Adam Michnik Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

A Connection That Never Expired

In 1974, Jeffrey Goldfarb went to Poland to do research about democracy—and put down lasting roots

July 7, 2021 • by Elzbieta Matynia and Claire Potter

Claire Potter: Elzbieta, let's begin with when you met Jeff Goldfarb. Elzbieta Matynia: Jeff and Naomi Goldfarb came to Poland in 1973—Jeff was on an IREX fellowship, and Naomi attended some studio classes at the Academy of Arts. I had just begun my graduate studies. But we were both interested in the same ...

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

A conversation between Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Dwayne Betts

April 22, 2021 • by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Marci Shore

Marci: As you know, the original impetus for this forum was horror of the children being taken away from their parents at the American border, and my saying to Stephen Naron that we should use material from the Fortunoff archive to prepare a film about parent-child separation during the Holocaust. ...

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

Democracy

Democracy and Social Justice

On the significance of C.T. Vivian and Adam Michnik

March 11, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The New York Times, April 26, 1984: “A Polish Nobel laureate in exile stood in a church on lower Fifth Avenue yesterday and read an open letter of moral outrage from a jailed dissident in Poland to his jailer. The letter, as another speaker put it, fell like ''a tornado'' on the ...

Democracy

Donald Trump: Democracy’s Mirror image?

Modern liberal democracies can always cancel themselves

September 15, 2020 • by Philip Manow

______ In a modern representative democracy, power alternates via elections. Or, as one minimalist definition puts it: ‘democracy is simply a system in which incumbents lose elections and leave when they lose’.[1] But since they only leave after the event, democracy on this account of it can only ever prove itself ex-post. ...

Feature

Statues for Predators

Poland struggles with the entanglements of the Catholic Church and Solidarity

March 13, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

Less than two years ago, the Charlottesville alt-right march and various other white nationalist rallies threw into renewed spotlight the racist aspects of the politics of commemoration in the United States. Communities across the country, from Baltimore to New Orleans, began to assess more openly and more critically the value ...

Feature

#AgainstTrump

A re-invitation to read Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Notes from Year One

June 8, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

With the Donald Trump now virtually declaring, “L'Etat, c'est moi,” in his attempts to avoid possible indictment, I can think of no better time than now to highlight Public Seminar’s second book, Jeffrey C. Isaac’s brilliant #AgainstTrump: Notes From Year One (for a free download click here). The book was officially published to coincide with Adam Michnik’s visit ...

Feature

The Democracy Seminar, Then and Now

An Invitation

May 4, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We are imagining a forum for activists and thinkers who support democracy against the looming global threats of authoritarianism. The definitive feature would be openness. It would be a direct outgrowth of a small, international, at first clandestine, informal and improvised New School project, “The Democracy Seminar,” first proposed by ...

Feature

Gray Memory

On a Self-limiting Collective Imagination

April 13, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” So wrote Milan Kundera. Years ago, I found in his bold assertion confirmation of the findings of my first major research project on the sociological dynamics of cultural freedom. I would like to think my study of ...

Democracy

Democracy Dies in Darkness

A keynote address from the Dramaturgies of Resistance conference

February 28, 2018 • by Elzbieta Matynia

I have been fascinated by a dimension of political life that occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century in both non-democratic and democratic contexts. I think of this dimension -- something I experienced myself -- as closely related to the politics of hope, and I call it performative. Just ...

Feature

A Post on Friendship, Love and Power

On the Power of the Powerless in Dark Times

February 2, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“There are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen and heard, can be tolerated…there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the ...

Education

Women and Men in Dark Times (Syllabus Included)

University Lectures at The New School

January 29, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Elżbieta Matynia and I are teaching a special university wide course for undergraduates this semester, inspired by our favorite political thinker, Hannah Arendt, and her illuminating collection, Men in Dark Times. The course is a response to the present political moment. We, as did she, live in “dark times.” And as ...