Articles

An Appeal, A Denial, and A Letter Published

The following is a letter sent by Alan Sussman to the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Sussman is a trustee of one donor-advised-fund managed by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and he asked the Federation to send $1,000 to a group that opposes Israel's occupation of the West Bank. To his surprise and chagrin, his request to donate his family's money was denied.

What We're Reading

By Samantha Hill
Mike Jay writes about Walter Benjamin and Intoxication and Kathryn M. Rudy offers a startling account of how much it costs to be successful in some fields of academia.

The Culture of Nationalism and the New Racism

By Roger Berkowitz

Earlier this month at the National Conservative Conference multiple speakers sought to promote a “new American and British nationalism.” There was an effort to describe a nationalism grounded in strong national borders, and the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Also held up as the roots of American nationalism were constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.

What We're Reading: How to Save the Amazon

By Roger Berkowitz
Roberto Mangabeira Unger writes that lectures and stern words will do little to save the Brazilian Rain Forest. There are 30 million people living in the Amazon, Unger reminds us, and we “need to ensure that the forest is worth more standing than cut down. To that end, we must give the inhabitants of the Amazon the means to both use and preserve their environment.” Above all, what is needed is ways to make the people living in the Amazon aware of its worth to them.

Sexism in Academia & Bureaucracy 

By Samantha Hill
As a new semester approaches, Troy Vettese chronicles Sexism in the Academy. Littered with statistics about the ways in which academic structures, like teaching evaluations, halt the upward mobility of female academics, Vettese paints a bleak picture: There are two tenured men for every tenured woman. The proportion of black women among tenured faculty has fallen since 1993. 

What We're Reading: Wealth Gap

By Samantha Hill
Are we living in a new gilded age? Two pieces this week address the tyranny of wealth and celebrity “culture.” In the American Affairs Journal, John Pierpont Morgan, compares two moments of economic crisis, thinking about whether or not inequality is good for capitalism. The wealth-gap, he writes, is self-reinforcing. 

What We're Reading:
The Spirit of Free Speech  

By Roger  Berkowitz
Jason Richwine takes on the  argument that free speech only applies to the government regulation of speech. Of course, legally it is true that only the Constitution only protects speech from governmental restraint. But Richwine rightly argues that there the culture of engagement requires a broader protection of free speech. 

The American Algerians
 

By Roger Berkowitz
It is well known  that Richard Wright found in Paris the freedom he  never found as a black man in America. Maybe less well  known is that that James Baldwin, in his essay, “Alas, Poor Richard,”  accused Wright, as Adam Shatz observes, “of celebrating Paris as a “city of refuge” while remaining silent about France’s oppressive treatment of its colonial subjects.”

What We're Reading:
Thinking

By Samantha Hill
Liane Carlson writes about thinking for The Revealer, and what happens when we lose faith in thinking as scholars. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s critique of academic thinking, and those who rank among the professional thinkers, Carlson emphasizes the communal nature of thinking as an activity that we engage in, while reflecting on the declining state of academia today.