Guest post by Tadzio Koelb This week Chester Himes would have celebrated his 100th birthday. If this event is remembered at all, it will mostly be by those who are interested in Himes as the “black Raymond Chandler”, pulp master of the Harlem Renaissance. While this is an accurate reflection of how Himes is read, [...]
How much should we memorialise tragic events? Poland is home to many of the landmarks of horror associated with the Nazis. But of these arguably the two most notorious are memorialised in very different ways. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the concentration and extermination camps where over a million Jews, gypsies, communists, trade unionists and lesbians and gays [...]
Icons are not an ideal means to talk about politics. To make someone an icon is to transform a person into a static timeless idea. All that once was political is violently removed. All that is human is removed too. Graduation ceremonies here in Britain hear quotations from Gandhi and Mandela without reference to the [...]
Twenty people gathered in London’s East End on April 19th for a typically low key but poignant memorial ceremony. The Friends of Yiddish were marking the 66th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the vastly unequal battle that began on that day in 1943. Led by the youth, Jewish resistance forces in the ghetto [...]
