The Lost Language of Integration

Posted by on Nov 15, 2016 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights | 0 comments In a recent This American Life episode, investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses the perils of America’s segregated school system. She points out that there has been only one proven way to narrow the performance gap between African-American and white schoolchildren, and it has nothing to do with magnet schools, or Teach for America, or any of the newfangled efforts to right a...
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Eastern Europe: Return to Normality?

Posted by on Oct 14, 2015 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured | 0 comments IT HAS BEEN THE FATE of Central and Eastern Europe — that wedge of territory between what was once the Soviet Union to the east and the European Community to the west — to wrestle with its own “abnormality.” For nearly five decades, the region experienced varying degrees of Soviet-style Communism, from the relatively liberal version enjoyed in Hungary to the more Stalinist model endured...
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The Boomerang Intellectual

Posted by on Jun 6, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Interviews | 0 comments Many intellectuals in East-Central Europe have traveled considerable ideological distances over the decades. The most common trajectory has been from the Left to the Right, as former Marxists were born again after 1989 as liberals, neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, just plain conservatives, and ideologues even further to the Right. Janos Kis in Hungary, who critiqued Marxism from the Left in the...
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From Solidarity to Business

Posted by on Apr 29, 2015 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized | 4 comments When I met with Mariusz Ambroziak in 1993, he was secretary for the Solidarity trade union in the Mazowsze area around Warsaw. He’d been a Solidarity activist for most of his life, starting out as a young worker involved in the famous Solidarity chapter at the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw. But by 1993, he was having difficulties getting up in the morning and going to work. It took two alarm...
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Before/After

Posted by on Apr 27, 2015 in Featured, Plays | 0 comments BEFORE/AFTER Reading of a new play by John Feffer Part of the European Month of Culture Supported by the Delegation of the European Union to the United States 90 minutes Before/After is a multimedia portrait of the transformation of East-Central Europe told by the people who made it happen. Through words, pictures, video, and music, it tells the story of the people who chipped away at the Iron...
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