The Literary Supplement 2014

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SPRING 2014

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

THE HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW. ON SCREENS NEAR YOU. HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

From The President For over 45 years, the Harvard Political Review has published indepth analyses of timely and timeless issues in political discourse. Since its first issue, which featured an essay on the art of the presidential press conference by former Vice President Al Gore, the HPR has remained dedicated to the potential for long-form journalism to bring out areas of our collective political existence that often go unremarked.

As a dynamic platform, the HPR has embraced the digital age—ostensibly an age with fewer things left unnoted and fewer words in which to note them. Blog posts vie to replace news analysis, and tweets to replace blogs. Yet, in spite or because of this, the long-form article has returned, alive and well. The HPR’s second annual Literary Supplement represents a new foray into burgeoning journalistic style even as it hearkens back to bygone days.

The Literary Supplement also provides HPR writers with a novel platform to explore issues in depth and express them in non-traditional ways. Rather than just news analysis, the Literary Supplement also contains personal narrative, creative nonfiction, and visual art. For this breadth of style and inquiry, it stands alone on Harvard’s campus.

-Daniel Backman President

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Contents Re-Telling America’s Origin Stories

A Very Narrow Bridge

Matt Shuham

Nancy Ko

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Get Born

Censored by Memory

Kathryn McCawley

Samir Durrani

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National Narratives of the Holocaust

Does Music Matter?

Emily Wang

Tyrik LaCruise

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A Night to Remember, or Forget

An American in Zunyi

Barbara Halla

Rachel Wong

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iMemory

Where Are We Now?

Julia Becerra

Zeenia Framroze

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Teaching 9/11 Olivia Campbell

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From The Editor Most Americans would recoil at the idea that Hollywood had once held hands with Hitler. Could such reassuringly American films as Inglourious Basterds and Schindler’s List have been prefaced by years of collaboration with the Nazis? Yet when film scholars Ben Urwand and Thomas Doherty published two very different versions of that story, The Collaboration and Hollywood and Hitler, respectively, the controversy was intense. The New Yorker issued a scathing review of Urwand, Harvard University Press received criticism for publishing his book, and accusations of slander were thrown from both sides. Even seventy-five years after the start of World War II, the controversy looms large.

This issue of the Literary Supplement explores why the past can be so contentious. One natural point of departure is the Holocaust, with its endless ramifications in fields as diverse as international relations and semiotics. Nancy Ko uses the Open Hillel debate as a springboard for exploring how memories of the Holocaust are invoked in Israeli power politics. Western guilt for the past, she argues, enables complicity in the present. Emily Wang looks at that same Western complicity, not from the perspective of hard realism, but through the looking glass of the Boston Holocaust Memorial and the stone blocks of its counterpart in Berlin. Public commemoration is a space for remembering, but it can also be a place for forgetting.

Memory politics is most commonly the study of trauma: the searing eventfulness of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide are highly visible starting points for the field. But collective memory need not be about an event. It can also be a highly diffuse process like colonialism, or globalization, or the retelling of a nation’s founding myth. Samir Durrani challenges the notion of censorship and free speech as opposing concepts, placing them in the context of French memory laws about the country’s colonial past in North Africa. Matt Shuham shows us how the political rhetoric of both James Madison and Glenn Beck is anchored in the founding legends of our country. Tyrik LaCruise explores how musical ballads shape the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement. Remembering isn’t just an internal state. It is also intimately tied to rhetoric, music, film and art: it is a speech-act.

At the risk of reaching too far back into history, we might take a cue from Aristotle: “Poetry is more philosophical and more weighty than history, for poetry speaks of the universal, history of the particular.” It is my pleasure to introduce the HPR’s Literary Supplement on memory, which acts as that elusive middleman between reality and fiction, history and poetry. Whether we turn to the lyrics of David Bowie, textbooks in France, or monuments in Berlin, we should not forget that above all, memory is a construction of the present.

-Rachel Wong Senior Editor, Books & Arts

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Re-Telling America’s Origin Stories James Madison, Fox, and Friends Matt Shuham

The social books website Goodreads has an incredibly handy user-generated list of the New York Times’s best-selling fiction and nonfiction books of 2013. Most notable was just how many of 2013’s nonfiction bestsellers were written by conservative television and radio personalities.

Bill O’Reilly was most prolific: three books of his, Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln, and Killing Jesus, all showed up on the Times’s list at one point or another, in all cases for multiple weeks. Other VIPs join O’Reilly on the list with their own efforts: Glenn Beck with Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America, Brian Kilmeade with George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution, and Mark Levin with The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic.

Besides the astounding fact that these books were written at all amid the media personalities’ hectic schedules (though some professed to the help of “co-authors”), it is even more interesting to look into the works’ subject matter. With only two exceptions, Glenn Beck’s Control and Charles Krauthammer’s Things That Matter, all of the books on the 2013 conservative-pundit-nonfiction-bestseller list are historical in nature.

This isn’t surprising: conservatives have always couched their arguments firmly in the past. The Tea Party is only the most visible recent example of the right appropriating historical imagery. We all remember Sarah Palin telling us that Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms,” a reminder that “we were going to be secure and we were going to be free,” and Mike Huckabee’s enthusiastic, though thoroughly inaccurate, statement about the delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence: “most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.” Indeed, conservatism almost by definition is historical. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains that conservatives value “traditional institutions and practices,” and that they prefer “the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal.”

Appropriating the past for political gain—that is, retelling history to suit one’s own ideological position—is a tradition that goes back to James Madison and his quest for a more centralized federal government. He, Alexander Hamilton, and others won that battle in no small part due to using history as propaganda.

This is the fun part about studying historical appropriation: it itself has a history.

Madison at some points was just as downright Machiavellian in his use of history

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as many of today’s conservative authors. But this comparison might raise questions that are yet unanswered: who has the right to tell the American story? Does history have rules at all? Who is left behind when history serves an ideological purpose?

MADISON AS MACHIAVELLI

It’s 1786. We are independent, but flailing: the Articles of Confederation have left the federal government without much control over the states. Tax revenue is dwindling, coordination of interstate trade policy is ineffective, and foreign policy is a hodgepodge of local merchant and farming interests.

James Madison is disappointed with the government as it stands. He calls in a favor from his friend Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to the French Court, asking for a shipment to be made of 200 French textbooks, journals, and pamphlets on everything from botany to political philosophy to, yes, history. The specific request is for rare and valuable books, most only available in Europe, which would “throw light on the general Constitution & droit public [public law] of the several confederacies which have existed.”

In a letter home to his father, he explains why he wants to study the past: “The existing embarrassments and mortal diseases of the Confederacy form the only ground of hope, that a Spirit of concession on all sides may be produced by the general chaos or at least partition of the Union which offers itself as the alternative.”

In other words, he needs to convince other Americans of just how badly things are going, in order to persuade them to ratify a stronger national constitution at the approaching convention in Philadelphia.

Instead of solely proclaiming the Articles of Confederation a failed document in the political present, Madison turns to the past: to Philip of Macedon. Strangely enough, Alexander the Great’s father may have had a much bigger impact on the American Constitution than many of us realize. He is the primary subject of Madison’s study.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Madison uses this historical example. The weakness of the American confederacy is like the weakness of the Amphyctionic League, which Philip corrupted over time until he ruled over it: “The danger [is] of having the same game played on our confederacy by which Philip managed that of the Grecian state [the Amphyctionic League]. I saw during the late assembly of the influence of the desperate circumstances of individuals on their public conduct to admonish me of the possibility of finding in the council of some one of the states fit instruments of foreign machinations.” Translation: if we’re too weak, foreign (and domestic) saboteurs might influence our government to its own demise.

Madison uses this argument everywhere. The newly independent Americans present at the Constitutional Convention worry most of all about the vulnerability of their new government: what if it isn’t strong enough to withstand an attack?

What if monarchists take over? What if, as Benjamin Franklin had warned, the “Society of the Cincinnati” (a group of veteran Revolutionary War officers founded in 1783) creates a new American aristocracy?

These questions nibble on the conscience of every elected representative in America, and Madison knows it. In a floor speech at the convention, he spells out the consequences of ending up like the Amphyctionic League: “Philip [of Macedon] at length taking advantage of their disunion, and insinuating himself into their Councils, made himself master of their fortunes.” And in a letter to Jefferson in October 1787, “[The weak centralized government] of the Amphyctions is well known

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“Had Greece, says a judicious observer on her fate, been united by a stricter confederation, and persevered in her union, she would never have worn the chains of Macedon; and might have proved a barrier to the vast projects of Rome.”

-James Madison, “Federalist 18” (1787)

to have been rendered of little use whilst it lasted, and in the end to have been destroyed by the predominance of the local over the federal authority.”

Our first national campaign wasn’t for a candidate, but for an idea: that our government ought to be strong enough to sustain itself.

POLITICS AS HISTORY

Today, our treatment of history isn’t so different. Often, it’s a prop meant to hold up our own beliefs about politics. For Glenn Beck, slavery serves as a warning against authoritarianism (“It’s not a white condition or a black condition, it’s a human condition: man will enslave man when he can. This is a warning sign.”), and the Holocaust serves as a warning for the persecution of Christians (“How did [the Nazis] make them wear prison uniforms?! A purple triangle … stood for being a Bible scholar.”).

Even though there were strains of white supremacy in early (and modern)

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America, evident in documents such as Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, and even though the purple triangle really identified pacifist German Jehovah’s Witnesses, often mistranslated from Bibelforscher, these statements fulfill their purpose: they are political, not historical.

Bill O’Reilly represents a similar trend. In an interview, he explains that he wrote Killing Lincoln not because of the historical appeal of the era itself, but because “America’s in bad shape right now” (emphasis the author’s). In speaking with Pastor Robert Jeffress about Killing Jesus, Pastor Jeffress articulated the presentism of the book well: “Your book fits a bigger narrative you’ve been telling for a long time: that secularists are out to destroy Christianity.” Again, O’Reilly wrote the book in large part because of the contemporary debate that surrounded it.

But the appropriation of history is more than a tool: it itself is a battleground.

Just as in Madison’s case, conservatives today see a new class of people chipping away at the integrity of American government. This time, instead of leftover loyalists or rebellious state legislatures, Glenn Beck and his colleagues see the “establishment” media at work. In the introduction to a “crash course” on American history, Beck urgently asks, “[a]m I the only one appalled that history is being written and re-written right in front of us? If you want to restore the country, you must take it upon yourself to learn and re-learn history. Restore our history, restore our country.” The political battleground has expanded to our past; American history is in fact being re-written, by Glenn Beck.

HISTORY AS POLITICS This claim that we need to “restore our history” is a not-so-subtle shot at the supposed liberal bias amongst the media and academic historians, and it reflects the panic of modern conservatism: that the American narrative is being crammed into a liberal mold. Efforts to counter this perceived shift form the basis of many conservative media personalities. In one marathon episode, Glenn Beck describes a theme park he plans to build, “Independence, USA,” which will hold at its center his private collection of American history. “This is my National Archives,” he explains, “[w]e will keep the things and the ideas and the books and the papers that tell the truth. Nobody is going to tell me ‘that’s not the truth.’ Really? Let me go to the archives and get it for you. Let me go and show you what they used when they built America.”

This hysteria over the sanctity of history affects our politics, even outside of the New York Times bestseller list. In 2010, Texas, one of the largest textbook purchasers in the world, changed its education standards to meet a more conservative bent. The New York Times quoted a school board member saying that “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” Another member asserted, “There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections.” According to the Times, “There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.”

A year later, and again in 2012, the Tea Party in Tennessee protested textbook standards in the state, listing as a demand that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens …” A spokesman for the group added that there had been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance,

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the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

Here are where the parallels to James Madison end, and where Jefferson’s shipment of 200 books of history, politics, and philosophy to Madison in 1786 becomes very important. History, then and now, is meant to inform our decisions and our political speech, not alter historical reality according to present bias. And history misused towards political ends is often more damaging than no history at all.

WHOSE HISTORY? Remember how the Tea Party (the Koch brothers’ one) got started—on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. After listening to reports of government housing bailouts, television correspondent Rick Santelli asked the traders on the floor if they “really want[ed] to subsidize the losers’ mortgages.” The group of white, property-owning, merchant elites cried in unison, “Nooo!” Then Santelli yelled the rant heard ‘round the world: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July! All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing!” Cue raucous cheering.

Despite his impassioned plea, Santelli was on the blunt end of poor history, the kind that might be in Texas textbooks or Glenn Beck bestsellers right now. He mistook the Tea Party that fought against taxation without representation for one that fought for Randian free market objectivism: the Tea Party that never existed.

Santelli, himself a white, property-owning, merchant elite, looked around the room: “These guys are pretty straightforward. And my guess is, they’re a pretty good statistical cross-section of America: the Silent Majority.”

They might have been a pretty good statistical cross-section of the eligible voting members at the 18th century Constitutional Convention. They might have even shared those delegates’ political values. But they weren’t representative. And that’s really my point: we shouldn’t forget, no matter how hard Madison or Glenn Beck try to make us forget this year or any year, that history is written by those with voices loud enough to write it, and so, far too often, are our politics. To use history as the foundation of political ideology, one should listen for the voices too quiet to be heard, then and now: those marginalized by their economic condition, their gender, their race, their religion, or any other number of factors. Their history is not a “made-up criticism” of the “mainstream,” it is the unheard reality, a reality waiting to be incorporated.

As it stands, American conservatives aren’t listening to these narratives. History has an odd way of repeating itself.

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A Very Narrow Bridge The Open Hillel Debate Nancy Ko “We have drawn that line. We are unwavering.”

“That line” is the one between Zionist and anti-Zionist groups, and the man drawing it is Eric Fingerhut. Fingerhut is the president of Hillel International, an organization that oversees Jewish centers of campus life for hundreds of colleges in the world.

Now, Fingerhut has threatened to expel Swarthmore Hillel because of a unanimous vote by its board to invite speakers and guests regardless of their stances on Zionism and Israel. The international organization views this “Open Hillel” policy as a threat to Jewish identity. But Swarthmore Hillel’s supporters, among them liberal policy junkies and Orthodox Jews alike, see Fingerhut’s line as a threat to free speech and open debate—which, for many, might as well be a threat to Jewish identity.

For those involved, it is hard to be anything but impassioned. But the sentiments of opponents of Open Hillel indicate an even larger problem, one that is sensitive and difficult to grapple with, but one too important not to confront.

“THE HATRED IS INESCAPABLE” Modern secular Zionism began with Moses Hess, a German Jewish philosopher who, in 1861, published Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question. History told Hess that the hatred of Jews was inescapable, only to be solved by the creation of a Jewish state.

But Hess’s work went without notice. Rome and Jerusalem had come too soon: German Jews were trying to assimilate, to be seen more as Jewish Germans. It was not until 1894, when the Dreyfus Affair shocked European Jews and re-situated persecution into contemporary Jewish memory, that Zionism gained some traction.

Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, published Der Judenstat in 1896, undoubtedly in response to the framed conviction of the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus.

To Herzl, “the plight of the Jews,” an exhaustive memory of expulsion and persecution, was a propelling force for the creation of a state that recognized the Jews as a distinct people. This was a direct criticism of the assimilation he witnessed

by German Jews: attempts at assimilation had historically failed the Jews and the Dreyfus Affair was Exhibit A. Herzl argued that the Jewish people should return to Palestine, “our unforgettable historic homeland.” Through World War I, Jewish migrations to Israel, aliyot, trickled onwards.

Then came a period of history that occupies human memory, without exaggeration, as the greatest evil of all time. The Holocaust, Ha’Shoah, exterminated two-

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thirds of the nine million Jews in Europe in the most institutionally deliberate act of mass violence in history.

Shortly thereafter, in 1948, Israel was granted independence with the end of the British Mandate. The Holocaust did what neither Herzl nor Hess could achieve: Jews from Europe arrived en masse. The Declaration of the State of Israel reads, “The Nazi Holocaust, which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe, proved anew the urgency of the reestablishment of the Jewish State.” In this way, the Israeli state would be defined by trauma.

THE LEGACY OF THE HOLOCAUST The Holocaust exacerbated an existential paranoia soon to be inherited by future generations of its victims. Less than a decade after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which had threatened the very existence of the Israeli state, scholar Ronald Aronson expressed his conflicting sentiments: as a Marxist, he condemned Israel’s oppressive actions towards Palestinians, but as a Jew, he was “awakened by a fear and panic I had never before known.” Despite his pacifism, Aronson treated Israeli charities with uncharacteristic generosity. These funds, he noted, “could not in wartime be anything but help for one of the belligerents.”

Indeed, threats by surrounding Arab states—in 1967, Arab leaders threatened to annihilate Israel, plunging the Middle East into the Six Day War—gave good reason for the young state’s existential crisis. The threats were easy reminders of the Shoah, and led to the regrettable tradition of, as Aronson put it, “seeing the Palestinian terrorists as Nazis.”

Evoking the Holocaust to justify political decisions has given Israel a very particular and risky monopoly on moral property. That is, actions and opinions motivated by realpolitik could be justified via moral imperative. In the Six Day War, Israel seized Judea and Samaria, disputed territories now known collectively as the Golan Heights and the West Bank. For some Israelis, this land was a Biblical entitlement, but for the Israeli state it also characterized an existential safety net in response to the Holocaust. Both these reasons are legitimate, yet neither would have categorically put the goals of the state ahead of Palestinian livelihood had the memory of the Holocaust not been evoked.

In a 1992 interview published in Chronicles of Dissent, Noam Chomsky acknowledges this, saying that the Holocaust “is very consciously manipulated.” An opponent of the occupation, Chomsky recalls a rather overt example of this, in which Wolf Blitzer, at the time a Washington correspondent to The Jerusalem Post, reported that a Holocaust memorial meeting in Washington was a huge success because, “Nobody mentioned arms sales to the Arabs but all the Congressmen understood that was the hidden message. So we got it across.”

This moral property also explains why—despite the fact that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law— Palestinian real estate is scant while support for the settlements is robust. Yet for Palestinians, Zionism is not the story of a people’s rescue. Far from it, it is the story of a people’s exile and uprooting.

Upon reflection, this is the ultimate irony: The story of the Palestinians is not unlike the story of so many exiled Jewish communities of the past. The famous saying goes, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue … and the Jews were expelled from Spain.” It is easier to list the institutions that haven’t expelled, exterminated,

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Gates surrounding the concentration camp at Auschwitz. or pillaged Jewish communities than it is to even begin listing the institutions that have. Why, then, have Israeli policies preferred further settlements, rather than identifying in Palestinians a common humanity?

The metaphysical mindset of the Jewish community, especially post-Holocaust, is characterized by a constant wariness of persecution and expulsion. But the resulting paranoia that catalyzes this legacy into one of victimhood leads Israeli policymakers to justify belligerence against the nation-less Palestinians, rather than sympathy with them.

“THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN TO ME AGAIN” By evoking the Holocaust in political consciousness, the Israeli political state established a moral high ground whose double standard ultimately undermines human rights. Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard and the founder of McGill’s graduate program in Jewish studies, stated in Commentary magazine in 1988 that “Palestinian Arabs are people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.”

Its racist tone may be shocking here, but it did not diminish a prolific career.

(Wisse’s statement rings ironic, for anti-Semitic pamphlets dating back to the founding of Lutheranism evoked a similar sentiment.) Yet Noam Chomsky was antagonized as being “agnostic” towards the Holocaust following his much milder statements in the aforementioned interview. A lower standard exists for the kind of rhetoric surrounding discourse on “Palestinian Arabs,” while a much higher sensitivity applies to rhetoric surrounding Zionism.

Evoking the Holocaust for the sake of advancing Israeli interests cheapens and flattens the Holocaust in historical memory. Such has been the case with attitudes towards the Boycott Divest Sanction movement, a pro-Palestinian group boycot-

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ting Israel until it withdraws from the illegal settlements. In 2011, Stanford Hillel released an anti-BDS statement reading, “[BDS] resonates for members of the Jewish community with the memory of anti-Jewish boycotts such as the Nuremberg Laws.”

But the comparison is misled. The Holocaust is an unequivocal evil. There were clear engineers of this evil (the Nazis). There were clear victims (Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents). Perhaps no one can completely fathom this evil without having lived it. However, the founding of the Israeli state, and its contentious aftermath, does not share this same morally absolute space. In a recent visit to Harvard, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, noted, “It’s disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust. We are not the victims this time. In 1938, did we have an entire defense force? Did we have political power over our enemies?”

Wielding the memory of persecution to justify goals that lie within a moral gray area diminishes the precise magnitude of the Shoah while turning the light forever green on morally ambiguous policies in the name of the Holocaust’s victims.

To illustrate the moral gray area: The number of Jewish settlements in the West Bank in 2012 grew by 15,000, at the expense of Palestinian homes. Even if Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad had been exaggerating when he said in 2012 “violent attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property, mosques, and farmland had increased by 150%,” the statement reveals the reality of Palestinian victimhood. Like so many Jewish shtetls of the past, Palestinian homes were pillaged.

Equating Palestinian resistance in the West Bank settlements—more often motivated by the desire to preserve a home rather than by anti-Semitism—with Nazi attempts to extinguish an entire people is at best using an axe to cut an apple. And it often comes at the expense of the Palestinians.

Professor Yehuda Elkana, former president of the Central European University and Holocaust survivor, wrote, “Two people emerged from Auschwitz: a minority that claims, ‘This will never happen again,’ and a frightened majority that claims, ‘This will never happen to me again.’”

Inappropriately evoking the Holocaust also means conflating the difference between those merely critical of Israeli policies or the Zionist idea and genuine anti-Semites. A 2014 New York Times piece reported on the popularization of a hand gesture, the quenelle, in France by performer Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. The quenelle resembles an upside-down Nazi salute, and fans have been pictured making the sign next to French synagogues and Holocaust memorials. M’Bala M’Bala remarks that the quenelle is symbolic resistance of “the system,” what he believes to be Jewish rulers who cloak themselves in the memory of the Holocaust.

In chilling symmetry, M’Bala M’Bala, like Chomsky, remarks on what he sees as a monopoly on the status of “victim.” But while Chomsky and Burg’s criticisms of how Israel handles the memory of trauma are meant to improve the anatomy of Israeli politics and Jewish identity, M’Bala M’Bala’s criticism is designed to ostracize an entire people. Misplaced evocations of the Holocaust by pro-Zionist rhetoric provide fuel for very real anti-Semitism. What’s more, conflations of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism allow anti-Semites to cloak themselves as anti-Zionists.

And that’s exactly what M’Bala M’Bala does. Fear and paranoia, the unfortunate companions to the Holocaust’s legacy, are too easily manipulated as more fuel for anti-Semitism in popular culture.

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THE MAIN THING The Open Hillel debate occurring in colleges across the country echoes what the political climate in Israel has been for decades now. Those against Open Hillel have posited that modern Jewish identity is contingent upon Israel, and therefore that any anti-Israeli sentiment is dangerous to Jewish existence. A pro-Israel Harvard student once told me, “To me, there is no difference between Jews sitting around a table with members of the BDS movement and Jews sitting with Nazis in 1930s Berlin to establish the most efficient implementation of the Nuremberg Laws.” And a recent New Republic piece reported that editor of Commentary John Podhoretz branded Swarthmore Hillel as anti-Semitic for being willing to host anti-Zionist speakers.

Such sentiments by opponents of Open Hillel rhyme with the paranoia held by many Israeli policymakers. Alan Dershowitz, renowned law professor at Harvard, said to the New York Times, “I don’t think this is a free-speech issue. The people who want divestment and boycotts have plenty of opportunity to speak on campus.

The question is a branding one. You can see why Hillel does not want its brand to be diluted.”

But Hillel is not Neiman Marcus, and pro-Israeli policy is not Christian Louboutin. Branding provides Hillel with a condition that contradicts its claims to diversity: “Only if you support Israel can we host you.” Again, it evokes the kind of high ground towards Israeli policy that, this time, supersedes even the legacy of free speech: for Hillel, the axe has cut out prominent Jewish voices like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

And the line has only been inching farther from inclusion. In January 2014, Jewish author David Harris-Gershon was barred from speaking at the University of California-Santa Barbara Hillel because the Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Evan Goodman, found a political post in which Harris-Gershon acknowledges that the pro-Palestinian BDS movement is one legitimate form of non-violent protest.

Harris-Gershon was barred from speaking at Hillel. Harris-Gershon does not subscribe to the BDS movement. Harris-Gershon is a supporter of the pro-Israeli two-state solution.

We should never forget the Holocaust. Its memory will, and should, continue to touch Israeli policy. But we need to be careful about how. Rather than fearfully wielding its memory as political strategy—rather than precariously making Jewish identity contingent upon its fearful trauma—let us universalize its lessons.

Especially because neither side is innocent, it is time to acknowledge each other’s histories. In memory of the Holocaust we must justify peace, not violence. We must not draw lines, but erase them. A first step could be Open Hillel.

Certainly the way forward will not be easy … it never was. Reb Nachman of Breslov fathered words now sung into Jewish folk music: “Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar m’od. V’ha’icar lo lefached klal.”

“All the world is a very narrow bridge. But ha’icar”—the main thing—“is not to fear at all.

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Kathryn McCawley “Get Born”

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Censored by Memory Memory Laws in France Samir Durrani

“The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man ...”

Thus begins Article XI of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The document signifies a landmark in the history of human rights, no doubt. But it contains an unavoidably moral approach to the legal protection of free speech. Such an approach, based on moral principles, falters most easily before memory laws.

MEMORY LAWS Memory laws, acts that have passed with increasing frequency in the French National Assembly, cast moral judgments on certain opinions by outlawing their expression. In the shadow of a turbulent history, the French parliament has enacted what is likely the most stringent and complicated set of memory laws in the world.

Haunted by the specter of the Second World War, Europe has taken incredible measures to curb hate speech. The European Union has established in 2008 framework law to criminalize hate speech, advising one to three years of incarceration.

But France has gone further than any other nation in its campaign against hate speech—passing memory law has been dubbed France’s national sport. Why France, rather than Germany or Austria? While the Holocaust is fresh in the memory of Europeans, xenophobia is rooted deeply in a bitter part of French history, notably slavery and global colonialism. Furthermore, the rhetoric behind the French Revolution reifies political fears of dangerous speech. Fueled by these fears, the number of memory laws passed in France exploded after the Second World War. In 1894, the New York Times wrote, “The principle of censorship, inherited from dynastic Governments, was retained in France until it was swept away by the press law of 1881.” Indeed, the French revolutionized their speech protection laws in a way the world could not ignore, but amendments and changing interpretation led the law to follow in line with the very principle of censorship it sought to terminate.

Article 24 criminalizes incitement to discrimination or hatred, and further amendments have broadly expanded the scope of criminalized speech.

Memory laws in France have consistently been met with outrage, particularly by the academic community, which many laws are specifically tailored to regulate.

“History is not a slave to current events ... History is not memory,” reads “Liberté pour l'histoire” (Freedom for History), an appeal by some of France’s most notable historians against restrictive memory laws. The appeal, which continues to assert, “The politics of the Nation State, even motivated by the best intentions, is not the politics of history,” lays out a dogmatic argument for academic freedom, which

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several French laws trammel.

But what of memories themselves? Are memories slave to current events? Perhaps not individual memories—the memories of those who experienced tragedy— but certainly historical memories—the collective memory of a people, which reads its history as grounds for directed progress. This “progress”—the debate continues as to whether this progress is truly positive—emerges as memory laws, but also as social movements and cultural changes. The memory of persecuted peoples, for example Hebrew servitude in Pharaonic Egypt, serves important political functions that alter the course of history and the future. That is to say, the way we remember incidents that we’ve personally never experienced changes the way the history is viewed and furthermore changes the way the present is understood.

Perhaps the idealism of academia clouds the practical impetus of the memory laws. Is free speech worth tolerating revisionists? That is left for the people of France to debate. However, the conflation of memory with history in the political arena is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Whereas memory may compose a portion of history, its usefulness is in the present rather than past. Memory has seeped into politics as rhetoric—a loud political machine that feeds on outrage.

FRENCH LEGISLATION Article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005, demands that school curricula recognize the positive role of the French colonization of Africa. The law explicitly violates educational neutrality, and moreover demonstrates the modus operandi of memories realized as law.

“School curricula shall recognize in particular the positive role played by French citizens living overseas, notably in North Africa, and will accord to the soldiers of the French army who served in these territories the prominent historical role they deserve.”

Educators argued that the state had no place in dictating curricula—especially by spinning history. In a debate reminiscent of the creationism-evolution debate, one wonders whether the people ever benefit from passing a memory law. In an interview with The Guardian, professor of law Thierry Le Bars explains, "It is by no means self evident that France's colonialism was positive. Think of the ignoble legal status of the Muslims in Algeria, of the massacre of up to 5,000 Algerians in Setif in 1945, of all the unfortunates who endured the hell of slavery to assure the prosperity of Caribbean islands." The overwhelming evidence of the negative effects of colonialism seems to fall short for proponents of the memory law, notably the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) conservative majority. Instead, ideas of what should be or what should have been take precedence. French nationalistic pride imposes a sort of political agenda on history. Thus, the UMP moralizes history in order to change the present, rather like proponents of creationism in schools, who ignore scientific truths and opt for moral truths instead.

Moral truth, the unlimited subjective lens through which history may be viewed, alters the way history interacts with the present. It is worth noting that history is by no means objective. Methods of analysis, preconceived notions, positionality, and research funding sources each add a layer of subjectivity to historical research.

Despite this, the imperfect practice retains objectivity to a greater degree than do moral judgments.

For example, viewing the slave trade as a crime against humanity immediately

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This figure at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris climbs the Stairs of Death. moralizes the historical event, casting present-day judgment on a centuries old institution. This particular case may be admirable, especially in light of contemporary slave-trade issues. But who is to say that condemning the slave trade is different from lauding colonial invasion? Either way, history becomes a moral object to use as a political tool.

The Taubira Law of May 21, 2001, follows exactly as described above. It is the official French recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity. The law was not met with any uproar—people disapprove of slavery across the board. In fact, the Taubira law was questioned only in the wake of the law of February 23, 2005, the colonialism law. Historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, professor at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, boldly condemned both laws in an interview with the Journal du dimanche. After Pétré-Grenouilleau’s subsequent infamy and threats of lawsuits, historians officially co-authored “Liberté pour l'histoire,” detailing the limitations of history—that it is neither a judicial object, nor a memory—and appealing for the overturn of the four laws which most clearly restricted the ability of historians to conduct research. Besides the Taubira law and colonialism law, “Liberté pour l'histoire” condemns the law of July 13, 1990, and the law of January 29, 2001, concerning Nazism and the Armenian genocide respectively, as “unworthy

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of a democratic state.”

But these two laws include a unique complication. While colonialism and slavery are overwhelmingly part of France’s collective memories, these two laws are also ingrained within individual memories. These memories are recent to a point that they are political to this day, without the need to moralize history. Unlike colonialism and slavery, the issues of the law of July 13, 1990, and the law of January 29, 2001, are not relics of a past time. Instead, they are modern: Europe still experiences their bitter aftertaste.

TOO SOON? But how soon is too soon? When exactly is a law a memory law, and when is it a law responding to contemporary issues? For the historian, it does not matter.

Any law with a moral tinge is a chisel to the foundations of the amoral study. But then again, no historian denies the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide. These relatively recent events fail to spark the outrage of historians because, by and large, the French are all on the same page. The Holocaust occurred. The Armenians faced genocide. It seems cut and dry, amoral. But, if there is a consensus about the veracity of these events, why put the laws in place then?

The Holocaust marks more than systematic genocide. To many, it marks the failure of the world to act quickly enough on human rights violations. Europe is haunted, including France, which passed the law of July 13, 1990, to combat these certain concerns by criminalizing Holocaust denial. Even if the law serves only to deter a few from denying the Holocaust, it marks a commitment to the moral grounds of the Allied Powers. This moral justification of the law is compelling, even to proponents of free speech.

The same argument follows for the law of January 29, 2001, which recognizes the Armenian genocide as a crime against humanity. But why would France pass a law that moralizes the history of foreign nations? France was at least involved in the Second World War—Ottoman suppression of the Armenian people seems less relevant. Speculation suggests that the law appeased the Armenian population in France, a major voting block, because the president rushed the law through parliament in a voting year. Perhaps the domestic law was intended to have geopolitical repercussions; further legislation criminalized Armenian genocide denial, but was repealed a month after Turkey withdrew its ambassador and cut economic ties with France. Regardless, the moralization of the Armenian genocide is politically puissant.

TO COMPARE AMERICA “There is no Richter scale of suffering,” declared Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau in his infamous interview that sparked national outrage. Keeping Pétré-Grenouilleau in mind, it is not fair to caricaturize the United States as a nation with a short history devoid of emotional toil. Slavery and racial discrimination have scarring effects still visible in American politics. To compare death tolls and the severity of injustice proves nothing, for metrics fail to capture these atrocities. To say France has suffered a more terrible history is not a justification of its memory laws that restrict speech. America has suffered too, but the Supreme Court has consistently expanded the scope of speech protection in the wake of the Civil War.

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“Burning of the Plaine du Cap - Massacre of whites by the blacks.” (Haiti, 1791) Given such similar pressures, why does America not have speech-restrictive memory laws? Are American legislators more resistant to memory law, less susceptible to moral rhetoric? Probably not. The Patriot Act, the Defense of Marriage Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many other pieces of American legislation were argued on moral grounds. An interesting difference between free speech law in France and the United States lies in the clauses that establish their respective rights to free speech. The quote from Article XI of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen continues as, “Every citizen may therefore speak, write, and print freely, if he accepts his own responsibility for any abuse of this liberty in the cases set by the law.” The First Amendment, on the other hand, reads, ”Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Perhaps the First Amendment’s basic structure, unfettered by a moral justification—rather than Article XI’s appeal to “the most precious rights”—and lack of an escape clause—rather than Article XI’s concession that the law may punish certain speech—establish a right that is simply more difficult for memory law to cripple. Perhaps the very fact that Article XI is the eleventh article reflects a lesser commitment to speech freedoms than a nation that established the right to free speech in their first amendment.

Regardless, it would be a mistake to argue that any nation is free of memory law, that memory—an incredibly effective political tool—is somehow forgotten in the political landscape of newer countries, more progressive countries, or fallen civilizations. Memories inform our understanding of the present as much as the past.

They are memorialized as holidays, history, and legislation, in the form of memory laws. Memories function as windows into our collectively remembered past, with a moralizing tint.

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National Narratives of the Holocaust The Nature of Remembrance in Boston and Berlin Emily Wang Six glass towers.

Six for the six concentration camps constructed in Poland, their names engraved on the pathway that guides visitors through the towers. Majdanek, Treblinka. Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec. Six for the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

And at night, light shines up from the bottom of the towers to illuminate the memorial. Six towers for six memorial candles.

The towers of the New England Holocaust Memorial are constructed from massive glass panels, taller than they are wide. Framed by metal beams on all four sides and stacked delicately upon one other to form slender glass chimneys, the panes of glass seem frosted, almost translucent. Fragile in a way that Boston as a whole is not. Fragile in a way that the brutalist architecture of the nearby Government Center is not. Fragile in a way that suspends the monument from its urban surroundings, from the street traffic, the concrete and cement, the low groans of ships in the Boston Harbor as workers unload containers of steel nearby.

We arrive at the memorial as the capstone to a day-long walking tour of monuments and art installations around Boston. The day had proceeded with a detached repetitiveness. Some pointing, brief historical background, commentary from the group on the design elements of the structure, and invariably, photographs. On to the next one.

But the Holocaust Memorial asks more from its visitors than a cursory glance and a cellphone-snapped picture. It carves out a space in an urban center and invites visitors along the path leading through the towers and into the smokestacks.

The visitor’s experience is contained entirely by the monument’s glass confines. In its delicate translucency, the memorial constructs an enclosed space, separate from its surroundings both literally and stylistically.

One-by-one, we file through the memorial. As I approach the first tower, I realize that the smoky texture of the glass is the result of millions of pale-white numbers etched onto the surface. Grouped in seven-digit clusters, the digits recall the tattooed identification numbers used in concentration camps. Four walls of glass containing hundreds of thousands of these numbers tower above me, incrementally dimming the harsh sunlight of summer.

The New England Holocaust Memorial is rife with such symbolic meaning.

It’s not just the glass chimneys or numbers on the walls, it’s the grate beneath my feet, the stars that shine from underneath the grate, the stacked stones that visitors

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leave behind. It’s the strategically-selected location, merely a block away from the Freedom Trail that charts the genesis of the United States of America and roots the nation’s history firmly in the political allegory of freedom and justice.

And it’s the steam that rises through the grates. In the late August humidity, the muggy air clings to the skin. As the warm air ghosts around my ankles to rise through the towers, I feel the heat prickle. The intent is not difficult to discern; in a bid to empathically link the visitors and the victims of the Holocaust, the memorial makes visitors hyper-aware of their position inside a quasi-literal smokestack. It evokes a sensation of noticeable—however slight—discomfort. It makes the horror all the more real.

The history of the Holocaust—and the United States’ relationship to it—is indeed horrific. Laurence Jarvik’s 1982 documentary “Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?” opens with an excerpt from a letter that asks, “[A]nd you, our brothers in all free countries, and you, our governments of all free lands, where are you? What are you doing to hinder the carnage that is now going on?” The letter, smuggled to the United States in 1944 on behalf of Rabbi Michael Weissmandt and Mrs. Gisi Fleischmann, unearths a dimension of our nation that muddies America’s self-identification as the arbiter of freedom and democracy. Even as our national narrative positions the Allied powers against Nazi Germany, good against evil, these attempts to divide moral ground ultimately fail in light of America’s systematic failure to rescue the victims of the Holocaust.

In the wake of violent pogroms in Poland, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a joint convention of thirty-two nations. But the 1938 Evian Conference in France ended in failure—with the exception of the Dominican Republic, all nations in attendance, including the United States, refused to accept additional Jewish refugees. Following the world’s unilateral refusal to accept Jewish immigrants, German officials released a statement noting the hypocrisy of conference’s outcome given the Allied nations’ condemnation of Germany’s treatment of the Jewish people.

Multiple failed attempts to encourage the Western nations to open their borders to the Jewish refugees ensued. In February of 1939, Senator Robert F. Wagner and Representative Edith N. Rogers introduced the Wagner-Rogers bill in the Senate and House, respectively. The limited refugee bill aimed to permit the admission of 20,000 German refugee children in addition to then-current joint German-Austrian immigration quota of 23,790. The bill was defeated in committee following strong opposition from anti-immigration groups.

Meanwhile, Nazi persecution of the Jews continued. Thousands of torched synagogues. Hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children killed in systematic and planned killings masquerading as spontaneous violent uprisings.

Perhaps the most damning story of all is that of the travelers on the St. Louis.

Aboard the German transatlantic liner were 938 refugees fleeing persecution in Germany. The refugees on board the ship, initially destined for Cuba, were in possession of landing certificates and travel visas issued by the Cuban director-general of immigration. But President Federico Ladero Bru had invalidated the certificates and visas a week earlier following public scrutiny of the director-general’s sale of the travel documents for personal profit. When the St. Louis arrived at Cuba, the 908 passengers possessing invalidated documents were unable to enter Cuba, and despite international overtures made to President Bru, the St. Louis was forced to leave Cuban waters with 908 refugees still on board. Even though national coverage resulted in overwhelming sympathy for the passengers, the United States also

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refused to allow the refugees to enter. Roosevelt and the White House remained unresponsive as passengers cabled, desperately seeking refuge. Mere miles away from the shoreline of Florida, the St. Louis set sail to return to Europe.

Jewish organizations eventually negotiated for refuge for the passengers in Britain, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. But the refugees on the European continent were again in peril following the German invasion of Western Europe.

254 of the original passengers eventually perished in the Holocaust.

Despite such incidents, our nation’s collective inertia perpetuated itself. In response to the apathetic citizenry and the era’s anti-Semitism, the national press attempted to downplay initial reports of the Holocaust in order to avoid appearances of pandering to the Jewish population. On May 14, 1943—the day after all remaining occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto were deported into concentration camps—the New York Times’s coverage of the event was relegated to page seven.

These anecdotes paint a picture of US isolationism and anti-Semitism in the World War II era. The State Department’s failure to take further action to protect the Jews in Europe reflects popular sentiment in the Great Depression. A 1939 Fortune Magazine poll revealed that 83 percent of individuals opposed relaxing immigration restrictions. Economic hardship had forced society inward. How can we help others, we had rationalized, when even our own citizens struggle to feed their families? So the Evian Conference ended with a whimper. So the Wagner-Rogers bill died in committee. So the St. Louis returned to Europe. So the initial coverage of 700,000 Jews murdered in the “Final Solution” was relegated to 11 lines on page six of the Chicago Tribune.

Nazi officials, unable to force the Jewish population to flee to countries unwilling to accept the immigrants, rationalized their choice to turn to the “Final Solution.” Their aim to eliminate the Jewish people from Germany could not be solved by emigration, they claimed. Thus commenced the grisliest stage of the Holocaust.

What does it mean to liberate Auschwitz with events like the St. Louis embedded in our national past? What does it mean to condemn the perpetrators of the Holocaust when our nation’s failure to act exacerbated its effects?

The steam rising from the grates of the New England Holocaust Memorial seems to answer this unspoken question. As the heat settles onto the slick skin of the back of my neck, the uneasiness I feel becomes its own sense of complicity. In front of me, behind me, viewers linger in the towers, peer below into the grates, place stones along the granite walls lining the entrance and exit. They put their cellphones on vibrate. The glass confines of the memorial isolate visitors from their surroundings.

Peering out, impenetrable.

Surrounded by the sounds of the city, the Holocaust Memorial is a pinprick of absolute, oppressive silence.

Perhaps the monument evokes discomfort because we must feel uncomfortable in order to begin to untangle our nation’s role in the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Thousands of miles away, Germany grapples with a similar question of collective complicity. Unlike the United States, where national guilt from the Holocaust is largely separate from the nation’s political identity, such discussions of responsibility are inescapable in the country still burdened with the political legacy of the Nazi Party. Michael Sontheimer, writer for Der Spiegel, explains in his 2005 piece “Why Germans Can Never Escape Hitler’s Shadow” that “[f ]or us Germans, whether we like it or not, the past is always present.”

Still, the essential question remains the same—how does a country incorporate

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The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe lets visitors navigate their own pasts. such guilt-tinged horror and tragedy into a national narrative?

Just south of Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, 2,711 cement slabs rise from the ground at varying heights. Arranged in a grid-like formation, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe resembles a collection of coffins or tombstones, a set of abstracted markers for the millions of lives lost.

Yet in spite of the abstraction, the physical experience of the monument retains an emotional tenor. Like the New England Holocaust Memorial, it recreates an element of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. But unlike the memorial in Boston, which recalls a specific element of the emotional experience, the abstraction of its Berlin counterpart suspends any experience from specifics. The tourist in Berlin experiences the field of symbolic gravestones differently than, say, the children playing at the periphery. The visitor’s experience is self-defined and therefore unique.

Perhaps such an open approach to memorializing the Holocaust is a response to Germany’s previous attempts to contend with its Nazi past, first with the philo-Semitism of the 80s and 90s and the ensuing desire to move on and forget.

“Clearly, there was something artificial about the ritualistic displays of historical contrition that had long been central to public life in Germany. But to assert that the time had come to move beyond the past, once and for all, was no less artificial,” Yascha Mounk declared in her New York Times op-ed. “Normality cannot be

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decreed by fiat.”

The singularity of visitors’ experiences of the memorial is intentional. In a nation where nearly all citizens have some ties to the Holocaust, the nature of complicity is complicated—widely dispersed, but far from homogeneous. In order to avert explicitly assigning blame, the monument leaves open and abstract the intent of the memorial. No visitors are immune: Peter Eisensman, the architect behind the memorial, explained, “I don't want people to weep and then walk away with a clear conscience.” The visitor’s experience is dictated entirely by his or her own ties to the Holocaust. Awareness of guilt must emerge organically in order to avert sentimentality, or worse: insincerity.

In 2003, during the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the deconstructed, minimalist monument was embroiled in controversy.

Degussa AG, the German firm contracted to provide the anti-graffiti resin for the cement slabs, was linked to its parent company Degesch. Degesch, it so happens, supplied Nazi concentration camps with Zyklon-B hydrogen cyanide tablets during the war.

Sontheimer was correct in his recognition that for Germany, the present is inextricably linked to the Holocaust. Even as Germany memorializes the Holocaust, the ugliness of the past inevitably and inescapably presents itself.

Germany, then, must balance the act of remembrance with that of overcoming.

The nation cannot remain paralyzed in its past, but moving forward is not so simple.

The 4.7 acre site of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe testifies to the impossibility—and inadvisability—of forgetting. But its blank faces and perpendicular angles offer no further answers.

Both the Boston and Berlin Holocaust memorials offer collections of moments instead of sentimentality, physical experiences instead of editorialized explanation.

They translate the burden of national memory into a physical space.

But where Boston’s memorial encloses, Berlin’s exposes. Unlike the insulated nature of Boston’s memorial, Berlin’s memorial maintains a more porous relationship with the surrounding city. The grid-like arrangement of the stelae resembles the layout of the nearby street intersections. The memorial’s location at the center of Berlin results in high foot traffic and plenty of visitors, tourists and locals alike.

On sunny days, children play inside the labyrinthine arrangement of slabs. Families picnic.

The memorial reflects Sontheimer’s declaration of the past’s omnipresence. Just as the monument has woven itself in the physical fabric of Berlin, Germany will always contend with its past role in perpetrating the atrocities of the Holocaust.

However, such porousness also exposes the memorial to the callousness and grit of the city. On January 1, 2014, news reports revealed that a man was filmed urinating from one of the cement stelae comprising the monument. In the same video, individuals appeared to launch fireworks from the site. The police did not deem the acts to be political (though the monument has previously been the target of neo-Nazi vandals), yet the news story appears to carry an inherent political weight. German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters condemned the vandals, stating that “The incidents are outrageous and to be deplored.” On the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront, commenters immediately celebrated the man’s actions. User Hungry Brian deplored the monument as “the Jew’s hideous markings on an otherwise beautiful city … [the vandal’s acts] will make it smell as ugly as it looks.”

The act—and the responses it drew—offered a telling portrayal of Germany’s

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struggle to situate the Holocaust in its national narrative. Like the Zyklon-B incident, the video’s controversy emerges from Germany’s uncertainty about how to treat this memorial, and by extension, how to treat the Holocaust. For the memorial is merely a manifestation of the event itself: a dark scar in the center of Berlin to mark a dark period of German history.

So the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe completes its final goal. Its presence continues to propagate discussions, however controversial, of how to properly commemorate. The topic remains fresh, unresolved, a contemporary historical battleground. For how can a nation relegate the Holocaust to the past when an abstracted cemetery occupies nearly five acres at the heart of its capital?

Monuments do not merely commemorate events. They connect the past to the present, endowing history with a physical space. They embody the tension between remembrance and complicity that emerges as nations attempt to situate tragedies like the Holocaust within their national narratives. And, most importantly, they help individuals situate such events within their own narratives.

History becomes relevant when it distills the vast collective memory into a single individual’s physical sensation—of glass walls and faint steam, of a dizzying maze of tombstones. And as visitors begin to grapple with their own sense of culpability through these experiences, a nation’s history begins to take shape, written as an aggregation of individual moments.

In Berlin, children leap between the seemingly endless rows of concrete slabs, limbs splayed. Meanwhile, as I exit the New England Holocaust Memorial, I leave a single stone along one of the ridges lining the footpath. The action hearkens back to the Jewish tradition of leaving visitation stones at graves. In an age where the experience of traveling and visitation involves so much consumption—buying souvenirs, taking photographs, coming, seeing, conquering—the act of leaving something behind feels remarkably personal. And it is only fitting for a monument that asks for so much from its visitors.

By the exit, an engraving on the path implores visitors to Remember. But if the deadened silence surrounding the monument is any indication, the task is a more complex burden than the simple command suggests.

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Does Music Matter?

Music as a Liminal Space of Societal Memory Tyrik LaCruise

It could not be in Jesus' name, Beneath the bedroom floor, On Christmas night the killers Hid the bomb for Harry Moore.

It could not be in Jesus' name The killers took his life, Blew his home to pieces And killed his faithful wife.

Langston Hughes, “Ballad of Harry T. Moore”

WHEN IT ALL BEGAN While it’s difficult to pinpoint the beginning of an intellectual era, historians generally agree that Harry T. Moore was the first martyr of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Yet, despite his central role in the cause, Moore is often forgotten. To quote Myrlie Evers-Williams, former chairwoman of the NAACP board of directors, “Oftentimes we hear people say today that the civil rights movement started when Rosa Parks sat on the bus in the wrong place, or that it really started with Dr. King.

What we fail to recognize when reporting the facts of the Civil Rights Movement, of the modern Civil Rights Movement, is that there were people involved without names, who were not known … but you seldom see anything documented about those cases.”

In 1934, nine years after graduating from college, Harry Moore founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP. In 1937 Moore, along with the help of NAACP council Thurgood Marshal, filled a lawsuit for the equalization of teacher salaries across racial groups. In 1941, he organized a statewide chapter of the NAACP while maintaining his teaching position. That changed in 1946 when Moore and his wife, by now well-known civil rights activists, were fired from their teaching positions and blacklisted from the profession. Instead of shying away from his work in response to these pressures, Moore re-devoted himself to the NAACP, becoming an organizer.

In 1949, Moore began work on the Groveland Rape Case. Norma Padgett had

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accused four men—Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin—of rape. She was white and they were black. Within days, three of the accused were in custody and the fourth was dead.

Unable to further harass the suspects in custody, a mob of angry Floridians turned to the African-American community of Groveland in order to vent their anger. For days, Groveland burned, and the terror did not stop until the National Guard intervened.

In the context of this fervor, the Groveland Case quickly became national news.

Moore, with the NAACP behind him, committed to the boys’ defense. After years in court, first in trial and later battling the conviction that inevitably came down, the two defendants who appealed were granted a retrial. Shortly afterward, Irvin and Shepherd were shot by the police. Shepherd was killed, Irvin seriously injured, and Sheriff McCall of Lake County was absolved of all wrongdoing.

That absolution did not stop activists from questioning what happened that night, and when Irvin, who survived by playing dead, had recovered, he described a different chain of events. McCall claimed he stopped to fix a flat and was attacked by his two charges, who had been chained together. Irvin, on the other hand, claimed that McCall had pulled them out of the car and started shooting. In response to this testimony, Moore fought for Irvin’s suspension and indictment on murder charges. But he did not succeed.

Six weeks later, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a bomb exploded beneath the Moores’ bedroom floor. That Christmas Day, at the age of forty-six, Harry died; Harriette, nine days later. Their killers were found only after four separate investigations and fifty years of speculation.

The Moores remain the only couple to both have died in the civil rights struggle.

Already famous for his work as an activist, Harry Moore became even more prominent in death. Rallies were held across the nation, and at one of these rallies, Langston Hughes debuted his elegiac “Ballad of Harry Moore.”

The ballad stopped Harry’s story from being forgotten. Recently, Sweet Honey in the Rock resurrected “Ballad of Harry Moore” in their shows. After one performance, an audience member exclaimed, “It gives us a knowledge of things we really had no knowledge about. … [T]here are so many African Americans who don’t have a clue about African Americans.”

Preserved forever in Hughes’ lines is the quiet resolve amongst civil rights activists in the wake of the Moores’ death. The ballad’s refrain, “No bomb can kill the dreams I hold / Freedom never dies,” became the defining sentiment of the movement. In the following years, Florida’s continued bombings did little to deter people from the cause.

It’s nearly impossible to track the impact of a song. Still, the “Ballad of Harry Moore” was one of the first in a long line of civil rights era protest anthems. From Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” released a year later to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” over a decade afterward, the Civil Rights Movement is a story that is as well told in the grooves of a record as it is in the words on a page.

Music was there throughout, energizing people at rallies, broadcasting burdens across races and classes and eventually continents. A number of artists—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mahalia Johnson, and Peter, Paul, and Mary—played at the March on Washington, arguably the most famous gathering of the Civil Rights Movement.

Johnson even performed as the introduction to Martin Luther King Jr.’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech. Their songs, carefully chosen to resonate with a crowd

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“Freedom never descends upon a people.

It is always bought with a price.”

-Harry T. Moore itching for change, served as testimonies to the need for it. Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” for example, was a jaded absolution of Medgar Ever’s murderer.

The real culprit? The system that groomed him to perpetrate his crime. In it, Dylan sings: A South politician preaches to the poor white man, 'You got more than the blacks, don't complain.

You're better than them, you been born with white skin,' they explain.

And the Negro's name Is used it is plain For the politician's gain As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train But it ain't him to blame He's only a pawn in their game.

Though he held a controversial position, Dylan raised an interesting question: can a politics produced by such a broken system really work to fix it?

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CAN CHANGE REALLY COME? Early in 1964, shortly after the death of his eighteen-month-old son, Sam Cooke wrote and recorded his iconic “A Change is Gonna Come.” The song, released just weeks after Sam Cooke's own tragic death, was partially inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “A Change is Gonna Come” quickly became an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement, and is generally viewed as one of the best songs of the 20th century. What makes “Change” particularly interesting is not its top twenty spot on Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Songs of All Time” list, but rather what happened to the song once it made it to the radio.

In one of the song’s most poignant moments Cooke cries: I go to the movies and I go downtown Somebody keep telling me, "Don't hang around" It's been a long, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will...

Here, writing in the wake of a racial run-in while on tour, Cooke strikes at the heart of the segregation and racial discrimination seen through America and concentrated in the South. These practices were no secret, but never before had they been sung about on a top forty hit. As a result, “Change” made its way to the radio without the lyrics in question, leaving only LP buyers able to hear all of Cooke’s reflection. In doing so, record executives subjected “Change” to the limits of the very system he was speaking out against.

And so the question lingers, does it matter who makes the music of our memory?

The influence of music executives on music, while often overlooked, is essential.

As someone must produce every record, with every song comes an executive directing expression. There’s no ignoring the possible sanitation of protest pieces of music. Winston Churchill said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” Does the same apply for the once “subversive” songs that have become part of our musical canon?

On some level, it must. “A Change is Gonna Come” is evidence that songs are not impervious from outside influence, from edits intended to make the song sell more records. While music serves as a reservoir of collective memory, even there things must be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, music remains one of the most effective ways we have of engaging with our past. Within the span of a song, an artist, through the fusion of melody and lyrics, is able to transport her listener back in time. Here the artist is able to communicate the thoughts and emotions captured years prior for years hence.

Imagine reading an essay on the death of Hattie Carroll, or reading the lyrics of the song on the page: something immeasurable is lost without Dylan’s music driving home his point about its importance. The greatest songs of recent memory are inextricably linked with our collective memory, and our greatest memories are tied to the pieces of music that keep us from forgetting them.

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A Night to Remember, or Forget The Paris Massacre and French Collective Memory Barbara Halla Kader was a student at a French university in Paris in 1961. Though we know little about him, it is possible that he was the French-born son of an Algerian immigrant who had moved to France after having served for the French army in one of the world wars. Kader’s life was not easy: he lived a poor existence in the French shantytowns, or bidonevilles, with a manual job and no prospects of a good education. Yet many Algerian immigrants hoped this was still better than the poverty and prospect of unemployment to be found in war-ravaged Algeria, which in 1961 was in the middle of an ongoing conflict and in the process of decolonization from France.

But that, in many ways, was not the case.

Algerians living in France faced constant and clear danger. On the one hand, they faced daily frisking from the French police, brutal violence and blind discrimination by the general population, and on the other continuous pressure from the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN), eager to recruit French-Algerians to fight for their cause. Kader and many of his peers were the de facto victims of a transnational conflict that would culminate in mainland France, on October 17, 1961, in what is nowadays known as the Paris Massacre of 1961.

The Paris Massacre of 1961 rarely makes headlines in France’s cultural narrative.

It is not included in the textbooks that provide an overview of French, or even Algerian, history in either country, never mind the international academic community.

But before we try to understand why such an event has been erased from public memory and textbooks, it is important to understand its origins and how it unfolded. As mentioned previously, in 1961 the French empire was in its last gasps. The jewel of the Empire fought back; the FLN organized strikes and sparked a revolutionary war that had France trembling, yet not ready to give up. The attacks of the FLN were not limited to the presence of the French army, but had spread quietly all over mainland France as well.

Throughout 1961 and, in particular, in the days preceding October 17, the attacks of the FLN had been targeting the French police force rather violently—merciless killings in the streets, beatings as violent as the ones that many Algerians living in France were subject to in their everyday life. At the same time, the FLN was recruiting. Though many French-Algerians wanted French citizenship, they never got it. They had built their lives in France, lived on French soil, some even fell in love and married French men and women, yet they were not really considered French citizens. Rather, the French government had created a specific category, called the French Muslims of Algeria (FMA), to distinguish them from the rest of the French

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population. The FLN had exploited such a distinction to feed the nationalist feelings of the Algerian population in France.

These events worried the French government, and in particular the French Minister of Internal Affairs, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury. With the French National Police, the notorious Maurice Papon at its head, on October 16, 1961, they imposed a curfew only on the category of French citizens dubbed the FMA. This curfew meant that those French citizens of Algerian nationality were not allowed to leave their homes after 8 o’clock. If they did, they would be arrested. But the French branch of the FLN could not tolerate such an insult. To counterattack the inhumane laws the French government put in place, they organized a peaceful protest and urged the Algerian population of Paris to gather en masse in the streets of Paris after the curfew, bearing no weapons whatsoever. And gather they did. Women, men, adults and students flooded the main streets of Paris, by all accounts, unarmed and peaceful.

But this protest made the French police uneasy. The French government gave the police force carte blanche authority in the matter of dealing with these protesters. Every Arab-looking individual would be arrested and then beaten. In the streets, the police fired shots that killed a number of Algerians, though the death toll was never confirmed. According to the French government, fewer than 20 were killed; according to the FLN, more than 200. Some were even thrown in the freezing Seine to drown. No one was ever found guilty for this tragedy. The official journalistic accounts and numbers collected by the French governments are now part of the French archives, to be opened only in 2020.

There is, however, a twist to the story. One could consider whether the French government was justified in their approach in imposing a curfew and giving the police carte blanche. It is just as important to remember that though this particular protest was in fact peaceful, the FLN had harmed and attacked several police officers in the past. There was no reason for the police to believe that this protest would be harmless. The ultimate problem was not whether the French government had legitimate concern, but rather, where it found the moral and political authority to single-out one part of the French citizenry and treat them like second-class citizens. The reason why this massacre conflicts with the rest of French history lies precisely in the legitimacy of the government’s actions, with respect to the nature of the republic that they were leading. In a way, even the citizenship status of those Algerians forced at a sort of home-arrest does not justify their actions, especially the actions of a self-proclaimed democratic republic. This conflict, buried forty years ago, reminds the public of the ever-present conundrum—liberty versus security.

Nevertheless, the Paris Massacre was about French citizenship, and this fact begs the question: how can such an episode, which happened in the heart of Paris, while the rest of the city was sleeping, have been so easily forgotten? For the French government, forgetting and erasing this episode was crucial. They had been building a narrative of the French nation, in which the empire was not lauded. And even more, they had been building a narrative of a nation where the French-Algerians were not really present, as they had not participated in the making of the French Republic. In the end, creating a coherent story about the French Republic, as with every other nation, is about remembering, just as much as it is about forgetting and sweeping under the rug those moments that do not fit the narrative.

This particular moment in history, one that has passed unaware to the eye of mainstream imperial or even Western history at large, is an example of how historical amnesia builds the narratives of two countries: France and Algeria. For France,

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it is the uncomfortable truth on two fronts. On the one hand, it would like to be remembered as the epitome of freedom and democracy. The values of the republic, the ideals of the French Revolution, and the institutions of the Fifth Republic remain intact because people believe them to be efficient. But is a republic efficient when its own citizens are denied the right to protest and are murdered under the orders of its own ministers?

On the other hand, the Paris Massacre is a bitter reminder that issues of citizenship remained unsolved. France has tried very hard to build the image of a coherent nation, with one population under the three-color flag, a population that is united by its history as much as by its culture—in short, a nation of uniformity. But this image is somewhat false. The question of French citizenship is still a raw spot in 2014, as it was in 1961, when French citizens faced discrimination and were forced to give up part of their civil liberties. To this day, children born in French territories to immigrant parents are not legally French citizens. They have to wait until they are 18, and even then they have to apply. Not all are successful, despite having spent most of their lives in France.

In Algeria, historical narrative is about the people they forgot. The problem with the French-Algerian citizens is that they were never really fully French, but most of those participating in the protests were not Algerians either. The Algerian government never publicized this event, even though it would have suited their plans to portray the French as the villain. The Paris Massacre was omitted from the national narrative, in large part because it was a reminder that these two nations shared a fundamental similarity, despite the attempts of the Algerian government to pretend otherwise. It is also a reminder that the Algerian government might have responsibilities beyond that of Algeria’s own territory. When trying to rebuild a nation ravaged by war and colonial legacies, what happens on the other side of the Mediterranean might not be a priority.

Though clichĂŠ, history is written by the winners, and the general narrative is transcribed by the feelings and actions of the man on the spot. For countries like France, it is about Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Robespierre, Napoleon, Charles De Gaulle. But the real history, the one that changes nations, even through omission, is done through the middlemen as they challenge the status quo. People like Kader, whose stories we do not know and whose lives are not outlined in textbooks, are the ones that lived the Paris Massacre. It is important to remember that it is not only about the sacrifice, or the people that died and suffered. The FLN and its protest would be nothing without the 30,000 that showed support for its cause that October night. They were the ones who actively challenged the French government, who through their actions proved that the divide would make them second-class citizens, but not passive victims. History is nothing without the masses and those who fight for the leaders on the covers of history books. It is a pity that this is so often forgotten.

The Paris Massacre of 1961 has only recently resurfaced in the French national consciousness. In 2005, a film appeared that described the event and the conflict: Nuit Noire. This narrative film follows the fictional lives of the many participants in this massacre: French-Algerian citizens and their daily struggles and French policemen, scared of the organized attacks that the FLN brought to their homes.

It is a dark film that describes the lives of those who lived it. Following its release, the French newspaper Le Monde was among the first to bring attention to the Paris Massacre and what it described as the night that cadavers flooded the Seine. Critics

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“Here we drown Algerians” lauded the sobriety of Nuit Noire, pointing out that it did not favor or pick sides, rather displaying the faults and excesses of each. Other stories and books followed Nuit Noire, all attempts to reach the people, not just the media. It is no coincidence that Nuit Noire was first released as a television series, before hitting cinemas as a full-length film.

These attempts have been well received by French media, and yet the average French citizen still does not know much about the Paris Massacre. Even if they did, it would probably not rupture their notion of French citizenship, or even what it means to be French. Stories like the Paris Massacre of 1961 are omitted from mainstream French history—or any history for that matter—because these omissions are used as a tool to keep the nation together. History is continuously written and rewritten by academics, as it always has been, and the debate on nationhood and memory seems to remain in the ivory tower, rather than becoming the problems of the ordinary citizen. The Paris Massacre of 1961 is a prime example of that.

It challenged the French government then, and it still challenges the government now. It does not appear in mainstream school textbooks, as it displays a conflict within French history, a moment when what it meant to be “French” was not clear: a moment when the French were fighting the French. In such instances, memory is constantly used by government, with the perhaps unconscious help of academia, to group and divide, to justify its own actions. The problem, in the end, remains not just how to make people remember, but how to make them care. The Paris Massacre might have sparked an academic debate, but it seems to have been forgotten again, just as easily as it was remembered.

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An American in Zunyi History for the Next Generation Rachel Wong

It was the start to another sweltering day in the little Chinese town of Zunyi. I ambled to a nearby food stall for breakfast, where a vintage TV buzzed lazily in the background. A reporter was reciting updates from the Korean Asiana Airlines crash at San Francisco. Suddenly, the clink of chopsticks and slurp of noodles paused as news broke that there had been three deaths, and that all three of the victims were Chinese schoolgirls. A man across from me stood up and declared, “All three of them were from our country, huh? Why didn’t more Americans die?”

When the question was repeated, it felt almost rhetorical. “Why don’t more Americans die?” The man’s glare swept over me—I suppose I looked a bit too amused. I wasn’t worried that he would single me out for an American. I have the almond-shaped eyes and thick bangs to pass as a local, and if I stayed quiet, I could spare him the accent that would give me away as a foreigner. But in moments like these, when I find my fellow Chinese cursing my fellow Americans, it’s hard to tell which side I’m supposed to be on.

I was here to study how Chinese people make sense of communist history. Of course, it’s no secret that Chairman Mao’s China has been transformed beyond recognition. Highways and McDonald’s now grace paddy fields that had once held laboring dissidents. Yet in five years’ time, and against all doomsday predictions, China may very well surpass the Soviet Union as the longest-living communist state in history. I wanted to know: is the extraordinary resilience of the regime somehow connected to the way the Chinese think about their own history?

I sat down with young members of the Party, curators of communist history museums, officials at an electricity plant, even retired ladies at morning tai chi. “What makes you proud to be Chinese?” I would ask. “What does communism mean to you?”

Over hotpot in a market stall, one official downed his fourth glass of maotai (Chinese vodka) and furrowed his brows at me: “In imperialist America, capitalist corporations exploit the proletariat without mercy. But in China, everyone is equal.” He gestured to his retinue of waiting workers, who rushed over to replenish his glass. “Workers can share a drink with their bosses anytime. Right?” he roared.

The workers retreated, nodding in silent assent. “You Americans are like mosquitoes, drinking the blood of…” That’s when he waved me off, forgetting to finish his sentence.

Another time, I met with a newly-ordained party member, fresh out of college.

We spoke about the Opium Wars, the Nanjing Massacre, the Beijing Olympics. We censored ourselves on the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, the escaped dissident Chen Guangcheng, the never-sorry artist Ai Weiwei. I mentioned my grandfather’s

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Memories of Mao permeate a new, ambitious China. adventures in the Korean War; she recounted her father’s loyal services to the Party.

We sounded like two Mao enthusiasts, reminiscing about the good old days. Suddenly, she leaned forward and asked, “What do you Americans think about Tiananmen Square?”

As open-ended as my questions had been, I got the sinking feeling that my American identity was somehow getting in the way, an uninvited guest at Mao’s dinner party. But things didn’t really come together until I met that retired lady at tai chi. “This is where my ancestors lived,” she chirped, pointing to a hillside that had been remade into a massive concrete government building. When I expressed regret that they’d been forced to move out, she looked at me in surprise. “It was an honor for us,” she said. “And just over there is the Martyr’s Mausoleum. Shall we go up?” We walked the three hundred steps to the top, where a stern stone statue of Red Army soldiers looked out over the Zunyi cityscape.

I watched as she knelt before the altar, offering incense to the fallen dead. Then, she spread her fingers over their engraved names, pointing out the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who had died for “our cause.” She patted the knee of a young Red Army medic, whose bronze smile had been weathered by the years. I looked down at the knee. It was a brighter shade of gold than John Harvard’s shoe. How many pats? I wondered. How many pilgrims? We finished in front of a low stone

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house with barred windows. “This is where their ashes are kept,” she murmured. I couldn’t see inside, but she could. She had been coming here since her toddler days and remembered how the mausoleum had been built, bit by bit.

I had come here, to the heartland of China’s poorest province, to see how communist tradition collides with capitalist modernity. The drunken official’s Marxist drawl, the college grad’s whispers about Tiananmen, the retired lady’s incense offerings—it’s easy to dismiss these reflections on communism as the fading remnants of a past era, soon to be replaced by the glitter of modernization. Yet in many ways, it is exactly these people who have set the stage for the China’s rise. The American they see in me is a reminder of their own nation’s past weakness, of a “century of humiliation” when China lay helpless against the aggressions of foreign powers. As China scholars Schell and Delury write, this shame has transformed what it means to be Chinese. It is the reason why the official was less interested in proletarian revolution and more interested in making Chinese corporations better than American ones. The man at breakfast was indignant that Chinese schoolgirls had been killed on American soil, not that they had died on a Korean airline. The young party member wanted to know: did Americans understand why Tiananmen had to happen? As for the lady at tai chi, she knew that the ashes of those fallen soldiers would remain on her ancestor’s mountain, whether or not there was a grand mausoleum to honor them.

As the train trundled out of Zunyi and the sun sank behind those ash-covered hills, I found myself absurdly wishing that I were a mosquito. Not in the drunken-boss American-imperialist sense, but in the sense that I could somehow erase myself, perch on someone’s shoulder, and drink in all those conversations meant only for the Chinese. But even as the wish formed itself, I realized how impossible it all was, and at the same time, how okay it was too. I would never be able to see inside that mausoleum. But I had come close.

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Julia Becerra “iMemory”

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Where Are We Now? David Bowie’s Legacy in the 21st Century Zeenia Framroze

For five decades, David Bowie has been a cultural chameleon in musical history: “Space Oddity” played in the background as BBC broadcast the first footage from the moon. The deep V-necks and laced-up red boots of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane could drive crowds insane. Few aren’t lured by Bowie’s lyricism in “Let’s Dance.”

Bowie occupies a unique and constantly changing place in our musical psyche and memory. His voice and style draw on his musical past while possessing contemporary appeal. He has written nonsense lyrics and cultural anthems. Perhaps the most predominant manner in which we remember David Bowie is a sociopolitical one: many of his songs gained traction in times of moral crisis or cultural rejuvenation, among them the moon landing and the Cold War. Bowie never explicitly viewed himself as a political artist, yet it was a defining feature of how his music is listened to and remembered.

David Bowie has been a crucial part of the world’s cultural growth, and how we remember this artist has fascinating implications for how we will and ought to receive Bowie’s latest album. After a ten-year hiatus from the music industry, Bowie unexpectedly released a new album, The Next Day, shocking fans and critics alike.

The album possesses an elderliness—a wisdom—and arguably, a distinct and explicit social commentary that we have not seen before from Bowie.

The Victoria and Albert Museum recently ended an exhibit called David Bowie Is, showcasing much of Bowie’s costume gear and memorabilia from the David Bowie Archive. The exhibit itself forces audiences to ask many poignant questions about who David Bowie is, who he was, and what he and his audiences hope for him to be. The difficulty, of course, with putting Bowie into these boxes is that his artistry does not allow him to be confined or explained. Determining how The Next Day will factor into our sociopolitical understanding of the different shades of ‘Bowie’ will necessitate painting a picture from the messy palette of his fashion and presentation choices, music and writing, and his growing self-consciousness as the superstar musician of many generations.

“FASHION! TURN TO THE LEFT! FASHION! TURN TO THE RIGHT!” That perfectly strained voice is practically audible as you stand in front of the sound-wave-reminiscent Ziggy Stardust costume at the V&A Museum. The billow-

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ing yet magically structured pant legs encapsulate everything about Bowie himself: restrained yet resounding, confined within visible lines yet explosive.

David Bowie, both in song and appearance, is synonymous with the new and avant-garde. At the forefront of the world of fashion, David Bowie’s eclectic choices defined the notion that artists ought to conform to their own personal standards, rather than those of their audiences. Bowie’s choices to embrace the outlandish and weird have manifested in our understanding of Bowie as a maverick of society, a champion of risk-taking. Bowie experimented with cut and size and fit in a way few celebrities had before. His aim did not seem to be explicitly to endear the fashion world to him or appeal to the Bond Street highbrow, but rather to set a certain standard for them to aspire to.

Eschewing countless fashion staples, Bowie put himself together physically as weirdly as he put himself together musically. As Aladdin Sane, the distinct lightening bolt painted across his face, Bowie explored the clash of minimalism and color, navigating the music industry as a massively popular rock star for the first time.

As Ziggy, Bowie placed himself above the popular music fray, experimenting with the weird and extraterrestrial, sporting a painted gold orb on his forehead. Bowie’s fashion choices were typical of his personal choices, indicating a desire not to cater to a certain consumer of music, and not to cater to a certain definition of “male performing artist.” Without being an advocate or poster child for any cause or alliance, Bowie dismissed the sartorial rules with flair.

Bowie’s sexuality and public discussions of it further set him apart in our collective memory of the artist. David Bowie displayed a reluctance to uphold the banner for homosexual or bisexual groups, despite the fact that sexuality and androgyny were a core component of his performance and identity. Having made several public declarations regarding his sexuality, Bowie eschewed the attention focused on the importance of his orientation, often calling his decision to discuss it a mistake: “I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners or be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that bisexuality became my headline over here for so long.”

The most authoritative of Bowie’s biographers, David Buckley, noted that this period in Bowie’s artistic life focused on his ability to shock his audience with his sexuality, and to reinvent himself, artistically. These years carried with them the distinct decision to focus on moral codes that defied social definition and confinement. In a way, Bowie’s decisions regarding sexuality and fashion allowed him to drive social change without being overtly committed to it. He accomplished the kind of change that all great art aspires to: a deep, cultural, and historical type of change.

“TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE” Most peculiar about the way we remember David Bowie is where we believe the “change” that he propelled is manifested. Was Bowie the pioneer of the new and weird? The leader of the musical masses to adopt a different style of listening and aesthetic experience? Or was he the result of morphing cultural undercurrents, a pop icon as mutable and malleable as public perception itself? In many ways, the lyrics of Bowie’s most popular songs give us insight into the inner workings of the singer. While many of his stranger tunes have faded into oblivion, some have truly

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Bowie explored the idea of rock stardom through his many reinventions. stuck, becoming anthems of generations and causes. Bowie’s own reflection on interpersonal “Changes” resulted in a generation’s collective anticipation of the changes that the ‘70s would bring.

Bowie’s lyrics also managed to capture the sense of sociopolitical unrest in his listeners’ lives and express it in song, as was seen during the Vietnam War. Bowie’s lyrics could often reach a level of incredible depth, tapping into a type of generational memory that was so implicit that people reacted to it subconsciously. His famous collaboration with Queen’s Freddie Mercury for “Under Pressure” is a fascinating exploration of the reverberating effects of a lack of humanity, a social development that “puts people on streets.” In a 2008 interview, Brian May recalled, “It was hard, because you had four very precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us,” particularly when Bowie took over the writing of the lyrics. The political relevance of the song was subtle but powerful: “Love’s such an old fashioned word / And love dares you to care for / The people on the edge of the night / And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves.”

And thus our memory of Bowie is so innately human. It is the memory of a singer whose deliberateness in diction and tune appealed to something far above a consumer driven appreciation of music: a human appreciation of each other.

As Bowie grew, the world grew with him. The pleasant fear of “Changes” was as much a reflection of the changing world around Bowie as it was about the changing singer himself. “The Man Who Sold The World” (1970) and “Hunky Dory” (1971)

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reflected on the issues of humanity surrounding the effects of the détente and different human rights movements in the United States and Africa. Placing “Changes” on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, Rolling Stone looked at the song as a reflection of Bowie’s own relationship with a generation’s evolving tastes and values. Telling audiences to “turn and face the strange,” without ever asking their permission or seeking their blessing, it was Bowie and his anthem that marched the rock audiences into the ‘80s.

Before Bowie stopped touring and performing, his later works cemented his status as an inconceivably important rock star for the Baby Boomer generation. As Ziggy Stardust crooning “Starman,” he appealed to a forgotten hope for fantasy and wonder in a world where “poppa might get us locked up in fright.” In reality, Bowie says, we ought to just “let all the children boogie.”

At the same time, during the years he spent in Berlin, Bowie made sure that his sociopolitical statements were not perceived in such a manner. Wrapping up the ‘70s for himself with “Ashes to Ashes,” Bowie explored the depths of his own fantasy and memory with a song about a 1969 album character, “Major Tom.” Though the song is often simply hailed as a tribute to the character, Bowie’s interaction with his own memory mirrored the nuance of a generation emerging from a period of extreme historical tumult—“They got a message from the action man / I’m happy, hope you’re happy too / I’ve loved all I’ve needed love / Sordid details following.”

Bowie’s growth in tune, appearance, and costume, and their consistent interaction with one another, cemented Bowie as an artist unlike any other the world has ever seen. The incredible depth of his music appealed to something human and inhuman, popular and unknown, utterly insane and nonsensical, and yet perfectly lucid. It is why the politics of Bowie are so hard to pin down: the artist himself never viewed himself in that paradigm, and never wanted his audiences to either.

“AND THE NEXT DAY AND THE NEXT, AND ANOTHER DAY” Bowie’s latest album, The Next Day—released unexpectedly in March 2013— melded the themes of memory, identity, violence and reconciliation in a brilliant union of the past and present. The cover of the album itself is a commentary on this very union; atop Bowie’s most revered and well-known Heroes album cover is a simple white square with plain black text spelling out the album name. Is Bowie obliterating the past or writing on top of it? Dismissing his musical tradition or keeping it in the back of his mind? Bowie is no doubt asking himself these questions as an artist, as much as he is asking us as an audience to answer them for him and ourselves. In this very question lies the political relevance and genius of Bowie; he asks us to question how we interact with our past.

The first single Bowie released from that album was one of the most explicit examples of social commentary that Bowie has injected into his music. “Where Are We Now?” not only looks at the world through the lens of a post-Berlin Era Bowie, but through the eyes of those who have listened to and loved David Bowie’s music for years. Other singles from the album featured intriguing music videos entirely engrossed in the subjects of cultural commentary and memory. The controversial music video for “The Next Day” featured Marion Cotillard as a stigmata figure in a brothel-like den for priests, demonstrating Bowie’s new and direct engagement with organized religion. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” delves into the themes of stardom, obsession and voyeurism:

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The new album asks listeners to define the past for themselves—and for him.

They burn you with their radiant smiles Trap you with their beautiful eyes They’re broke and shamed or drunk or scared But I hope they live forever.

The music video for the song, featuring fellow androgyne Tilda Swinton, allows the audience to see Bowie interacting with a younger version of himself, testing the limits of memory and reinvention.

The album has received with much fanfare and critical acclaim. Songs like “The Next Day,” “Valentine’s Day,” and “(You Will) Set The World On Fire” seem to herald the arrival of a new, strong, and unabashedly opinionated Bowie, while tracks like “I’d Rather Be High” and familiar guitar twang of “Dancing Out in Space,” recall moments from the Space Oddity and Ziggy eras.

The importance of this album and even David Bowie himself might well be lost on the millennial generation. Bowie is sixty-six years old—the strains of wisdom and old age are a new addition to his music. However, the importance of Bowie has expanded to encompass the idea that he’s no longer merely a musical figure or a pop star, but an artistic enigma. He’s an artist whose choices in music and film and presentation are filled with poignancy and subtlety, whose lyrics speak of an internal struggle that knows no need for paradigms and vocabulary.

That is why Bowie should occupy a revered place in the music libraries of today’s youth: Bowie is not at the stage in his life where he has a chart position or a royalty to make. He makes music because, for him, it has always appealed to a certain kind of humanity, a political nature of empathy that is more intangible than what we perceive to be politics today. Bowie can still be the sociopolitical barometer of the millennial generation. The Next Day is the bridge, the album that connects generation to generation, memory to memory.

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Teaching 9/11 History for the Next Generation Olivia Campbell

Teaching tragedy is no easy thing. It’s a careful balancing act between emotion and analysis, and it’s always a difficult compromise. Since September 2011, New Jersey has officially included 9/11 as part of the state curriculum. The New Jersey plan is a conventional one; it stresses human loss, using a wide array of resources to present the emotional aspects of 9/11. The teacher guidelines include tips on how to help students who have been directly affected by 9/11 or have some other personal trauma that resonates particularly with the attack on New York. It presupposes an emotional connection, and seeks to foster such a connection if one is found to be lacking. In short, the New Jersey curriculum is exactly the kind of 9/11 education we need to be moving away from.

Surprising as it may sound, for the majority of junior high school students 9/11 is history. It may not have taken place before they were born, but it is history in an emotional sense—they simply do not associate with it. For all practical purposes, the events of 9/11 are for them what Pearl Harbor was for my parents’ generation, or what the fall of the Berlin Wall or end of the Cold War was for mine: politically and historically essential, but devoid of any emotional attachment. Indeed, today’s 18 year-olds are probably the youngest to really remember September 11, 2001 for what it was. Even then, many of those memories are likely vague and shallow, nothing like the poignant recollections of those who lived through 9/11 as adults.

The educational legacy of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War is perhaps one of the most powerful examples of the consequences that can arise from a distorted presentation of modern history. Arab and Israeli accounts of the circumstances leading to the battle, not to mention the war itself, differ so profoundly that textbooks written by one group or the other are hopelessly contradictory. In Hebrew it is known as Milkhemet Ha’atzma’ut, “War of Independence,” while in Arabic it is called al-Nakba, “The Catastrophe.” After 65 years, the 1948 war still inspires emotion in the youths of both groups. Moreover, though the 1948 war was the first in a series of events that comprise the Arab-Israeli conflict, the way it is taught has prevented either group from moving on.

Today, even recognizing that there is disagreement has emotional undertones.

It was as recently as 2007 that the Israeli government allowed for elementary textbooks in Arab schools in Israel to include the fact that many Arabs call the war a catastrophe. The decision was a controversial one that was slammed by the Israeli right as being anti-Zionist. The addition was not extended to other Israeli schools.

The Palestinian curriculum, in contrast, does not address the issue of the “Palestinian narrative” of the 1948 war until late in the high school years, a curriculum point

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9/11 has transformed from memory to history. absent until 1994, when previously strict content standards were relaxed. As a result of those standards, oral history has played a strong role, creating an education arguably more emotionally poignant than what any textbook could provide. The result is that young people from both groups are emotionally tied to a war that occurred a generation before they were born, which hinders meaningful progress today.

The way we teach 9/11 matters because it is too easy to simplify the terrible things done that day into the familiar story of the good guys going after the bad guys, and our ends justifying our means. We want students to be critical thinkers, to analyze the choices our country has made even in its darkest hour. Admittedly, our students need an education that acknowledges human loss, yes, but they also need one that focuses more clearly on the effects of 9/11. Moving forward, the historical significance of 9/11 is not only the tragedy and unity that the families of the victims, New York City, and really all of the United States suffered. The legacy of 9/11 will also lie in the American actions it prompted: the beginning of the War on Terror, the redefining of both international relations, and indeed, of security itself.

The implications of 9/11 in both American domestic and foreign policy are so profound, that teaching only, or even mostly, the human aspect is a disservice to our children. If we, as American citizens who lived through 9/11 and everything that followed, engage with 9/11 in only mourning our loss, and praising our sacrifice, we deny ourselves the benefit of hindsight. The objective clarity we need to debate security versus freedom and the way we fight the “War on Terror�, come at the cost of recognizing that our first reactions were not always the right ones. The trajectory of American policy, foreign and domestic, is complex enough without passing the emotional baggage of 9/11 on to the next generation of leaders.

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