129 episodes

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.

Recall This Book Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

    • Arts
    • 4.7 • 29 Ratings

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.

    124 The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)

    124 The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)

    NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race.
    They discuss the founding years of UNESCO and how it came to be that Jews were defined as the most plastic of races, and “Blackness” came to be seen as a stubbornly un-plastic category. The discussion ranges to include entwinement and interconnectedness, and Edward Said's notion of the "contrapuntal" analysis of the mutual implication of seemingly unrelated historical developments. Sonali's "Recallable Book" shines a spotlight on Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism--revised in 1955 to reflect ongoing debates about race and plasticity.
    Mentioned in the episode:

    Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)

    Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" (1954) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought ( "the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming" )

    Franz Boas, "Commencement Address at Atlanta University," May 31, 1906 (this is where he says the bit about "the line of cleavage"

    Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Final Report, immigration COmmission (1911)

    W.E.B. Du Bois, "Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace," (1945)

    Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

    Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

    Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination



    IHRA definition of Antisemitism.


    Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

    Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (1952)

    Natasha Levinson, "The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness," in Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. by Mordechai Gordon (2001)

    Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (on the contrapuntal)

    Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law


    UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1950 Statement on Race


    UNESCO, 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences


    Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (on the methodological nationalism of postcolonial studies and new approaches that challenge it)


    Recallable books:

    Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950, 1955 rev. ed.)

    George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)


    Read and Listen to the episode here.
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    • 48 min
    123* Sheila Heti Speaks About Awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

    123* Sheila Heti Speaks About Awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

    In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.
    Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”
    if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk.
    Mentioned in this Episode:
    By Sheila Heti:

    Pure Colour

    How Should a Person Be?

    Alphabetical Diaries

    Ticknor


    We Need a Horse (children’s book)


    The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)


    Also mentioned:

    Oulipo Group


    Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard


    Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael


    George Eliot, Middlemarch



    Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)

    Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy


    Willa Cather , The Professor’s House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”)

    William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.



    Listen and Read:
    Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    • 43 min
    122 The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)

    122 The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)

    In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London -- is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of "ethnic expectations" and the ways it can have negative effects even when the expectations themselves are positive, and the dense intertwining of race, class, nation, colonial status, and gender, and the travels of the concept of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.
    Mentioned in the episode:


    The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report [the Sewell Report] (2021)


    The Moynihan Report (1965)

    Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" (1923)

    Diane Reay, "What Would a Socially Just Educational System Look Like?" (2012)

    Bernard Coard, How the Caribbean Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System


    Steve McQueen, Small Axe, "Education," (2020)

    Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

    B. Brian Forster, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020)

    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Adieu Culture: A New Duty Arises" (2003)

    David Simon's TV show The Wire (and also Lean on Me, and To Sir, with Love and with major props from Derron, Top Boy)

    Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (1994)


    Listen and Read
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    • 47 min
    121* Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))

    121* Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))

    Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well.
    The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities--while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging.
    The companion text for this episode--Privilege by Shamus Khan--addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts.
    Discussed in this episode:

    Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India


    Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students


    Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test


    John Carson, The Measure of Merit


    Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn


    Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions


    Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State


    Donna Tartt, The Secret History


    Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India


    
    Listen and Read Here
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    • 51 min
    120 A Roundup Conversation About Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism

    120 A Roundup Conversation About Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism

    Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning.
    The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements.
    Mentioned in the episode

    Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege.

    Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.)

    Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland.


    RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism.

    The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque.


    Lori's interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism.

    Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland's recent dissertation ("'Not One Inch of Retreat': The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996"), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing.

    Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.


    Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation.

    Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation.


    Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism.

    Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization.

    Recallable Books

    Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism.

    Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110)

    Susan Bayly's Saints, Goddesses and Kings.

    • 47 min
    119 Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2

    119 Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2

    Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far right. She joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian midway through a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." Listen to episode 1 here.
    The three discuss the transnational formation of the Jewish far right over the 20th and 21st centuries, the gradual movement of far right actors into the heart of the Israeli state, and the shared investment in territorial maximalism, racial supremacy, and natalism across the Zionist ideological spectrum.
    Coming up next in RTB 120: Lori and Ajantha sit down with John to synthesize what Murli and Natasha had to say about Ethnonationalism in Indian and in Israel.
    Mentioned in the episode

    Ben Shitrit, Lihi. Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

    El-Or, Tamar, and Gideon Aran. “Giving Birth to a Settlement: Maternal Thinking and Political Action of Jewish Women on the West Bank.” Gender and Society 9, no. 1 (February 1995): 60-78.

    Neuman, Tamara. “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave.”

    Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 51-70.

    Neuman, Tamara. Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

    Krampf, Arie. The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity, and Change. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.


    Read and Listen here.
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    • 49 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
29 Ratings

29 Ratings

Bringing up Baby ,

Très sexy …

… if you love conversation about excellent books you’ve never heard of

jj_review ,

👏

I discovered the podcast after listenting to the episode with Christine Desan... what an amazing program !! Thank you for these amazing conversations and for the exciting resources attached to each episode.

wellsake ,

Right?

Someone should stop Elizabeth Ferry from saying "Right?" in every other sentence. This is a common quirk among academics and it is so grating. Instead of being solicitous, just make your point. Right?

Top Podcasts In Arts

Fresh Air
NPR
The Moth
The Moth
99% Invisible
Roman Mars
Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked
Snap Judgment
The Magnus Archives
Rusty Quill
The Recipe with Kenji and Deb
Deb Perelman & J. Kenji López-Alt

You Might Also Like

The LRB Podcast
The London Review of Books
The New Yorker Radio Hour
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
Political Gabfest
Slate Podcasts
The Book Review
The New York Times
The TLS Podcast
The TLS
The Ezra Klein Show
New York Times Opinion