The Promise and Perils of a Clinton Victory and a Trump Defeat
President Hillary Clinton + The Politics of Small Things = Progress?
Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate?
I can’t say that I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. I may have been born just a little too late to have been caught up in the folk craze, though I do remember singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” during chorus in elementary school. I have my share of Dylan discs, of course, covering all periods from the early “protest” stuff to the mid- and late-1960s electric period and onto more recent back-to-the-roots material with Love and Theft being a particular favorite. …
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 death, pain, suffering, and deep wounds. The Polish neighbors of these victims, instead of providing help, had been their tormentors.
The location of the exhibit was an obvious choice: …
Against Exceptionalism, Beyond Triumphalism
A Review of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture
On 13 April 1943, on the 200th 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 …
Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power
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 …