scholarly journals „To nie była Ameryka”. Z Michaelem Charlesem Steinlaufem rozmawia Elżbieta Janicka (Warszawa – Nowy Jork – Warszawa, 2014–2015)

2016 ◽  
pp. 364-480
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Janicka

“This was not America.” Michael Charles Steinlauf in conversation with Elżbieta Janicka (Warsaw – New York – Warsaw, 2014–2015)Born in Paris in 1947, Michael Charles Steinlauf talks about his childhood in New York City, in the south of Brooklyn (Brighton Beach), in a milieu of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. His later experiences were largely associated with American counterculture, the New Left, an anti-war and antiracist student movement of the 1960s (Students for a Democratic Society, SDS) as well as the anticapitalist underground of the 1970s (“Sunfighter”, “No Separate Peace”). In the 1980s, having undertaken Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, Steinlauf arrived in Poland, where he became part of the democratic opposition circles centred around the Jewish Flying University (Żydowski Uniwersytet Latający, ŻUL). In the independent Third Republic of Poland, he contributed to the creation of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.Michael C. Steinlauf’s research interests focus on the work of Mark Arnshteyn (Andrzej Marek) and of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, Yiddish theatre as well as Polish narratives of the Holocaust. The latter were the subject of his monograph Bondage to the dead: Poland and the memory of the Holocaust (1997, Polish edition 2001 as Pamięć nieprzyswojona. Polska pamięć Zagłady). An important topic of the conversation is the dispute concerning the categories used to describe the Holocaust, including the conceptualisation of Polish majority experience of the Holocaust as a collective trauma. Controversies also arise in connection with the contemporary phenomena popularly conceptualised as the “revival of Jewish culture in Poland” and “Polish–Jewish dialogue.” Another subject of the conversation is Michał Sztajnlauf (1940–1942), Michael C. Steinlauf’s stepbrother. The fate of the brothers was introduced into the canon of Polish culture by Hanna Krall’s short story Dybuk (1995, English edition 2005 as The Dybbuk) and its eponymous stage adaptation by Krzysztof Warlikowski (2003). Looking beyond artistic convention, the interlocutors try to learn more about Michał himself. This is the first time the readers have an opportunity to see his photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto.The conversation is illustrated with numerous archival materials from periods before and after World War Two as well as from German-occupied Poland. „To nie była Ameryka”. Z Michaelem Charlesem Steinlaufem rozmawia Elżbieta Janicka (Warszawa – Nowy Jork – Warszawa, 2014–2015)Urodzony w 1947 roku w Paryżu, Michael Charles Steinlauf opowiada o dzieciństwie spędzonym w Nowym Jorku, na południowym Brooklynie (Brighton Beach), w środowisku ocalałych z Zagłady polskich Żydów. Istotna część jego późniejszych doświadczeń związana była z amerykańską kontrkulturą, Nową Lewicą, studenckim ruchem antywojennym i antyrasistowskim lat sześćdziesiątych (Students for a Democratic Society, SDS) oraz podziemiem antykapitalistycznym lat siedemdziesiątych („Sunfighter”, „No Separate Peace”). W latach osiemdziesiątych, w związku z podjęciem studiów judaistycznych na Brandeis University, Steinlauf przyjechał do Polski, gdzie stał się częścią środowiska opozycji demokratycznej, skupionego wokół Żydowskiego Uniwersytetu Latającego (ŻUL). W III RP miał swój udział w tworzeniu Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich w Warszawie.Zainteresowania badawcze Michaela C. Steinlaufa ogniskują się wokół twórczości Marka Arnsztejna (Andrzeja Marka), Jicchoka Lejbusza Pereca, teatru jidysz oraz polskich narracji o Zagładzie, którym poświęcił monografię Pamięć nieprzyswojona. Polska pamięć Zagłady (2001, pierwodruk angielski 1997 jako Bondage to the dead: Poland and the memory of the Holocaust). Ważną część rozmowy stanowi spór dotyczący kategorii opisu Zagłady, w tym koncepcji polskiego doświadczenia Zagłady jako traumy zbiorowej. Kontrowersja nie omija zjawisk współczesnych, konceptualizowanych potocznie jako „odrodzenie kultury żydowskiej w Polsce” oraz „dialog polsko-żydowski”.Bohaterem rozmowy jest także Michał Sztajnlauf (1940–1942), przyrodni brat Michaela C. Steinlaufa. Historia braci weszła do kanonu kultury polskiej za sprawą opowiadania Hanny Krall Dybuk (1995) oraz teatralnej inscenizacji Krzysztofa Warlikowskiego pod tym samym tytułem (2003). Abstrahując od konwencji przekazu artystycznego, rozmówcy próbują dowiedzieć się czegoś więcej o samym Michale. Czytelniczki i czytelnicy po raz pierwszy mają możność zobaczyć jego fotografie pochodzące z getta warszawskiego.Rozmowa jest bogato ilustrowana niepublikowanymi dotąd archiwaliami sprzed drugiej wojny światowej i z okresu powojennego, a także z czasów okupacji hitlerowskiej w Polsce.

Stirrings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Lana Dee Povitz

Using the conceptual lens of terroir, this chapter provides an overview of hunger and poverty in the United States, starting with the urban liberalism of the 1960s and tracing the onset of austerity politics from mid-1970s through the early 2000s. It shows how New York City food activism was connected to an array of apparently unrelated social movements, including American Communism, community control, the countercultural New Left, feminism, Black Power, and AIDS activism. As governments reduced spending on social programs, leaders from these movements formed nonprofit organizations geared toward providing services, such as emergency meals and low-cost groceries. This chapter offers an overview of why and how service provision came to absorb the attention of late-twentieth century activists and shows how nonprofit kitchens and offices became sites of mentorship. As charismatic, overwhelmingly female leaders passed on values and strategies forged in earlier eras, they enacted activist genealogies that helped sustain political involvement over decades. Powerful interpersonal bonds and people’s own sense of being transformed by their activism illuminate the underappreciated role of emotion in the history of left-progressive movements.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Polletta ◽  
Katt Hoban

Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Making decisions by consensus, decentralizing organization, and rotating leadership serves to model the radically democratic society that activists hope to bring into being. Our comparison of consensus-based decision-making in three historical periods, however, shows that activists have understood the purposes of prefiguration in very different ways. Whereas radical pacifists in the 1940s saw their cooperative organizations as sustaining movement stalwarts in a period of political repression, new left activists in the 1960s imagined that their radically democratic practices would be adopted by ever-widening circles. Along with the political conditions in which they have operated, activists’ distinctive understandings of equality have also shaped the way they have made decisions. Our interviews with 30 leftist activists today reveal a view of decision-making as a place to work through inequalities that are informal, unacknowledged, and pervasive.


2000 ◽  
pp. 198-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Bergesen

Wallerstein came of age intellectually at Columbia University, where he was an undergraduate, graduate student and faculty member for a quarter of a century (1947-1971). While we often think of his work on African politics and his concern with third world development as precur-sors to world-system theory, a large part of his intellectual biography was shaped by those Columbia years. They mark the high point of a triple hegemony of university, city, and nation, as at this time Columbia was the leading university in the leading city of the hegemonic nation. It was a time before the 1960s when the New Left and Berkeley would challenge the centrality of New York and Columbia as undisputed centers of American social thought and it was before what would be called the policy intellectuals would emerge in Washington DC in the 1970s/80s. It was also a time before the great in?ux of federal money in the 1960s which spurred social research and lifted other universities to prominence. It was a time of what I will call The Columbia Social Essayists, referring to scholar/intellectuals such as C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter and Meyer Schapiro.


2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 188-193
Author(s):  
Manuel Yang

Putting together a reader from the polymorphously diverse writings of a formidably creative, dissident writer who reflects in his or her sensibility and voice the defining compass of the times that he or she has lived through and, moreover, helped remake is an unenviable task of tribute fraught with inevitable omissions and haunting incompletion. In his obituary on C. Wright Mills, his trans-Atlantic friend and comrade of the international New Left, Edward Thompson recognized that it was Mill's “style, rather than a comprehensive theory of social process . . . the style of a responsible and catholic eclectic” that he successfully attained in his late years and remains his enduring legacy. Thompson was able to make greater strides in achieving, if not a “comprehensive theory of social process,” a poetically incandescent, empirically textured way of reading this social process from the perspective of the English plebeians, artisans, and commoners, most famously with The Making of the English Working Class. Noting that in America The Making of the English Working Class “had both a Movement reading and an Academic reading,” Peter Linebaugh, a former student of Thompson's, has stressed its function as “an iconic text in some ways in the Movement . . . a text of particular class composition and a particular political moment” that also became among the students “a shield for the troops in this strategy, protecting us from the shafts and cuts of the Old Boy Network” of US higher education in the 1960s. Thirty-five years later, under the specter of another “particular class composition,” we may ask ourselves if The Essential E.P. Thompson can bid us to undertake new readings of the last “great bustard” and to pitch them against the neoliberal imperial Behemoth that encircles us today wherever we turn our eyes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randi Saloman

Dublin's Gresham Hotel, where Gabriel and Gretta Conroy end their evening in Joyce's most famous short story, has a fascinating history. It was founded in 1817 by Thomas Gresham, who began life as a foundling rescued from the steps of London's Royal Exchange and was thereby given the name of the Renaissance statesman who built that exchange. This sixteenth-century Thomas Gresham was even better known, however, for his eponymous ‘Gresham's Law’. Both Gresham's Law and the hotel setting and history enter into and help to shape ‘The Dead’. Questions of value and valuing suggested by Gresham's Law are shown to be more complicated than they initially appear, as they intersect with the various forms of hospitality traced in the story. The ‘secondary’ quality of the famous Dublin hotel (built by the second, unknown Thomas Gresham) underscores – and ultimately redeems – the theme of secondariness that runs through ‘The Dead’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-361
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Grau-Pérez ◽  
J. Guillermo Milán

In Uruguay, Lacanian ideas arrived in the 1960s, into a context of Kleinian hegemony. Adopting a discursive approach, this study researched the initial reception of these ideas and its effects on clinical practices. We gathered a corpus of discursive data from clinical cases and theoretical-doctrinal articles (from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s). In order to examine the effects of Lacanian ideas, we analysed the difference in the way of interpreting the clinical material before and after Lacan's reception. The results of this research illuminate some epistemological problems of psychoanalysis, especially the relationship between theory and clinical practice.


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