion and judgment, and remarkably, the political monitoring of the private life of artists, the theme of their powerful play, “The Files,” which juxtaposes their dairies with their security files of the Ministry of the Interior from the 70s (think “The Lives of Others” with more dramatic and documentary power, expressed through superb fully embodied acting). The invasion of privacy in this case involved Ewa Wójciak Facebook page, as reported in the letter below. I reproduce the letter of protest here, which points to the unfolding events and comments by Kitlinski, illuminating the meaning of the events. Readers wishing to support this letter of protest should send their names and comments to teatr@osmego.art.pl
On the day of the elections for a new pope, shortly after the official announcement was made, Ewa Wójciak took to her private Facebook profile and wrote: “…and so they elected a prick, who denounced left-wing priests during the military dictatorship in Argentina.”
To Wójciak’s astonishment, her status almost instantly became the cause for a massive media outrage.
She was invited onto a show for the local TV channel, where she defended the private character of her Facebook status, while retaining her conviction that the choice made by the Vatican was of scandalous nature. She explained that, regardless of . . .
Read more: Political Repression in Poland: Ewa Wójciak and the Eighth Day Theater
By Michael Weinman, April 5th, 2013 
In the immediate aftermath of the latest elections in Israel, my (somewhat snide, but really felt) response was “good thing there is a future; there’s surely no present.” Meaning, I suppose, something like: nice to see that folks really made a statement that the current political system is fundamentally broken (by voting in droves for the newly-minted Yesh Atid [i.e., there is a future] party), but that doesn’t mean that anything has actually changed, or can be expected to change, any time soon. I had wanted to try to develop that reaction into a sustained thought, but failed. Then, in the build-up to Obama’s visit and the drama of Netanyahu’s troubled, but ultimately (and predictably) successful, attempt to forge a coalition, I thought that there was a real moment to expand on my initial response. I failed again. Obama’s visit itself would have been a nice occasion to revisit my thesis and see how it was holding up against “facts on the ground.” But, alas, that moment passed as well.
Who would have thought that the “critical mass” would have been reached through a seemingly benign, almost anodyne, gesture by Yair Lapid (head of the afore-mentioned party) in saying that any structural changes to Israeli economic and fiscal policy—and such changes, it is universally agreed (and, seriously, now, how often is universal agreement reached on anything in Israel?)—must first of all resolve the difficulties faced by the “ideal typical” family of “Riki Cohen” who (it so happens) is said to hail from Hadera, the suburban semi-city between Tel Aviv and Haifa where my wife’s parents have lived for 25 years.
So, I am sitting here in their house in Hadera, looking over the pages and pages devoted to “Rikigate” in the thick Friday [think: Sunday] editions of Yediot Ahronot and HaAretz (including prized positions on the front covers thereof), and I realize: this is the evidence that the January version of me would have wanted to rip from the near future and point to in making my comment about the lack of a political present in Israel. . . .
Read more: Is There an Israeli Future? Post-Election Reflections on Minister Lapid, “Riki Cohen from Hadera” and the Pursuit of a Normal Society
By Lukasz Pawlowski, April 1st, 2013 
In the ongoing American and British debates on the financial crisis and the best ways to bring the economy out of the woods, two opposite views repeatedly collide – the one represented by those who prioritize deficit reduction, the other by those who argue for recapitalizing the economy. The case of the United Kingdom shows that drastic cuts – if not supported by stimulus packages – instead of tackling the debt may actually inflate it. The American policy record on the other hand, proves that even substantial stimulus packages do not always lead to economic revival. It’s not enough to throw some extra money into the pool – equally important is what these resources actually fund and whether they are accompanied by structural reforms.
British clamps
Moody’s decision to downgrade UK’s rating from AAA to AA1 announced at the end of February was a serious blow to David Cameron’s government as it undermined the whole austerity program Conservatives embarked on precisely to regain the trust of both financial markets and rating agencies. Nonetheless, in a speech delivered on March 7th Prime Minister announced he would keep on the chosen course since – as his famous predecessor once asserted – for this policy “there is no alternative.”
Many British economists do, however, see an alternative, and their number grows as it becomes clear that the spending cuts introduced so far, instead of reducing the debt, have increased it (from 600 billion in 2008 to 1.1 trillion four years later to be precise). How is it possible to cut down on expenses and inflate the debt at the same time? Excessive savings lead to economic contraction, which in turn reduces state revenues and forces the government to continue on borrowing. “What truly is incredible” – argued Martin Wolf in his “Financial Times” column – “is that Mr. Cameron cannot understand that, if an entity that spends close to half of gross domestic product retrenches as the private sector is also retrenching, the decline in overall output may be so large that its finances end up worse than when . . .
Read more: Tighten or Stimulate? British v. American Economics
|
A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|