Do you have a political role model?

This week in North Philly Notes, Jennie Sweet-Cushman, author of Inspired Citizens, writes about what politicians Americans look up to—if any.

Like many flabbergasted Americans, I recently watched the footage of a US Senator, Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) threatening to fight a union president providing testimony with whom the junior senator apparently had a pre-existing beef. It happened right there at the meeting of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The posturing was broken up by committee chairman, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who scolded Mullin like a child. It was all very….not exactly behavior that should be emulated by anyone.

At its best, the incident is yet another comical example of politicians behaving badly; at worst, it further deteriorates the perception Americans have of their elected officials, making it harder and harder for citizens to admire the people who represent them.

This example perhaps explains what drew me to write Inspired Citizens: How Our Political Role Models Shape American Politics. Americans who have political role models often identify with a national political figure like a high-profile member of the House of Representatives or, even more likely, a U.S. Senator. I found that people that identify with a political role model—especially if that connection is a strong one—are more likely to be politically engaged. They vote at higher rates and are more likely to participate in important forms of political participation like contacting their elected officials, protesting, or donating to political candidates. More democratic engagement makes for a better, healthier democracy and aspirational political figures can be associated with this sort of positive impact on American politics.

But our political role models also present a mixed bag. Only about half of Americans report that they even have one. And for those who do have someone they admire, there are also downsides for contemporary American politics. Those that identify with former president Donald Trump, for example, are much more likely to report experiencing or participating in acts of political aggression and are more supportive of the possibility that political violence may be necessary. It is not just Republicans. Those that name current President Joe Biden as their role model very similarly sanction violence. And, as extremely well known and high-profile figures, U.S. presidents are the most common political role models that people name, suggesting how very important it is that we elect people to the presidency that encourage participation in politics by civil means and not by inciting violence.

No one in either my study of Americans or political candidates in the United States named Senator Mullin as their political role model (though he was a relatively unknown member of Congress until just this year). But a significant number of Americans reported that they have no one at all that they look up to in American politics. Perhaps that is for the best if those most likely to be admired are going to foster the darker side of American politics—if they are going to model solving political disagreement by challenging their opponents like schoolyard bullies.

Importantly, however, political role models also have the potential to inspire democratic engagement and normatively positive attitudes like trust in government and political efficacy. National political figures would be well served to consider how their behavior may (or may not) be emulated by those they aim to serve. Political role models in American politics should serve as guiding lights, illuminating a path toward a more equitable, inclusive, and kind society. Their leadership should not just be about wielding power but about harnessing it for the greater good, inspiring hope, and catalyzing positive change.

Designing a comprehensive resource for community-engagement professionals

This week in North Philly Notes, Elizabeth Tryon, coauthor (with Haley Madden and Cory Sprinkel) of Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships, writes about the challenges and rewards of integrating community engagement into higher education.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, it’s overwhelming to try to process the impact of events of the last four years. A global pandemic disproportionately affected minoritized communities in a climate of vitriolic hatred and intolerance encouraged by the former president. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests created overdue heightened awareness of systemic racism. In a short time span, so much of the country’s dialogue shifted that it is mind-boggling to catalog the ramifications, good and bad. The learning curve was steep, especially for community engagement (CE) under lockdown, but universities pivoted more quickly in response to the COVID-19 closure than thought possible for such behemoth institutions. It was gratifying, in our campus Zoom world in the late summer and fall of 2020, to see conversations about equity take center stage. Some academics seemed to have been living a cloistered existence, unaware that inequity and systemic racism persist in the neoliberal construct of academia. Now folks were gamely attempting to wake up and contribute to rectifying some inequities. The gates of the ivory tower seemed to crack open and we heard a new willingness to listen and try new things.

These issues were not new in the context of academic CE. For many, many years we had been hearing from off-campus partners that our institutions didn’t do enough to prepare students in CE coursework (some of it required to graduate) before unleashing them on the unsuspecting populace. And that even with the best intentions, students sometimes interacted with community members in ways that caused harm. At our university a large community-based study, overseen by Professor Randy Stoecker in 2006, categorized those issues using a grounded-theory method. These findings were so extensive that our team published a book with Temple in 2009 called The Unheard Voices. This work led us to plead with administrators to institute policies to improve CE. These calls had largely gone unheeded, and 10 years after the Voices study, a community follow-up showed that not much had changed except that partners were becoming choosier about agreeing to projects and they still needed us to shoulder the burden of student training. (One told us, “Tell your students to stop bringing their white nonsense!”) Higher ed has a moral responsibility to behave better both inside the campus boundaries and especially beyond if universities continue to send students into the community under their auspices.

While the issues chronicled in Voices included everything from students not showing up at their sites to the vagaries of the academic calendar, over the next decade packed rooms for every workshop or conference presentation our team led with words like “cultural humility” in the title pointed to the overarching problem. Once all the available extra chairs were dragged in, people sat on floors or windowsills or hovered in doorways. Instructors kept saying, “I’m not equipped to teach these topics. I need the tools to do a better job of not only ensuring my students do no harm, but also ensuring the CE project is more than a break-even exercise for my community partners.”

During those years we were lucky to have some very skilled student interns who had extensive training in intergroup/intercultural dialogue as well as lived experience and wisdom. They knew how to meet students at their level as they worked toward more equitable partnerships and helped us develop workshop curriculum. This led to the creation of a CE Preparation staff role in 2019, filled by Cory Sprinkel, also a skilled dialogue facilitator, and we embarked on formalizing our student trainings for wider dissemination.

Our new handbook, Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships, is designed to be a comprehensive resource for use by community-engaged professionals to prepare students for more equitable relationships with community members as they conduct course projects or research. It is structured into three broad sections that loosely mirror a companion set of open-access online modules that instructors can assign: an introductory overview and literature review; essential concepts, including student motivations, identity, privilege, power and oppression, and cultural humility; and additional contexts and considerations that drill down even deeper. We used a developmental approach so instructors can go from simpler to more complex understandings. Every chapter starts with discussion and theory and then moves to specific strategies and classroom activities. The book ends with appendices of activities and resources we have collected over the years.

We could only write from the perspective of a predominantly white institution in a medium-sized city, and our BIPOC faculty/staff colleagues, while very supportive, were too committed to join us as coauthors. So, we solicited short vignettes from small private and large urban campuses, community colleges, HBCUs, and minority-serving institutions. We received contributions from a diverse group of 22 colleagues about a plethora of related issues, including valuable contributions from students. It was a real pleasure to work with all of these contributors and my co-authors and I are excited to see this handbook reach CE professionals that have been looking for resources to help them prepare students for equitable partnership building.

Only the Paper You Need

This week in North Philly Notes, Beth Kephart, author of My Life in Paper, writes about our relationship with paper.

A sheet of paper is a promise or a dare, a letter, a list, a story, a smudge, a treasure or the evidence that finally proves the crime. It signifies (or can signify) the death of a forest, the corruption of water and air, a coming heap in the trashcan or the dumpsite.

Each office worker consumes, on average, 10,000 sheets of paper a year, claim some who have dared to quantify the situation. And with paper accounting for more than a quarter of the total waste in landfills, TheWorldCounts, an organization that uses live trackers to help the rest of us understand the magnitude of global challenges, presents this fact for our imagination: “With all the paper we waste each year, we can build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California!”

Paper, ubiquitous paper, isn’t even a human invention. Give the patent rights to the paper wasps and yellow jackets who, millions of years ago, heeded some inborn directive and began to saturate chewed-up wood with their own saliva and convert the fibrous material into their thin, architecturally brilliant nests. It would be a long time before anonymous humans would leave traces of the stuff in Central Asia and even longer before Cai Lun, a Chinese official employed by the Eastern Han Court in 105 CE, acquired fame for his understanding that you could beat the heck out of cellulose fibers, set the loose organic material to float in a watery vat, and, using a screen of some sort, dip into the suspension before leaving the material to dry and flatten in a variety of ways. It was in this way that old clothes, for example, became new paper, and that paper, in time, became new clothes.

The technology of paper spread. Various cultures had their paper making secrets, but the mechanics were essentially the same—pound, suspend, dip, dry, let those hydrogen bonds do their thing. In the United States, William Rittenhouse made an early claim as key colonial papermaker when, in 1687, he purchased a 20-acre wedge of land along an active tributary of Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek, and constructed, with help, the first paper mill of British North America. Families who had worn their old night clothes or shirts to ruin were paid, by the mill, for their rags. A class of rag pickers emerged.

Paper offered proof of the power of recycling. It also offered proof of Nature’s profound versatility. Consider Dr. Jacob Christian Schaeffer (1718-1790), a German mycologist who, among many other things, made the making of paper one of his lifelong obsessions. Experimenting with cabbage stalks, moss, grapevines, nettles, cat-tails, thistles, mallow, corn husks, potatoes, old roof shingles, reeds, beans, St. John’s wort, aloe, clematis, sawdust, burdock, and asbestos, among other organic materials, Schaeffer ultimately created a six-volume book to showcase his methods and samples. The fibers, always, were the thing—wherever they could be found.

After the Hollander beater was invented by the Dutch in 1860, hand beating gave way to machines. Demand, already on the rise, grew—outpacing, sometimes overwhelmingly, supply. Though the Frenchman Nicholas Louis Robert had invented the first paper-making machine in 1799, it wasn’t until the 19th century that papermaking became an industrial force. All those trees. All that water. All those chemicals. All that stink in the air above the factories.

Recycling was—and remains—the answer, or at least an answer to our paper needs. Recycle your paper and you are saving the trees, contributing to lower levels of air and water pollution, reducing the need for chlorine. Being a wise steward of paper helps, too—printing on both sides, widening your margins, writing smaller numbers, maybe, memorizing your grocery-store lists.

But there is also, I have learned in recent years, this: Grab a vat. Acquire or build a deckle and mold. Save your ratty T-shirts or buy actual couch sheets. Hunt about your yard or in your refrigerator or other places where plucking flowers is not the work of thieves for some delicious fibrous stuff (lawn clippings, cattails, dandelions, arugula, wheat straw, the inner flesh of mulberry trees, say). Save your journal scraps, old drafts, last year’s reports, yesterday’s printed news, your abandoned holiday gift list, the books you no longer wish to read. Make, in other words, your very own paper, which perhaps you’ll lace with blanched flower petals, or perhaps you’ll size with okra juice so that you might write, on it, a story.

Stand in the breeze pulping and vatting and dipping and drying, and this is what you’ll see: Every sheet of paper is a miracle of sorts. Use it well. Recycle honorably. Imagine yourself as a paper wasp, making only the paper you need.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some forty books, a memoir teacher, and a book artist. Find her online at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com.

University Press Week Blog Tour #SPEAKUP

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #SPEAKUP. Today’s theme is Where does your press #SpeakUP?

Today’s entries describe the ways your press’s partners—booksellers, libraries, community organizations, scholarly societies—work with you to amplify authors’ work in various communities around the world.

University of Nebraska Press
A guest post from local bookseller and UNP author, Carla Ketner.

University of Illinois Press
A 2023 retrospective look at all the conferences we have attended to showcase the places we’ve met to speak with authors, readers, and other presses to build community and share our books and journals.

Columbia University Press
In this blog post, author Michele Moody-Adams discusses the use of narrative activism to #SpeakUP and empower change in social movements.

University of Alabama Press
“Talking About Books: UA Press and OLLI Book Club.” We #SpeakUP with a collaboration with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the University of Alabama Campus.

University of Notre Dame Press
The Notre Dame Press Book Festival: Reaching Out to Campus and the Broader Community: Every fall, the annual Book Festival and Dirty Book Sale puts Notre Dame Press in the center of campus and the broader community for two days of educational sessions, a fabulous sale, and plenty of opportunities to connect.

Johns Hopkins University Press
A post highlighting partnerships with our local bookstores.

Rutgers University Press
The post will be about Rutgers’ Celebration of Scholarship and the inaugural Mortenson Award, awarded to RUP author Camilla Townsend for her work on the book On The Turtle’s Back to preserve Lenape history that is important to the university and to NJ and the NE region.

Purdue University Press
A guest post on multimedia responses to books.

University of Toronto Press
Guest post by Project MUSE, highlighting our 15-year partnership and how we work together to amplify author’s work in communities around the world.

University of Pennsylvania Press
Highlight of two Penn Press books that address Philadelphia neighborhoods and communities: The landmark sociological study The Philadelphia Negro, by W.E.B. Du Bois and Laura Wolf-Powers’ University City, which chronicles five decades of planning in and around West Philadelphia’s University City.

University Press of Kentucky
Guest blog from Mandi Fugate Sheffel, owner of Read Spotted Newt Books in Hazard, KY.

Bristol University Press
The relationship between BUP and our booksellers, bookshop events.

Johns Hopkins University Press
A celebration of local Baltimore bookstores.

The University of the West Indies Press
Director, Christine Randle, shares where the UWI Press #SpeakUP.

SUNY Press
Guest Post by Vanessa Valdes, How Arturo Schomburg’s Search for Juan de Pareja led to The Met.

University of Washington Press
Q&A with the program manager of Humanities Washington. This Seattle-based organization features UW Press authors and others through the Speakers Bureau program, which brings humanities events to communities throughout Washington State in partnership with libraries, museums, historical societies, community centers, and civic organizations.

NYU Press
As a fledgling academic, author Lisandro Pérez shopped at his local bookstore, Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida. Forty years later, he returned there to launch his book The House on G Street, sharing the personal story of his family’s life in Cuba.

University Press Week Blog Tour #SPEAKUP

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #SPEAKUP. Today’s theme is How does your press #SpeakUP?

Today’s entries highlight new approaches and formats here that boost authors’ voices, including digital, open access, audio, accessibility efforts, even early thoughts on AI.

Princeton University Press
A discussion of our expanding in-house speaker’s bureau, PUP Speaks.

Duke University Press
“Speechifying,” a post by our director Dean Smith.

Lever Press
A post by acquiring editor Sean Guynes.

University of Nebraska Press
A guest post from Courtney Ochsner, Acquisitions Editor, on our Zero Street Fiction Series.

University of Notre Dame Press
CREATING SPACE FOR CONVERSATION: Notre Dame Press 5+1 intern and graduate student Jake Kildoo writes about the experience of facilitating conversation between two prominent Elie Wiesel scholars for an NDP “Books for Better Understanding” video focused on new, expanded releases of Wiesel’s Four Hasidic Masters and Five Biblical Portraits.

University of Illinois Press
A post highlighting some of our approaches to accessibility and formats of featuring our authors work, featuring the UPside podcast, journal special issues, open access content, and the Press’s recent alt text initiative.

Gallaudet University Press
The post will spotlight our work with publishing signed language video content. It will describe the importance of signed language content in scholarly publishing as well as the challenges.

Columbia University Press
Leigh Gilmore speaks up about the history and power of narrative activism, from Harriet Jacobs to Tarana Burke.

Purdue University Press
Purdue University is pleased to support OA publication practices.

University of Toronto Press
Guest post by Post Hypnotic Press Audiobooks discussing an audiobook project for The Gatherings, which boosts Indigenous authors’ voices and ideas.

University of Pennsylvania Press
How university press publications move beyond mainstream media headlines and online clickbait to offer sources that inform current moments. Specifically, how Penn Press Penn Press has, from several scholarly perspectives, published a wide range of work on the Israel Palestine war.

University Press of Mississippi
A blog entry discussing the aims of the Press’ new First Author’s Initiative and why it matters.

University Press of Kentucky
Davis Shoulders, one of the editors of the new series Appalachian Futures series, and co-owner of Atlas Books, speaks to the series’ importance in the region (share video).

Bristol University Press
Thea Cooke on Open Access and partnerships.

Johns Hopkins University Press / Project MUSE
How Project MUSE gives added reach to their publishers & their authors.

UBC Press
A conversation with UBC Press’s accessibility committee about past, present, and future efforts to make UBC Press publications more accessible.

SUNY Press
Guest Post by Jenn Bennett-Genthner, Manager, Training, Development & Services about SUNY Press’s accessibility efforts.

University of Washington Press
UW Press will share the story behind the development and publication of Jesintel: Living Wisdom of Coast Salish Elders and how the book illustrates the Press’s community-based publishing strategy.

NYU Press
Author Isabel Millan explains how queer and trans writers of colors can create new worlds that empower marginalized children. Her work celebrates theirs and fights against book bans.

University Press Week Blog Tour: #SpeakUP

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #SPEAKUP. Today’s theme is Who does your press help #SpeakUP?

Today’s entries feature quotes from authors or staff who are contributing daily to the amplification of voices and expansion of ideas. What does it mean to senior or field-defining or first-time authors—personally, professionally, to their fields at large—to be published by university presses?‘

“I have had a relationship with Temple University Press since the 1990s and have published three books with them. They understand and evaluate my work as being first a piece of scholarship. Their editors have been mentors, not gatekeepers and, in particular, they understand how to work with emerging scholars who need support through the entire process of book production. University presses, by focusing first on scholarship, can also take intellectual risks. Work that would never see the light of day with a corporate press has a chance with a university press. And university presses, as nonprofit entities, have different economic considerations than corporate presses. In my experience, the same amount of content costs about half as much (and in some cases far less than that even) as that produced by a for-profit press, and the quality is indistinguishable from those for-profit press books that cost far more.”—Randy Stoecker, author of Liberating Service Learning

“As a first-time academic author, it’s incredibly reassuring to know that our work is being shared through a trusted press. My coauthors and I have worked hard to develop a text we hope will be useful to higher education professionals across the country. Throughout the writing process, knowing that our work had somewhere to land and that we had collaborators in dissemination took a lot of stress off our shoulders. University presses help so many writers share their unique stories.”—Haley Madden, coauthor of Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships

“With the proliferation of publishing models for faculty, I believe in and advocate for the fundamental value of the university press. There is simply no other vehicle for long-form arguments that has the level of credibility that a university press can afford. And that is because they take their time to maintain a scholarly process that involves external and internal peer review from subject-matter experts. The existence of university presses also tells me something important about the university, that it is committed to the dissemination of ideas and therefore to the community. For these reasons, I am proud to edit a series under the Temple University Press imprint.”—Paul Djupe, editor of Religion and Political Tolerance in America, and editor of the Press’ Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics series

“It has been a great pleasure to work with Temple University Press on my book, Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race. Brothers is the first memoir and by far the most personal book I have written. Everyone at Temple—from my editor to the publicity manager—has been generous and kind, approaching the book not just from a professional vantage point but also from a more human and caring perspective. I am grateful that there are university presses like Temple that are willing to take a chance on a memoir, and that know how to support a historian trying to find a voice beyond academic history.”—Nico Slate, author of Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race

“My relationship with Temple University Press goes back some twenty years and four books. In that period, I have worked with two of the best editors. Editors who read my work, a remarkable engagement, in my experience.”—Grant Farred, author of The Perversity of Gratitude

“Being published by Temple University Press is a wonderful vehicle for emerging scholars to offer new perspectives, ideas, and research findings to a broad range of readers. Respected university presses like Temple Press enrich the academic discourse in ways that have an enduring and positive impact on the world.”—Valerie Harrison, coauthor of Do Right by Me

University Press Week Blog Tour: #SPEAKUP

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #SPEAKUP. Today’s theme is What Does It Mean to #SPEAKUP at your Press? 

Today’s entries shine a spotlight on new or backlist projects that exemplify the ways the SpeakUP theme intersects with a Press’ mission, practices, acquisitions/marketing/production strategies, etc.

Click on links to Presses to read their entries.
(Note: Some Press have not provided links or descriptions of content as of time of publication)

Yale University Press

University of Notre Dame Press
Greg Bourke, author of Gay, Catholic, and American, writes about choosing to publish his book with University of Notre Dame Press.

Columbia University Press
In this interview, Howard University’s Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume and Columbia University’s Dr. Frank Guridy #SpeakUP about The Black Lives in the Diaspora series and its mission to uplift voices of Black scholars and authors who have often been marginalized by providing a platform for their research and perspectives.

Leuven University Press
Guest post by a press Acquisitions Editor.

University of Nebraska Press
Guest post, by UNP Director.

University of Chicago Press
Interview with Laura Mamor, author of Sexualing Cancer, a book that SpeaksUP about the intersections of politics, gender, and public health

McGill-Queen’s University Press
#SpeakUP Reading list

University of Amsterdam Press

Purdue University Press
Purdue University Press has a long history of publishig in Jewish, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies.

Harvard Education Press
Executive director Jess Fiorillo writes about HEP’s mission and our books that that “speak up” against problems in education

Bristol University Press
Alison Shaw on BUPs history and mission.

Duke University Press
Curated reading lists with free content.

University Press of Kentucky
Frank X Walker, the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate, is an artist, writer, and educator who has published eleven collections of poetry. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, Walker speaks to the importance of books by the University Press of Kentucky.

Johns Hopkins University Press

The University of the West Indies Press
Empowering our authors as Dara Wilkenson Bobb is with her marketing strategy for Gods of Bruising.

Cornell University Press

SUNY Press
#SpeakUP Reading List

University of Manitoba Press
Highlighting ways our recent titles have spoken up.

NYU Press
Author Jeffrey S. Gurock explains how sports hero Marty Glickman spoke out against anti-semitism.

An interview with Jonathan Graubart

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost an interview with Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, which first appeared in the Academe blog on November 6.

BY JENNIFER RUTH

The situation in the Middle East demands the best of all of us. Yet so many capitalize on the moment to harness the conflict to their own domestic “culture wars” agenda. Typical are op-eds like this one, arguing that contextualization, when in support of Palestinian refugees, amounts to little more than illiberal “identity politics.” In another one, Simon Sebag Montefiore, writing for the Atlantic, short-circuits attempts to raise the context of mid-century colonialism by heaping scorn on “the decolonization narrative,” calling it “a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19^th century.” We need more forums where we hear from academics who have thought long and hard about the history and can move us past the binaries that have come to dominate the discourse—academics like Jonathan Graubart, professor of political science at San Diego State, who wrote this post and whose book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs was published this year.

Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism places readers in dialogue with thinkers like Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Ella Shohat, and, of course, as the subtitle indicates, Hannah Arendt. I just finished Graubart’s chapter on Arendt and was reminded of all the reasons why “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man” in Origins of Totalitarianism remains one of the most important pieces ever written. The “solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees,” Arendt wrote, demonstrating how linking self-determination to nation-states has produced a crisis of statelessness in every part of the globe. Graubart’s deeply insightful and necessary book enlists Arendt and other voices to establish “a foundation for a contemporary dissenting Jewish perspective, which challenges the fundamental premise of Zionism and reconceives Jewish self-determination to require a just and interactive co-existence among Jews and Palestinians” (4).

I asked Jonathan if he were willing to answer a few questions for the blog and he graciously agreed.

JR:  Why did you feel compelled to write this book?

JG: I’ve been active in the Jewish peace and dissent movement for about thirty-five years and in scholarly research on Israel-Palestine for two decades. The grim direction of Israeli society and its stance toward Palestinians led me to undergo a fundamental probing of what went wrong with Zionism and of how to reimagine Jewish self-determination to be compatible with a just coexistence of Jews and Palestinian Arabs. For inspiration, I looked back to a group of far-sighted dissenting Jewish Zionists from the pre-state era, who I label Humanist Zionists. They looked to the ancient holy Jewish site of Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing just institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In opposition to the mainstream Zionists, they opposed a Jewish nation-state because doing so would subjugate and displace the majority Arab population in Palestine and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. More generally, the Humanist Zionists warned the Zionist movement—albeit with no success—against embracing nationalism and imperialism, the two umbrella dynamics that proved devastating to Europe, the world, and to the Jews in particular.

These dissenters were not a large group but included influential Jewish figures, such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and, my personal favorite, Hannah Arendt. They proposed a binational federation that would allow for a just and egalitarian coexistence of Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities. Although the Humanist Zionist vision lost out, I have found that its insights for advancing both a reckoning of the harms inflicted by the Zionist project and a new vision of Jewish self-determination have become more important than ever.

JR: Has the reception of your book been impacted by the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza?

JG: These events have sparked greater interest in my book. I’ve had receptive audiences when presenting my book to universities in the US and England and been invited to speak on multiple media outlets, including Al Jazeera Arabic, a progressive Black radio station in Philadelphia, and the Majority Report with Sam Seder. People are much more interested in learning about alternative visions and programs for coexistence. Most gratifying has been the warm reactions I’ve received from Jewish college students. To be sure, my book talk was cancelled at both Oxford University and Cambridge University because of pressure placed on the sponsoring departments to avoid topics that appeared overly critical of Zionism.

JR: Apart from the book, you have a long record of criticizing Israel’s grave abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law, as reflected most recently in your op-ed for Common Dreams, “Why One-Sided US Condemnation of Hamas is Morally Tone-Deaf, Self-Absolving, and Counter-Productive.” You have also raised regular concerns about the efforts of mainstream American Jewish organizations to chill critical discussion on college campuses of Israeli policies. What do your experiences tell us about the current state of academic freedom in the US?

JG: There has been a growing disjuncture over the past several decades on American campuses. On one side is a robust criticism of Israeli policies and US complicity and empathy for Palestinians. This shift extends to Jewish students, who are much more likely than older Jews to consider Israel’s treatment of Palestinians a form of apartheid. On the other side are campus Hillels, affiliated Israel-advocacy groups, and a network of well-endowed Israel-advocacy groups ranging from far-right groups, such as the Canary Mission, and centrist ones, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Part of their advocacy consists of weaponizing the charge of antisemitism to discredit individuals and organizations they deem hostile to Israel. Guided by the definition from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which employs the expansive language of “double standards” and disproportionality, the Israel-advocacy networks have lobbied colleges and universities to classify anti-Zionism, support for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and other strong criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. Crucially, they are backed by high-end donors and leading politicians. In 2019, President Trump signed an Executive Order that empowers the Department of Education to apply the IHRA definition of antisemitism as a guide to find violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  President Biden has not rescinded this order. Advocacy groups have already mobilized this new legal tool to take on university programs linked to Middle East issues. [JR: See the AAUP’s 2022 Statement “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism”]

The Israel-advocacy networks primarily target two categories of people and organizations. One is critical Jewish academics, such as myself, who link our analysis to a distinct Jewish perspective. We are seen as dangerous for disrupting the narrative that all Jews identify closely with the position taken by the establishment advocacy groups. At San Diego State, a number of local groups and individuals have warned Jewish students away from certain of my classes, and appealed to university leaders to either have me removed from public panels on Palestine-Israel or properly “balanced” by a supposed “pro-Israel” Jewish voice. Because I am a tenured professor sufficiently invested in these issues to sustain personal attacks and at a campus where academic freedom is mostly protected, I have not been silenced. Not all Jewish academic critics, however, have enjoyed my luck.

The second targeted group are primarily Arab and other Muslim students and groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Hard-right Israel-advocacy groups, such as the Canary Mission and Stand with Us, openly intimidate students with hostile questions, especially women wearing hijabs, and place students on various “wanted” lists of antisemites and terrorist supporters. At SDSU, I have seen a number of students traumatized by such “doxing” and others who have decided not to express a critical opinion in public. The organization Palestine Legal maintains a more comprehensive compilation across the country of such instances.

The current conflict has intensified the intimidation campaigns. Hillel International, the ADL, and others are encouraging Jewish students to file Title VI complaints. The ADL and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law are imploring universities to investigate their SJP chapter for giving material support to terrorists. Florida has already moved to ban SJP from its colleges. Importantly, the attacks are not limited to those who arguably expressed support for the initial Hamas invasion but extend to all those who added an “and” to their condemnation of Hamas’ atrocities. Anyone who has provided a broader context and/or also condemned the nature of Israel’s horrific response has been accused of “moral equivalency” and soft on terrorists. In other words, the very act of providing a broader understanding, an essential task of universities, is now deemed as antisemitism or, in the case of Jewish critics, “self-hating.”

Sadly, antisemitism, as well as Islamophobia, has surged in the US, including on college campuses, and demands condemnation and proactive measures. But mobilizing the charge of antisemitism to suppress much-needed scrutiny of Israeli actions is not the way to proceed. As Hannah Arendt argued decades ago, the answer lies in solidarity with all oppressed and probing scrutiny not just of outside persecution but the wrongful actions of one’s own community. The zero-sum, hardline nationalist path chosen by partisan Israel-advocates represents a step backward, an anti-antisemitism of fools.  It is, thus, more urgent than ever to reinvigorate robust discussion and scrutiny, which demands vigorous defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and co-editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.

Jonathan Graubart is a professor of political science at San Diego State University who specializes in the areas of international relations, international law, Zionism and Jewish dissent, Israel-Palestine, the United Nations, normative theory, and resistance politics and the author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and other Pariahs.

What Workers are Striking For: A View from Detroit

This week in North Philly Notes, Michael McCulloch, author of Building a Social Contract, writes about the importance of labor power to create broad-based prosperity.

The 2023 “Summer of Strikes” has continued into the fall, and while the UAW and the Big Three are nearing a deal, Detroit’s casino workers remain on picket lines. Though union membership has declined for decades in the U.S., the Motor City still carries powerful associations as a post-WWII labor stronghold. In September, Joe Biden conjured that historical memory while visiting UAW strikers in suburban Detroit, becoming the first modern American president to take part in a labor protest. “The middle class built the country,” Biden argued, “and unions built the middle class. And that’s a fact. So, let’s keep going.”

News coverage of Biden’s visit emphasized an exchange that followed his remarks. Asked whether he supported the 40% pay increase the UAW initially sought, the President replied, “Yes. I think they should be able to bargain for that,” which prompted public debate about the appropriateness of such a large raise. Yet to reduce this or any labor negotiation to a number, considered in the abstract, oversimplifies the stakes. A more tangible way to think about the significance of workers’ pay would be to consider the places where the rewards of labor are most intimately experienced: workers’ houses. Detroit has a different historical memory to offer in that regard.

Before the founding of the UAW, the Motor City emerged in the 1910s and 20s as a mass-production innovator and a rising economic powerhouse. Amidst that rapid growth, the city gained a prominent role in the national conversation about work and its rewards. High turnover in city factories, and the threat of strikes, hung over Detroit industrialists’ efforts to build more and better cars and other products. To attract and retain the best workers, despite the difficulty of modern industrial labor, employers—lead by the Ford Motor Company—determined that they needed to offer more.

In 1914, Ford famously doubled the company’s effective wage to five dollars per day, and reduced the work day to eight hours, curbing attrition and causing a general increase in wages city-wide. Yet this raise was not an end in itself—what gave it meaning was a concurrent effort to build modern houses in Detroit. Facing a housing shortage in the 1910s, business leaders, lenders, government agencies, developers, and workers themselves contributed to widespread effort to increase the volume and quality of houses available for workers. It was a flawed project—marred by racial segregation—but it did begin to establish the principle that in modern America, hard work should be respected and well rewarded. This housing transformation, which occurred in Detroit and many other industrial cities, brought increased privacy, indoor bathrooms, and electric lighting to many for the first time.

The story of Detroit’s Model-T Era housing boom can serve as a reminder that the current labor crisis, though often conceived of as a problem of wages, is also a housing problem—a shortage of affordable, aspirational dwellings that work can put within reach.

In the 1910s and 1920s, as today, wages were not enough to secure workers’ gains. Before the rise of industrial unions, and before government programs such as unemployment insurance and social security, workers’ economic gains were continuously at risk. Vulnerable to layoffs, illness or injuries—and lost work that could drain hard-earned savings or even lead to eviction—workers found that the front porches of their newly-built bungalows could be places to sit with gnawing worry about the economic future.

Amid the crisis of the Great Depression, workers in Detroit and elsewhere took to the ballot box and the streets to demand security for their hard-earned gains, and in particular, for their houses. Today, amid a wave of twenty-first century strikes, this history points to the importance, beyond wages in the abstract, of work’s lived rewards, and of the urgent need for policies and contracts that can secure workers houses today and into the future.

Using Manifold at Temple University Press and Libraries

This week in North Philly Notes, Alicia Pucci, Scholarly Communications Associate at Temple University, and Mary Rose Muccie, Executive Director at Temple University Press, explain how they use Manifold as a platform for publishing books from our North Broad Press imprint.

Founded in 1969, Temple University Press publishes books in the humanities and social sciences and is the premier publisher of books on Philadelphia and the surrounding region. The Press began reporting administratively to Temple’s libraries in 2010. With the 2018 launch of the libraries’ Center for Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing, the libraries and Press began to partner on new approaches to sharing scholarly output and developing services in support of our mission to advance learning and scholarship. One such service, launched in 2019, is North Broad Press (NBP), a joint Libraries/Press open access imprint that provides Temple faculty with an opportunity to author their own open textbook.

NBP primarily publishes high-quality open educational resources by members of the Temple community, with limited additional capacity to support scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and digital scholarly projects. Everything we publish is open access and goes through a traditional book production process, including peer review by two independent experts in the field. Copyediting, typesetting, and design are provided at no cost, and we allocate stipends to some Temple authors to support writing an original open textbook. To date, we have published five textbooks and have sixteen in varying stages of progress. All NBP titles are published our Manifold platform.

Temple began using Manifold when the NBP imprint was announced and at a time when the Press was strategizing on sustainable open access models for traditional titles. After evaluating the options for hosting and publishing open access books, including the ease of integration with our established procedures, support for digital enhancements, and cost, we applied for and were chosen as one of ten publishers to participate in a 2019 pilot program on using Manifold.  

We kicked off our Manifold collections in 2020 with four Press titles previously published as part of the American Literatures Initiative (ALI). Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ALI supported the publication of important scholarship in literary studies, which had become an underfunded and under-resourced discipline from which fewer titles were able to be published. Open access availability of these titles matched the spirit of the grant by expanding their reach and supporting their use in ways beyond the traditional print and electronic editions.

Manifold allows for the inclusion of related and supplemental material to enhance and expand the traditionally published content. The Press was immediately able to take advantage of this by including the text of two author talks, a link to a website listing reviews, and slides from a presentation related to Belinda Kong’s Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square.

In addition to the five NBP titles published to date, Manifold hosts all Press open access titles. This includes over thirty titles in labor studies, re-released with new forewords through a Humanities Open Book grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Press titles included in the Knowledge Unlatched program; and, most recently, titles made open access through support from the authors or their institutions.

Our experience with Manifold has been positive, in part because it is designed to be compatible with the majority of publishing outputs. Unlike an authoring platform like Scalar or Pressbooks, Manifold ingests source texts created externally, including EPUB, Google Doc, Markdown, HTML, and Word, which makes it a great option for smaller publishing initiatives like NBP that have limited bandwidth and rely on a combination of internal and external workflows to produce their content. For example, although most of the NBP production workflow is managed in house, we have used various tools for generating the final open access and print-on-demand files. This includes working with external vendors and freelancers, partnering with our library’s graphic designer on text design and typesetting in InDesign, and using Pressbooks to typeset less complicated titles. And because Manifold is compatible across devices, users can access content on desktops, smartphones, and tablets and enjoy a customizable and immersive reading experience. Given the evolving ways users, in particular students, are accessing online content, this factored in our decision to use the platform.

Manifold fosters experimentation and innovation through its support for diverse project types. These can range from simple text-only content that has been authored directly in Word/Google Doc to media-rich content that has been designed professionally. Because NBP serves the broad Temple community across departments and courses, the textbooks vary in complexity. Our current publications are primarily text with hyperlinks throughout. However, upcoming projects will integrate elaborate imagery, audio files, videos, interactive H5P exercises, and supplementary resources like instructor guides and homework assignments.

Although Manifold is not an authoring platform, we have incorporated it at specific points in that process. NBP authors can request that we post draft versions of their manuscripts, as in this example. This allows authors to experiment with the process of writing an open textbook, as opposed to a traditional book. Readers can highlight and annotate Manifold titles and share those annotations with others, either publicly or in private reading groups. Not only is this useful for students using the final version in class, but it also allows for crowd-sourced open peer review on draft manuscripts. NBP currently employs single-blind peer review with the option for open peer review, and we would love to expand the options to include this feature.

All NBP textbooks are licensed under Creative Commons to facilitate the unfettered flow of ideas, scholarship, and knowledge. In this spirit of open, we also aim to make our titles accessible. The Manifold team prioritizes accessibility as a non-negotiable design philosophy and ensures that their user interface follows the latest WCAG 2 AA standards. However, it’s important to note that while the platform itself is accessible, the final book files that are ingested in Manifold must also be made accessible. At NBP we have built support for accessibility into our workflows, ensuring that the final book files are accessible before they are ingested.

Like many open source developers, the Manifold team continues to work with the community to develop the platform and is committed to incorporating feedback from publishers, librarians, and users alike. As more scholars experiment with new modes of publishing, the platform adapts to meet these growing needs. This commitment, along with the features outlined here, is key for a mission-driven press such as Temple that wants to deepen its support for digital scholarship and open access.

This post originally appeared as part of the Publisher Spotlight series in the Open Access Book Network blog and is reposted under a CC BY 4.0 license.