#columbia university press

[garadinervi]

Edward W. Said, (1986), After the Last Sky. Palestinian Lives, Photographs by Jean Mohr, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1999

Cover Design: Benjamin Shin Farber Cover Photograph: from the interior

«The further we get from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence.» – (p. 34)

«A second incontrovertible fact is that the alliance between Zionism and the United States ultimately caused our dispossession, and prolongs it to this day. […] It is as if Palestine had been a nondescript locale in the process of being evacuated by faceless natives, until Americans thought better of it and filled it with deserving Zionists. Any Palestinian who wishes to understand the peculiar miseries of his or her situation today must reckon with an almost total official American opposition to us as a people, as a society, as a cause.» – (p. 133)

«I would like to think, though, that such a book not only tells the reader about us, but in some way also reads the reader. I would like to think that we are not just the people seen or looked at in these photographs: We are also looking at our observers. We Palestinians sometimes forget that – as in country after country, the surveillance, confinement, and study of Palestinians is part of the political process of reducing our status and preventing our national fulfillment except as the Other who is opposite and unequal, always on the defensive – we too are looking, we too are scrutinizing, assessing, judging. We are more than someone's object. We do more than stand passively in front of whoever, for whatever reason, has wanted to look at us. lf you cannot finally see this about us, we will not allow ourselves to believe that the failure has been entirely ours. Not any more.» – (p. 166)

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day - The Altruistic Urge

Today’s Book of the Day is The Altruistic Urge written by Stephanie Preston and published in 2022 by Columbia University Press. Stephanie Preston is is professor of psychology and director of the Ecological Neuroscience Lab at the University of Michigan. She is co-editor of The Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption (2014). She studied how emotions impact empathy and decision-making. by using…

[thegirlwiththelantern]

5 Academic Books I Want to Read

I’m not long back from London. I picked up a few history books while I was there. But I also saw quite a few academic books in Guanghwa Bookshop that I very much wanted. Unfortunately the price of them is painful to think about. Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China: A Study of the Neglected Zhou Scriptures and the Grand Duke Traditions by Yegor Grebnev | Columbia University Press Scholarship…

[kaggsy59]

"...there was more compassion among plants and animals than among human beings!" #eroshenko @ColumbiaUP

I’m continuing on into March with another indie book, and it struck me as I was reading this one just how valuable independent presses are in bringing neglected authors to a wider reading public. Today’s book is a case in point; the author is a completely new name to me, and his life and work are both fascinating. Interestingly, the publisher is Columbia University Press, responsible for the…

[jewishbookworld]

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Edited by Andreas Kraß, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Yuval Yonay Biographies and Geographies When queer Jewish people migrated from Central Europe to the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century, they contributed to the creation of a new queer culture and community in Palestine. This volume offers the first collection of studies on queer Jewish lives between Central Europe and Mandatory…

[cavalierzee]

Arresting Liberty

[goodblacknews]

Learn More About Karine Jean-Pierre, Political Strategist, Activist and New White House Press Secretary (LISTEN)

Learn More About Karine Jean-Pierre, Political Strategist, Activist and New White House Press Secretary (LISTEN)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) A few days ago, Karine Jean-Pierre made history when she was announced as the next White House Press Secretary, taking over from current Press Secretary Jen Psaki on May 13. Jean-Pierre will be the first Black woman and openly LGBTQ+ person to hold the high-profile position. To read about her, read on. To hear about her, press…

[allthecanadianpolitics]

"I always thought legalizing euthanasia was a no-brainer. 

It always seemed to me like an individual choice people ought to have, akin to legalizing abortion or same-sex marriage. 

If someone is in such pain that they decide to end their life, I thought, who are we as a society to tell them they can’t? 

There’s also a harm reduction component. If someone is dead set on ending their lives, shouldn’t we give them a relatively safe, effective option under medical supervision? It would be cruel not to. 

This was the rationale behind the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Carter v. Canada, which determined prohibition of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was unconstitutional. 

But the legalization of MAiD has brought to the fore some disturbing moral calculations, particularly with its expansion in 2019 to include individuals whose deaths aren’t “reasonably foreseeable,” which opened the floodgates for people with disabilities to apply to die rather than survive on meagre benefits. 

I’ve come to realize euthanasia in Canada has become the ultimate neoliberal policy — we’ll starve you of the funding you need to live a dignified life, demand you pay back pandemic aid you applied for in good faith, and if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you just kill yourself? 

The problem with my previous perspective was it held individual choices as sacrosanct. But people don’t make individual decisions in a vacuum. They’re the product of social circumstances, ones often out of their control.

Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, told the Associated Press that Canada’s MAiD policy is “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”

This sounds hyperbolic, but there are endless examples of people with disabilities who were offered euthanasia rather than live a life of pain and exclusion. And with the impending expansion of MAiD to include people with mental illnesses, the problem is only going to get worse."

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[bobnichollsart]

Today's random portfolio artwork post is "In the Wake of Colossus," one of my paintings from Locked in Time, written by Dr Dean Lomax - Palaeontologist and published by Columbia University Press (the colour version is from the Korean translation). Featured are a passing herd of Mamenchisaurus, the tyrannosaur Guanlong, and some unfortunate Limusaurus stuck in the mud. There is fossil evidence for this – check out the book!

[garadinervi]

Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood. How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2023

Cover Art: June Jordan, on far right, with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, Vertamae Grosvenor and others, The Sisterhood, 1977 [Inscription: Verso, front row left to right: Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, possibly Louise Meriwether; back row left to right: Vertamae Grosvenor, Alice Walker, possibly Louise Meriwether, Toni Morrison, June Jordan] [June Jordan Papers. Folder ‘Jordan with others, 1977-1999’, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]

[sscarletvenus]

the university which administers the Pulitzer prizes is not allowing press on campus, to make sure nobody on-site can document what is happening.

the nypd threatened student journalists qnd their dean with arrest if they leave a building named after Joseph Pulitzer.

at this point it isn't even worth remarking on the sheer horror, the baffling irony of it all.

entire new york roads have been closed to traffic so that nobody can prevent the world's largest police force's brutalization of students protesting their tution fres and tax dollars contributing to killing kids.

all of this to... keep investing in an apartheid regime.

Columbia University would rather risk their students getting murdered than divest from genocide...

[bandzboy]

"Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities.  I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine. And we are not alone. College campuses across the United States have followed Columbia’s lead.  And so, it is my hope that we can all learn from their examples to remain clear-eyed about the stakes of this crisis and focus on the actual violence being perpetrated in all of our names."

[kaggsy59]

"I'm not on good terms with the present day, but posterity loves me." #SigizmundKrzhizhanovsky @ColumbiaUP @RusLibrary #ReadIndies

For our #ReadIndies a year ago, I was delighted to be able to revisit one of my favourite authors in translation, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. I think I’ve written about everything of his which has been translated into English, mainly in volumes from NYRB Classics, translated by the wonderful Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formazov, and his writing is truly unique. However, in 2022 Columbia University…

[jewishbookworld]

Living in Refuge by Leonardo Schiocchet

Living in Refuge by Leonardo Schiocchet

Ritualization and Religiosity in a Christian and a Muslim Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon This comparative ethnography of a Muslim and a Christian Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon focuses on contrasting social belonging processes through a ritualization approach. Leonardo Schiocchet argues that contrasts emerge out of the intersectionality of religiosity, nationhood, refugeeness and…

[dostoyevsky-official]

Letter from Professor James Schamus

As Columbia survivors of last fall’s International Day of Jihad (sic), a not-surprisingly quite effective disinformation campaign, we still shouldn’t dismiss credible accounts of genuinely anti-semitic incidents on the rise, here and elsewhere. They deserve condemnation – as does the manufactured hysteria around them, weaponized in the movement to quell legitimate political speech on campus and elsewhere, mainly through the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism itself.  Let’s start with Rav Elie Beuchler, described in much of the recent massive press coverage of the terrors awaiting us Jews at Columbia as the “Columbia Rabbi” who sent an email to a few hundred students yesterday telling them to go home “as soon as possible” in fear for their lives and safety. One thing Beuchler is not, in fact, is the Columbia/Barnard Hillel campus rabbi; rather he is on the staff of the Orthodox Union-Jewish Institute for Leaning on Campus, run as a wing of the Orthodox Union.  To get a sense of the political mission of the OU-JILC, consider its Founding Director, Menachem Schrader, whose biography on the organization’s website attests he “has been community rabbi of Moshav Carmel in the Judean Hills and of Congregation Tiferet Avot in Efrat.” Carmel and Efrat are – and you can probably guess where this is going –  illegal Israeli settlements located in the Occupied West Bank, centers of the Amana movement, the radical settlement arm of the violent, racist Gush Emunim. Amana was founded and led for decades by Ze’ev Hever, a Jewish supremacist terrorist who spent 11 months in jail for a Jewish Underground bombing plot before becoming a major establishment figure in the settlement movement. (Ironically, after his own car was vandalized in a violent “Price Tag” settler vigilante action in 2012, Hever himself, at least publicly, called for a reduction in settler rampages – one needn’t wonder whether his fanatical acolytes heeded that call.) The OU-JILC actually brands itself as the “Heshe and Harriet Sief OU-JILC,” named, one assumes, after its major benefactors. Heshe and Harriet Sief, who are also major donors to Yeshivat Har-Etzion , which is located – you guessed it – in the Etzion bloc of settlements. It should be noted that funding for the Initiative, as with the Union itself, is opaque – the Union itself, given its prominent political activities, has been decried in Jewish philanthropy circles for its lack of transparency).   The Initiative has planted itself on thirty or so campuses in the United States, and has been welcomed into spaces controlled by International Hillel, which has become increasingly reactionary in its policing of Jewish students’ speech around Israel and Palestine.  That policing now threatens to engulf the University as a whole. Action based on genuine concern for the well-being and safety of our Jewish students and colleagues should be founded on the defense of the very principles and norms being assaulted by those hijacking that concern to give cover to the larger project of ethnic cleansing and settlement in the West Bank and, now, of course, Gaza.

a letter on the rabbi who said campus isn't safe and jewish students should stay home. yet again it should be noted that some of the students leading the protests are antizionist jews, and that columbia suspended the student jewish voices for peace organization several months ago, for which they are facing an ACLU lawsuit