What do you call it when Jeremy Corbyn walks into a Seder? Jewishness, Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) and ethical subject-formation

Then UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attendance at a Passover Seder organised by the radical leftist group, Jewdas, in April 2018, led to a brief but vitriolic controversy involving Anglo-Jewish umbrella organisations concerning who qualifies to speak as a Jew. This article uses this controversy to engage with Judith Butler’s attempt to address this question, suggesting that in decentring Zionist claims to Jewish subjectivity she fails to take account of how different Jewish subjectivities are formed, and thus ends up proposing a ‘good Jew/bad Jew’ binary that dissolves Jewishness into universal humanism. Drawing on the work of the German-Jewish mystical anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), the article proposes a different way of understanding subjectivity that retains ontological inherency as a plausible precondition for ethical solidarity. As such, the article’s argument has implications not merely for a reworked understanding of Jewish subjectivity but for the politics of subject formation more broadly.

Sing Me Back Home

This paper examines the role of country music in the political life of the Young Patriots, a radical leftist group composed of white southern migrants to Chicago that allied with the Black Panther Party during the 1960s and 1970s. It begins by taking up scholarly accounts of the Republican Party's strategic embrace of country music during the era before examining the ways in which the Young Patriots used country music as a tool to organize in their local community. It argues that by grounding their analysis of country in the political economy of their neighborhood of Uptown Chicago, and institutions particular to migrant enclaves—especially the urban “hillbilly bar”—the Young Patriots offered an interpretation of country's politics that runs counter to the racialized business logic that governed Music Row and White House as well as more contemporary narratives about country music's essential political intransigence. Finally, it offers provisional thoughts on how this case study illustrates a fundamental challenge for political progressives invested in country music: how to organize the complexity of a genre whose politics were—like the politics of the working-class—often divided against itself and expressed in deeply contradictory ways with regards to central political issues like race, gender, and the nation, and what it means to put those organized politics to work.

Modele polskiej polityki pamięci. Obrazy wojny o Lwów w listopadzie 1918 roku w polskich periodykach polityczno-społecznych w miesiącu stulecia niepodległości Polski

This article contains a comparative analysis of presentations in selected Polish periodicals in November 2018 of the war between Poland and the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic over Lviv and Eastern Galicia in the years 1918–1919. In an analysis of the media discourse the author takes into account factographic, axiological, teleological, ideological, and political dimensions. He distinguishes five conventions for the presentation of the events: national-dramatic, national-heroic, martyrological-defamatory, tragic, and tragi-comical. He argues that not all have been represented in the different models of memory policy functioning in the public debate in Poland under the governments of the Law and Justice party (2015–2019). He considers that there have been four such models: the nationalist-Catholic, conservative-nationalist, universalist-patriotic, and self-critical. He argues that the rightist political party (Law and Justice) has long aligned itself with the conservative-nationalist model, while centrist groups, and especially the leftist group, do not attach great importance to memory policy. The author points to the danger resulting from neglect of historical issues in the Polish media.

Measuring Judicial Independence Reconsidered: Survival Analysis, Matching, and Average Treatment Effects

This article reconsiders how to judge judicial independence by using the Japanese judicature, one of the allegedly-most dependent judiciary branches. In their influential work, Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2003) argue that judges who once belonged to a leftist group take longer to reach a ‘moderately prestigious status’ under the long-term conservative rule of Japan. Their method does not, however, deal appropriately with the possibility of judges not reaching this position because the judge dies, retires early, or is still at the early stage of her career. Ramseyer and Rasmusen also mistakenly assume that all judges will eventually obtain this position. This article develops a survival analysis model of judicial careers and attempts to solve the problems of censoring, left truncation, and split population. We also offer a way to utilize a matching procedure to estimate average treatment effects on censored time-to-event as well as event occurrence. We re-analyze a corrected version of Ramseyer and Rasmusen's data using their and our methods. One of the most important findings is that, contrary to what Ramseyer and Rasmusen argue, leftist judges are not discriminated against in terms of the timing of promotion.

Why Are Japanese Judges So Conservative in Politically Charged Cases?

Theory suggests that Japanese politicians have weaker incentives than U.S. politicians to keep lower court judges independent. Accordingly, we hypothesize that Japanese lower court judges who defer on sensitive political questions will do better in their careers. To test this, we assemble several new data sets and measure the quality of the assignments received by about 400 judges after deciding various types of cases. We find that judges who deferred to the ruling party in politically salient disputes obtained better posts than those who did not, and that judges who actively enjoined the national government obtained worse posts than those who did not. We also hypothesize that judges with forthrightly leftist preferences do worse in their careers. We measure the speed at which the 500 judges hired during the 1960s moved up the pay scale and find indications that judges who joined a leftist group were promoted more slowly than their peers.