On August 21, 2011, visitors to Bwog, a Columbia student news blog, found a shocking headline staring back at them: “BREAKING: Dean Moody-Adams Resigns.” Michele Moody-Adams, Dean of Columbia College, had sent a resignation email to the top administration and select alumni of the university. Moody-Adams charged that Columbia University’s administration was planning “changes” to the deanship that would “have the effect of diminishing and in some important instances eliminating the authority of the Dean of the College over crucial policy, fund-raising and budgetary matters.” She asserted that “changes of this kind will ultimately compromise the College’s academic quality and financial health.” “Because I cannot in good conscience carry out a role that I believe to be detrimental to the welfare of the College,” she continued in the email, “I have submitted my resignation as Dean of Columbia College, effective June 30, 2012.” Columbia President Lee Bollinger would not give her that long, demanding and receiving her immediate resignation the next day.

This chaotic rupture was a far cry from the jubilant reception Moody-Adams got when she assumed her position as dean in the summer of 2009. Observers expected the first woman and first African-American dean of Columbia College, a professor of philosophy, to add “gravitas,” as the New York Times put it, to her position. Only two short years later, Moody-Adams resigned by sending out an accusatory email before the university could officially announce her departure. Moody-Adams, known for her earnest sincerity, clearly felt unsettled enough by something to risk her professional reputation in a public flameout. But she never revealed what that “something” was, and the specific reason for her departure remains a mystery.

Moody-Adams’ abrupt resignation comes in the midst of great organizational shifts within Columbia University, with the College at the center of the transformation. It is no coincidence that her resignation followed a report by McKinsey and Company, an executive consultancy group, delivered to the university administration. Many have speculated that Moody-Adams resigned because the report recommended greatly reducing the role of the dean, a position that historically holds sway over effectively every aspect of the College’s undergraduate operation.

The report, which is confidential, may very well do so. Sources I spoke to within the university rest blame not in McKinsey’s report, but rather in other administrators like Vice President of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks, the technical boss of the dean. They believe that Dirks might be pushing to diminish the dean’s decision-making role in the College, thereby increasing his own power.

But the recommendations of McKinsey or a power grab by an administrator mean nothing unless and until the Trustees of Columbia University and President Bollinger choose to act on their plans.

Columbia University is a massive organization. Columbia College is much smaller within that system, but it has retained special privileges and rights within the university bureaucracy, such as control over financial aid, the Core Curriculum, curricular standards, and alumni fundraising that its dean has traditionally protected. A weakening of the dean’s power would eliminate those advantages, endangering the storied institutions that make Columbia College a premier place of higher learning.

The main, and most important, beneficiary of the College’s liberal arts’ character and powerful dean is the undergraduate Core Curriculum. The Core is important for two reasons: its “traditional” nature encourages alumni to donate to the College, and its curriculum provides a rigorous general overview of Western thought and literature rarely seen in an American university today. But with a class size capped at twenty students each and a requirement for all Columbia College freshmen and sophomores to take its main courses, the Core also incurs massive expenses, making it a likely cost-cutting target for the central administration.

A powerful Dean of the College is the biggest administrative obstacle standing between corporate Columbia and the Core. Any dean will jealously guard the responsibilities entrusted to the position—a powerful dean will actually succeed. Moody-Adams’ resignation made it clear that the authority of the dean is under attack at Columbia. Should the campaign succeed, the Core, and therefore the very character of the College that defines the Columbia experience, may be next.

Moody-Adams Shut Out

Even without an official statement from Moody-Adams on why she stepped down (she did not respond to any emails sent to her by The Current), it is still possible to understand the context of her decision. The answer begins with the structural changes taking place at Columbia over the past decade.

Over the last ten years, Columbia University embarked on a massive institutional expansion to build a new campus in Manhattanville and  establish educational centers abroad. According to several individuals affiliated with the university I spoke with throughout this semester, in 2008, Columbia began reassessing its core organizational structure to cut costs and streamline the university ahead of its expansion. These sources indicate that the administration made the Arts and Sciences division its main target. This conglomerate of divisions within the university includes Columbia College, as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts, the Graduate School of Architecture, the School of International and Public Affairs, the School of Continuing Education, and the School of General Studies—the meat of Columbia’s liberal arts operation. Vice President Dirks, with the blessing of President Bollinger, hired McKinsey to consult on the process in the fall of 2010.

The review began as Austin Quigley, the dean of the College since 1995, was winding down his tenure, which officially ended in July 2009. Moody-Adams, hired away from Cornell University, came without any awareness of the coming shifts at Columbia. (“There’s a lot to learn,” she said in an opening interview with Columbia College Today.) Her relative ignorance of Columbia’s inner-workings left the deanship exposed while other elements within the university geared for battle ahead of McKinsey’s recommendations.

In an example of this preemption, the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the professors and departments that comprise the core of the university’s undergraduate level, heard of the plans, and, in response, launched the Policy and Planning Committee in September of 2010. Wayne Proudfoot, a professor in Columbia’s religion department and one of the ten inaugural members of the Policy and Planning Committee who ended his tenure as planned at the end of summer 2011, told me that the committee “was established to energize the faculty,” and cultivate a larger culture of faculty governance at Columbia. According to one source, its members insisted on “interviewing” McKinsey before it was hired, to signal some control over the process to Dirks and Bollinger’s administration. McKinsey was hired, completed its recommendations, and delivered them to the university in a highly confidential report during the Spring 2011 semester.

Proudfoot revealed that over the summer the committee held various meetings debating the budgetary and organizational recommendations of the McKinsey report. He informed me that Dean Moody-Adams was present at the committee’s general meetings, along with the deans of the other Arts and Sciences schools.

However, Proudfoot also said that Moody-Adams did not attend a series of higher-level strategic budgetary meetings between the committee and the top administration of the school, including Vice President Dirks, who represent what is known on campus as the president’s cabinet, or simply as Low, a reference to the central building that houses Bollinger’s offices. Various other off-the-record sources confirmed this claim. An internal email obtained by The Current and sent to the Arts and Sciences faculty from the committee on August 30, 2011 seems to confirm this claim, stating that, “Four meetings were held [with President Bollinger] during May, June, and July.” The email talks of President Bollinger’s plans to “eradicate” deficits in the Arts and Sciences, but fails to reveal how he will do so.

When we spoke at the beginning of this semester, Proudfoot did not understand why this would be the trigger for Moody-Adams’ resignation because none of the other deans were invited to the higher-level meetings, either. He also said that he found nothing in the McKinsey report that, in his mind, Moody-Adams would find onerous. He believes that the university could release a modified report without harm, and that at the committee’s higher-level meetings, Bollinger “committed to endowing the Core when going out to fundraise among alumni,” something which has since been reported publicly in the Spectator.

On the face of it, Proudfoot’s argument that these high-level meetings should not have triggered Moody-Adams’ resignation would seem to make sense. No other deans of the Arts and Sciences schools were invited. None of them quit in response to their exclusion.

However, a look at the university’s history, and the unique role that the Dean of the College has played in it, shows that Dean Moody-Adams, the person who controlled almost all of the College’s important functions, should have had a position at the negotiating table. Her exclusion from it exemplifies the structural frustrations that she contended with during her tenure.

The College’s Diminishment and Subsequent Revival

In Stand, Columbia, a definitive history of Columbia, Barnard professor Robert McCaughey describes how, in the late 19^th century, elite institutes of higher education in the United States began to transform from mere colleges into larger, multi-school universities. Debates raged in academic communities around the role that the original colleges would play in the new universities. At Columbia, where the administration bet on professional-oriented graduate schools as the future of education, McCaughey describes how this period ended in “the relegation of the College.” Over the next generation, Columbia significantly expanded the Law School and the School of Mines, created a modern medical school, and founded Teachers College. And it shifted hiring power and financial resources toward these schools at the expense of the College. As McCaughey puts it, “Columbia became a world-class university as rapidly and as fully as it did because it was not held back by what [then Columbia President] Barnard…viewed as the dead weight of a collegiate past.” The College effectively became a commuter school for local New Yorkers, and Columbia’s undergraduate reputation and community deteriorated.

By the 1920s, Columbia’s enrollment was up, but, according to McCaughey, longtime Columbia President Nicholas Butler assessed in 1921 that the university needed to increase its capital stock by 40 percent. Tuition funded over 50 percent of the university’s operations, leaving Columbia with little extra cash to expand. Unlike Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which all raised funds from their undergraduate alumni, Columbia College graduates proved more reluctant. McCaughey suspects that their reticence stemmed from the fact “that most graduates from the College had been commuters and [were] thereby less likely to have generated the bonding experiences with class and college that existed on residential campuses and years later produced generous gifts.” The university made no real movement to rehabilitate the College until the late 1980s and 1990s.

Columbia University suffered as a result. By the 1960s, it maintained an operating deficit that its administrators were unable to stanch until Michael Sovern became president in 1980. Sovern, an alumnus of the College himself, balanced the budget and sought to improve the financial and reputational standing of the university. Toward the end of his career, he became more vocal about Columbia’s need to revitalize the College’s financial and academic operations. George Rupp, who replaced Sovern in 1993, realized that sentiment by initiating infrastructural and academic enhancements that focused on placing the College, as Rupp put it, “at the center of the University.” During his presidency, Rupp increased Columbia College enrollments by 25 percent, from 3,200 students in 1993 to four thousand in 2002, an expansion strategy that continues today under President Bollinger who took over from Rupp in 2002.

The Powerful Dean: A Peculiar Institution

On the surface, Rupp appears to have succeeded. Columbia College improved its campus infrastructure and curricular life dramatically, and saw the requisite increase in donations from alumni now convinced of the College’s prominence within the university. According to a source familiar with Columbia’s fundraising efforts, Columbia College receives ten times the donations of any other Columbia school. Since Rupp began his re-centering strategy, Columbia’s endowment has increased from about $2.2 billion in 1995 to about $7.8 billion today.

Ironically, the long neglect of the College by the university allowed the undergraduate dean  to create a powerful fiefdom within the College itself. With the College in the background, university administrators gladly let its dean reign without much oversight. But when the College became a more central part of the university, Columbia found itself in a position unlike other elite universities. At Harvard, for example, the dean of the undergraduate college deals almost exclusively with undergraduate student life issues like housing, advising, and student health, leaving financial aid, curricular requirements, and fundraising to the university administration. The Dean of the College at Columbia thus enjoys a unique level of power—the power that Moody-Adams sought to protect in writing that the planned changes to the university structure would have the “effect of diminishing and in some important instances eliminating the authority of the Dean of the College over crucial policy, fund-raising and budgetary matters.” Many of the College’s most ardent supporters suspect that Moody-Adams was right to accuse the Low administration of attempting to diminish the power of the dean.

A Fine Balance

What remained in question, however, was where the administration sought to transfer the influence of the dean. Sources I spoke to within the university expressed anxiety that the dean’s power would move to the office of the Vice President of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas Dirks. Like the College’s prioritization, the Arts and Sciences is a recent invention. The consolidation of Arts and Sciences’ six schools started in the late 1980s and was formalized in 1991 with the newly created position of vice president sitting atop it. In their new home, the respective deans of the faculty organizations retained their respective powers, but answered to the new vice president.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences was underfunded from the start. “Even as Columbia College expanded,” McCaughey writes, “the social sciences and humanities departments continued the now two-decade process of downsizing their graduate programs.” These two structural trends—an expansion of the College and a budgetary reduction in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—subordinated a well-funded position like the Dean of the College beneath an under-funded one like the Vice President of Arts and Sciences. Such a situation created no small amount of confrontation.

Before Moody-Adams’ resignation, the severest example of such friction manifested in Dean Austin Quigley’s firing, and reinstatement four days later by President Rupp in 1997. Quigley was forced by Rupp to resign over severe disagreements the dean had with then Vice President of Arts and Sciences David Cohen over disbursement of funds that Quigley was raising for the College. Rupp’s move to side with Cohen backfired: powerful alumni and students, “staged a veritable sit-in at Rupp’s office” over Quigley’s firing, reports McCaughey in Stand, Columbia. The dean was known as much for his popularity among the students as for his fundraising prowess with College alumni. In this case, Quigley rallied alumni support through his cultivated relationships and cemented the dean’s power during his tenure.

His reinstatement, though, failed to eliminate structural fiction. The Dean of the College oversees the Core Curriculum and undergraduate financial aid. Both are essential to the College’s success. Both also operate as money sinks. The Vice President of Arts and Sciences tends to the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences—academic departments, professor benefits, and some salary, among other things—and is tasked with ensuring a happy and well-functioning faculty.

On the face of it, these priorities dovetail. A competitive and dynamic college would be neither without a competitive and dynamic faculty—the same could be said vice versa. However, with funds scarce, responsibility bifurcated into two positions, and an imbalance in both titular authority and fundraising capabilities, internecine conflict will ensue.

When the vice president perennially faces a budget shortfall, especially since the recession hit in 2008, multiple sources suggested that he reaches for the largest, lowest hanging fruit available to him: the college’s financial aid or the Core. Siphoning money from the College, though, is a bit tougher than raiding a cookie jar. The real debates occur over long-term budgetary priorities—something that was the central topic of discussion in the high-level meetings this summer from which Dean Moody-Adams was excluded.

Traditionally, the dean still holds tremendous informal sway over the process. Big donors rarely give to the university without aim. Most of the time, large donations are earmarked, and the person who attracted that donation, the dean in this case, can strongly influence what university projects see that allocation. Since such power relies on the dean’s alumni relationships, when a Columbia neophyte like Moody-Adams assumes the deanship, the dean’s sway erodes. Without the informal, relationship-based power to draw on, the dean is left in charge of nearly all the College’s functions, but with a diminished ability to shape what those functions will look like down the line.

When the Policy and Planning Committee was granted a seat in this summer’s high-level discussions, the formal strategic process not only excluded a college representative, but included two de facto representatives from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Vice President Dirks from its administration and the Policy and Planning Committee from its faculty. Moody-Adams found herself in a position without the informal fundraising-based control over the process, and a lack of formal influence over strategic and policy-making decisions.

Faced with such a predicament, Moody-Adams had three possible choices: 1) work quietly within the university to improve her formal standing, 2) privately complain to powerful alumni who might have helped her, or 3) play the nuclear card and go public, an option that would either lead to instant dismissal or instant ascendance in the eyes of many students, faculty, and alumni. She chose the nuclear option and sent out a resignation email. Her move was an utter disaster and failed to spark a movement to save the dean at Columbia.

The Interim

It seems that the simplest answer to why Moody-Adams chose the nuclear option is also the truest: encountered with the structural pressures of her position, which were exacerbated by her exclusion from the high-level summer meetings, Moody-Adams simply gave up on trying to move the discussion in her direction. She lobbed a Hail Mary and fell miserably short of her target—almost short enough to suggest that she never wanted it to succeed in the first place. The common assumption is that Moody-Adams is smart enough to demystify the Machiavellian workings of Columbia’s upper echelons. It is possible, however, that she took the job of dean without understanding its unique position in the university, and the challenges threatening to dismantle that position. Being Dean of the College might be compared to being a member of congress with no formal leadership role, but with an ability to exercise immense behind-the-scenes influence. That role, however, does not fit on a job description when being hired, especially when the ones doing the hiring are attempting to diminish the position’s power. Moody-Adams did not need to resign to assert her rightful role in the College. She could have done better by persevering through the pressure and securing formal recognition of the dean’s importance, or barring that possibility, cementing the type of alumni relationships that would have given her that power, albeit informally. She didn’t, and the Columbia community should move beyond the Moody-Adams era.

Which leads to the man who filled her shoes: longtime Columbia professor and star teacher, James Valentini. Much of an already wary faculty is convinced that Valentini (who declined an interview request at the beginning of this semester) is, as many sources put it to me, a “tool” of Dirks and the Low administration. Multiple factors support this claim: Valentini was appointed interim dean almost immediately after Moody-Adams’ resignation, he is said to have a cushy relationship with the Low administration, and his wife, fellow Columbia professor Teodolina Barolini was the Policy and Planning Committee’s chair in 2010-2011 and remains a member of it today.

Valentini’s near universal acceptance as Dean of the College by the general undergraduate student population alarms some observers. The interim dean knows the quickest way to a Columbia student’s heart: a Milano sandwich and a plaque engraved with his Bwog nickname sitting front and center on his desk. He succeeded in delivering both, simultaneously, to the undergraduate population in the month after his appointment. If he is both Dirks and Low’s man, then his appointment might ring the death knell for the storied institution of a powerful deanship.

But, by all accounts, Valentini is a smart, thoughtful man, with the interests of undergraduate students truly at heart. More importantly, as one source told me, “he knows what he knows, he knows what he doesn’t know, and he wants to quickly know what he doesn’t know.” This revelation lends a glimmer of hope to an otherwise bleak future for the deanship.

The Future: Recommendations

The  ambiguous position of the dean of the College within the university is untenable. It works well when a strong personality, with knowledge of the position’s history, assumes office. But when someone new to the university and its intricacies enters the position, it can lead to a bureaucratic infighting and chaos. The confusion and angst caused by Moody-Adams’ resignation is merely the symptom of an incredibly broken system, one that must be fixed—quickly and decisively.

First, in the short-term, Columbia must do its utmost to reassure alumni that it will not cut the budget for either the Core Curriculum or financial aid. The greatest fear is that both or one of the two may slowly disintegrate under the weight of financial austerity and increased class size, potentially leaving Columbia’s academic experience unrecognizable in the future. That is the alumni nightmare, and Columbia must allay those fears by increasing its transparency. To begin with, it can release an executive summary of the McKinsey report to the public as a means of clearing the air surrounding its recommendations. President Bollinger (whose press office did not return an email requesting comment for this piece) should also deliver an open address to provide his official take on the matter, allowing him to outline a clear policy vision and gain the trust of those wary of his actions. And, lastly, Teodolina Barolini should resign from the Policy and Planning Committee immediately. This may change little in practice, but Valentini’s credibility will suffer among the faculty and the alumni as long as this most obvious conflict of interest exists.

With his credibility restored, Valentini may defy the wishes of the administration and defend the power of the deanship. Low might have believed it was hiring a yes-man when it chose Valentini as interim dean, and that may yet prove true. But, should Valentini wish to assert his position, his popularity amongst the students will allow him to ask the hard questions with some protection. The university and the College are at a crossroads. With its peculiar and powerful deanship, Columbia has stumbled onto a unique and compelling model for the modern-day liberal arts college situated within a much larger, corporatist university. To ensure its continuation, the university should elevate the deanship to a position on par or above that of the Vice President of Arts and Sciences. Free to maintain the privileges that the College has long enjoyed, the dean of the College can secure a holistic approach to the undergraduate experience. It can protect the academic traditions that define Columbia, such as the Core Curriculum, while simultaneously safeguarding the richness of campus life. A dean in charge of one and not the other could fail to uphold the integrity of both.

–David Fine, Editor in Chief

//DAVID FINE is a junior in Columbia College. He can be reached at fine.davida@gmail.com.

By Stephanie Goldstein

Our names sound different.

Speaking the God-gurgling syllables

In our baby-fat calves

And tender, roasting ears.

Committed to orthodoxy

Down to the split grains of sugar

Heaps of damp flour in

Our digested Hebrew-lettered childhood

I always hear the sweetness churning.

I am bent over you

Head bobbing back and forth

Whispering Hashem, Hash—

Curve, curve dash.

You only hear me

In the language God spoke

When he told us we were sisters

Bound to each other through tales

Of oppression, revenge, and miracles

Where the Jews came out on top over and again

On top of my back.

Shaping me into a pretty, obedient black letter of heaven

I bend over you

I curve under your bend

We are the tradition before

Abbreviation

The Hebrew before English

The sisterhood before religion

Ingrained in our Jewish-star hearts

Sometimes straight beliefs are not so straight.

Dot my Hebrew-Godletter-Hey

And I am in New York City.

Where lights are always on

My eyes are still adjusting.

I start talking to boys,

Real boys—men—not fake baby-filled futures

But I can hear the baby needs

In their modern man-screams,

In their masculine way of saying

“Hello baby.”

Water soaks the flesh of your exposed white ankle

A puddle of bones beneath your Calvin Klein skirt

Before we came here

Your skin was an off-white color

Sweating the steam off heaven’s throat

Almost like the bubbling light in my old white synagogue

Walls streaked with more than paint

But I see the color in religion in

My new N.Y.C. temple

The diversity of our sisterhood

In wool turtlenecks, slutty spaghetti straps,

Sex and synagogue.

But I am still Sarah Chanah

My Hebrew name still has meaning

In all interpretations

Sounding in my ears like love

I still see the tradition in modernity

And I still say no.

We are the sisters

With curves in our ink-blotted spines

With black streaks over our peek-a-boo sexuality

And I am not willing to compromise my curves

For your dash

I want up-to-interpretation Judaism

The cracked Torah parchment

Oiling my hands with butter

Until they can feel nothing but the hot grease

And I say yes.

Knowing we are more than sisters

Judaism is more than religion

More than God

More than me and you.

I want it all.

The curves and the dash.

You are not just an abbreviation

A letter

But our name

That bears no language

To be spoken.

The cursive Hebrew letter “Hey” is often paired with a dash as an abbreviation for G-d’s name.

\\STEPHANIE GOLDSTEIN is a first year in Barnard College. She can be reached at shg2111@barnard.edu. Photo by Flickr user Katie Cowden.

By Jacob Snider

Recently I have been obsessed with the mannerisms of human beings—the way we speak and talk, and also…the way we walk. This fall, in New York City, I have been consumed with simply watching the way people maneuver through space—o­n the sidewalk, crossing the street, on the subway, or while they are eating on a bench. In all of these arenas, there are social contracts and standards of “accepted behavior.” Of course, these public spaces, being inhabited mostly by people who are strangers to one another, do not have written constitutions—rather, we observe silent contracts and silent standards.

Often, humans follow other humans’ behavior because they are afraid to stand out, or to be caught doing the “wrong thing.” To me, this is never more apparent than on the hustling bustling NYC streets, where everyone hurries from A to B, and no one wants to engage with some strange stranger.

In this piece, I created a scenario based on real experiences, that flips some of these expectations. In my world, non-conforming movements are prized possessions, and interacting with a completely random human can be sacred and beautiful.

This is the Boroughing into my mind after experiencing the sidewalks of New York.

late afternoon on Amsterdam

crying on the sidewalk, face down naked lathering gallons of sun is not necessarily admired in this America. this may be the wish of the vendor who peers behind his silent streetcart, eyes wary like the stare that greets a stranger at a motel with no vacancies.

we are approaching my favorite time of day. summer sun has fallen, light blue glow bathes over everything, relaxed twilight. puddles line the street like ponds, do they ever dry?

it’s the shit and tears we’d like to spill on the sidewalk, the girl in the red and yellow dress quips, and her laughing sounds like crying. they’re putting a small dog into a small dog carrying case before they board the person bus. mama says shut up and flicks her bony finger in the girl’s face. redyellow is still laughcrying.

this noise can’t push past the wooden doors of the cafe, where the younger european whispers above american grandma. “that’s why she goes crazy. because she’s too smart!” snaps the blonde, wobbling, a terrible porcelain doll of a person. the middle schoolers will rush in soon. these younger ones are a flood-tide that knows no limits.

we look adoringly at three things: children, dogs, and old people. excusing all the actions of, holding the door for, smiling at, nodding toward, a slightly blank gaze. is it unthinking?  overconscious? on the surface, infinitely forgiving.

though there is so much screaming we wear on our faces.

the bussines-man

Business-man is still going for it. And the energy is increasing.

The fat city bird watches, perched on the city bench.

Business-man flings his head to face the bench, and scowls in disgust, as if he has smelled something awful. He begins to rotate his head, gesticulates with his hands, and lets out a wordless noise that lasts for over ten seconds. He contorts his body theatrically. Amoeba. Machine. Dinosaur. A combination of all three.

His performance is directed at a woman, who belongs to the fat bird.

She has thick glasses, a raincoat, and wrinkled hands. She is preparing for something. Her eyes begin to fidget.

She lets out a sqwawk, whipping her face up to the sky.

Woman responds to business-man’s contortions with movements all her own. There is no gracefulness whatsoever. A unique physical gesture has been assigned to every number in existence, and a random number generator has replaced her brain.

Unclear whether the tango of recklessness is a battle or an alliance. They are stomping, gyrating and jerking together like baby raptors.

Seeing such expression—which is fearless but not vicious—some passersby faint. Others attempt to walk onwards, to pace politely past the situation, toward wherever they were going, but fail, falling to the ground. A gravitational force has connected their eyes to the two-person spectacle, and with torsos glued to the pavement, their legs still mindlessly pursue a walking motion, feet suspended in the air.

\\JACOB SNIDER is a junior in Columbia College. He can be reached at jss2195@ columbia.edu. Photo by Flickr user Tonicito.

By Aaron Kohn

Relieved to land in Dulles, having feared Hurricane Irene would block my flight from Addis Ababa, I sit in the almost empty airport, keeping my fingers crossed for my connection. It’s the first time I’ve had high-speed Internet (one of my flaws) in a number of months, and I’m sure the glow of my laptop screen on my glasses makes me look in a trance. I barely notice that a young man has chosen a seat directly across from me in the waiting area. My eyes meet his.

He looks like he has just come from Africa—a smile too big for your normal traveler, white Adidas too well kempt for an American, a non-descript empty backpack over his shoulder. He confirms my stereotype when he says, “Hello,” in a thick African accent.

“Where are you headed?”

“Nashville,” he replies, prompting me to look up at the monitor to see that his flight isn’t leaving till 4:25 PM. It’s 10:15 in the morning.

“You have a bit of a wait,” I think out loud, not mentioning that he could really be stuck if the storm arrives by then.

“Yes. I know, nowhere to go,” he says as he looks around the terminal not with unease, but amazement.

“Where are you from?”

“Zimbabwe.”

“Today?” My forced air of surprise entices him to say more.

“Yes, it’s been a long day.”

“Harare or Bulawayo?” I inquire, knowing he will associate himself with one of two big cities.

“Harare,” he replies. “But now I am a permanent U.S. resident like you.” He adds, “I hate Zimbabwe.”

“Ah. Okay,” is all I say. The situation feels too uncomfortable to offer congratulations. So many people I’ve run into in Africa dream of coming to America. Too many.

We idealize immigrants so much in America—especially Africans—that most of us don’t know where Zimbabwe is, and probably won’t bother finding out. When someone hears that this boy left Africa, they will think life there was terrible for him, not because they will know about the politics of Robert Mugabe, but because it is “Africa.” He has no idea.

***

Looking at my laptop, he stands up and asks, “Can I change my Facebook to Nashville?”

This being his first few hours in America, the suggestion seems amusing. I nod my head curiously, happy to keep the conversation going. I turn my laptop towards him so he can log in. Then I click “Edit Profile.”

“Make it Nashville.” I type in the city. Below I see he was born in 1985. There’s not a lot on his profile. He notices too.

“Interested in women,” he adds.

Seeing the “About” box blank,” he says, “I like football.” I begin typing, but add, ‘(soccer).’

“Here we don’t call it football.”

“Soccer. Okay,” he agrees in a tone that doesn’t clearly indicate whether or not this is news to him.

His voice gets more emphatic, his tone more excited, and maybe too loud for two people sitting next to one another in an empty concourse. “No more Zimbabwe! Delete the picture.”

We make his profile picture blank. “All Zimbabwe pictures, delete!”

“You want to delete everything about who you are?” I ask in a worried tone. What proof does he have that life in America will be better for him?

“I hate Zimbabwe,” he says as we delete five of his six photos, leaving the logo of “The Oprah Winfrey Network” as the only remaining photo.

This is immigration. No more Ellis Island. No obvious estrangement. Possibly wait months or years to save money. Endure lines and frustration at an embassy where young State Department servants learn to block out the stories in order to see the statistics. Win a lottery for a residence permit and make a Facebook update. Take the last gaze at a familiar country, at home, for the foreseeable future.

With the final click on Facebook and one’s past can be erased. Put behind. Out of mind. Off the web. Forgotten. Deleted. A blank CV. A migrant with a one-way ticket. A new Act I at age 25, with a love of Oprah.

“Log out.” I follow the instruction, shut my laptop and stick it in my backpack.

Unzipping his bag, a stapled stack of paper emerges. It is an official pamphlet for “Permanent Residents.”

“This place is money.”

Did the phrase come from some rap song or is there a language barrier? He sort of explains, “Did you know that in Zimbabwe, a bag of corn chips costs $4 [dollars are standard currency since Zimbabwe’s money became worthless], but over in that store,” he points across the terminal to a Hudson News shop, “it is only $1.80.” Somehow, it seems he could tell me the price difference on most of the items in the store.

“That is…if you can find food in Zimbabwe now,” I add, trying to appeal to his discouraged side.

“It’s not like 2008. It was very bad then. No food. Empty stores,” he says.

That was the year when I decided to bail on a drive to Harare. The U.S. Ambassador’s car had been stopped in a media stunt, and a New York Times reporter had been arrested. It was illegal to have U.S. currency at the time, but to buy petrol from the government, one had to use dollars. Someone must have thought “Catch 22” meant Statute 22.

“What will you do in Nashville?” I try to change the subject.

“I can make maybe $900 a month in landscaping, right? And I can find a place to stay for $100 a month?” he asks.

“I’m not really sure…”

“Or in hygiene, maybe $1,100 a month?”

“What do you mean?” afraid of what comes next.

“You know, cleaning toilets and bathrooms. Maybe I can save $500 a month! This place is money!”

Clearly the land of opportunity.

 ***

“Can I use your phone to call Harare? I’ll give you $2.”

Thinking it probably costs $3.99 a minute, I don’t say anything and hand him my iPhone.

A loud voice and a joke later to a friend, he hands me the phone back. The few people who have arrived around us watch. He doesn’t offer me money and I don’t ask.

***

Back in the backpack, another stapled packet appears. “One six six two,” he points to the price of his ticket on Ethiopian Airlines. “It’s a lot, right?” he says in a tone that seems to be looking for my agreement.

$1,662 isn’t a bad airfare, but one can only imagine what he went through to get it. In fact, few will understand what the average person’s life is like in a place like Zimbabwe. After the books I’ve read, documentaries I’ve watched, people I’ve met, and days I’ve spent in neighboring countries, I can’t imagine what life would be like.

Zimbabwe isn’t at war. There are still daily flights to Harare, Bulawayo, Livingstone. There are often lines of Chinese construction workers with duffel bag in one hand and hardhat in the other boarding the flight to Harare in the Johannesburg airport. But these are not the indicators of safety—economic, health, or thought.

Most Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa or Botswana. Only a few get the opportunity to venture further. Some onlookers might regard those who abandon their homes at times of greatest need disparagingly, but the need to erase one’s history and one’s memories of home shows something much more meaningful in one’s psyche. Trauma. For some emigrants, it might be too late for reparations at home—leaving no option but to leave it.

***

When I finally have to board my flight, I debate whether to mention the impending hurricane. What happens to this Permanent Resident if he gets stranded? Could his first 24 hours in the U.S. be spent on an airport bench, unsure of where to go and what to do?

Cowardice takes over as the dark clouds and wind loom ever closer. Hopefully I am not the only friendly traveler. It feels special to have been a part of someone’s identity arrival, even if it all it took from me was the click of the track pad.

I board my plane. The pilot tells us we might be the last ones out before the storm.

Later that night, I check online to see if the Nashville flight was cancelled. It wasn’t.

By Maddie Wolberg

As such, the spotlight came to rest squarely on America’s academic institutions. Who better to play the role of detective? Universities and think-tanks were easy pickings—officials had the luxury to choose from hundreds of experts, each with intensive research skills, a deep interest in and preoccupation with their subjects, and, perhaps most importantly, time and energy to focus on projects and research. Academics and other professional intellectuals had a well of knowledge dug deeper and narrower than that of the U.S. government. Many had government backgrounds or were practiced and celebrated political, economic, and social analysts. Having largely concentrated on war efforts and administrative tasks, Government officials lacked both the time and the focus of academics, but they desperately wanted comprehensive information on the Soviet machine—and fast.

Beyond this, area studies were becoming increasingly more popular at academic institutions. Intended to focus squarely on one region or even country in particular, area studies attracted students with an interest in understanding regional politics, culture, and language to gain a complete grasp of every aspect of the particular region. Thus sovietology—the study of the Soviet Union and a prime example of concentrated area studies—was born. Some academics, including David Engerman and Alexander Motyl, in recent books have voiced criticisms of the academic study of sovietology during the Cold War, questioning whether the field was perhaps too intimate with government influence. Engerman sums up the problem of sovietology—and the difficulty of assessing the blurred lines between academia and government—when he writes in Know Your Enemy, that during the Cold War, “intellectual life took place in an era of government support or government interference, depending on one’s perspective.” Columbia University’s Harriman Institute struggled with the same problem during the post-war and early Cold War period: given the mutual reliance of government and academia upon one another, how close was too close?

Harriman (originally called the Russian Institute) was created in the name of somewhat less explicit goals. It was founded in 1946, on the tail end of World War II and at the beginning of an era defined by a new international enemy, the Communists. Engerman, a historian on the topic of sovietology, notes that the Rockefeller Institute (who led the charge in sovietology and later helped establish Harriman) hoped to “promote area studies not as a means for knowing enemies, friends, or subjects, but as a means of spurring more cosmopolitan general education, promoting interdisciplinary research, and reducing the ‘provincialism’ of the social sciences.” Nonetheless, by the time the Harriman Institute came to fruition, the Rockefeller Institute was working with new partners to develop academic centers for sovietology: the U.S. government and its intelligence services.

Columbia was targeted as a prime spot for such an institute. It already had the Naval School of Military Government and Administration (NSMGA), which taught international affairs and intensive language with a regionalist focus. The NSMGA marked an already-present connection between government and academia; it had been designed as “an experiment,” seemingly intended to test the waters for a relationship between government intelligence and academia.

The Harriman Institute similarly bridged the gap between the U.S. government and academia, creating a network of information and data that could be shared for mutual benefit. It was initially supported by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a World War II-era intelligence agency which later acted as a feeder of academics to Harriman. The first director of Harriman, Geroid Tanqueray Robinson, was the former head of American Soviet researchers for the OSS. He had begun his career as a civilian academic. His staff was also largely comprised of those who had been in military or government service during the war. Immediately, the linkage between the government and the institute was established and was kept up by a constant flow of staffers from OSS projects called in to work on Harriman initiatives.

Area studies claims to promote understanding and knowledge about America’s neighbors—something that held true for the Harriman Institute. Yet the government depended on information from Harriman for its wartime intelligence and military activities, thus making explicit a major element of the relationship between the two. Harriman’s technical independence, as part of a private university, belied its close link with the OSS and other intelligence agencies. Catherine Nepomnyashchy, the former director of the Harriman Institute, noted in Sixty Years of the Harriman Institute that, “as in the OSS during the war, the faculty at the Institute were training their students in research methodologies tailored to penetrate Soviet obfuscation about everything from production statistics to the rigors of everyday life in the U.S.S.R.” Similar research tactics lead to similar conclusions—a hint at the deep connection between the work of Harriman’s academics and the ways in which it was used. Engerman writes that, “army officers and diplomats […] wanted concrete answers to concrete questions.” They were more interested in simply having information and applying it to a situation than understanding the theories and pedagogical implications behind area studies. The Harriman Institute was also apparently founded to promote research and understanding specifically of the Soviet Union (as opposed to a broader study of regions). In effect, to provide a glimpse of what was really happening in Russia, tellingly called by Winston Churchill a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Harriman, along with several other institutions and universities including Stanford and the Hoover Institution, intended to help fill a major gap in information about activities within the Soviet Union. While Harriman’s research certainly filled the same gap for academia, the government later used this information for various Cold War operational activities. According to Engerman, the “inter-disciplinary model”—that is, area studies—“was oriented toward the start toward serving policy needs.”

We conceive of academia as unbiased and without special interests which might affect its research outcomes. This was seemingly compromised by the close relationship between the Harriman Institute and the U.S. government during the early Cold War era. But was there indeed something fundamentally wrong about using independent intellectualism for policy purposes? Olga Khvostunova, an assistant professor at Moscow State University and a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute this semester studying the role of think-tanks in Russia and the U.S. during the Cold War, told me that the legitimacy of the work done by an independent think-tank or academic institution is compromised when it is commissioned by the government or too closely involved with its interests. Often, she said, a “government will choose what they want to choose” out of a research analysis, risking an emphasis on certain beneficial aspects while neglecting others which make not be so flattering or useful. This is especially dangerous, Khvostunova noted, when think-tanks and academic institutions downplay their cooperation with government bodies or private actors, a relationship that is “sometimes not articulated.” We need only to look to recent scandals that exposed Columbia Business School professors who failed to disclose their personal interests on Wall Street, and with governments, while researching and reporting about the current economic crisis to understand this problem’s seriousness.

Similar scandal, while not frequent, and rarely recorded in writing, certainly occurred at Harriman during the height of the Cold War and the Red Scare. There is some evidence of underground CIA funding for publications of the Institute, including the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, which was dedicated to attaining Soviet news from within the country and which was headed by a Columbia professor. Either party, however, apparently never acknowledged the subject of where sudden bursts of funding came from for the struggling publication. More frighteningly, contemporaneous with the rise of McCarthysim in the 1950s, several prominent scholars at the University were accused of having Communist tendencies or influences. They were mostly reinstated, but not without consequences for the academic community: Engerman notes that the “climate of fear” established during the witch hunts of the 1950s may have resulted in “scholars opting for ‘safe’ topics, students opting to study different regions, or seminar participants taking care not to appear pro-Soviet.”

The story of relations between Harriman and U.S. governmental agencies is not wholly a bad one, however. The intensive collaboration between the two bodies may have resulted in broad, positive benefits. After all, despite concerns that the government may have excessively influenced Harriman research and conclusions, there is little doubt that the field of area studies gained huge support after the government became intimately involved in promoting it. Regionalist scholars, especially those of previously understudied areas like the Soviet Union, benefited from increased resources and support for their projects and enabling the growth of sovietology and, later, of Russian and Eastern European studies. Beyond this, common sense suggests that the more sources of input—and the more diverse backgrounds and environments from which this input comes—the better and more comprehensive the outcome will be. This seems to have held true for the Harriman Institute as well. Fledgling projects like the Current Digest of the Soviet Press benefited from government interest in the project, which not only allegedly supported it financially, but also helped its writers gain access to the country via connections at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where diplomats were already clamoring for translation services. Given the somewhat troubled relationship between the embassies—Russian officials had previously refused to grant student visas to American scholars, claiming that universities were too full as it was—the members of the Harriman Institute, coupled with diplomats in Moscow, seem to have exerted some pressure on the U.S. State Department and perhaps the Soviet government, who had been wont to permit such collaborations.

Khvostunova similarly notes the potential for positive collaboration between governments and public or academic institutions: “People in government can’t be experts in every issue. … They need intellectuals, the media to work with them. … [A better model would be] like the Agora, a place where people can come together and ideas are exchanged.” She points out that activists and intellectual leaders should, in fact, become more involved in “the apparatus” of government in order to effect policy change. It is difficult not to agree with this point in the era of public conscience and consciousness, where multiple sectors of the populace—and notably academics and students—have the opportunity to engage in governance and force reform.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, Legvold, the former Harriman head, told me that the Harriman Institute has reduced its connections with the government, only permitting collaborations between scholars and government bodies that are contracted independently and are born from “contact which is informal.” He emphasized the importance of keeping a separation between government and academia, remarking that, during his tenure as director, “we didn’t want any entanglement or any negative consequence from working with the government, especially from working with the CIA or the Department of Defense,” both of which have reputations for conducting secretive, backdoor operations. The risk of government collaboration says Legvold, “is that the outside world is looking at [our] research and says it’s colored because it is done for the government or the CIA.”

Indeed, Harriman has benefited from its hefty endowment, supported by private donors and independent organizations, which has helped it to avoid any serious reliance on government funding since the 1970s. Given recent concerns over the Chinese government’s growing interest in establishing a “Confucius Institute” at Columbia, which will only be supported if Tibetan studies at the university are de-emphasized or even cut, it is not surprising that Legvold is quick to defend the Harriman Institute. It is this type of awareness and distaste for government interference, however, which will continue to protect the Harriman Institute, and other academic institutions and organizations like it, from losing their independence and choice of projects. The death knell of independent and unbiased intellectualism will only sound, it seems, if we lose sight of keeping academia open and honest—always imbued with the goal of improving the academic community, society, and the world.

By Shira Poliak

The early kibbutzim transformed the landscape, actualizing the Zionist dream of an independent and viable Jewish homeland. Olive groves and orange blossoms produced luscious crops, and once again the land flowed with milk and honey—not from the fountains of Biblical miracles, but from the cracked hands of men and women who found repose in their passion to develop the land, in a shared sense of purpose. The kibbutz movement continued to grow throughout the early- and mid-twentieth century, both before and after the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.

Approximately one hundred years since the creation of the first kibbutz in Palestine, the kibbutz movement today is slowly withering. Pockets of kibbutznikim, members of these communities, are making exodus to urban centers. Some kibbutzim are also privatizing, adapting their original collective ethos to conform to contemporary industrial realities. But over 250 kibbutzim continue to dot the map of Israel, from the south of the country to the north. Despite their shrinking numbers and shifting nature, the movement is still a prominent feature of Israeli society and history—bearers of a treasured conception of patriotism that has inspired other young pioneers who yearn to build nations of their own.

Juma Sutralino is one such pioneer. A South Sudanese refugee who fled to Israel years ago, Juma returned to the land of his birth a year and a half ago, prior to his country’s independence this summer. Juma spent his time in Israel scraping a living as a dishwasher on a kibbutz in the southern city of Eilat. Despite living on the margins of Israeli society, he learned Hebrew, befriended native Israelis, and grew to admire the kibbutz model he witnessed firsthand.

As a song writer , Juma has performed in the prominent Tel Aviv Cinematheque venue in Israel. Now, resettled in his homeland, Juma has replaced song and lyric with a desire to actively build his newly-independent country. Juma believes that kibbutzim could play a pivotal part in South Sudan’s future: kibbutzim, he told me, can “help unite people and teach them how to help each other out”.

Following a civil war between the Sudanese central government and Southern rebels that lasted nearly five decades and killed over two and a half million people, South Sudan became the world’s youngest country in July 2011. The war left South Sudan with little infrastructure or institutions with which to tackle its overwhelming poverty, continued sprouts of violence near its border with Sudan, and dysfunctional education and health systems that are some of the most undeveloped in the world. Half of the population does not have access to drinking water. Nearly 80% of women neither read nor write. The new South Sudanese government, international actors, and South Sudanese émigrés who have since returned are now working to modernize the state. Like the early kibbutznikim, the people on the ground are determined to actualize their intense yearning for political stability and economic prosperity, for a more viable home.

Juma was part of a small number of refugees—about 600 men, women, and children—who returned to the new South Sudan from Israel. Representing about 20% of the Israeli population of South Sudanese refugees, they have returned to a country they barely remember and to conditions dissimilar to those of the realities they originally fled. But they are not alone: the returnees from Israel are part of a larger refugee migration to South Sudan. In fact, more than a million refugees, many who fled to neighboring African nations, have resettled in the country since the United Nations ruled that it was safe for them to travel home six years ago. The UN’s decision followed the 2005 peace deal, brokered by the United States, in which the Sudanese government and Southern rebel forces both sanctioned the South’s secession and the creation of an autonomous state.

South Sudan is well-suited for Juma’s dream for kibbutz revolution. Though only a meager 4% of the country’s land area is currently cultivated, a promising 90% of it is arable. The country boasts a vast natural resource base, ideal for the economics of labor-intensive, agrarian production. Some analysts predict that South Sudan could become a major food exporter in the region, a source desperately needed in light of food shortages plaguing sub-Saharan Africa.

The former song writer-turned-activist has not only proposed a development model, but is beginning to take substantive steps toward implementing his Israeli-inspired vision. Juma told me during a conversation this summer that he had met with the nation’s Agriculture and Health ministers to develop an implementation strategy for the project. Speaking comfortably in a mix of English and Hebrew, Juma successfully managed to convey his enthusiasm over the telephone. While politicians, economists and citizens will continue to wrestle with South Sudan’s deep structural and social problems for decades, Juma’s efforts and determination to build a kibbutz exemplify the endeavors of otherwise-ordinary South Sudanese individuals who are using non-traditional means to rebuild their country on a fundamental level.

And yet, Juma’s relatively cheerful disposition belies a refugee experience in Israel marred by hardships. Israel received a dramatic increase in African refugees in 2007, as conditions for Sudanese and Eritrean refugees in Egypt began deteriorating and following an incident in which Egyptian police killed over thirty Sudanese refugees in central Cairo. William Tall, a representative for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Israel, told me that It also became more difficult for African refugees to seek asylum in Europe. In that year alone (2007), some 5,000 refugees crossed the Egyptian border into Israel. The influx of asylum seekers en masse was Israel’s first such surge of non-Jewish Africans in its short history. Since 2007, refugees have continued to stream into Israel by the hundreds of thousands. There are now nearly 35,000 African refugees in Israel, according to the Israeli government. Of these, the UNHCR estimates that about 3,000 – 4,000 are from South Sudan. While Israel has successfully integrated thousands of Jewish immigrants, it lacks an official refugee policy or asylum process directed to non-Jewish, non-Palestinian refugees.

Israel is ill-equipped to provide basic services to the throngs of new immigrants and has a dearth of resources and manpower with which to assess individual asylum claims. African refugees such as Juma receive a conditional release visa that protects them from deportation, but provides little else. The protection does not constitute a work permit, and refugees cannot apply for one. They are not eligible for social benefits, such as health care or education, nor can they file individual asylum claims. Worse still, visa holders must travel to the Ministry of the Interior’s refugee processing center in the central Israeli city of Lod to renew their protection status every 3 months. For Juma, renewing his protective status meant missing a day of work, losing much needed pay by traveling over eight hours to a small, inefficient office. Once there, depending on the mood of the particular officer or the number of cases seen that day, one’s visa may or may not be renewed.

These frustrating technicalities and policy inadequacies prevented Juma from getting an education while in Israel. Juma had “a vision to enter university to feel like a human being and have something to do in the world,” he told me. His inability to obtain funding to enroll in college in Israel also motivated him to return to South Sudan.

“There is a lot of work in Israel,” he said, referring to the relative ease for Sudanese in Eilat to find jobs illegally working in hotels or washing dishes, “but it’s hard because we want to learn. It’s important to advance, not just to work. When you work, you stay in the same place. When you travel outside, you need to get more knowledge to then be able to give support [to] our country. We didn’t get that in Israel.”

And so, motivated by South Sudan’s impending independence, a beleaguered Juma turned from his exile and flew to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, a year and half before this summer’s independence. His trip, however, was beset by its own peculiar challenges. UN officials and Israeli refugee NGOs were concerned that the returning refugees could be killed if the government knew of their connections to Israel. And so, while the Sudanese government was informed about most of the returning refugees and from where they were coming, Juma’s return was kept a secret. Homecoming for Juma thus not only engendered dislocation, but meant gambling his life. His return was coordinated by an international aid organization, Operation Blessing, in consultation with the UNHCR. In keeping with international standards of refugee transfers—in which the host country pays for the refugee’s travel home—the Israeli government partly funded his flight.

Juma joined one of the first groups from Israel to return to South Sudan because he was determined to vote in a January 2011 referendum in which over 98% of South Sudanese voters called for the creation of an independent South Sudan. This was Juma’s first chance to exercise a democratic rite.

Nevertheless, leaving Israel was not easy for Juma. He had to say goodbye to a tight-knit community of South Sudanese refugees in Eilat, the many friends who he said became his makeshift Israeli family, as he did not have any relatives there. Though ecstatic to reunite with his mother, who he had not seen in years, he was returning to a country he barely knew.

But the opportunity to be a part of this historic nation-building process neutralized Juma’s lingering doubt. “If there is a problem at home we have to fix the problem—that’s why we are here,” he told me resolutely, imploring his peers to return home as well.

Other refugees share Juma’s resolute commitment to rebuilding their homeland. They have followed his lead, flying from Tel Aviv to Juba on Operation Blessing-chartered flights, and assuming interesting roles in the narrative of South Sudan’s early development. Prior to returning to South Sudan six months ago from Israel, Asunta Ceasear completed a course in brick making: a poetic, if not utile, step toward literally constructing the nation that she longed to make hers again. She returned to South Sudan with her seven-year-old daughter, who now attends school in Juba.

Renting a room in the young country’s capital and reunited with her sister, Asunta said that South Sudan appears dramatically different from the country she fled six years ago. Back then, “there was no difference between night and day,” she said, referring to the constant barrage of smoke and ash from heavy bombing during the civil war. The sounds of gunshots were a fixture of daily life. But now, the new capital is “peaceful, without shooting or discrimination,” she said. While celebrating independence this past July, Asunta was overwhelmed: the event passed as she cried tears of joy, tears of disbelief. It was a moment she never imagined witnessing.

Despite the excitement of independence, the refugees with whom I spoke are still acutely aware that the road ahead will challenge their optimism. Asunta made the unfamiliar journey home without her husband, who remains in Israel, enrolled in a computer course and making money to support his wife and daughter in Africa. Many families have also chosen to separate temporarily. In some cases, the husband left first to establish a home before bringing his wife and kids. In others, as in Asunta’s, the wife and children undertook the first anxiety-ridden steps toward home.

Though Juma has made money playing at a few weddings in South Sudan, neither he nor Asunta have found a steady job. William, a 29 year old single man who returned to South Sudan in May and dreams of becoming a farmer, also has not found work. William said that many people in Juba are having trouble paying for basic provisions, such as water and gas. He paid 10 pounds for 50 liters of water—the equivalent of $3.74 U.S. dollars—which is “a lot if you are not working,” he told me.

These daily challenges are compounded by continued violence in some regions. Fighting resumed along the border between South Sudan and Sudan soon after the July independence. Since September 2011 and continuing for the following few months, temporary refugee camps in border regions have sustained continuous bombing. The UN Refugee Agency reported that Refugees have testified to cases of abduction and rape of women and girls by armed militias.

I learned about these stories and began researching the history of South Sudan as a reporting intern at the Jerusalem Post this summer. After exploring how South Sudanese in Israel were celebrating independence and how the new state could affect the status of the thousands of South Sudanese refugees who are still living in Israel, I was curious to piece together the stories of the refugees who had chosen to return to Africa.

Juma’s kibbutz initiative addresses the gnawing question about how refugees’ past experiences—living temporarily in a culture that is essentially not their own—prepare them to handle the challenges they confront in a country many have not lived in for decades and in which the problems far outnumber the meager resources to mitigate them. Juma left a country that, though flawed, had become familiar. He has returned to a homeland that is alien to him now and is beset with tremendous obstacles. To cope, Juma has chosen to learn from the only home he really remembers—Israel—in order to rebuild the one he left behind—South Sudan.

Juma’s story, like the stories of the other refugees to whom I spoke—in essence, the story of South Sudan—is a story in motion. It doesn’t have an end and is being played out in real time, a fact evident in the way these individuals are sharing their narratives. Unlike Juma, most of the other returnees related their tales in broken Hebrew and English. The phone connections were very poor. I sat glued to the phone in the Jerusalem Post basement, focused on hearing incredible stories of personal strength, of fear overcome, of commitment to one’s country. Most of the former refugees I spoke to did not have the luxury of setting up formal interview times, and instead spoke to me while shopping at the market, or during short breaks between meetings with friends.

The creation of new states was commonplace at the end of World War I and following the Soviet Union’s collapse, but opportunities to witness the building of nations come rarely today. Juma’s story, like those of his peers, is one of construction “on the margins”—the daily challenges, the yearning and the quest, the profusion of conflicting emotions. He is at once deeply appreciative for the things he learned from the kibbutz and mindful of its inadequacies, with which he must now reckon. The challenges of his past and his longing to transform his estranged homeland into a nation present a situation in which success is uncertain and the stakes are high—exceptionally high.

Suspended in an uncertain position, Juma’s kibbutz does not necessarily promise to be established. What will happen to Juma—and to the rest of his South Sudanese brethren—no one can say. He knows this. But with an unwavering spirit, and like the Israeli kibbutznikim before him, Juma is determined to intrepidly pursue his national birthright.

\\SHIRA POLIAK is a junior in Barnard College and a Contributing Editor of The Current. She can be reached at smp2156@barnard.edu. First photo courtesy of PikiWiki Israel. Second photo courtesy of United National Photo.

By Jeremy Liss and David Fine

Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, a Bloomberg View columnist, and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He writes about a variety of subjects, but lately Goldberg’s published works, including his book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, focus on the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wider geopolitical movements of the Middle East. Recently, The Current sat down with Goldberg in The Atlantic’s Watergate offices in Washington, D.C. for a discussion reproduced below in condensed and edited format.

Click here to jump to an extended version of this interview.

Obama’s kishkas

The Current: You’ve interviewed a lot of interesting people like Barack Obama, for instance. Is there something you see that you can tell us from meeting him about the way he acts—and how that might inform his decision-making and emotional temperament?

Jeffrey Goldberg: There is this perception among Jews that, “Oh, he’s so cold to us, he doesn’t like Israel, he doesn’t like Jews, he doesn’t feel it in the kishkas,” and all that other shit.

The truth is, when you meet him, he is just a cool character.

Like, it’s completely possible to imagine that any world leader upon meeting him comes away thinking, “Wow, I don’t know if that guy liked me,” because he’s just cool. He doesn’t emote, he doesn’t grab your shoulder, he doesn’t hug. It’s all an intellectual relationship he has with people, and you see it up close, and then you sort of walk away understanding. Jews who need a lot of emotional reinforcement on this set of subjects—I’m not saying that as a disparagement, it’s just reality—don’t get what they need from him because of his nature.

[…]

I sort of came away from a couple of encounters with Obama thinking, “Ah, this is why people think that he doesn’t like Israel,” because he’s not a guy who conveys a lot of heat about anything.

And it’s a political fault, in a way, because you’ve got to fake things in order to get your way, and he probably would have had more of his way with certain Jewish constituencies if he had been able to fake sincere love of Israel. I think he has an interesting and sympathetic intellectual relationship with the idea of Israel, and he certainly is a person whose been shaped in many ways by his exposure to Jewish writers, Jewish professors, Jewish thinkers.

Goldberg’s stomachache

The tension comes from two—I want to say contradictory but they are not contradictory—observations, they’re actually independent, but mutually reinforcing, observations.

The first is that the world has it out for Israel. Israel is held to a completely separate standard than any country including the United States. Europe, and this shouldn’t be surprising, Europe is a place that is hostile to the idea of Jewish nationalism. The Arab world is moving toward more extreme forms of anti-Semitism, not toward reconciliation. So, it is true that Israel is singled out for special scorn, it is true that the world has a pornographic interest in Israeli failings, real or imagined, what is also true, and this is the separate observation, is that Israel and its leaders are engaged in various self-destructive policies, from my perspective.

There’s a war going on inside the heart of Israel and the heart of the Jewish people over the definition of Zionism. My definition, and the definition of the original Zionists, I think, is that Zionism is a liberation movement of a people. But there is a minority, but very powerful faction within Israel and the Jewish people, who argues that Zionism is about the redemption of a specific piece of land, and that side, though I think it’s the minority, seems to be driving Israeli policy. And it’s driving Israeli policy in very dangerous ways.

So the stomachache comes from the realization that there are two trends that reinforce each other. One is the world’s dislike of Israel and the other is the set of Israeli policies that create more dislike of Israel and that accelerate it or intensify the dislike, then creates a whole set of other negative reactions in Israel, such as all these moves to essentially, I don’t want to overhype it at this point, but to limit democracy in various ways.

The pain of this is that it’s easy to be one of those people who says, “Israel’s terrible, it’s a ridiculous place, it should be battled.” It’s easy to be one of those people who says, “Israel’s always right and that any criticism directed at Israel from the Jewish community or without is a kind of anti-Semitism.” What’s harder these days is to acknowledge that Israel is on a path in many ways—a self destructive path—and that much of the world is very eager to help Israel destroy itself, and if that doesn’t work then just to destroy it.

And there’s a sadness, there’s a sadness that a lot of Jews feel. Maybe that’s not the word they would use to describe the feeling, but there’s confusion, and there’s angst, and there’s sadness about what’s happening because the narrative is no longer clear. The narrative is muddy. At a certain point you just have to say to Israelis, “Look we have a certain advantage sitting over here, we can understand a little bit better, you’re insular, you’re a very small country but you’re also surprisingly insular.” We have the advantage of sitting here and looking there and saying, “This isn’t going down very well…it’s certainly not going down well with many Jews college age and in their late twenties and thirties.” They’re not relating to it in the same way that people in their mid forties relate to it.

It’s interesting, I was thinking about this the other day: My feelings about Israel were completely shaped and formed before the first uprising, which was 1987. Then, okay, so I had a basis, a platform, on which to think about Israel, and it was a positive platform. And then you sort of can criticize and analyze, but you have at bottom a kind of positive notion about why the basic cause of Israel is just, even if many of its policies are cruel or self defeating or greedy or whatever word you want to use. What’s happening on campus today is that people your age have only known Israel as a country stuck in this swamp of settlement and occupation and you’ve only known Israel, the conflict, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People older than you remember it as the Israeli-Arab conflict, and those are very different things.

The Arab Spring: cycle breaker or accelerator?

It’s not an Arab Spring. It’s an Islamist Awakening. The Muslim Brotherhood-style groups are coming into power, are or will be coming into power, in half a dozen countries. The Muslim Brotherhood is theologically committed to the idea of the elimination of Israel. It’s a theological problem. Israel poses a theological problem. There is a solution to the theological problem.

I don’t spend a lot of time hunting down moderate Islamist leaders. I think if you’re an Islamist, you’re an Islamist: You have a set of beliefs about Jews and Israel that is fairly immutable. That’s not to say that the Muslim Brotherhood, when it takes power in Egypt, is going to break the peace treaty in Israel. I don’t think the Egyptians are particularly interested in having a war with Israel, I just don’t think there is any hope for a negotiated settlement backed by moderate Arab regimes.

I think this is part of a natural historical cycle. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop the weather. We are moving through—Arabs moved through nationalism and it didn’t work, then it moved through a long period of dictatorship that’s coming to an end, now it’s going to move through a period of more Islamist influenced governance. It won’t work.

There will be at least one election in these countries. If there is a second election, that will be interesting. I mean it doesn’t seem like from what I know, I don’t think that democracy is in and of itself a high or overwhelmingly important value of these parties. Democracy might be a means to an end. If you think that you’re carrying out God’s will and God has put you into power, it’s hard to accept that a manmade system, democratic elections, should remove you from power, so I don’t know.

The PA on life support

In this historical moment I don’t see a breakthrough with the Palestinians. What I assume is going to happen is that the Palestinians will, at a certain point—the West Bank Palestinians—will dissolve the Palestinian Authority. Maybe by 2013 at the latest—the 20^th anniversary of Oslo. The Palestinian Authority was created as a negotiating mechanism for the Palestinians with Israel. Twenty years gone by and there’s no Palestinian state. I think the Palestinian Authority will disband itself.

And if I were a Palestinian strategist, a political strategist, as opposed to a military strategist, I would simply say let’s dissolve this. Tell the Israelis, “Look, you are the occupier anyway, so let’s just formalize this. Go back to your occupation. You’re in charge of garbage collection and security, and, oh, by the way, we also want to vote in Israel. Since we’ve been under your control for 45, 46 years, let’s just get the vote. You’re not going to let us go, you’re not going to let us be a country, so we’ll just vote in Israel, thank you very much.”—And then, and then the conflict moves into the next phase, the phase that the smartest Palestinian strategists seek, which is the South Africa phase. When American Jews, among others, are confronted with the simple Palestinian demand for a vote and have to say to themselves, “Well, what do I support? Do I support a Jews-only democracy or do I support democracy?” It’s going to be a tough one.

Current: What do you think will happen with American Zionism at that point?

JG: The minority of American Jews are for Israel no matter what Israel does, or support whatever measures a right-wing Israeli government will take to ensure the continued Jewishness of the Israeli state. I think the majority of American Jews at that point might wash their hands and say, “You know, the Jewish state is important to us, but democracy is more important to us. Since we support the right to vote of people around the world and the right of people to be free around the world, you’ve got to give them the right to vote, or create a Palestinian state.”

Now I tend to think that Jews aren’t so self destructive, that, at that point, when the world says on behalf of the Palestinians, ”Give the Arabs in the West Bank the vote.” I think that those Jews who believe that Zionism is mainly about the redemption of the land will say, “I cannot give up this land no matter what, so my choice is maybe I should just give them the vote because I’d sooner give them the vote than leave Shechem.”

But I think the majority of Israelis would say, “Well if two-million West Bank Arabs have the vote, then we are basically moving toward binationalism, and binationalism didn’t even work in Belgium, so it certainly isn’t going to work here—it will end in chaos and war, so let’s just get the hell out of Dodge, let’s just get the hell out of the West Bank.” And again, the problem with that is it’s not on the Israeli timetable, it’s not in the conditions that Israel wants to create that would be ideal. It would be as a last-ditch move to try to salvage what’s left of the idea of a Jewish state.

Current: Isn’t there a Palestinian side to the equation, though, in terms of vying for Palestinian statehood?

JG: I think they’re going to give up. Look, like I’ve said, maybe there is…Palestinians are not in love with the idea of a state in the Gaza and the West Bank. That’s not what they want. A lot will settle for it, because that’s what reality is dictating, but I think, I’m not pulling this out of the air, I talk to people. I think smart people know that this will be and this might bring about the creation of that Palestinian state that they’re not really enthusiastic about.

But, it also might bring about something—look if you’re a Palestinian, even a moderate Palestinian, you don’t believe that the Jews have a national—you don’t believe the Jews are a nation—you don’t believe they have a national right to a state. You want your whole country back. You’ve been inculcated in this from birth, and if you see Israel on the ropes a little bit, you know it’s T.S. Eliot: “The giving famishes the craving.” This is the problem of all negotiations—is that Palestinians, when they think that Israelis are on the ropes, they don’t start asking for less, they start asking for more. It’s what you would do.

It’s why Gaza didn’t work. The Palestinians had a choice, they could have said, “Oh, this is great, we have Gaza. Let’s build a building infrastructure, and let’s have a business, and maybe some high-tech and some tourism.” No, they were like, “Ah, and they’re running away because we used weapons against them.” So I’m not, as you can tell, an optimistic dude.

Ahmadinejad’s date with a tank-barrel & Israel’s Rabin shortage

We’re very good at survival. We’re not—history shows—we’re not so excellent at statehood. Survival has occurred mainly in the diaspora. We are mainly a diaspora people. We’re not really good at this. That’s just the record. On the other hand, we just tend to survive.

Ahmadinejad, I’m convinced, someone’s going to eventually hang him from a tank-barrel. He’s going to be remembered as a footnote in history, and I think the Jews will just chug along with the next phase of their history. So, if you closely study Jewish survival over three-thousand years, you have to say, “Yeah, we’ll get out of this one too.” We got out of the worst one. With some damage, obviously, like 33% of all the Jews being killed, but I tend to think we’ll get out of this one.

But, the story of Israel the last twenty years is the story of the awesome power of assassination to change the course of history. It’s impossible to do the counter-factual history and say, “If Rabin had lived, X and Y and Z would have happened.” But I don’t know.

Current: You don’t see another Rabin emerging?

JG: He hasn’t shown his face yet. I keep hoping that Netanyahu is that guy. The irony, obviously—it’s not even an irony, it’s sort of the reality of Netanyahu—is that he’s the only person in Israeli politics who can deliver 75% of the Israeli population to a painful compromise, he just doesn’t seem to want to do it. In that recalcitrance, in that hesitation to do it, of course, is his credibility with the Israeli people. Your typical Israeli, not a settler necessarily, is saying, “If Netanyahu says this is a safe thing to do, then it’s a safe thing to do.” That was Rabin’s credibility. So, I like Tzipi Livni a lot, I don’t know if she’s going to be able to carry 75% of the Jews of Israel to territorial compromise. I don’t know if she has the credibility.

[…]

Let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of an Israeli. 2000, Ehud Barak pulls out troops from Lebanon as the world demanded, and gets Hezbollah on the border leading to the 2006 war and leading to a Lebanon that is essentially a Hezbollah state, right? 2005, Ariel Sharon comes along and says—Oh, Ariel Sharon is the other—there is assassination and there is stroke. The ability of a stroke to change history, a single man’s stroke to change history, is astonishing. Sharon comes along and says to the Israeli people, “We have to pull out of Gaza, not only the settlers, but the army, it’s best for the future demographics of the state, we can’t afford to be there anymore.” He does it, because he’s Sharon, he gets it done. And, you don’t get Singapore on the Mediterranean, you get Hamas and rockets.

So in the last decade or so, you’re an Israeli and you’re looking at the situation in your North and in your South, and you say, “Each time we’ve pulled out of land, we get rocket attacks in exchange, so now you’re telling me you want to pull out, not of the far North or not of the South, but you want me to give Palestinians land that overlooks Ben-Gurion National Airport and Tel Aviv? You’re out of your mind.”

You can understand that. Which is why, look, we all know, it’s cliché to say it, but everyone knows what the peace treaty is going to look like. And there is going to be an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley for a set number of years, which is, of course, a sticking point or a breaking point for the Palestinians, but that’s reality. The point is that only Netanyahu at this point could create a peace deal and sell it to the majority of Israelis. I don’t think there is another Israeli politician who can do it.

Bibi Netanyahu’s Cubans

JG: Oh there’s a great interview.

Current: Yea?

JG: That’s a joke.

Laughter

That’s like…that’s like pulling teeth out of a mule. He’s hard to interview. He’s hard to sort of get going. He’s got his set piece answers and there’s a kind of rigidity that is not very pleasant. Once when I was interviewing he started—in his office—he took out a cigar and started smoking it. And two things struck me: he didn’t offer me a cigar and he also didn’t say, “Oh by the way are you fatally allergic to cigar smoke?” or, “Do you mind if I smoke a cigar?” He just kind of smoked the cigar and I thought, “That’s not cool. What is that about?”

And you don’t want to over-interpret specific personality quirks and make them stand in for the whole, but I was like, “Okay. You’re going to blow cigar smoke in my face. Fine, go ahead, and you’re the prime minister, so what am I going to say? I’m going stop the interview because you’re pissing me off?”

Anyway seeing people up close is—even in short bursts of exposure—it’s pretty useful..Tempting Israel’s democratic fate.

[…]

I think that Netanyahu is classically liberal in a Jabotinsky mold. I think he understands the value of democracy, and unfettered free speech, and an independent judiciary.

[…]

Israel’s big selling point in America is that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. If it ceases to be the only democracy in the Middle East, whether because it ceases to be a democracy, or because other countries rise up as democracies—and it’s going to be hard to argue that Tunisia soon isn’t a democracy, Egypt is another question, Libya’s certainly another question—but, if you see the executive try to manipulate the supreme court, if you see laws banning free speech as it relates to calling for boycotts, if you see laws designed to punish the press, people are going to sort of say that they’re proud of Israel as a democracy in a hostile area, and if it ceases to be that, I think they are going to lose support.

Israel has to balance that out. Yes, it’s fair to say that some of these NGOs that are supported by European governments, some of these NGOs are advocating for basically the elimination of Israel, and that’s problematic. But, you have to weigh that against how much of a problem is it if the world ceases to understand us to be a democracy? It’s not good. It’s not good.

[…]

And none of this, “Well you can vote in Jordan but you live here,” crap. You live on this piece of land and that’s where you’re going to vote. It just doesn’t work. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? And I’m not waiting for Hashem to go fix it. That’s a great comfort, if you can believe like a child that Hashem is going to come and fix the problem that you’ve created then great, but he didn’t fix the Holocaust, so I don’t know that he’s going to fix this one. No offense, he’s just busy.

Current: Hopefully lightning doesn’t—

JG: —I would appreciate that, because then I would know: “Oh! Didn’t realize you were listening. Excellent, I’m very happy now to know.” But you know what I mean, it’s nice to be a settler and have this childish belief.

Current: Do you really think that’s what settlers believe?

JG: I don’t know what settlers believe. They believe that they create their own reality, they create their own mental realities. Also, look, the truth is that democracy is a very high, very important value for me. It doesn’t have to be an important value for other people. …What percentage of American Jews would still support Israel if it ceased to become a democracy—if it ratified itself in some way as a non-democratic state, as a state of Jews in which had limited press freedom and not independent judiciary, in which the government basically states to the world, Palestinians are going to live in a condition of, in essence, perpetual non-citizenship. What percentage of American Jews would stick with Israel?

Grow up, stop schnoring, this is your people

Yea, it’s interesting because I try to think about tzedakah dollars too. With the fire in the Carmel last winter, I got some schnorey letter from the JNF, saying, “We need fire trucks. Buy fire trucks for Israel.” It’s like, for fuck sakes, you’re a nuclear power. A world center for IT and high-tech, buy your own damn fire trucks. I wrote this thing—and I don’t mind supporting orphanages, that’s fine, Jewish educational institutions, the traditional recipients of non-tax dollars—but stop being so schnorey. You’re a grownup country. Grownup countries fund their own fire departments. They don’t beg American Jews for fire trucks. Anyway, I got in trouble for that one. I don’t care. It just pissed me off.

[…]

I don’t mind Jews who are critical of Israel. Obviously I mind the lunatics who call for the destruction of Israel, I think that’s anti-Semitic. If Palestinians deserve a country, Jews deserve a country, it’s not that hard philosophically. But, what I don’t like is disengagement. We live in this age of the wicked son, who basically says, “This doesn’t have anything to do with me.” It does have something to do with you. This is your family. This is your people.

By Sam Schube

On December 7, 2011, The Current hosted a panel discussion between Columbia Professors Mark Lilla and Adam Kirsch on Columbia’s campus. Moderated by Current Senior Editor Sam Schube, the event revolved around issues posed in Kirsch’s new book, Why Trilling Matters. Schube’s review of the book and video of the event appears below.

Part I

Mark Lilla & Adam Kirsch on Why Lionel Trilling Matters: Part I

Part II

Mark Lilla & Adam Kirsch on Lionel Trilling: Part II

A friend of mine reads novels, and often—probably three or four a month. His Facebook page tells me that he “likes” six books, each of which is represented by a small square icon displaying, when available, the cover art for each work. This is obviously one way to communicate an interest in literature: Facebook allows us to tell our friends (and potential advertisers) what we like. Our digital selves claim interests in historical fiction, and Wes Anderson movies, and “The Wire.” Facebook lets us tell each other we have taste.

“Liking” a novel, however, is not the same thing as loving it, or feeling ambivalent about it, or finding in it ideas that tell us how to live. It is simply a muted declaration that we don’t hate the thing, and that other people should know that we’ve bothered to learn about it. This modern production of the self is a process of curation: we collect and organize signs in the hopes of creating a digital persona that resembles our actual self, or perhaps an ideal self. On the Internet, we are what we like.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Not long ago, reading novels could be more than a signifier of taste and consumptive potential. And in the twentieth century, one critic more than any other wrote with the belief that reading and thinking about literature could transmit universal and essential values—that reading novels could help us create better, fuller selves. That critic was Lionel Trilling, the subject of Why Trilling Matters, a smart, reassuring new book from Adam Kirsch, an editor at The New Republic and a Tablet Magazine columnist. Kirsch sets himself the task of rehabilitating Trilling and his method of intellectually virtuous criticism, and of showing that that method remains valid—and, more importantly, useful—today. This means defending Trilling from charges of elitism or idealism, and from our assumption that political literature and literature that is political are the same thing. Kirsch works to position Trilling somewhere between the monolithic “guardian of culture” and the modern consumer of it (a stance mirrored by Trilling’s positions as Columbia professor and Partisan Review contributor). From the space between, emerges a figure that does, indeed, matter.

Lionel Trilling was born in 1905, and by the time he died in 1975 had lived through two world wars, a depression, radical social change, and decades of the fear and squabbling of the Cold War. Trilling took literature as a sort of alternative battleground, one where he could adjudicate the political and moral issues of his day. In doing so, Trilling relied on big words to communicate big concepts: “They return again and again in his essays,” Kirsch writes, “to the point that they seem to bear his trademark: moral, liberal, will, mind, reality.” This is Trilling’s legacy, rather than a “school” of criticism, or a theory of the novel. Trilling “offers what literature alone offers, an experience,” and explains to us how the experience of reading novels can be connected to larger and often political questions in the world.

Kirsch points out that Trilling’s reliance on “the big words” is tied to his other signature technique, his frequent use of the first person plural, what Kirsch calls the “famous Trilling ‘we.’” While this “we” could at times exclude or seem elitist, it was more often used to flatten the gap between critic and reader. Kirsch asserts that the “we” made Trilling’s authoritative judgments palatable, and allowed for the possibility of reading as shared experience. Together, these tools allowed Trilling to explore the ways in which literature can be brought to bear on the world, the way it explains (or fails to explain) us to ourselves. Much of Trilling’s criticism relies on the construction of dialectical relationships within and outside the text: between artistic genius and social value, between amoral modernity and values-based conservatism, and, “above all, his sense of the conflict between the artist’s will and the demands of justice.” Trilling asks us, and forces us to ask: what does it mean for literature to be political? What are “values” in literature?

Kirsch is careful early on in the book to do away with the understanding that Trilling became a critic only because he failed as a novelist, publishing only The Middle of the Journey in 1947. If the novel was not as successful as Trilling had hoped, it was because his literary gift called for a different form: the characters in The Middle of the Journey can be seen as vessels for ideas, but that is only because, as Kirsch puts it, “the elements of experience that Trilling cared about most were, precisely, ideas.” This concern for ideas in literature, and for our own response to them, made the critical essay—not the novel—the best vehicle for Trilling to tackle questions of liberalism, realism, and morality.

Kirsch goes on to explore the multiple and overlapping varieties of liberalism Trilling pursued in his criticism. He notes that Trilling’s liberalism is not always or necessarily political, but can be “at once an emotional tendency, a literary value, an intellectual tradition, and a way of being in the world.” Trilling’s exploration of liberalism comes most famously in his collection The Liberal Imagination, but the concept runs through nearly all his work. What, then, do these varieties of liberalism look like? How does a novel demonstrate its liberalism?

In a number of ways, Kirsch tells us. Importantly, while Trilling staked out and held a place as a liberal anti-Communist for nearly all his adult life, Kirsch is careful to note that his liberalism is about more than ideology. Trilling’s liberalism carries the “essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty”—in short, the qualities we find in good literature. Good writing can inform a good politics, and vice versa: in the face of popular liberal, Marxist, class-based theories of history, which insist that economic forces determine history, Trilling argued for the novel as a way of preserving the historical power and dignity of the individual. The knowledge, gleaned from literature, that life is various and complex should cause us to think twice before bowing to massive, reductive ideologies. Smartly, Kirsch notes that Trilling’s gift was to communicate this conviction in his writing: “The key to the lasting power of The Liberal Imagination,” he writes, “is the way Trilling does not just advocate ‘variousness’ and ‘complexity,’ but allows these virtues to structure and animate the book itself.”

Why Trilling Matters’ second half is a bit scattered, though no less effective in reminding us of its eponymous objective. Kirsch gives us chapters on Trilling’s complicated relationship with his own Jewishness, on his complicated relationship with modern literature (especially the question of how to teach it), and on his complicated relationship with Allen Ginsberg as the young poet’s professor at Columbia. (Ginsberg traced “Fuck the Jews” and a penis into the dust on his dorm room window, and Trilling defended him from a very confused dean.) Trilling’s teaching, Kirsch writes, was crucial to the development of his critical thought: creating a syllabus for a course on modern literature forced Trilling to negotiate between “genius and justice.” This question, of the demands and responsibilities of art in an increasingly complex world, animated nearly all Trilling’s criticism.

The book’s final chapter is devoted to exploring the societal changes that have wrought an age in which a defense of Trilling’s relevance is necessary at all. As Kirsch notes, “Toward the end of his life…the cultural ground began to shift under Trilling’s feet, in ways that put this very conception of literature and selfhood in jeopardy.” It is one thing to defend the broadest kind of liberalism during the Cold War; it is another entirely when that liberalism is decried as antiquated and conservative, as it was on this campus in the spring of 1968. Kirsch smartly juxtaposes late-period Trilling with early, lively Susan Sontag, whose understanding of art left no room for grand moral questions like Trilling’s.

The times, though, did not completely leave Trilling behind. On the contrary, Trilling comes off as rather prescient, especially when he notes in an essay, cited by Kirsch, that contemporary art “cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience…The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased—the faculty of ‘taste’ has reestablished itself at the center of the experience of art.” Art no longer forces us to struggle with variousness and complexity, and thus the connection to ideas—to liberalism and morality and political consciousness—loses its power. Here, you can see Kirsch beginning to go red in the face: “It is no accident, finally, that the age of the new sensibility, of total permeability to art, of the commodification of spiritual prestige, is also the age of literature’s crisis of confidence.”

Kirsch is successful in his task. Why Trilling Matters shows us that the critic’s approach remains relevant. Our time and culture are often hostile to the kind of dedicated, moral readings of literature Trilling mastered, but we keep reading. Trilling’s work, “by showing what it means to define one’s self through reading, proves that this kind of readerly heroism is always a possibility for those who believe in it.” If we’re to engage with literature in a deep, serious, and political way, we have no better teacher.

By Hannah Novack

The commissions were an attempt to develop an optimistic view of the future, one filled with prosperity and peace. These architects were delegated no small task: to conceive of a new American city and to explore the prospects of a post-World War II American society.  This call to urban reimagination prefigured an active architecture committed to, and capable of, the organization of such a city. Architecture, the commission asserted, would have a direct role in realizing this imminent and productive golden age. It was hypothesized that buildings could be designed for an ideal, and the physical structure would induce such an ideal.

The project’s title, “New Buildings for 194X,” encapsulated the vision’s characteristic anticipation, as participants and curators alike optimistically asserted that their plans, though unrealized, portended a near, if unknown, future.  And though none of the designs were ever built, they collectively mark the start of a new discussion on the existence of urban community and the accordance of architecture with urban planning.

194X-9/11: American Architects and the City, on view at the Museum of Modern Art, makes use of Architectural Forum’s challenge to wartime architects as a prompt to explore the development of urban planning from World War II through the present. A retrospective, the exhibit effectively draws a parallel between the precariousness of the wartime period and our current political, social, and economic climate in a post-9/11 New York. Rather than showing a comparison of the two eras as separate from each other, the exhibition attempts to show the development of a mutually illuminative discourse between them. Through its parallelism, the show raises broad questions concerning the ability of architecture to respond to and affect contemporary social and political climates.

The show proceeds to explore the developing discourse on urban renewal through a selection of eighty-five works from the MoMA’s extensive private holdings. The exhibited designs and models, drawn from the wartime and immediate postwar period through the modernist criticisms of the 1970s and into the present day, showcase the work of some of the twentieth century’s most influential architects.  The thesis, so to speak, is clearly and logically presented through their chronological arrangement.  The Modernist approach to city life and architecture’s role as an active influence on society is presented first. The sequence then subtly leads into its subsequent critiques.

The developing modernist project is introduced through the Architectural Forum prompt. Here, Mies, whose work pervades the exhibition, comes to occupy a central role in the exhibit’s portrayal of the emergence of an active architecture invested in shaping its buildings’ urban surroundings. His work is a linchpin in the show’s presentation. His design for the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) campus in Chicago, in particular, is presented as illustrative of his theories of order, and of individual buildings acting within a whole.  The design for the campus, which is dominated by a grid system, evinces a careful consideration of the relationship between the constituent buildings no less than of that between the campus as a whole and the surrounding urban environment of Chicago’s South Side.

The IIT design, and others like it, offers convincing support for the claim that order within design and an interrelationship between structures could promote a harmonious urban landscape. Portrayed as quintessentially Modernist in outlook, his plans are offered in order to concretize for visitors architecture’s deliberate, systematic, and yet largely theoretical engagement with the urban landscape.

Interestingly, one of Mies’ most famous and outspoken critics, Rem Koolhaas, designed the student center for the IIT campus. Completed in 2003, the center provides an unusual opportunity to analyze the intersection of the architects’ opposing visions, an opportunity that the exhibit fully exploits and expands on. Koolhaas and his contemporaries of the 1960s offered a critique of theories inaugurated by 194X, including Mies’, which centered on architecture as a means for achieving social reform.

Unlike Mies—for whom buildings needed to respond to their socio-cultural context and thereby produce socially reflective and relevant cities—Koolhaas represented a faction arguing that the modern metropolis, such as New York, is essentially the outcome of amassing individually functional, internally coherent buildings. The result of such an amassing, Koolhaas and company posited, is the development of the “inherited city” rather than the socially active, relevant and reformative city of Mies. The City of the Captive Globe, a conceptual drawing by Koolhaas, offers an emphatic declaration of this competing vision.  A striking perspective drawing, it depicts a globe in the center of an abstract urban environment with each city block  raised, highlighting the independence they maintain within the urban environment as cities-within-a-city. Though there is clearly organization with a unified framework determined by New York’s grid—a pattern embraced and exemplified in Mies’ earlier IIT campus design—such urban planning does not necessarily determine the various programs supported within the system.  Through the juxtaposition of such well-selected designs, the exhibit effectively encapsulates the varied visions and, through the contrasts and chronological arrangement, traces the development of urban planning from postwar modernism through to the subsequent criticism of the 1970s.

Having presented the revolution and subsequent evolution of urbanism in architecture, the show makes the leap to the present. Drawing on the thematic parallelism between today and the sociocultural context that gave rise to 194X—global conflict, financial chaos, and a generally precarious outlook—the show attempts to locate contemporary urban architecture within the overarching discourse on planning and the cityscape.  Presenting seven entries for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, the show begins to justify such a continuity. Just as the 194X designs, and modern architecture in general, became linked to the post-war effort, the new architecture embodied by these Ground Zero designs aims to be responsive to the realities of a post-9/11 society. The mode of design is not merely aware of the new reality that necessitated it, but seeks to offer, in the tradition of Mies and those who initially dreamt up an architecture of a better world, an optimistic, even triumphalist, response to it.

Though the earlier portions of the exhibit successfully prepare visitors to identify such a continuity in the Ground Zero designs, the attempt feels half-hearted in comparison. Constituting a relatively small portion of the show, they lack the curatorial guidance provided elsewhere. Perhaps viewers are expected to be educated on current architectural issues, particularly pertaining to the highly publicized debates surrounding the 9/11 memorial site. Nonetheless, it is made clear, despite its attempts to the contrary, that contemporary architecture is not the main focus of the show. Rather, it is to provide a stronger architectural background to place these contemporary designs in conversation with a greater, longstanding dialogue of urban renewal, which it accomplishes.

Without fully unpacking the contemporary designs, viewers are led to deduce that just as history is cyclical, the issues facing architecture and urban life can and do repeat themselves.  Furthermore, the show asserts that it is pertinent to understand the history of urban architectural theory in order to appreciate our modern urban landscape and the ways in which contemporary architects address issues as varied as congestion, overcrowding, and programming.

A fortunate, if unrelated, byproduct of the rather wide time period examined is that viewers can encounter the variety and development of architectural drawing techniques. With numerous intricate drawings and models on display, even the untrained eye can appreciate the highly involved craftsmanship and exactitude of the hand-drawn plans, sections, and axonometrics.  Particularly the presentation models including famous New York sites such as the Seagram building by Mies and the Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill are quite interesting.  From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, the works on display are extremely impressive. Whatever the exhibit’s perspective, the presence of these works and the ability to closely examine them—both for their materiality as well as the often bewildering visions that comprise their content—lends the show an awe-inducing factor that any visitor can appreciate.

The idea of New York City as an urban jungle has become something of a cliché, an inherited truism that New Yorkers have come to take for granted. And, perhaps, that’s the force of the exhibit’s presentation. Mies indicated a significant development in architecture in the early-to mid-twentieth century when he proclaimed: “There are no cities, in fact, anymore.  It goes on like a forest.  We should think about the means that we live in a jungle, and maybe we do well by that.” As a forest is a delicately assembled ecosystem, New York City has both systematically and organically developed.  It traces architects’ approaches to the order of urban space with the premeditated intention to promote modernization.  They designed with the idea in mind that their projects did not exist within a vacuum, but would directly enact change in broader society. Moreover, the show illustrates the uniqueness of this union.

Koolhaas once wrote in an article, “Miestakes”:  “I do not respect Mies, I love Mies. 
I have studied Mies, excavated Mies, reassembled Mies. I have even cleaned Mies. Because I do not revere Mies, I’m at odds with his admirers.”  This quote seems to encapsulate the tone of the exhibit. 194X-9/11 successfully demonstrates the enduring discourse amongst architects in regards to the idea of the city. It calls attention to responsiveness in architecture and urban planning that has come to be taken for granted, but is indeed the result of a continuing and historical evolution of architecture’s social role. New York City is represented as a working slate as it is an active, materialized conversation that constantly changes, but its past is always evident.

By Max Daniel

The New York School, an informal collective of artists, poets, dancers, and musicians, emerged in the 1950s and generated much of the era’s underground and alternative cultural trends. In addition to Beat poetry and Jazz, abstract expressionist art was one of the group’s most influential contributions to American culture. Adapting surrealist and cubist styles, among others, this aesthetic approach helped define the landscape of post-war American art, intriguing and exciting audiences and critics alike.

Often eclipsed by celebrities of the movement like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning is considered one of the most significant abstract expressionist painters by leading artists and historians. The enormous career retrospective currently at the Museum of Modern Art, virtually unprecedented in its scope, restores de Kooning to the popular consciousness. John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator, told the New York Times that de Kooning is, “an artist people want to know of,” and that he believed the artist would be, “rediscovered by a new generation.” New York is being reintroduced to de Kooning, once a well-known figure in the American art world, with the first major exhibition of his works in America in almost 30 years.

Filling the entire sixth floor of the MoMA, the de Kooning retrospective spans works from his teenage years to those completed while in his eighties, each room representing a specific phase in his career. Despite its broad scope, the exhibit is heavy on his most famous works from the late 1940s to early 1960s, and most visitors familiar with de Kooning likely come to see works such as Pink Angels or his Woman series. The vast scale of the museum’s retrospective urges the viewer to take a more extensive look at his oeuvre. The exhibit’s comprehensiveness calls attention to de Kooning’s commitment to continual change and contradictions in his art, an appreciation that can only be garnered from such a holistic approach to his career.

The inclusion of sketches and studies of his most famous works, as well as lesser-known pieces from the late ‘60s and onward, helps create a cohesive portrait of de Kooning as an artist constantly changing his approach. While paintings by Pollock or Rothko are readily identifiable, the differences between de Kooning’s artwork are so great that each room of the MoMA’s retrospective could be highlighting a different artist. Elderfield told the New York Times that when, “de Kooning found his signature style, he would abandon it and struggle to discover the next one.” The exhibit does, however, show that de Kooning still managed to learn from his previous works rather than make a clean break. Still, the retrospective leaves one with the impression of de Kooning as a restive artist, unsatisfied with defining and inevitably limiting characteristics, in contrast to the distinctive and telltale works of Pollock or Rothko.

The first room of the exhibit contains works that reveal de Kooning’s early obsession with pale yellows and pinks. Pink Angels, a large and vibrant oil fusion of de Kooning’s figures and abstractions, epitomizes this phase and provides an early indication of his figure and field abstractionist philosophy. De Kooning’s early Cubist-inspired works also set the stage for the exhibit’s focus on the artists’ evolving relationship with subject and background, which is one of the standout features of his six Woman paintings.

De Kooning’s early career was characterized by works centered on intangible subjects such as Pink Angels and his series of untitled black and white collages. But, there is a significant shift in the exhibit’s latter half. These later works depict more familiar subjects such as figures and landscapes. Though the subject matter becomes increasingly ‘standard,’ their over-exaggerated and greatly expressive forms cast them in an increasingly distinctive, enchanting light. While some of the earlier works in the exhibit portray focuses in shapes or excess paint, the massive canvases that make up de Kooning’s Woman series depict a much heavier application of paint that points to an aggressive and emotional stylistic shift.

A sequence of six abstract depictions of a seated female nude composed between 1951 and 1953, the Woman series comprises some of de Kooning’s most famous and defining works, and serves as the nucleus of the MoMA’s retrospective. These depictions of a traditional figure through nontraditional means are a common trope in abstract expressionism. Yet, the heavy brushstrokes, flecks of dirt and charcoal, and clumps of dried paint mark de Kooning as an accomplished action painter. They speak to the way in which he engages the canvas as creative arena. Though constituting a unified series, the paintings vary in the relationship and conflation between figure and background, as well as in their levels of impasto and in the physicality of the works. To experience the series in person is to be overcome, not just by the dwarfing magnitude of its scale, but by the magnitude of the artist’s expressive force. The varied abstract transformations of the female figure captured in the six works offer a distilled insight into the experimentation and aesthetic momentum that dominated the artist’s creative process over a long and prolific career.

The heavy and grainy surface quality of the Woman series is not as evident in de Kooning’s later abstract landscapes, such as Palisade and Montauk. But the large swatches of color and the combination of both distinct and vague shapes are carried over from his past works and were present throughout the remainder of his career. The massive gestural brushstrokes from the Woman series are later revived, but his subsequent consuming landscapes lack the grotesqueness and raw physicality communicated through their painterly grit. Additionally, de Kooning’s later landscapes were often finished with enamel, giving the paintings a glossy shine and polished effect, at odds with the incomplete and disjointed quality of the Woman series.

The retrospective at the MoMA is not only the first de Kooning exhibit in the United States since 1983, it is one of the largest of his exhibitions ever. Indeed, few artists have received such an extensive treatment of their careers, nevertheless at the MoMA, comprising some of the most sought after artistic real estate in the world. The 200-plus works, occupying the entirety of the museum’s sixth floor, are estimated to have a net worth of over $4 billion. One can imagine, then, few grander ways to make the case that de Kooning’s position in the popular art canon should be restored to public consciousness.

Celebrating the career of an oft-overlooked artist in style, the exhibit achieves more than mere acquaintance. Though, with an artist as prolific as de Kooning, familiarizing the public with his extensive oeuvre is, in and of itself, no small task. Still, the retrospective builds a compelling case regarding the development and exceptional versatility of de Kooning’s career as producing an outstanding oeuvre worthy of the public’s attention, and consideration among the giants of twentieth century art. The MoMA’s “de Kooning: A Retrospective” offers a glimpse into a restive artist’s creative process as he consistently readjusts his focus, each time creating radically different works that, when viewed together, express a seemingly singular commitment to continual variation and aesthetic evolution.