By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 17th, 2010 
 Democracy, social justice, freedom, cultural refinement and pleasure, all, along with their opposites, are to be found in the detailed meetings and avoidances, engagements and disengagements, comings and goings of everyday life. The politics of small things has been our theme of the week.
Adam Michnik and I decided to try to organize our friends in a common discussion. Despite the workings of the security police and his jailers, and despite the hard realities of the cold war, we created alternatives in our own lives, and this affected many others. Although I am not informed about the specifics, I am sure that such things are now happening in China.
But I should be clear. I am not saying that therefore, the People’s Republic’s days are numbered, or that liberal democracy is just around the corner. Escalation in repression is quite a likely prospect. Michnik’s life after receiving our honorary doctorate did at first lead to a prison cell. Shirin Ebadi is in exile today, as was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after his prize. But people continue to interact around the shared human rights principles to which these people dedicated their lives, and this has persistent effects, at least for those people, but beyond their social circles as well. As Michnik put it “the value of our struggle lies not in its chances for victory but rather in the values of its cause.” My point is that if people keep acting according to those values, they are very much alive and consequential.
And it is in this way that I applaud the Afghan Womens Soccer team and  understand its significance. That these young women manage to play their game despite all the horrors of war and occupation, despite the persistence of harmful traditional practices and inadequate implementation of the law on elimination of violence against women in Afghanistan (this was the subject matter of the UN report that Denis Fitzgerald referred to in his reply to my post) is their great achievement. We have to pay attention to such achievements, and . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: the significance of the politics of small things
By Iddo Tavory, December 12th, 2010 
Iddo Tavory recently began teaching at the New School, in New York, after completing his Ph.D. at UCLA, in Los Angeles. His areas of research focus include the sociology of religion, temporality and interaction. -Jeff
Last week I went to MoMA. Since I came to New York I got more “culture” than ever before. It isn’t that Los Angeles had no great museums, but something about New York—or perhaps the fantasies of the city that I had—spurred me to go to museums much more. The exhibition I went to was Abstract Expressionist New York, which I was particularly excited about: New York art, shown in New York.
In other words, it is a bit like listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers in California, only far more highbrow. As my partner and I were walking around, we were trying to make sense of the paintings, to decide if we like De Kooning and Motherwell, to “get a feel” for this kind of art. Though we both come from middle-class families, neither of us feels really comfortable around modern art, say, after early Expressionism or Cubism.
It isn’t that we don’t like it, it’s just that we don’t feel like we know how to evaluate it. It isn’t that we aren’t moved, it is almost as if we don’t know how to be moved. It is a strange sensation, looking at a painting and trying hard to be moved. Being moved, after all, shouldn’t involve trying. That’s the whole idea with emotion.
In fact, we do learn to be moved. More precisely, we learn ways to open ourselves to the possibility of being moved. Through the process known in sociology as “socialization,” we learn the knowledge, skills and preferences that will shape the choices we make, the direction we take.
This isn’t only a nice sociological idea, but something that we found out first hand when we were leaving the . . .
Read more: MoMA KIDS: Teaching Art Appreciation
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
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Democracy, social justice, freedom, cultural refinement and pleasure, all, along with their opposites, are to be found in the detailed meetings and avoidances, engagements and disengagements, comings and goings of everyday life. The politics of small things has been our theme of the week.