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February 2019
1939 Society Lecture in Holocaust Studies: The Matter of the Neighbor: Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, and the Watts Writers Workshop
This talk explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in the heart of Watts by Jewish American writer Budd Schulberg immediately after the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and argues that the success and final demise of the project tracks Schulberg’s shift from prose to property. Drawing on Schulberg’s archives, including lease contracts, letters, and personal notes, I argue that Schulberg’s personal and financial investment in Watts re-located his political standing as the “neighbor” to the Watts writers with whom he…
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The 1939 Society Lecture in Holocaust Studies: Hannah Arendt’s Message of Ill-Tidings
‘It was not only their own misfortunes that the refugees carried with them from land to land, from continent to continent,’ Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘but the great misfortune of the whole world.’ Shortly before her death, Arendt said that the real story of her generation of Jewish refugees from Nazism had yet to be fully understood. This lecture will return to Arendt’s refugee years to show how her influential theories about rights, the human condition, and political life were forged…
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