By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 19th, 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. Today the New School is celebrating his life and work. To contribute to the day, I am re-posting a piece we put together last April.
Ary 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
He started his career as an Africanist, whose work on the Ivory Coast stands as a classic in the field. Aristide Zolberg 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), . . .
Read more: Aristide Zolberg, June 14, 1931 – April 12, 2013
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 24th, 2013 Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of Chicago, and my first and only long term position, at the New School for Social Research, was her primary American academic home. But when I was a Ph.D. candidate, she was feuding with her department Chair in the Committee on Social Thought, Saul Bellow, (or at least so it was said through the student grapevine), and she was, thus, not around. And I arrived at the New School, one year after she died. Nonetheless, she was with me as an acquaintance at the U. of C., and soon after I arrived at the New School, we in a sense became intimates.
A personal story
At the University of Chicago, I wrote my dissertation on a marginal theater movement on the other side of the iron curtain. I was studying alternative theaters in a polity, The Polish People’s Republic, which officially understood itself to be revolutionary, and that was analyzed by some critics, both internal and external, as being totalitarian. Thus, I read both On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism. From the point of view of Arendt scholarship, the effects of these readings were minimal. From On Revolution, I came to understand her point about the difference between the French and the American revolutionary traditions, giving me insights into the Soviet tradition, but this barely effected my thinking back then. From The Origins, along with other works, I came to an understanding of the totalitarian model of Soviet society, a model that I rejected. My dissertation was formed as an empirical refutation of the model.
But then I went to the New School, and in the spring of 1981, I came to appreciate Arendt in a much more serious way. A student kept on asking odd questions in my course on political sociology. I would use key concepts, and he repeatedly challenged my usage. “Society,” “ideology,” “power,” “politics,” “authority,” “freedom:” I would use the terms in more or less conventional . . .
Read more: Hannah and Me: Understanding Politics in Dark Times
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 12th, 2012 
To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth post, click here.
A couple weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at a conference honoring my dear friend and colleague, Vera Zolberg. The papers presented to this conference, “From the Art of Memory to Memory and Art,” were in her special fields of inquiry, the sociology of culture, the arts and the study of collective memory. It was a wonderful event, a long set of conversations with Vera and her work. The day’s proceedings revealed how her fields of inquiry have advanced in the past twenty years, how she has contributed to this advance, and how the fields can and do speak to general public concerns. I am hoping that we will be able to put them together in a special collection drawn from the conference. Here I present my contribution to give a sense of what we discussed and its significance. I started with one of my pet peeves, concerning the word “reflection.”
To continue reading the full In-Depth post “Art, Culture and Memory: Conversations with Vera Zolberg,” click here.
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 12th, 2012 When I hear the word “reflection,” applied to the study of culture, I reach for my red pencil, if not my gun. My problem with the word is that it stops inquiry just when it should begin. While it may be generally true that the ruling ideas of the times are the ideas of the ruling class, I think our job as sociologists and students of culture is to actually explain how this happens, what are the specifics, and the exceptions, avoiding reductionism, understanding both the significance of cultural creativity and accomplishment, and the complexity of the social world.
I am thinking of this pet peeve of mine today for two reasons: because I think that the work of Vera Zolberg stands as a model of what can be learned when we move beyond sociological truism in thinking about the sociology of the arts and memory, and culture broadly understood, and also because I am, ironically, tempted in opening my presentation today with a “reflection note.” As in: the intellectual quality of Zolberg, as a sociologist of the arts, collective memory and culture, is a reflection of the quality of Vera, as a person. And, ironically, I am not sure I can, or should even try, to explain this connection between professional accomplishment and personal quality, but I know I should talk about both the quality of Zolberg’s work and about Vera as a person (our people would say a mensch) today.
Vera and I have been closely connected professionally for a long time, from the beginning of my career as a serious student of sociology. We both worked to specialize in the sociology of the arts at the University of Chicago. When I was preparing my special field exam in this area, I discovered that there were three students who focused in their studies on the arts before me, Mason Griff (who I had studied with as an undergraduate), Hugh Dalziel Duncan and Zolberg. This was when I first read Vera’s work, her dissertation on the Art Institute of Chicago (a work that I still refer to, as the students in this semester’s departmental dissertation seminar can confirm).
Vera and I studied with the same teachers, Morris Janowitz, Donald . . .
Read more: Art, Culture and Memory: Conversations with Vera Zolberg
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