Before the War Ended
A short story by Kay Hoff
Call For A Yell-Ceasefire Around The Polish Pogroms
A few weeks ago at 7/9 Planty Street in Kielce, Poland, we of the Jan Karski Society launched a permanent exhibition devoted to the Kielce pogrom, a tragedy suffered by a local community of Holocaust survivors for whom that city became a place, not of peace and security, but of ...
Antifascism as Political Passion in the Life of Cristina Luca
Far-left politics and radical universalism (including its Stalinist variant) seduced countless intellectuals during the twentieth century. Yet, this absorbing subject still needs to be deciphered and recalled. In a similar vein, the topic of apostasy, that is to say, the awakening to what Immanuel Kant once called “dogmatic slumber,” ...
...Clinical Psychology, Psychological Science, and Neo-liberal Times
Clinical psychology first emerged as a formal subdiscipline within psychology in the aftermath of World War II. During the war, psychologists were initially hired by the military to play a role assessing recruits for psychological stability, combat readiness, and potential for officer training. They were also charged with the task ...
Manufacturing Victory
A review essay on A. J. Blaime’s The Arsenal of Democracy
These days people generally think of Detroit -- with its vast expanses of abandoned real estate that have given rise to the photographic genre known as ruins porn -- as the place where modernity went to die. But for a good chunk of the twentieth century, Detroit was the ...
The War on Fascism
By my title,“The War on Fascism,” I do not mean the war between the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan on the other, the war that took place between 1939 and 1945. Rather I mean an unspoken ...
Sleepwalking into the Future? II
Is there a European memory creating a sense of belonging and encouraging civic participation?
This is the prepared text of a contribution to a conference of the Europe for Citizens Forum in Brussels on January 28th, 2014.
The title of this discussion employs the metaphors that describe walking into the calamity of WWI, as framing both the ways Europeans remember the 20th century, and even ...
Solidarity with Ukraine against Putin’s Reality
We should not be surprised by differences about how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding reasons for those differences is one critical step toward formulating an effective response. Recognizing both real policy options and the equal importance of political signals is the second. Moving too fast is ...
Sleepwalking into the Future?
Memory and civic participation in Europe: East, West, North and South
This is the prepared text of a contribution to a conference of the Europe for Citizens Forum in Brussels on January 28th, 2014. Irit Dekel, Anna Lisa Tota and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, also contributed to the Forum. Their texts are forthcoming.
It is an honour to reflect on European remembrance ...
Torture and Dignity
This lecture to the New School's General Seminar was originally published on the above date. Given the recent revelations concerning the CIA's program of torture, we are highlighting Bernstein's reflections today, Dec. 12, 2014. -J.G.
I. The Abolition of Torture
Human beings are the sorts of being who can undergo devastation: they ...
Thought-Defying Evil
In the summer of 1945 Melvin Lasky, who was stationed in Germany with the American occupation forces, visited Karl Jaspers. Lasky, a correspondent for the Partisan review, mentioned the name of Hannah Arendt. Jaspers had lost contact with Arendt since 1938 and was stunned to discover that she was still ...