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3 days ago | 
libertiesjournal.com | Arash Azizi |Celeste Marcus |Enrique Krauze |Ibrahim al-Assil
Last month Liberties assembled a number of specialists on regions or communities plagued by despotic leaders for a conversation on Zoom.
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2 weeks ago | 
libertiesjournal.com | Celeste Marcus |Jake Harrison
The abstract principle that human beings are born with dignity is too difficult for a person to formulate on her own. It had to be formulated by many minds in concert over generations and then enshrined in philosophical texts which shape worldviews and governments. Though the idea of human dignity is at least as old as the Bible, it was not set down in a political philosophy until millennia later.
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1 month ago | 
libertiesjournal.com | Celeste Marcus
The slick marble walkway between the tarmac and passport control at Ben Gurion airport was lined with poster after poster of missing, returned, or dead hostages. Still wobbly from hours on and off planes and in various layover airports, I walked past their smiling faces beside numbers marking the days since October 7, 2023, photographs of family members, and endless slips of paper demanding BRING THEM HOME NOW. Almost all of the posters were in English. Who are they talking to? I wondered.
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2 months ago | 
salmagundi.skidmore.edu | Rochelle Gurstein |Tom Healy |Celeste Marcus |Terence Diggory
* This is an edited transcript of a conference sponsored by Salmagundi, convened in October 2023 at the Tang Museum on the campus of Skidmore College. There are three sessions, each kicked off with opening remarks by one of the participants ROBERT BOYERS: Probably each of us can recall a time when we were turned off by something adored or approved by a friend or a stranger.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Celeste Marcus |Jake Harrison
Horror — like beauty, passion, and all states in extremis — confounds the habits which regulate the human mind. Before articulation — which is to say, before the experience or the witness of horror is transformed from something beyond our ken into a verbal artifact manufactured by reason or insight or prejudice or all of these things — we are alone with something unlike the materials we are able to know.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
libertiesjournal.com | Celeste Marcus
To understand bigotry, study the bigot not its victim. The exercise is a repudiation of the poison but it is also rational: bigotry is fostered, nurtured, and manifested by all manner of factors which affix to a victim – usually (but not always) a vulnerable one – but which have little to do with them. Bigots are protecting something internal, something to which they lay claim and pledge loyalty. The victim bears the brunt of those imbalances.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
prospectmagazine.co.uk | Celeste Marcus
“Most of them were lovely—not hardliners. They didn’t even seem that interested in Trump. They came to the rally for the community. These are the kinds of people who will stop supporting him as soon as they see that he is hurting the country.” We were sitting in my living room eating the Halloween candy that the expected children had not stopped by to collect. The man speaking was an Israeli journalist sent by his paper to cover the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden a few days earlier.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Celeste Marcus
There are events so disfiguring that their impact and interpretation strip us of the accoutrements of ordinary life which serve as a buffer between consciousness and the depths of human cruelty. Last year, 7 October was the first day in a year-long global enlistment in events of this kind. Not one global earthquake, but millions – so many and so powerful we have been permanently shaken from prior conceptions of what is justified and what is acceptable. We are not human in the way we were before.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Celeste Marcus
Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania and a proud, religious Jew, is likely to be named as Kamala Harris’s running mate in the coming days. Some have speculated that a Shapiro vice-presidency can tell us much about a Harris administration’s orientation toward the Middle East.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
prospectmagazine.co.uk | Celeste Marcus
There are now, as there have always been, two visions of America which compete for the soul of the country. That competition, more than either one on its own, defines American identity. Both are equally real in the literal sense—they exist imperfectly but in reality, and have since the inception of the country—and metaphysically.
