Essays

In early 2014, the artist Anton Christian placed a shattered wooden boat in front of the impressive baroque Cathedral of St. Jakob in the heart of the Austrian city of Innsbruck. Christian had found the boat on the shores of the Adriatic Sea and brought it to Innsbruck to evoke images of Lampedusa, the Italian island that has become the symbol of the refugee crisis. After the boat was partially destroyed by vandals, the artist decided to keep the damaged object in front of the cathedral, supplemented by a marker that explained the attack. …

On 13 April 1943, on the 200^th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial to the nation’s third president. Facing a sharp wind blowing in from the Potomac, the president admired the heroic statue and read the famous words that grace the interior walls of the building: “All Men Are Created Equal.” In the midst of a global war against fascism, Roosevelt proclaimed that the Jefferson Memorial would stand as “a shrine to freedom,” dedicated to a man who bent his entire life to the proposition that “men are capable of their own …

Eviscerating the Constitutional Court and purging the judiciary, complete politicization of the civil service, turning public media into a government mouthpiece, restricting opposition prerogatives in parliament, unilateral wholesale change of the Constitution or plain violation of it, official tolerance and even promotion of racism and bigotry, administrative assertion of traditional gender norms, cultural resurrection of authoritarian traditions, placing loyalty over competence in awarding state posts, surveillance without check — with such policies and more, right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland …

The rise of right-wing political parties on both sides of the Atlantic has proved almost incomprehensible to mainstream political commentators. How can modern people in an integrated, cosmopolitan world embrace localism, racialism, and tribal identity?

The migrant crisis, and attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists, are commonly cited as reasons for right-wing parties’ successes in Europe. Likewise it has been suggested that the right wing in the United States favors protectionist policies in response to lost manufacturing jobs. …

My parents and I arrived from Poland in Tel Aviv a few months before the outbreak of World War II. The rest of our extended family remained in Poland, and none of them survived. Three of my grandparents, my mother’s six sisters and one brother, five of my cousins — all were murdered by the Germans. They were deported to the extermination camps from their various seats of residence — my town of birth Bielsko-Biala, Krakow, Makow-Podhalanski, Warsaw. I have visited Poland many times, and the presence of the Jewish absence in Polish life has constantly accompanied me. Books and articles of mine have been translated into Polish,I have lectured at Warsaw University, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow …

Stalin, in the first decade of Soviet power, backed the idea of “socialism in one country,” meaning that, until conditions ripened, socialism was for the USSR alone. When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared, in July 2014, his intention to build an “illiberal democracy,” it was widely assumed that he was creating “illiberalism in one country.” Now, Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, and puppet-master of the country’s government (though he holds no office) have proclaimed a counter-revolution aimed at turning the European Union into an illiberal project. …

The Oval Office is up for grabs between Clinton and Trump, and I can’t remember the last time that I, living in a capitalist society, as a consumer, somehow ran out of options. If I can get my beer non-alcoholic and my ice cream fat-free, surely I can get my presidential candidate non-corporate and scandal-free, right?

How did we get here? Trump is a shameless liar with no experience in political office; while Clinton has too much of the wrong kind of experience — for example, promoting fracking and selling arms around the world. We are trapped between Scylla and Charybdis. …

While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions of how one might be at home in the world into sharp relief. The fact that she was Jewish and German during the first half of the twentieth century profoundly influenced her life and writing. Given today’s refugee crisis, Arendt’s work is being examined anew in order to understand the ways in which mass statelessness has influenced the world since the twentieth century. As historian Jeremy Adelman wrote in The Wilson Quarterly: “Arendt’s voice is one we can turn to as we grapple with the spread of statelessness in our day. Camps and pariahs are still with us.” …

This year’s pride marches in Europe have taken place under the shadow of a threat, compounded by the recent terrorist attacks in Western Europe (Paris, Brussels and now Germany) and the slaughter at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. We have been urged not to give in to fear, while at the same time we’ve been told that undisclosed security precautions are being taken. The route of the Paris pride march was drastically shortened, supposedly for security reasons. It’s not clear whether the attack in Orlando was motivated by religious fundamentalism or was more the product of anger and anguish about the attacker’s life and sexuality. Either way, it could be just a matter of time before a similarly murderous anti-LGBTQI attack takes place in Europe. …

In a June 12, 2016, Op-Ed (“The Scope of the Orlando Carnage”) New York Times columnist Frank Bruni joined many pundits in cautioning against what he described as narrowly sectarian interpretations of the violence that was unleashed at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on the previous evening. “Let’s be clear,” Bruni declared, responding to “complaints on social media” about the failure of the mainstream media and politicians to avow the homophobic motivations of the attacker, “this was no more an attack on L.G.B.T. people than the bloodshed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris was an attack solely against satirists.” Extending this curious analogy between satirists and queer people …