Sam Schulman
Yale University, English, Emeritus
- Boston University, English, EmeritusMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Literature, Emeritusadd
- Anti-Semitism, Bolshevism, German Intellectual History, Jewish intellectual history, Modern Jewish History, Modern History of German Jews and Judaism, and 17 moreGerman-Jewish Studies, Early Modern German History, The French and German Intellectual History, German and European History and Society, German-Jewish Studies, Intellectual history of 18-20th C German Jewish thought, Holocaust denial (negationism), Antisemitism, Eastern European and Russian Jewish History, Central European history, 19th Century German History, German Jewish history, Dutch-Jewish History, Early Modern Jewish History, Evolutionary Anthropology, Ancestors (Anthropology Of Religion), Ancestor Worship, and Western Esotericism (History)edit
- Instructor, Yale; asst prof, BU; Asst Prof., MIT, then magazine publisher, media entrepreneur, investment banker, jo... moreInstructor, Yale; asst prof, BU; Asst Prof., MIT, then magazine publisher, media entrepreneur, investment banker, journalist writing primarily for Weekly Standard. Located near Charlottesville, Virginia.edit
Columbus, Ohio: Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers... more
Columbus, Ohio:
Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and civil servants to punish the speakers. The censors didn’t want to make us good or persuade us of anything in particular: Obedience would suffice. As we began, more or less, to govern ourselves, the first thing we did was rid ourselves of the informers, demote the priests and schoolteachers, and find other work for the cops.
What we're doing these days is something quite new: The people themselves seek to rehire the censors, restore the (social) network of snitches, and redeploy the police—to govern our own speech. The aim is not to ensure the stability of a regime but to save us from being unkind to one another and encourage moral excellence. The notion that vigilantly watching what we say makes us better people is a crazy one. But it has an even crazier corollary: the widely shared conviction that what people say aloud is a reliable gauge of their private thoughts. Consider the case of the student journalist and the terrorist.
Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and civil servants to punish the speakers. The censors didn’t want to make us good or persuade us of anything in particular: Obedience would suffice. As we began, more or less, to govern ourselves, the first thing we did was rid ourselves of the informers, demote the priests and schoolteachers, and find other work for the cops.
What we're doing these days is something quite new: The people themselves seek to rehire the censors, restore the (social) network of snitches, and redeploy the police—to govern our own speech. The aim is not to ensure the stability of a regime but to save us from being unkind to one another and encourage moral excellence. The notion that vigilantly watching what we say makes us better people is a crazy one. But it has an even crazier corollary: the widely shared conviction that what people say aloud is a reliable gauge of their private thoughts. Consider the case of the student journalist and the terrorist.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Born to a wealthy, artsy, philanthropic family in Englewood, New Jersey, Lex Kaplen had made a mark at Harvard by founding an undergraduate magazine, which brought him to the notice of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, who... more
Born to a wealthy, artsy, philanthropic family in Englewood, New Jersey, Lex Kaplen had made a mark at Harvard by founding an undergraduate magazine, which brought him to the notice of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, who hired him. But Lex left his junior editorial job after two years to attend Yale Law School. There he had the idea of starting a new, national "literary" magazine (which is how the New Yorker was classified by an adoring advertising industry), but one less arch, more rooted, written for the young woman who lives in Dubuque, or yearns to. Lex's dream took fire when Si Newhouse, whose Condé Nast acquired the New Yorker in 1985, fired Shawn in 1987. The magazine's editorial staff regarded this as a betrayal, and some who were young and had little to lose joined Lex's project. After a test issue of Wigwag in early 1988, Lex found an investor and hired me as publisher, to start January 1989.
Research Interests: History of Journalism, Magazines, History of Graphic Design, The New Yorker magazine, James Thurber, and 2 moreand Media, Journalism, Social, Communication, Development Communication, , Media Studies, Media Literacy, Media Education, Media Impact and Effect and Usage, Alternate Media, Media Research and History of modern and postmodern magazine design and periodical publications
An exchange between Sam Schulman and readers on his July-
August 2004 Commentary piece, "How the Feminists Saved Marriage."
August 2004 Commentary piece, "How the Feminists Saved Marriage."
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France’s momentary appearance on the world stage as a champion of free expression, after the execution of the beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, made for a break in her relentless culture of repression of free speech, which she shares... more
France’s momentary appearance on the world stage as a champion of free expression, after the execution of the beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, made for a break in her relentless culture of repression of free speech, which she shares with most of Europe. By any standard, limitations on free speech are not only wrong, but they have proved themselves to have no effect on reducing hate speech or holocaust-denial. The American free speech regime has produced less holocaust denial and - perhaps - a climate of more tolerance in the generation since holocaust denial bans swept Europe.
Research Interests: Antisemitism (Prejudice), Free Speech, Holocaust Studies, Freedom of Speech, antisemitism and Islamophobia, and 7 moreJewish heritage, Polish-Jewish / German-Jewish Relations, klezmer revival, Jewish heritage tourism, Holocaust commemoration, antisemitism, social identity, oral history, Antisemitism, International Holocaust Denial, Holocaust denial (negationism), Freedom of Speech Vs Hate Speech, Islamophobia In Europe, and Theorie Und Geschichte Des Antisemitismus
The helping professionals didn’t help; the caring professionals didn’t care: the Jay report shows how a culture of "best practices" and other fancies of managerial expertise helped police, government and social workers ignore the problem... more
The helping professionals didn’t help; the caring professionals didn’t care: the Jay report shows how a culture of "best practices" and other fancies of managerial expertise helped police, government and social workers ignore the problem of Rotherham's girls.
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Same-sex marriage throws into relief the nature of Jewish marriage, and what is Jewish about it - and the nature of marriage itself, partly through an examination of Jesus' radical revision of Jewish marriage in Mark 10 - and the... more
Same-sex marriage throws into relief the nature of Jewish marriage, and what is Jewish about it - and the nature of marriage itself, partly through an examination of Jesus' radical revision of Jewish marriage in Mark 10 - and the reluctance of Christian scholars to note its radicalism.
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Radical feminists once aspired, in the name of women’s freedom, to abolish the institution of marriage. In the event, not only did they fail to do that, but the preservation of marriage became, in a way, the movement’s chief if wholly... more
Radical feminists once aspired, in the name of women’s freedom, to abolish the institution of marriage. In the event, not only did they fail to do that, but the preservation of marriage became, in a way, the movement’s chief if wholly unintended accomplishment. What now threatens to end marriage is not feminism but something else, and that something may signal the end of the era of feminism as well.
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US feminists and liberal politicians supported the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban rule in 2002. As recently as 2009, Hilary Clinton and Eleanor Smeal pledged they would never abandon the women of girls of Afghanistan. Smeal was... more
US feminists and liberal politicians supported the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban rule in 2002. As recently as 2009, Hilary Clinton and Eleanor Smeal pledged they would never abandon the women of girls of Afghanistan. Smeal was silent in 2012 when Clinton helped plan a hasty departure and set up negotiations with the Taliban. The broken promises of the most idealistic Americans are reminiscent of the behavior of liberal Republicans after the Civil War, who first supported Reconstruction, but quickly tired of the task of protecting newly liberated black slaves from their former masters. The German-American politician Carl Schurz rehearsed the part that Hilary Clinton would play 150 years later, first leading troops into battle (in Schurz's case, on the battlefield), proclaiming a just peace, and then allowing himself to be persuaded that it was in the best interests of the "colored people" to sort things out with their former masters on their own.
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An arrangement inching toward uneasy acceptance is a ontradiction in terms, and a profound threat to women.
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Holocaust education has been one of the great failures of our time. The more students are taught about the holocaust, the more they see a resemblance between Israel and Nazi Germany. 'Holocaustology' has been chasing demons - turning... more
Holocaust education has been one of the great failures of our time. The more students are taught about the holocaust, the more they see a resemblance between Israel and Nazi Germany. 'Holocaustology' has been chasing demons - turning 'jolocaust-denial" into a sin greater than antisemitism itself, and blinding us to the insincerity of holocaust-deniers. More recently, some have assaulted the "dual genocide theory" - which aims to forbid any comparison between the butchery of Lenin and Stalin and that of Hitler. The denunciation of such comparisons puts Jews shamefully on the side of neo-totalitarians and historical deniers. Jews need to find their way out of the moral swamp into which their naive belief that 'memory' alone will save them.
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'Good censors,' rare in the US, abound in Europe, which tried to stop Hitler with anti-hate-speech legislation. I look at two instances of good censorship. One is ithe history of Pakistan's harsh blasphemy law, which was first drafted by... more
'Good censors,' rare in the US, abound in Europe, which tried to stop Hitler with anti-hate-speech legislation. I look at two instances of good censorship. One is ithe history of Pakistan's harsh blasphemy law, which was first drafted by Macaulay in the 1840s who hoped to bring about civil peace in multicultural British India. I also look at the attempt to outlaw all criticism of slavery in pre-Civil War America, again in the hope of bringing about civil order and mutual toleration. Fear of violence seems to motivate the attempts to limit free speech, past and present, but the intention is not to end violence, but to limit it to those already subject to it in a given society. The impulse to restrain "hate speech" is not only futile, but ignoble.
Research Interests: Censorship, Pakistan, Hate Speech, Free Speech, Indian Law, and 13 moreLiberalism and Republicanism, Pakistani legal system, Abolitionism, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Jim Crow Segregation, Blasphemy, Lincoln Douglas Debate, Indian Criminal Law, Blasphemy in Pakistan, History of Southern Slavery, Us Grant, Criminal Law In Pakistan, and Carl Schurz
As the 2012 election approached, American media instructed us to deplore our political polarization. In France, where politicians seek to occupy the center, and push others to the periphery, we might expect a healthier politics. But is... more
As the 2012 election approached, American media instructed us to deplore our political polarization. In France, where politicians seek to occupy the center, and push others to the periphery, we might expect a healthier politics. But is it? Does the range of voter concerns find expression in political choices, and does the outcome align with a voter consensus? Watching the two countries' presidential campaigns in 2012 will be instructive.
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Research Interests:
Matthew Weiner's show is a 1950s Carousel tray with hundreds of slides illustrating the moral failings of our distant 50’s ancestors. Coffee was weak but men were strong—or to be more exact, they were cowardly bullies and misogynists.... more
Matthew Weiner's show is a 1950s Carousel tray with hundreds of slides illustrating the moral failings of our distant 50’s ancestors. Coffee was weak but men were strong—or to be more exact, they were cowardly bullies and misogynists. They were strong only in the eyes of the women of the 50’s who, without the benefit of 70’s feminism, submitted willingly to male enslavement. (Perhaps because he actually believes this about women before feminism, Weiner expects a higher standard of performance from the male actors in his cast.) "Mad Men" invites us to congratulate ourselves for having found solutions to every failure of the decade. Above all, Mad Men teaches us, the triumph of feminism has raised all of us to a higher plane. It has liberated the modern-day counterparts of Mad Men’s secretaries and housewives from their thralldom to male sexuality, and it has freed men from their otiose masculinity and combativeness.
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After a youth spent as the indulged and inevitable prince, he has become the king that Hamlet would have been had he enjoyed the services of Axelrod and Plouffe, instead of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
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Research Interests: Dutch Politics, Holocaust, Dutch History, Jewish heritage, Polish-Jewish / German-Jewish Relations, klezmer revival, Jewish heritage tourism, Holocaust commemoration, antisemitism, social identity, oral history, Dutch-Jewish History, and 3 moreHolocaust History and Historiography, Dutch Holocaust, and WW2 in The Netherlands
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Heeft het herdenken van en het onderwijzen over de holocaust zin gehad? Er vinden nog steeds op grote schaal en op vele plaatsen massamoorden plaats. Misschien moeten we accepteren dat het educatie-project niets heeft opgeleverd.
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In the two books that precede the great trilogy, Merrill surrenders the consolations of self and style and abandons the search for human contact and domesticity that had characterized his early lyrics. The dispersal of the self may be a... more
In the two books that precede the great trilogy, Merrill surrenders the consolations of self and style and abandons the search for human contact and domesticity that had characterized his early lyrics. The dispersal of the self may be a precondition for the ecstasies of the trilogy and one of the sources of its knowledge.
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Hallam Tennyson called his father's "Maud" "the antiphonal voice to 'In Memoriam,' and the poem lurches from death to death. But the emergence of the public voice of the poet at the poem's little-admired conclusion, purged of morbid... more
Hallam Tennyson called his father's "Maud" "the antiphonal voice to 'In Memoriam,' and the poem lurches from death to death. But the emergence of the public voice of the poet at the poem's little-admired conclusion, purged of morbid self-reflection and dedicated to a larger public good, was the for the poet the justification of the whole enterprise, and achieved through a series of expressions of private grief.
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Intriguing and seldom-recognized verbal resemblances between the Ode and Spenser's "Maye Aeclogue" and "Prothalamium" make apparent Wordsworth's unsuccessful attempt to borrow Spenser's self-mastery in the Prothalamium, in which the older... more
Intriguing and seldom-recognized verbal resemblances between the Ode and Spenser's "Maye Aeclogue" and "Prothalamium" make apparent Wordsworth's unsuccessful attempt to borrow Spenser's self-mastery in the Prothalamium, in which the older poet turns away from the false consolations of the landscape's gaudy beauties to the exercise of the the imaginative powers that lie within.
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This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried... more
This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is
stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to
comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for
them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that
history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold
War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED
conference than a lifeanddeath
struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”
Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me,
whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered,
Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using
Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic
history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation.
stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to
comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for
them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that
history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold
War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED
conference than a lifeanddeath
struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”
Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me,
whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered,
Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using
Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic
history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation.
Research Interests: NATO, History of International Relations, 20th Century German History, Cold War International Relations, Cold War history, and 6 moreU.S. Foreign Policy, Political Sciences, Arms Control and Disarmament, America and the World / History of International Relations, JFK Historiography, and US Diplomatic History
The entertainment industry doesn’t necessarily intend to broadcast an image of American society that is devoid of culture, faith, and morality, and inhabited by deracinated, materialistic hedonists. But allowing the entertainment business... more
The entertainment industry doesn’t necessarily intend to broadcast an image of American society that is devoid of culture, faith, and morality, and inhabited by deracinated, materialistic hedonists. But allowing the entertainment business to assume the job of communicating our image to the world has been a disaster for foreign policy. When a president speaks about freedom, Martha Bayles asks, what does it suggest to a foreign public? “The political wisdom of the American Framers? Or the giddy personal freedom expressed in a movie like Convoy?” (That was a late Sam Peckinpah CB/trucker/road-revenge film that happened to be the first American movie the Communist party permitted into China in 1978—and it was a huge success.)
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Militant atheism has a long and not notably successful history--punctuated, however, by boomlets that tend to occur after terrible and seemingly inexplicable human disasters. The latest such boomlet owes its popularity to al Qaeda, whose... more
Militant atheism has a long and not notably successful history--punctuated, however, by boomlets that tend to occur after terrible and seemingly inexplicable human disasters. The latest such boomlet owes its popularity to al Qaeda, whose attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 created an appetite not
only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell:
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe. Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell:
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe. Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
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The “year” in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s greatly acclaimed new memoir, extends to the anniversary of the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne on December 30, 2004. Didion’s tale of what happened in that period is interwoven... more
The “year” in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion’s greatly acclaimed new memoir, extends to the anniversary of the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne on December 30, 2004. Didion’s tale of what happened in that period is interwoven with her memories of her husband, her attempt to grasp the fact of his death and of her new solitude, and her investigation of the “literature of grief.” Unmentioned in these pages is the fact that,
after the book was completed but months before its publication, her daughter Quintana Dunne also died. Thanks to the
publicity surrounding the release of The Year of Magical Thinking, no reader can be unaware of this fact; but, for the duration of the book, Didion herself seems not to be. Her authorial decision to remain, as it were, ignorant of her daughter’s death creates a curious sense of disorientation—and also, inevitably, greater
sympathy for an author who, the reader knows, is soon to become doubly bereaved.
This effect, one begins to suspect, is a calculated one. Joan Didion’s best writing has always been dependent on the presence of her own self, observing what she describes, observing herself describing it. When she is not present—as in her fiction and in her political writing (where she tries to understand the world
without mediation through her personality)—she falls radically short. The Year of Magical Thinking is one of her best pieces of writing, but it partakes of some of the same deep flaws that beset her abundant worst.
after the book was completed but months before its publication, her daughter Quintana Dunne also died. Thanks to the
publicity surrounding the release of The Year of Magical Thinking, no reader can be unaware of this fact; but, for the duration of the book, Didion herself seems not to be. Her authorial decision to remain, as it were, ignorant of her daughter’s death creates a curious sense of disorientation—and also, inevitably, greater
sympathy for an author who, the reader knows, is soon to become doubly bereaved.
This effect, one begins to suspect, is a calculated one. Joan Didion’s best writing has always been dependent on the presence of her own self, observing what she describes, observing herself describing it. When she is not present—as in her fiction and in her political writing (where she tries to understand the world
without mediation through her personality)—she falls radically short. The Year of Magical Thinking is one of her best pieces of writing, but it partakes of some of the same deep flaws that beset her abundant worst.
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John Le Carré, who taught so many of us in our youth about the complexity of good and the perplexity of those who seek it, seems to be living his life backward. As he grows older, what is good and evil, right and wrong, becomes simpler to... more
John Le Carré, who taught so many of us in our youth about the complexity of good and the perplexity of those who seek it, seems to be living his life backward. As he grows older, what is good and evil, right and wrong, becomes simpler to sort out, not more difficult. "The Mission Song" shows an author blithely unburdened by moral complexity.