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, 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
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 21st, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis of “For and Against Memory” click here.
A few years ago, I had a couple of opportunities to present publicly my thoughts on collective memory: at the annual memory conference at The New School and at an interdisciplinary conference on resistance and creativity in Cerisy, France. Collective memory was then an emergent major concern internationally, and it has been a long term interest of mine, starting with my analysis of the way collective memory served as a base for independent public expression and action in Communist societies (published in my one and only piece in the premier sociology journal, The American Journal of Sociology). There was a kind of vindication for me in these developments.
While collective memory is now hot, I have long been interested in a topic (by the way informed by the work I did with Edward Shils, which indicates how I have learned from a conservative thinker as I have suggested in earlier posts). Yet, I am ambivalent about this development. I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the memory’s emergent academic and public popularity, concerning two problems. I see a disturbing trend, people turning to memory as they lose political imagination (this shows that I am not a conservative). Also, a too simple identification of memory with enlightenment concerns me (a conservative concern perhaps). By underscoring the importance not only of memory, but also of forgetting, I wanted to highlight these issues in my talks in 2008. And I am posting a version of the talks here today because I think the problems remain, though many academics including some of my students and colleagues are now addressing them. In a couple of weeks, I am off to Berlin to take part in a discussion on the topic of memory and civil society, where I hope these issues will be discussed.
I should add that at that time I was composing my presentation on memory, I was working . . .
Read more: For and Against Memory: Poland, Israel-Palestine and the United States (Introduction)
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