Phillip Freeman—

Aristotle is one of the best-known names from ancient times. Along with Plato, Homer, and a handful of others, almost every educated person has heard of this fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher. But Aristotle is also in many ways one of the least-known figures of antiquity. His writings undoubtably changed the world since he practically invented many of the subjects studied in modern universities—biology, logic, literary criticism, political theory, and much more—but even most philosophers and historians would be hard-pressed to say much about his life.

Dozens of scholarly books and hundreds of academic articles are written every year about the ideas of Aristotle. There are also several recent books on the philosophy of Aristotle for a popular audience, such as Edith Hall’s wonderful Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (Penguin, 2018). But for someone looking for the story of Aristotle’s life, there isn’t much available. The reasons for this are mostly the scarcity and obscurity of ancient and medieval biographical sources. Aristotle simply didn’t interest most writers in classical times—he was never as famous as Plato or Pythagoras or Epictetus. Those few who did write about Aristotle tended to love or hate him, especially detractors from rival philosophical schools who delighted in making him seem foolish. A few more-or-less reliable writers from ancient times such as Diogenes Laertius give us some reliable facts about the life of Aristotle, but there are certainly many imaginative episodes even in their descriptions. Fortunately, we have a few other sources including inscriptions and medieval Arabic works that have often been neglected. Studied together and used with care, all these sources tell an incomplete but fascinating story of a man who shaped the modern world like few others.

Aristotle was a brilliant, driven, and complicated man who lived most of his life as an outsider and wanderer. He was born in the small colony of Stagira on the northern edge of the Greek world but spent his childhood and youth in the wild and tumultuous kingdom of Macedonia where his father served as court physician. Orphaned as a teenager, he traveled to Athens to become a student of Plato at the newly-founded Academy. Sources describe him as one of the best students there, though he frequently disagreed and argued with his teacher. Plato was a master theorist and abstract thinker, but Aristotle loved practical observation and experimentation. When Plato died, Aristotle traveled to the Aegean island of Lesbos and spent several years in the area wading through marshes collecting and dissecting specimens he found there. Then he travelled back to Macedonia to become the tutor of Alexander, who would one day be known as the Great. When after a few years Alexander crushed opposition to Macedonian rule among the Greek cities, Aristotle returned to Athens to establish his own school, the Lyceum. Tainted by his connections to the hated Macedonians, Aristotle conducted his groundbreaking research and teaching among the hostile Athenians. When Alexander died in Babylon and his empire collapsed, Aristotle fled before he could be killed by anti-Macedonian forces in the city. Sailing into exile on the island of Euboea, he died the next year in his early sixties.

Aristotle’s works survived his death, but by the end of the classical age all that remained were the books we have today. These aren’t polished dialogues like Plato’s, but mostly dry lecture notes made by him and his students. Aside from the Nicomachean Ethics, they aren’t that easy to read—and even that short book can be tough going. But in spite of the difficulties of reading Aristotle, his legacy grew over the centuries. Medieval Muslim writers called him “the first teacher,” while the Italian poet Dante celebrated him as “the master of those who know” in his Divine Comedy. His best and most careful student, Thomas Aquinas, adapted his ideas to revolutionize Christian theology. Until modern times, Aristotle continued to be the ultimate authority on countless subjects. Even today, his ideas on ethics and other subjects are profoundly formative for students and continue to be taught in universities around the world. Aristotle’s ideas are worth anyone’s time to investigate and his life is a remarkable story of discovery that should inspire anyone in their own journey.

Philip Freeman is Fletcher Jones Chair of Western Culture and professor of the humanities at Pepperdine University. His books include Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor; Hannibal: Rome’s Greatest Enemy; Alexander the Great; and Julius Caesar.

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Allison Schrager—

Young Americans are too afraid to take economic risks. Compared with earlier generations, they are less likely to move, change jobs, start a family, or even move out of their parents’ homes. We tend to think that’s because they’re overwhelmed with risk—student debt, unstable jobs, or the possibility that AI may change everything. But the opposite is true: the problem is they aren’t taking enough risk. That dooms them to stagnation and feeling like they’ll never reach their full potential. No wonder they feel shut out of the American Dream.

That is why we need a risk reset. We’ve raised each generation to take less risk than the last. My work as a financial economist is about risk. But the lessons from financial markets can be applied to any risk we take.

For example, in finance, safety defines risk. But if we don’t define safety correctly, we take the wrong risks. This is part of what went wrong in the financial crisis of ‘08. It also explains the overwhelming amount of student debt. Young people were told education is a risk-free bet. If that’s true, any amount of debt can be justified because it will always pay off. College is a good investment, but it is not a guarantee—although it is priced like one. Not all degrees are equally risky, either. But when we convinced ourselves otherwise, we ended up with too much debt and earnings that did not pan out.

We also tell young people the world is much riskier than it is. In fact, the world has never been safer. We look at the world and feel like things are so risky: politics seem crazy, AI may take all our jobs or kill us all, and financial markets are volatile. Yet from an economic perspective, the opposite is true. The world has never been safer—not just compared to the olden days when people died at 50, but even compared to 50 or 15 years ago. Wages are more stable, the chance of job loss is lower. Health care is expensive but also more likely to save your life.

Not only is the world objectively safer; we take less risk. Normally, risk-taking is something we associate with young people, but each generation is taking less risk than the last. This is part of becoming richer and having new technology. We are also less exposed to risk when we are young, and that impedes development and learning how to be smart risk-takers. This may explain why, on the one hand, we see more risk aversion from younger Americans, but they are also more likely to take big risks that won’t pay off, like sports gambling.

It’s true we live in times of big risk-takers—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—who have all become wealthy by taking risks. Meanwhile the rest of us are shut out from taking risks, and it shows up on our balance sheets. This is in part because we’ve made risk-taking so expensive, but also because of the idea that you can’t take a risk until you’re in a secure place. Young people feel like they need a certain bank balance or to own a home before they can take on bigger risks or start a family. But everyone is entitled to risk and needs it at all points in their life. Often the best risks are taken when we are down and have less. Our best businesses were founded during a downturn or a job loss. Youth is the ideal time to experiment and take risks because risk is an important motivation—it is our superpower. We are motivated by the resolution of uncertainty. We need it in our lives to get out of bed in the morning.

Believe it or not, we are also good at risk-taking. We are often told we have biases that keep us from making good decisions when faced with uncertainty. But it is not risk that we’re bad at. The risks we face are often new or unfamiliar to us, or information about how risky the situation is gets presented to us in ways we can’t understand. We are built to take risks. We have thrived as a species under risky conditions for thousands of years. But in a modern world where risks are new and data can be presented in confusing ways, we can make mistakes. We can still make great decisions—we just need to learn more about how to translate risk into terms we understand. With AI and more big data, this skill will be more important than ever and should be part of our education.

Every generation complains that younger people don’t get it or have it easy. But young people today genuinely face many challenges. We’ve told them to avoid risk and made it harder for them to take it. The result is more stagnation and feeling shut out of the economy. We aren’t bad at taking risks, we’ve just been misled and shut out of taking the right ones.

Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a regular columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is the author of An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.

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Your book argues that public concerts can reshape our understanding of the Enlightenment. What made the Concert spirituel such an innovative revolutionary institution?

Andrei Pesic: We are so accustomed to going to concerts that thinking about their origins can seem a bit strange. But when the Concert spirituel was founded in Paris in 1725, it was the first institutionalized and lasting concert series in Western Europe (as opposed to the short-lived concerts that emerged at the end of the seventeenth century). Public concerts like this one were revolutionary in putting music alone at the center of an entertainment, whereas previously it had accompanied political or religious ceremony (e.g. court or civic music), theater (opera) or dance. The Concert spirituel also had a distinctive repertoire and reason for being: it mostly played religious music during its early years, which was deemed appropriate during church holidays when other entertainments were closed. But over the course of its sixty-five-year history, the Concert spirituel gradually stopped playing religious music, which led many observers to wonder whether this reflected broader cultural changes, or even a decline in religious belief. Explaining some of the reasons for this decline in religious repertoire is the puzzle I set out to explain in The Enlightenment in Concert.

Grand motets (grand religious music) dominated the Concert spirituel’s early repertoire, yet some critics argued that performing sacred music in a concert hall made it spiritually dangerous. Why did the concert setting provoke such concern?

AP: Yes, it was initially surprising when I found a few instances of religious rigorists (from a current of reforming Catholic thought called Jansenism) who criticized playing religious music in a commercial spaces, saying that it was like bringing the body of Christ to the opera house and was an offensive mixture of the sacred and the profane. This contrasted with most other religious writers that I found, who thought that the Concert was relatively innocuous in comparison to theater and opera, with dancing and singing women, plots with adultery etc., which were clearly immoral to contemporary religious authorities. But to the Jansenist critics, it was this very consensus about the Concert’s inoffensiveness that made it so “dangerous,” lulling people into a sense of false security by seeing religious music on the program, then gradually corrupting them into becoming (horrors) opera-lovers!

What can the rise of ticketed concerts tell us about the relationship between art and commerce during the Enlightenment?

AP: The conventional narrative of music history trends rightly to emphasize the novelty of composers, musical genres, and performers. I wanted to add to this by exploring how commercial innovations changed the musical landscape. In the case of the Concert spirituel, it presented a novelty, because anyone with the money to buy a (quite expensive) ticket could enter into a space where music and elite socialization combined, a concert hall where one might find people as oddly assorted as dukes and actors, Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What united all these people was a desire (and the ability) to spend a significant sum to hear music performed. On the other side of the curtain, the fact that the Concert spirituel was a business meant that it had to sell tickets to stay afloat. Its impresarios tried to perform music that would attract an audience, even though it wasn’t always easy to figure out what the audience wanted. Eventually, the more successful impresarios of the later decades of the concert settled on trying to present musical novelties to the audience (new instruments, virtuoso performers, new genres like symphonies and instrumental concertos), but this search for novelties led them away from the original repertoire of grand motets. I ended up developing a concept that I call “inadvertent secularization” to describe how these commercial motives ended up acting on the concert’s religious repertoire.

Many people think of the Enlightenment as a movement of philosophers and political thinkers. Why is music just as important to understanding this period?

AP: Ideas are important, but sometimes we let them capture too much of our attention when trying to understand an era of great cultural change like the eighteenth century in Europe. Initially I set out to answer a puzzle: why did the Concert spirituel stop playing religious music and start playing symphonies? I expected to find the concert organizers taking part in a secularizing wave linked to declines in belief, which is how previous historians had described such changes. But instead, I only found musician-businesspeople trying to make sure that they sold enough concert tickets to cover their expenses. This opened a new avenue for studying the Enlightenment as a time of changing practices and unintended consequences, rather than just being in the realm of abstract ideas.

Your research spans places including Paris, Berlin, and Haiti. What surprised you most about the similarities—or differences—in how music shaped public life across these regions?

AP: All three cities had concerts that called themselves “concert spirituel” at various points, with the concerts in Haiti (then the French colony of Saint-Domingue) and Berlin created in emulation of the one in Paris. I was surprised by moments of convergence between the repertoires of the concerts in the three cities, but then also by how much each city’s concert series differed because of the local audience’s taste, limitations to the size of the orchestra and availability of singers, and especially the fascinating re-interpretation about what “spiritual” meant in the context of a concert. Each city’s concert spirituel ended up showing something interesting about what was going on in the eighteenth century—in the case of Haiti, the much earlier breakdown of religious constraints among the French colonists, and in Berlin the fascinating interplay between cosmopolitan and specifically Prussian currents of Enlightenment-era artistic and intellectual culture.

In 1783, Johann Friedrich Reichardt introduced some of the earliest concert program notes to help educate audiences. How did these notes change the way people listened to music, and what do they reveal about Enlightenment ideas of “good taste”?

AP: The idea that knowledge should be democratized was a central tenet for many Enlightenment thinkers. In the case of the arts, systematic treatises attempting to distill “taste” have long been studied as an important characteristic genre, but there has been less attention paid to how figures like Reichardt, who created a short-lived imitation of the Concert spirituel in Berlin, used printed program notes in an innovative way to try to educate his listeners. His idea was that listeners could learn something before coming to the concert, and that this would improve their experience at the event. Nowadays this is a widespread practice, so it was an innovation that had a long afterlife!

Rather than seeing secularization as simply “less religion,” your book shows how it transformed religious practice. What’s one example of how music at the Concert spirituel reshaped the way people practiced religion?

AP: By the end of the eighteenth century, some writers were drawing on religious vocabulary to explain the closer attention and emotional investment that audience members expressed at musical performances. The historian James Johnson identified a shift when people started ostentatiously crying in public performances as characteristic of the age of sentiment (think of tearjerker novels by Rousseau and others) taking root in opera audiences and concert halls alike. What I add to this story is an examination of how various observers weighed the religious changes going on alongside the huge expansion of commercial entertainments during the same time—and I try to show that these two things had a lot to do with each other.

The Concert spirituel helped redefine how people experienced music. What do you think it still has to teach us today?

AP: I think that learning about the hybrid experience that listeners experienced in the eighteenth-century Concert spirituel, which combined sacred music and secular entertainment, might teach us something about the deep roots of the later cult of inner experience and artistic rapture that characterize the age of Romanticism in the nineteenth century and beyond. The contrast between the banal purchase of a concert ticket (just like any other commercial good) and the sometimes sublime experience of an artwork is still something that many people experience today. The origins of the elite concert series as a kind of stopgap religious observance sheds light on the experience that I think still characterizes a lot of concerts of all kinds today—they are still places to see and be seen, to experience new music and great performances, and perhaps the occasional moment of bliss, whether sacred or not.

Andrei Pesic is assistant professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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David Sorkin—

One of the verities of the post-World War II, post-Holocaust world order was that the “Jewish question” had been answered, the “Jewish problem” resolved.  An increasingly democratic United States, despite its abiding racisms, would include the Jews as equal members of civil society.  The Civil Rights movement (1946 –1968) removed the structures of discrimination in residence, employment, and education that had impeded Jews’ integration and upward mobility since the Great Migration (1870–1924).  Similarly, a democratic Israel guaranteed the equality of all citizens as its Declaration of Independence twice declared. In the new Jewish state security and equality for Jews and other groups went hand in hand.

In the last few decades that verity has shattered. Overt antisemitism—including Holocaust denial and the invocation of odious stereotypes—has migrated from the margins to the mainstream of legitimate political discourse. Violent attacks have proliferated. The bipartisan support for the state of Israel that was a pillar of US politics for some six or seven decades has unraveled since October 7th. Israel has repudiated the claims of its Declaration of Independence by declaring self-determination exclusive to the Jewish people (Basic Law 2018); erecting an apartheid system in the West Bank as well as expelling entire villages; and destroying Gaza as a functioning society capable of reproducing itself. The long-cherished notion of an equitable two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict has become a chimera.

How should Jews in the diaspora and Israel respond to this new and shocking situation?  One response is to look to past forms of Jewish politics, that is, those that once flourished and are now either dormant or moribund, and that may have something to offer the present.     

For example, some Jews on the left are trying to glorify and revive the politics of the Bund, the socialist workers’ movement which, founded in 1897, had its heyday in Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The Bund in Europe or the Workmen’s Circle in the US had much to offer, including a vision of solidarity among all workers and a more equitable socialist political economy. The Bund inspired many and was especially successful in establishing its own institutions, specifically unions, schools, and adult education. Yet even at its apogee in 1930s Poland, it remained one competing political party among many.

Another historical option was the endeavor to gain equal rights and citizenship. This political movement has usually been ignored or overlooked because its adherents have been tarred with the opprobrious term of “assimilation” and its ideology with the term “assimilationism.” Those are unfair and self-aggrandizing misnomers. Moreover, in recent decades its practitioners have been so consumed with providing unconditional support for the state of Israel that its original nature has been effaced.   

The emancipationists, as I prefer to call them, were the founders of modern Jewish politics.  In the nineteenth century they created major political forms. Lawyers used the courts and published broadsides; a vernacular press that disseminated knowledge, developed public opinion, and organized petitions, public meetings, and fundraising; educational and philanthropic voluntary organizations at first served the domestic needy and less fortunate and then the masses migrating from the last third of the nineteenth century.  The emancipationists interceded with governments. Their greatest diplomatic success was securing rights for Jews and other religious minorities in the new Balkan states—Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria—at the Congress of Berlin (1878). It was, regrettably, a paper victory, a pyrrhic one, because the Great Powers did not enforce it. Similarly, emancipationists joined forces with Zionists and other political movements to gain minority rights for Jews and other groups in the Versailles Peace Treaty following World War I.  Again, the victory was unsustainable because of the League of Nation’s flawed structure and practices.   

What characterized the emancipationists, then, was an abiding vision that Jews’ rights were not an exclusive concern, the source of an insular politics, but rather one critical component of a larger society that guaranteed rights for everyone. The emancipationists were committed to a polity of constitutional government and equality before the law.  They envisioned a common good that all groups could serve and benefit from. They acutely understood that Jews’ rights were a bellwether for rights in general. 

Those commitments and that vision are no less relevant today. Indeed, they are more urgently needed than ever in the face of divisive racism, self-serving demagoguery and polities making themselves exclusive through violence and cruelty.

David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Jewish History at Yale University. Sorkin has received multiple honors, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Whitney Humanities Center fellowships, as well as a National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.                   

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Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet —

Artemisia, who fought at Salamis, was not at all an ordinary woman. Herodotus affirms this. Her courage made her admirable and worthy of appearing in his account. Nor were the Amazons who founded the Sauromatian people ordinary wives. They refused to join the households of their companions and obediently stay at home, spinning, weaving, and waiting for their husbands. They were women warriors, like Artemisia. The motif of the ordinary woman resonates with the idea that Herodotus’s audience could conjure of Greek women like Andromache, gently but firmly sent back to the palace. While such remarks only applied to wives—that is, free women— they were often generalized, as if they described the reality of all Greek women, thus attributing a shared lifestyle to the entire female population. To be a woman in a Greek city-state supposedly meant staying at home and doing domestic tasks, or supervising those who were assigned such work. Women—a term that cannot designate all women, since other women worked for them—were supposedly relegated to the private space, while men—a term that, for the same reason, cannot designate all men—supposedly worked and discussed eminently more serious things outside the home. Such a framework does not allow for comprehending the existence of Artemisia; it even renders that existence impossible. Quite happily, numerous counterexamples provided by replenished documentation now offer proof that these representations are very much stereotypes.

Most of the texts handed down to us through manuscripts convey, at one point or another, these received ideas. Herodotus is no exception to the rule. During the war council called by Mardonius, Artemisia declares it straight out: The Greeks dominate the Persians (on the sea) like men dominate women. Further on and not guilelessly, Herodotus puts in the mouth of Xerxes a conclusion as dogmatic as it is ridiculous on the episode at Salamis that witnessed the defeat of the Persian army. “My men have become women and my women men,” Xerxes the Great supposedly said.¹ A few years later, Aristophanes takes up the stereotype, giving it a comic twist; men dominate women, especially sexually. Obviously in Aristophanes’s play that is not at all the case, but just the opposite.² The epic poets, dramatic poets, historians, philosophers, and those who studied nature and the human body: In Herodotus’s time they all conveyed—and sometimes without taking responsibility for them—such sexist stereotypes that reinforced the idea of men and women constituting two absolutely distinct groups, each of them homogeneous and both strictly hierarchized.

Now all Artemisia’s actions demonstrate the opposite. It is Artemisia, a woman, who dupes Xerxes and her Athenian pursuers. Artemisia, the Greek queen of Halicarnassus, is full of andreia and therefore admirable. As we know, stereotypes are often deployed to create a feeling of complicity between the one using them and those being addressed. They simplify complex realities by means of narrative elements that are easy to handle and manipulate.³ In this way they are an essential entry point for apprehending the discourse on Artemisia, and especially for understanding a framework through which the ancients and the moderns could have conceived her figure, to the point of rendering it extraordinary and implausible.

Very often stereotypes were not identified by modern historians who, in general, paid no attention to them. Indeed, gender stereotypes belonged to the pool of familiar, obvious facts. Because she did not correspond to the idea they held of a true woman, modern historians thus characterized the strong and courageous Artemisia as a “virago” or a “man-woman.^“4 In their eyes, her actions and behavior did not fulfill the expectations for her sex/gender. Of course, historians could argue that by characterizing Artemisia as masculine they were only reconstructing what the Greeks thought. Nevertheless, in this case, nothing in Herodotus’s Histories suggests that Artemisia’s behavior was considered to be out of conformance with her gender, except the attitude of the Athenian leaders, from which, moreover, our ancient historian distances himself. In his eyes, to the contrary, Artemisia’s andreia was completely positive. The problem with ancient stereotypes is that they are often ours as well, and for this reason, may pass unnoticed. Yet it is in resisting the appeal of false stereotypes—about women and men in general—that we can identify them and consider them for what they were, rhetorical motifs.

As grounds for the idea that the Greeks conceived of women as beings apart, contemporary historiography has made much of Pandora, a mythic figure from Hesiod’s poetry. Pandora embodied all that the Greeks supposedly thought of women and their nature—considered as different from their own and responsible for all evils.⁵ The Hesiodic myth and its variants shed light on a more complex attitude regarding women, referring uniquely to the category of wives here in the myth as in most uses of the sexist stereotype. Aristophanes expressed this crudely: Gender stereotypes had as their backdrop the sexual relationship that was the basis of legitimate marriage, necessarily heterosexual.

In fact, at the heart of the stereotyped image that opposed women and men, of course we find the question of generation. Sexual difference was central to it and gave rise to various theories on the nature of women and men. Even so, had those specialists in the human body, whose works were widely read in Herodotus’s time, developed a theory on sexual difference? Feminist philosophers and historians have insisted on the role that Aristotle played in the idea that this difference divided and structured humanity by establishing a sexual distribution of social functions in the city-state. This differentialist discourse ought to be reinscribed into the more diverse panorama of ancient representations of the human body if we want to avoid developing what would be, this time, a contemporary stereotype of ancient Greece.

It is not a matter of contesting that, in antiquity, women were the subject of discourse that described them as naturally opposite to and socially dominated by men, and even as being born defective. But it is essential to identify the stereotyped nature of these formulations to avoid, in our turn, spreading modern prejudices about ancient Greeks and Artemisia. In this way we will be able to understand the extent to which Artemisia, very much a leader and warrior, was an ordinary woman. Artemisia is not weak, fearful, or fragile. Nor is she an inveterate, fatal seductress. She is not even that woman described by Plato as naturally driven by the single desire to have children. Does that make her an extraordinary woman? Her political intelligence, her vigor, and her courage—could they be perceived as normal characteristics for a woman?

1. Herodotus, Histories 8.88, Purvis 2009 trans. ︎
2. Aristophanes, Lysistrata 674–80. ︎
3. Harris 2018, 167. ︎
4. Hornblower 1982, 24; Munson 1988, 103, 106. ︎
5. Among others see Nicole Loraux, “Sur la race des femmes et quelques-unes de ses tribus,” in Loraux 1981b, 75–117; Zeitlin 1996. ︎

Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet is professor of ancient Greek history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a specialist in the history of women and gender. Jody Gladding is an award-winning poet and translator.

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Eva Mroczek—

The Dead Sea Scrolls—a cache of Jewish manuscripts copied between ca. 300 BCE – 50 CE, including the oldest copies of biblical texts ever discovered—are on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC through September. The Museum of the Bible is a conservative Christian institution established by the owners of the craft store Hobby Lobby.

You may remember Hobby Lobby from a landmark Supreme Court case (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 2014), where the company successfully argued for the right to deny their employees insurance coverage for birth control on religious grounds. Or you may have heard of them back in 2011, when US Customs caught them illegally smuggling ancient cuneiform tablets looted from Iraq—mislabeled as ceramic tile samples— for their new museum. In 2017, they were forced to repatriate 3,800 artifacts to Iraq and pay a three million dollar fine.

The last time the Museum of the Bible exhibited “Dead Sea Scrolls” (2017-2020), every single one was exposed as a modern fake. The forged fragments, which had “mysteriously” appeared on the antiquities market, cost the museum undisclosed millions. The same back room deals for forged ancient manuscripts had also duped the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, a few other conservative American institutions, and the Norwegian manuscript collector Martin Schøyen.

This time, the batch of Dead Sea Scrolls on display at the Museum is the real deal: authentic fragments on temporary loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority. But the rhetoric about the Scrolls, real or fake, is the same: the Scrolls, the oldest copies of biblical texts ever found, are physical proof that the Bible is valid. What exactly this means is rarely explained. Some fundamentalist personalities leave it at that, allowing their audience to believe that Hellenistic-era documents somehow prove that all the stories in the Bible—creation in seven days, Abraham and Sarah, the Exodus from Egypt, King David’s rule—are literally true. But the Scrolls can say nothing at all about what was actually happening in 2000 or 1000 BCE. They can only tell us how Jewish writers hundreds of years later, in the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods, were writing about the tales and traditions of their ancestors.

Other commentators are more specific, explaining that the Scrolls prove that the text of the Bible has been accurately transmitted over two thousand years. There is some truth to this, but only in a limited way: among the Scrolls are partial copies of every book in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) except Esther, and many of those texts are very similar, nearly identical to the traditional Hebrew text, transmitted by generations of Jewish scribes, that serves as the basis for our modern translations. But the biblical texts we use today were only one version of several that were circulating during the time the Scrolls were copied. Contrary to claims that the Scrolls reveal that “the Bible” was always identical, what they actually reveal includes at least two different editions of Exodus, a long and a short Jeremiah, a dizzying variety of psalms including many that are not in the canonical Bible, and dozens of alternative stories, prayers, and visionary texts that made up the sacred library of early Judaism.

Whether maximalist (the Scrolls prove everything in the Bible is true!) or more limited (the Scrolls prove the biblical text has not changed!), most religious claims pay little attention to the content of the texts. They rarely go into any detail about what’s in them, except to repeat the claim that they are the same as our own Bible. What a shame to miss so much that is new about the Scrolls: superhuman heroes on heavenly journeys, racy dialogues between patriarchs and their wives, apocalyptic battles that rival Peter Jackson’s vision of the war for Middle-Earth. What’s really in the Scrolls, and accessible in translation for anyone to read, is rarely part of the story.

Instead, what religious audiences always learn is the oddly symbolic-sounding account of their discovery: a Bedouin shepherd boy was looking for his goat in the hostile desert, and providentially stumbled upon these precious writings forgotten in a cave for two thousand years. Often, the year of the discovery—1947, the year before the State of Israel was established—becomes a central symbol. Christian Zionists believe that this political moment fulfilled biblical prophecies of the “Ingathering of Israel” to the land, a step on the way to the second coming of Jesus, after which Jews would be converted or damned. It was no coincidence that the spectacular discovery of the Scrolls, long-lost “proof” for the Bible, occurred just before one of its most dramatic prophecies, in their interpretation, came true. It was a sign of God’s work in the world.

What matters most to the popular imagination is not the Scrolls themselves, but the story about them. Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past shows that the story about their discovery by a shepherd in a cave, while mostly true, is a version of a much older religious tale told by Jews and Christians. The tale of ancient manuscripts that were lost for generations, found again at a time of crisis, and changed everything is as old as the story of King Josiah in the Bible itself. Stories like this continue to be told over centuries, and many sound the same: hostile landscapes, remote caves, animal guides, illiterate and reckless discoverers, and looming disaster. Ancient texts have a powerful aura as physical objects, and the saga of their loss, survival, and recovery is providential. This is why even tiny, illegible fragments of parchment are displayed as holy relics of biblical truth.

Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles shows that our fascination with stories about lost texts is rooted in ancient religious ideas, and that even modern scholarly accounts of manuscript discovery are shaped by ancient Jewish and Christian storytelling. It’s a literary and religious genre worth understanding. It explains why people revere the Dead Sea Scrolls as an idea, even when they have little interest in what’s in them, and why institutions will pay millions to buy illegible scraps of the ancient past. But it also serves as a warning: such captivating stories distract us from the looting, smuggling, violence, and forgery that plagues archaeology and the antiquities trade, mythwashing these crimes in tales of mystery and revelation.

Eva Mroczek is the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies and professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at Dalhousie University in Canada. She is the award-winning author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity.

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No There There

In 1935, while Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris, was on an American lecture tour, she visited the Bay Area and spoke at Stanford and Berkeley. She had spent her formative girlhood years on a ten-acre farm in rural East Oakland, but when she sought it out she found that the farm had been subdivided into residential lots. “The house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not any longer existing,” she wrote with her usual scant punctuation. Her visit to Oakland was the source of one of her best-known aphorisms: “What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” There is no there there. She was not referring to the city of Oakland, as is sometimes claimed; she was making a point about memory and loss, but the pithy aphorism became a popular cultural trope for the anonymity of many modern cities.

What happened? In the distant past, architecture was limited to monumental buildings, churches and palaces, surrounding which were ordinary buildings that reflected the local vernacular. Thus, English towns were different from Italian hill towns, just as the tall row houses of Amsterdam were different from the mietskasernen (rental barracks) of Berlin. This remained true in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when architects were designing not only civic and religious monuments but also offices, apartment buildings, hotels, department stores, and movie theaters, because architectural eclecticism and the presence of ornament— simple and complicated, guarded and extravagant, often local in character—guaranteed a degree of variety. Things started to change in the 1950s, with the ascendancy of an architecture that favored severely functional buildings without ornament and without evidence of craftsmanship. Not for nothing was it called the International Style. Thanks to industrialization, building techniques were standardized, and the same steel-and-glass curtain walls appeared in Boston and Berlin, Montreal and Mexico City, Philadelphia and Phnom Penh.

By the 1980s, some architects had grown dissatisfied with this homogeneity. “For many of us working with the language of abstract modern architecture, Bauhaus International Style, call it what you will, this language has become repetitious, simplistic, and too narrowly confining,” observed James Stirling. Stirling’s solution was to look to history for inspiration, often recent history; others looked to local building traditions. Late in his career, from the mid-1980s until his death in 1997, Paul Rudolph built a number of office towers in Southeast Asia, not only in Hong Kong but also in Singapore and Indonesia. They include the Wisma Dharmala Headquarters Building, a twenty-four-story office building in Jakarta. “I wanted to make a building that was uniquely Indonesian,” Rudolph explained to an interviewer. He had visited Indonesian villages and been impressed by the way that overhanging roofs protected houses from the sun. “That had to do with roofs and so this, even though it’s a vertical building, and even though it’s air conditioned, uses a series of roofs. It also has to do with terraces, even though it’s an office building. The planting there is so fantastic. The office with planting seemed important. . . I wanted to take a cue from the vernacular architecture of Indonesia and really have a building that was truly protected from the sun. That’s essentially why I think it belongs there. It would be ridiculous to build it in New York City.”

Stacked-up house roofs compose the basic form of the traditional pagoda. Unlike a pagoda, however, the sloping roofs of the Dharmala Building are highly abstracted, and the building’s columnar structure, which is concealed in a pagoda, is plainly visible. Although the structure is reinforced concrete, the exterior surfaces, including the roofs, are covered in white ceramic tile. In addition, the rotated floor plans introduce considerable three-dimensional richness; this is anything but a box. The presence of outdoor terraces and planting creates the impression of a hanging garden. Is it Jakarta or Babylon—or maybe both?

The high-rise buildings Rudolph built in Southeast Asian cities are redolent with local character. The challenge with this approach is identifying what exactly qualifies as “local.” Few places have the sort of distinctive climate and traditions Rudolph encountered in Indonesia. Philadelphia, for example, has many brick buildings, but so do other East Coast cities. Nor does the city have a distinctive architectural style. Surviving colonial buildings such as Independence Hall tend to be Georgian, but later buildings demonstrate a variety of architectural styles: the prominent City Hall is Empire, an imposing art museum is Greek Revival, a concert hall is an example of German Rundbogenstil, or round-arch style, and the central library is French Neoclassical, modeled on the Place de la Concorde. As for Frank Furness’s creations, they defy easy categorization.

We have all seen airport bars and restaurants that attempt to create a sense of place with period photos, team pennants, and other knickknacks. Or “Main Street” shopping malls that resemble movie sets rather than real places. Sometimes the harder you work at what architects optimistically call “place-making,” the more artificial are the results. On the other hand, the Cherry Street Tavern, where I sometimes have lunch, with its worn wooden bar and faded Bob Dylan posters, is a real place. That is, it is real for me. That is why the architectural goal of place-making is so elusive; place is often in the mind of the beholder. If there is a there there, it may be the result of experience, memory, or even myth. I remember the first time I walked into the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, long before its current heartless renovation. My experience of this legendary locale had less to do with its physical design, which was not particularly memorable, than with its literary reputation—there in the corner of the Rose Room was the fabled Round Table; there sat Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker.

Is place-making a futile endeavor? Not necessarily. Take two buildings in Philadelphia: the thirty-three-story Francis Drake Hotel and the seventeen-story US Customs House, which date from around 1930 and were both designed by the local firm Ritter & Shay.* The buildings combine Art Deco features with traditional motifs. Their unprecedented (for that time) height is handled by modulating the ornamentation: more at the bottom, less on the way up, and something interesting on top. The undecorated brick shaft of the Drake is capped by terraces, tile roofs, and a Spanish Baroque dome, while the limestone-and-brick Customs House is finished off to great effect with an octagonal lantern that originally contained a furnace that glowed at night and emitted dark smoke during the day. The Drake has been converted into condominium apartments, and the Customs House continues to be a federal office, although it is slated to be sold. There is nothing particularly Philadelphian about Spanish domes or smoking lanterns, yet walking by these striking buildings I look up and recognize old friends, and I know exactly where I am.

*Verus T. Ritter and Howell Lewis Shay were in practice together from 1920 to 1933, and became the leading architects of high- rise buildings in downtown Philadelphia, including the Packard Building, for which they received an AIA Gold Medal. The federal Customs House commission was the result of a national competition.

Witold Rybczynski is an architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Home: A Short History of an Idea and The Story of Architecture.

The post An excerpt from What Architecture Is appeared first on Yale University Press.

Nelson Lichtenstein—

One might think that the kind of big political strikes cum public manifestations frequent in Latin America, eastern Europe, France, Italy, and the rest of southern Europe are entirely alien to the United States. We have had big marches, some sponsored or co-sponsored by the unions, but they are held on a Saturday. But this weekend protest tradition is actually of relatively recent ori­gin, with an unexamined politics and strategic outlook that has weakened the very impact of the cause those participating seek to advance. Although more people might be expected to show up on a Saturday, the potency of their protest is diluted by creating a divide between what people do in the arena of politics and how they conduct themselves in the world of work.

In the nineteenth century and for decades thereafter, one could hardly make such a distinction. A demonstration, a strike, and a march were all part of the same protest. Workers in tightly packed industrial districts “turned out” of their factories and mills and, marching by neighboring worksites, called on their mates to down tools and join the parade. In their demand for a shorter workday, union recognition, or higher wages, they sought not just to stop production but to occupy the public square—civic space—in order to demonstrate their power both as workers and rights-bearing citizens. Thus did the women of the antebellum Lowell Mills declare themselves “daughters of freemen” in protest against the “Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash.” Clashes with the police or militia were frequent because the local bourgeoisie were just as determined to deny such public legiti­macy to a proletariat organizing itself for political and economic combat.¹

In the 1930s and 1940s, when the industrial unions were on the rise, the biggest demonstrations also shut down factory districts in Detroit, Chicago, Akron, Oakland, the garment district of Manhattan, and other industrial hubs. In Detroit tens of thou­sands of autoworkers filled Cadillac Square in a series of one-day general strikes that were as much political as economic in their demands. In April 1937 the UAW emptied scores of factories to protest police assaults on female sit-down strikers then occupying department stores and smaller industrial establishments. After the war, in July 1946, the UAW again filled downtown Detroit, with fifty thousand striking workers, to demand the continuation of war-era price controls on meat, milk, and consumer goods es­sential to working-class families. And just fifteen months later, on April 24, 1947, the autoworkers shut down Chrysler, Ford, and many other factories in the city to fill Cadillac Square with more than a quarter million people protesting the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act then pending in Congress. This demonstration, on a Thursday, was by far the largest in U.S. history up to that point.But it was much more than a big assemblage because, as one union leader forecast, it seemed to open an era of class-wide gen­eral strikes deploying “the kind of political power which is most effective in Europe.”²

McCarthyism, prosperity, and the routinization of collective bargaining ended that prospect, but the understanding that dem­onstrations should have a working-class dimension was not lost on those like African American unionist A. Philip Randolph, who or­ganized the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” That demonstration was held on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The orga­nizers, who included many from the ranks of labor as well as the civil rights leadership, did not intend to shut down work in Wash­ington, DC. But that is exactly what the march accomplished.

“At 8 a.m.” reported journalist Russell Baker, “when rush-hour traffic is normally creeping bumper-to-bumper across the Vir­ginia bridges and down the main boulevards from Maryland, the streets had the abandoned look of Sunday morning.” Many Afri­can Americans in government employment and elsewhere un­doubtedly skipped work to join the march. But of the 160,000 federal and city employees, most were white and most of them stayed home, while nearly half of local businesses were closed. White tourists also avoided the city, leaving many hotel rooms vacant. As in the nineteenth century, the occupation of public space by a seemingly alien stratum of the populace had proven profoundly disquieting to those accustomed to the deference and invisibility of that social element. “For the natives,” Baker wrote, “this was obviously a day of siege, and the streets were being left to the marchers.”³

Ironically, it was the generation of self-consciously radical young people, organized into the Students for a Democratic So­ciety (SDS), who ended the century-long tradition that linked demonstrations, marches, and the world of work. When SDS leaders planned the first big protest against the war in Vietnam, a march down the National Mall from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, they chose Saturday, April 17, 1965, for the event. Most undoubtedly calculated that more students and workaday adults would show up on a weekend, but SDS was thereby repu­diating the tactics first deployed by the generation of antiwar ac­tivists who, in the 1930s, had tried to shut down Brooklyn College, Columbia, the Seven Sisters, and the rest of the Ivy League. Mimicking industrial labor, those Depression-era peace strikes were invariably held when weekday classes were still in ses­sion, much to the annoyance of college and university adminis­trators, who often redbaited and expelled the ringleaders.⁴

In the 1960s, however, we had antiwar marches, not student strikes. Almost regardless of who organized them, they were held on a Saturday. Even the radical March on the Pentagon, designed to stop the war planners, came on a Saturday and Sunday in the fall of 1967. In these marches the main idea was not to exercise a degree of shut-it-down economic power but to bear witness to the immorality of the war, to recruit new layers of society to the cause, and to make a political statement that would encourage politi­cians to defund the war or otherwise shift their policy posture. There were exceptions to this strategy, as with the genuine student strike that came in the wake of a May 1970 National Guard shoot­ing at Kent State University, which killed four protesters. The protest was bigger than anything in the 1930s; millions of students forced the closure of more than four hundred colleges and univer­sities, in some cases for the remainder of the school year.

Strike radicalism of that sort faded over the next several de­cades. Giant demonstrations, including the 1982 nuclear freeze march in New York City and the worldwide protests against the impending invasion of Iraq early in 2003, were held on Saturdays, as were marches defending women’s rights and those seeking full equality for gays and lesbians. Even labor conformed to the pat­tern. When the AFL-CIO brought hundreds of thousands of members to Washington in 1981 and 1991 for “Solidarity Day” rallies, they chose a late-summer Saturday for the two National Mall assemblies. Indeed, for aging leftists the periodic trek to the nation’s capital had begun to take on a ritualistic flavor. They were morally compelling and politically necessary, but they seemed to leave but a light impression on the social politics of the day.

The protest movement against the nation’s increasingly xeno­phobic immigration policies has been the great exception. On May Day 2006, a Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Latino, stopped work and took to the streets in a series of marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington, and scores of smaller cities. They were seeking to forestall congressional pas­sage of a highly restrictive immigration bill. This first “Day with­out Immigrants” proved a stupendous success. Latino pride and power took a giant leap forward. Thousands of workplaces shut down and even some of the most viciously exploitative employers of Latino labor, like Perdue, Cargill, and Tyson Foods, closed their factories to avoid an open conflict with an energized and determined workforce. Immigrant truckers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach demonstrated their crucial strategic power by stopping the flow of thousands of containers worth bil­lions of dollars.⁵ And this show of force paid off: within a month the Senate rejected punitive immigration reform, and in Novem­ber the Democrats captured control of both legislative chambers, a prologue to Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.

Almost twenty years later another set of protests took the form of a general strike in Minneapolis, where the Trump administra­tion’s deployment of nearly three thousand highly militarized Im­migration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel generated outrage, conflict, and the shooting death of two U.S. citizens, who were themselves participants in the citizen patrols and wit­ness groups seeking to observe and thwart the roundup of thou­sands of fearful immigrants, many legally in the country. On January 23, 2026, a Friday, more than fifty thousand people braved sub-zero temperatures to march through downtown Minneapolis demanding “ICE out of Minnesota.” Like other recent protest walkouts, from the 2006 “Day without Immigrants” to the 2018 red state teacher strikes, the initiating call for the strike came not from existing trade union leadership but from clergy, students, rank-and-file radicals, and even some civic leaders, who called for “no work, no shopping, no school.” But once the idea was put in play, Minnesota’s large cohort of progressive unions quickly en­dorsed the day of action, giving it even more momentum and le­gitimacy. Although the city’s largest companies did not cease operations, hundreds of shops, restaurants, and smaller enterprises closed, often on the insistence of their employees, unionized or not. The Minneapolis mobilization was a genuinely cross-class social movement whose vigils, patrols, and food deliveries to shut-in immigrants built a powerful sense of resistance and solidarity.⁶

In subsequent weeks the Minneapolis movement inspired school walkouts and protest meetings across the country and made opposition to ICE and Border Patrol “occupation” of American urban areas a political flashpoint in Congress and else­where. Faced with such a national outcry, the Trump administra­tion retreated in mid-February 2026, announcing the rapid withdrawal from Minnesota of its militarized street personnel. But when threatened with a suspension of funding to the Depart­ment of Homeland Security, in charge of ICE and the Border Patrol, the government agreed to just a few curbs on how those agencies deployed their heretofore freewheeling and often violent policing power.

Winning the Working Class

The big problem with even the most successful of these popular manifestations is that they leave no organizational legacy. Unlike a union that goes on strike, when the next crisis comes along, a new group of activists must start all over again. However, these glimpses into what an energized working class can accomplish offer a marker by which to measure the distance trade unionism in the United States must travel to revive itself and, in the pro­cess, transform the country. The difficulty is not just a consti­pated labor law or the hostility of MAGA Republicanism, because even when liberal Democrats are in office the union movement has barely grown, either in numbers or in power. One reason is that firm-centered collective bargaining of the sort envisioned by the framers of the Wagner Act is a poor fit for the kind of econ­omy in which most workers find themselves. Capitalism is trans­national and transmutable, creating a bewildering array of organizational forms under which work takes place. Given the globalized supply chains and the shapeshifting character of so many business enterprises, even a legally certified trade union en­joying the active support of its members may not have the eco­nomic or political leverage to win from some distant multinational a contract that creates a true measure of employee well-being and security.

We therefore need new tools. The NLRB, even under its most progressive leadership, has been neutered by the courts and gamed out by a phalanx of diabolically clever union avoidance law firms. For more than sixty years Congress has failed, when the Democrats were in control, to pass labor law reform, and it is increasingly apparent that even if they did, a more effective NLRB would have but marginal impact. We therefore need more powerful policies—both inducements and penalties—to alter corporate behavior, and that means a pro-union, pro-worker reg­ulation of the core investment strategies of the most powerful, technologically advanced corporations. As we saw in the case of Microsoft’s $68 billion merger with Activision Blizzard, the Fed­eral Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Depart­ment of Justice have at their command regulatory instruments far more powerful and costly than anything in the NLRB’s antique arsenal. Likewise, if and when an industrial policy is once again put on the national agenda, offering billions in loans, grants, and tax breaks to corporations aligning their expansion program with that of “the plan,” a progressive government, at either the state or federal level, might well make corporate neutrality toward any union-organizing effort a prerequisite to opening the money spigot. If big firms find that their billion-dollar investment plans are at stake when the union impulse raises its head, then an ac­commodation with their workers will seem a very small price to pay.

1. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 69–84, 145–73. ︎
2. Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 80, 262. ︎
3. William Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: Norton, 2013), 178. ︎
4. Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Ox­ford University Press, 1993), 91–94. ︎
5. Randal Archibold, “Immigrants Take to U.S. Streets in Show of Strength,” New York Times, May 2, 2006, A1. ︎
6. Luis Feliz Leon, “In the Twin Cities, A Massive Strike against ICE,” Labor Notes, January 27, 2026; Christina Morales, “Protesters Rally across the U.S. in Solidarity with Minneapolis,” New York Times, January 31, 2026; Sabrina Tavernise, “Tested by ICE Turmoil, Many in Twin Cities Feel Sense of Power,” New York Times, February 12, 2026, A12. ︎

Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author or editor of more than twenty books on labor, business, and economic policy, he lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

The post An Excerpt from Why Labor Unions Matter appeared first on Yale University Press.

What drew you to Jean Toomer as a subject? What was the research process like?

George Hutchinson: Much of my work has been related to the Harlem Renaissance and American racial culture, and Toomer is a fascinating subject in relation to both. His book Cane was and is considered a breakthrough in African American literature. Some writers of the time even dated the “renaissance” to the publication of that book. And yet, Toomer refused to be labeled a “Negro.” He considered himself the first conscious member of a new “race”—the American race—to which he believed all Americans unconsciously belonged or at least were destined to belong. I had written about Toomer often in the past and had recently edited a Penguin Classics edition of Cane, the introduction of which was published in the New York Review of Books Daily. Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked if I would consider writing a book for the Black Lives Series and suggested Toomer. During COVID, a book I had started on Herman Melville was stalled because of travel limitations. I thought Toomer would make a great subject, and I already knew the archive, mostly at Yale’s Beinecke Library, very well. Also, the library had digitized much of that archive, so I could do much of the early research from home during the pandemic. Toomer’s correspondence with his mentor, Waldo Frank, had been published. The papers of others who were close to Toomer, like Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, are also at the Beinecke, and much of O’Keeffe’s correspondence has been published. Later, of course, I visited the Beinecke as well as other manuscript libraries. The part of Toomer’s life I didn’t know as much about (from the late 1920s on) required learning a lot about the cult leader, G. I. Gurdjieff. I hadn’t realized how many brilliant artists across all media had become his followers, and I had to come to an understanding of how his practice worked to grasp how Toomer used it. The later periods of Toomer’s life such as his travels in India seeking spiritual enlightenment, and his late years on a farm in Bucks County, opened new, intimate dimensions of his character by way of intimate interviews with and memoirs by people who knew him, including his second wife. Every step was fascinating.

Toomer’s play, Natalie Mann, is inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s play, Man and Superman. It’s said that Toomer can relate to the social pressures shown in the play. Do you believe Toomer is a “superman”?

GH: No, I certainly don’t think Toomer was a superman. He was a very flawed person, like most of us. Yet, what emerged in my research was how deeply he yearned, from his late teens on, to be a superman. This helped explain his turn to Gurdjieff and his discomfort with racial labels. It seems to be a compensatory aspiration for a young man of proud background in vulnerable circumstances. He was born into the heights of the “colored aristocracy” of Washington, DC, yet had lost his father virtually at birth and his mother as he neared puberty, to then be raised by his grandmother and his famous grandfather, a great Race Man, while the family was declining into poverty. In early childhood, all his friends were white, and throughout his life into adulthood, he moved easily between the black and white worlds, although he did not look white to most people. The “superman” aspiration was also connected to his desire to be neither white nor black but something “higher,” and of the future. This merged into a search for Cosmic Consciousness. First, Shaw’s play inspired him; later he discovered Walt Whitman, along with the current studies of him that presented Whitman as the very apogee of Cosmic Consciousness. Whitman had presented Americans metaphorically as a “new race”––not in Toomer’s sense, yet nonetheless mixing many past traditions into a new Democratic mode of being, promising to bring humanity back into harmony with nature and the cosmos. Toomer thought he could be a successor of sorts. Toward the end of his life, as a Quaker, he realized that it was a flawed dream. He had “put on too much of an act.”¹ He embraced Christian humility.

By researching Jean Toomer, how do you feel racial oppression shaped his relationships with his mom, grandparents, and uncle. Do you believe his inner feelings had a subconscious effect on his romantic relationships?

All of Toomer’s early childhood friends were white, children of recent German immigrants and the like. He felt fully accepted by them and their families. But then he had to attend a “colored” school rather than the one they attended. (Later in life, he admitted he must have repressed how this affected him). Then he fell very ill. When he returned to full health, he no longer “fit in.” I suspect that one reason for this was that the white children had grown into the color line, so to speak. So early on, I think Toomer suffered a deep wound from institutional racism. Again, after his mother remarried and they moved to New Rochelle, New York, he lived in a white neighborhood but attended an integrated school with almost all white children. Here again, he came to feel accepted and happy. Then his mother died, and his grandparents took him back to Washington. For the first time, he really became part of the black community. Yet the ground was being hollowed out beneath his generation as Woodrow Wilson segregated the civil service and middle-class occupations for black people in the capital withered. Some of Toomer’s friends began passing as white. He took a different route, leaving for college in the Midwest and deciding that he would let people take him for whatever “race” they might. Some people took him for Native American, others for South Asian. Some knew he was black in American terminology. He considered himself “American,” and tried to be independent of all such labels. That remained his position through life, but of course most people who learned of his black ancestry considered him a Negro. When he married his first, white wife and newspapers made much of the “interracial” marriage, he proclaimed that it was the marriage of two “Americans,” and publicly broadcast his prophetic vision.

What similarities can you pull from the racial oppression Jean Toomer faced to the racial injustices the world experiences today?

GH: I should first mention that Toomer, his widow and closest friends, would object to people interpreting all of his life’s work through the lens of racial oppression. They felt he was seeking enlightenment like a Buddhist or Christian seeker of any race, and his failure to achieve cosmic consciousness vexed him more than his “racial” struggle. Anti-blackness is still, of course, widespread in the U.S. and much of the world. But the most significant relevant comparison seems to be between what a black writer or artist in any mode was expected to create at the time and related expectations today. This also pertains to how whatever a black writer or artist creates is interpreted through a “racial” lens, which drove Toomer crazy. As soon as someone learns an artist is black, they automatically filter their perceptions of the work through that lens, which also affects marketability.

The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and social movement for the African American culture to challenge racist stereotypes. How did Jean Toomer use the movement to enlighten Americans on a “new” American race? What do you think a modern-day Harlem Renaissance would look like? What would it achieve?

GH: The explosion of African American and black diasporic arts today vastly exceeds that of the Harlem Renaissance and is much more broadly honored with prestigious exhibitions and sales. The Harlem Renaissance opened important doors and established a cultural field with competing positions on aesthetics and cultural philosophy. It helped establish black authority over the “image” of the race. Toomer’s Cane substantially contributed to this, and he has remained a touchstone for many black writers and other artists, despite his own intentions. Yet, I don’t know anyone who accepts Toomer’s idea of the “American race.” Americans define themselves, above all, by the very racial identities that Toomer thought were being subsumed into the new one. You can change your nationality, your class, your religion, your sexual orientation, even your gender to some extent, but you can’t choose your race. It’s the great contradiction to the liberal ideology at the heart of American culture. The family was recruited early on to the reproduction of “race,” to ensure people grew up with a thoroughly internalized sense of which “race” they belonged to, affecting their innermost feelings, their relationships with others, how they moved and spoke with whom. Toomer noted that Americans of all races shared this sort of embodied racial “common sense” no matter what side they were assigned to. He thought that was a major obstacle to true self-realization. That his “American race” seemed delusional to others only confirmed his singular, prophetic calling. White supremacy remains powerful, and black Americans have developed a strong sense of being a “people” with an inspiring history. Toomer’s vision still seems delusional; and yet today more and more people with parents of different “races” resent questions about “what they are.” Some feel a disconnect between their external social identity and their primary relationships, the more intimate sense of who they “belong” to or with.

Can you provide a brief synopsis of Cane for someone who may not have read it yet? How did it show the difference between rural South and urban North during the Jim Crow era? How did it transform Black Literature as we know it today?

GH: Cane is an elegy for black folk culture during the period when it was being transformed by migration and modernity, and a meditation on the chaotic state of modern American culture more generally after World War I, as the migrants brought their culture to the urban North and transformed it. It is also a prelude, in Toomer’s view, to the emergence of his “new race,” a new America struggling to be born.

The book is a collage of lyrical prose, sketch, poetry, short stories, and quasi-dramatic narratives. It comes in three parts focused on varieties of contemporary black life—first, set in a rural southern town, then in more northern urban neighborhoods, and finally, back south in the rural town again. The first section of Cane evokes Southern black “soul” and rootedness in nature—the beauty, pain, and spiritual depth of the black “folk” and folk expression, which responds to Christian faith, the heritage of slavery, and racial oppression. But Cane is an elegy to that folk spirit, which Toomer thought was being subsumed by modernity and absorbed into a new American identity. 

In the second section, he sets his poems and stories in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. The rhythms of both the prose and the poems become rapid, staccato, in tune with the urban environment. The black migrants are “blackening” the cities, infiltrating them with black soul and erotic energies, but being absorbed into the urban market economy and social order. Class relations become more complicated within the race. Within this environment, Toomer inserts several frustrated, potentially prophetic figures who chafe against class lines, color lines, and Victorian sexual mores.

The third section is a longer, quasi-dramatic narrative, focused on a Toomer-like figure struggling ineffectually to synthesize all the contradictory forces in his life—black and white, rural and urban, soul and body, rootedness and mobility. In this attempt at synthesis, he struggles for a new language. Or rather, that new language struggles to be born through him. The book, Toomer says in the epigraph, is “oracular.”

Toomer thought the book was prophetic of his “new race,” but it has been almost universally understood as pointing the way toward a modern black aesthetic, which is a plausible interpretation even though he disagreed with it. (As a result, he has often been considered a traitor for not continuing to write “black literature.”) After all, in terms of current American racial discourse and the “one-drop rule,” Toomer’s American race would be considered black. In its contradictory relationship to racial discourse, Cane tells us something of the structures that still delimit, shape, and sustain American identities.

1. Gorham B. Munson, interview with India M. Watterson 27-28 June 1969, tape 1, side 1, p. 8, transcript in Amistad Research Center, New Orleans., ︎
2. Adeline P. Saffold to P.B.S Pinchback, 30 April 1863, in Jean Toomer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ︎
3. Mathew Benjamin Brady, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. ︎

George Hutchinson is the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture and the George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Cornell University. He is the award-winning author of several books, including In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line and the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. He is editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane. Hutchinson lives in Trumansburg, NY.

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