What is a Nation?

Referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia raise the question “What Is a Nation?”

What is a nation? What is a nation-state? Is it the same as a country? Are a people, or a tribe, the same thing as a nation? What does national sovereignty really mean? These are the key questions for our globalized 21st century.

What is a nation? Is it something you die for? Get murdered for? Is it something that can make you clinically insane, incapable of seeing reality? Is a nation something that can be created by treaty or politics? What does the birth of a nation look like? What does it smell like when it dies?

Michael Goldfarb draws on his decades covering conflicts rooted in frustrated attempts to express national feelings to look for an answer and comes up with more questions:

• Can the dozens of nations that make up western Europe hope to preserve their wealth and high living standards in a globalized economy without pooling their nation-hood into something greater?
• What is the importance of a nation-state in a world whose economy is no longer organized on national lines, In an era where the loyalties of global elites are to each other and not the lands of their birth?
• Will the 21st century see the creation of a United States of Europe and witness the splitting apart of the United States of America?

Referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia raise the quesiton “What Is a Nation?”
What is a nation? What is a nation-state? Is it the same as a country? Are a people, or a tribe, the same thing as a nation? What does national sovereignty really mean? These are the key questions for our globalized 21st century.
What is a nation? Is it something you die for? Get murdered for? Is it something that can make you clinically insane, incapable of seeing reality? Is a nation something that can be created by treaty or politics? What does the birth of a nation look like? What does it smell like when it dies?
Michael Goldfarb draws on his decades covering conclficts rooted in frustrated attempts to express national feelings to look for an answer and comes up with more questions:
Can the dozens of nations that make up western Europe hope to preserve their wealth and high living standards in a globalized economy without pooling their nation-hood into something greater?
What is the importance of a nation-state in a world whose economy is no longer organized on national lines, In an era where the loyalties of global elites are to each other and not the lands of their birth?
Will the 21st century see the creation of a United States of Europe and witness the splitting apart of the United States of America?

Without Memory There is No History, Here’s why

If an event happens and there is no one to witness and remember it, does it become part of history? If memory is eliminated is it possible to write or understand history? When FRDH host Michael Goldfarb researched his book Emancipation, about Europe’s Jews in the century and a half between being liberated from the ghetto and the Holocaust he came across stories of many interesting people in obscure places, completely forgotten because the community that might have remembered them had been eradicated. They were no longer part of history. Restoring them to the record became his obligation.
In this archive recording, originally made for the BBC, he tells the story of Gabriel Riesser.
It is particularly relevant to what’s happening in America today. This is about the ephemeral nature of civil rights laws, the tarnished promise of integration, how racial hatred is never dead and buried, and finally the foundation of all history writing: memory.

If an event happens and there is no one to witness and remember it, does it become part of history? If memory is eliminated is it possible to write or understand history? When FRDH host Michael Goldfarb researched his book Emancipation, about Europe’s Jews in the century and a half between being liberated from the ghetto and the Holocaust he came across stories of many interesting people in obscure places, completely forgotten because the community that might have remembered them had been eradicated. They were no longer part of history. Restoring them to the record became his obligation.
In this archive recording, originally made for the BBC, he tells the story of Gabriel Riesser.
It is particularly relevant to what’s happening in America today. This is about the ephemeral nature of civil rights laws, the tarnished promise of integration, how racial hatred is never dead and buried, and finally the foundation of all history writing: memory.

Berkeley: High Point Of The Revolution

This episode of FRDH is about Berkeley and the high point of the revolution of the 1960’s as host Michael Goldfarb remembers it. Revolution is a romantic word and a bloody practice.
This autumn “revolution” will be discussed a lot, as we mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
The word will also come into use as we move towards the 50th anniversary remembrances of 1968, the year of student revolution.
The University of California Berkeley, is where student revolution was effectively born in the US, during the Free Speech Movement. That was a movement of the left. Free Speech Week which may well spark a riot, is a movement of the right and it providing pundits the opportunity to note the irony that Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, has become anti-Free Speech.
In this FRDH podcast Goldfarb recounts the story of the Free Speech Movement, the fight over People’s Park and recalls a memorable rally on Berkeley campus addressed by Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. He then describes a moment of calm in the intensity of the Sixties, a calm that he calls the High Point of the Revolution.

This episode of FRDH is about Berkeley and the high point of the revolution of the 1960’s as host Michael Goldfarb remembers it. Revolution is a romantic word and a bloody practice.
This autumn “revolution” will be discussed a lot, as we mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
The word will also come into use as we move towards the 50th anniversary remembrances of 1968, the year of student revolution.
The University of California Berkeley, is where student revolution was effectively born in the US, during the Free Speech Movement. That was a movement of the left. Free Speech Week which may well spark a riot, is a movement of the right and it providing pundits the opportunity to note the irony that Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, has become anti-Free Speech.
In this FRDH podcast Goldfarb recounts the story of the Free Speech Movement, the fight over People’s Park and recalls a memorable rally on Berkeley campus addressed by Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. He then describes a moment of calm in the intensity of the Sixties, a calm that he calls the High Point of the Revolution.

Three Things I learned about America on Vacation

Three things I learned or was reminded of on my first American vacation in more than 15 years. First thing I learned: America is clearly in crisis but not yet at crisis point.
I watched television news just once – for a very few minutes. It is hysterical, condescending to its viewers and in the way it contextualizes reporting – frequently wrong. Some other podcast I will back that assertion … the history of how TV news got that way requires several essays … but trust me on this, the presentational style so overwhelms the factual content, that Americans – even the most intelligent – are operating in a news vacuum.
Much of the crisis in which American society is immersed, and which has been building for decades, has been framed by a news media that doesn’t inform but survives commercially by creating this hysteria as well as outrage … It was inevitable that an hysterical and outrageous person would legitimately gain political power democratically in my native land.
Second thing I learned: In a tweet the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, acknowledged, “We made a mistake: 30.3% of surveyed Harvard freshmen are legacies, not 41.8%.” It being Harvard, I’m sure the irony in the sentence, “We made a Mistake” was intentional.
very nearly a third of the students who are beginning their Harvard educations this year were admitted because a relative went to Harvard. Why does this matter? Well, for one reason, as the Crimson noted, nearly half of those legacies came from families with average incomes of more than $500 thousand a year. Another 23% came from families earning a quarter of a million to 499 thousand dollars, only 4% of legacy families were on incomes under 80 grand.
The situation at Harvard is one of the best pieces of anecdotal evidence of just how calcified America’s class system has become.
And a lot of the feelings expressed in polls about the American dream disintegrating proceeds from that calcification.
Third things I learned about, “Sex at Wesleyan, what’s changed, what hasn’t,” That was the headline on an op-ed at the New York Times. ““Adults may make fun of trigger warnings, but most kids support them because they’re about extending a hand to others, undergirding an ethic of caring and decency. Calling out “micro-aggressions” among classmates and policing tone on social media appeal to them in much the same way … Political radicalism at college is now more vocation than avocation, and anyone who displays a trace of racism, misogyny or sexual predation is suspect.”
This made me remember something I read 37 years ago at the times.
Here are links to all the things I learned on vacation:
http://features.thecrimson.com/2017/freshman-survey/makeup/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/style/wesleyan-sex-rules.html
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9901EFDB1E3BE732A25752C0A96F9C94619FD6CF

When Jews Met the Blues

When Jews met African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century the collision created American popular music. Both groups were immigrants to the great cities of America’s north – Jews came from Eastern Europe and Blacks from the American South. But their desire to get away from oppression to economic opportunity wasn’t the only thing they had in common. Their cultures were deeply rooted in music and music of a particular kind: crying out and soulful and syncopated. In this cultural history from the FRDH archive, Michael Goldfarb traces out how talented people in both communities met, borrowed, occasionally stole musical ideas and along the way created the American songbook, as well as rock and roll and and rhythm and blues. He also tells the story of the coming together and then fracturing of the great alliance for political progress in 20th century America … the alliance between African-Americans and Jews.

It is an alliance that can be traced at least as far back as Harlem in the 1920’s and disintegrated after the Civil Rights successes of the mid 1960’s amid acrimonious accusations of exploitation and appropriation. An argument that continues.

This FRDH podcast is a cultural history with lots of music and thoughtful interviews.

Mind of the South

If you want to know America, you have to understand the Mind of the South.

If you want to understand the dynamics that drove events towards the Charlottesville Outrage, you have to understand the mind of the south, or specifically the “white” Southern mind. That mindset did not just pop up, the day Donald Trump took office. It has been the driving force in American politics … all the way back to the foundation of the Republic.

White Southerners are a powerful force in American politics. Not a majority – but the largest single political bloc – in the country. In the century after the Civil War this bloc was attached to the Democrats – Lincoln was a Republican – and it acted as a drag anchor on the progressive forces that shaped the modern Democratic party. In response to the civil rights movement white Southerners shifted to the Republican party. Superiority is a key part of the white southern mindset, not just racial, but religious, as well. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the region saw a heavy influx of protestant immigrants from what is today Northern Ireland, Ulster.

In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb talks with Southern historians about the region and the mind of the South and traces the origins of recent events to well before Donald Trump entered politics. And through the medium of the Republican party the mindset is spreading all over the country.

Crash Anniversary Thought: Work ≠ Employment

On the tenth anniversary of the start of the Financial Crash, Michael Goldfarb looks at work and employment. Are they the same thing?

We are told we will have to work longer – in Britain last week it was announced that the age at which Britons in their 40’s could collect their state pensions – social security – would be going up to 68.

Work longer, but will we be employed longer?

It is all well and good if people are living longer that they stay in the work force longer but it would be jolly nice if the government told that to employers, almost all of whom seem keen on getting rid of their employees once they get past 55. When you add in all the stories about robots doing most forms of work by the time those in their 40s are eligible for their pensions, there seems to be some contradictions that need to be resolved.

The unemployment rate today – midsummer 2017 – is 4.3% in the US (4.5% in the uk)

In the 1960’s the golden era of the American economy, 4.3% was full employment and economic contentment. Numbers are pure in their value but data is not. 4.3% unemployment today is not the same as 4.3% unemployment back then. Today you are counted as employed if you work one hour or 40 during a week. Back then 40 hours was the standard.

A quarter of the jobs added in the most recent monthly report in the US were in restaurants and bars. Hospitality is not an industry for building a career, Waiting table, tending bar are good gigs for people on the way to something else or for folks who need a little cash infusion every day – I’ve worked for tips and I urge everyone who hears this to be generous – But you wouldn’t want to build a society in which more people work for tips than work at a steady job, manufacturing something or developing specialist knowledge that can be exported. And yet that seems to be the direction in which the Anglo-American economies are headed.

Robots are doing the heavy lifting in manufacturing and as we keep being told in the technology press, they are coming for the jobs of paper pushers next.
Since the Crash we live in an era of pre-emptive downsizing. Within four months of Lehman’s going bust 1.9 million people were laid off in America. Most did not work in financial services. Employers in enterprises of all sizes in many different areas of the economy took advantage of the event to cut payrolls, “reduce headcount,” etc. Many of the new jobs created since that nadir have been in part-time work.
We have entered a new epoch in which you will, if you are lucky, have a 20 year window of full-time employment and can lay the foundations for the stability that comes with it: buy a house, set aside for retirement, educate your children.

Michael Goldfarb answers his own question. Listen to FRDH podcast and find out the answer.