Czeslaw Milosz Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

Jeff Goldfarb navigated–and worked through–the polar opposites that can define academic and political life

July 7, 2021 • by Irit Dekel

_____ Jeff Goldfarb has been my teacher, colleague, and friend: our conversations about culture, politics, democracy, and activism—through reading and writing, in public and private forums—have continued since I began as a student in the Department of Sociology at the NSSR. From and with Jeff, and by studying sites within which democracy ...

Culture vs. Anti-Culture

What kind of cultural commitment provides constructive alternatives to “Tax Reform,” Access Hollywood Denial and Birther-gate Revival?

December 1, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

As I sit down to write this post, “tax reform” is on the verge of becoming the law of the land in the U.S., giving to the rich, taking from the poor, disfavoring those who work to live (including some of the relatively wealthier among us). And as Jeremy Safran ...

The Anxiety of Poetry

Interpreting the Jill Bialosky scandal

November 29, 2017 • by Sarah V. Schweig

The poem goes on addressing the dead: “You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,/ Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;/ Blind force with accomplished shape.” War starkly polarizes whole peoples into friends and enemies and has the power to twist human values: In ...