Jonathon Catlin

Schlock and Awe – the Diasporist Ben Ratskoff on the immersive traumatization at the Nova Exhibition

Brilliant interview with Ben Ratskoff on how the Nova Exhibition commemorating October 7 “invites visitors to participate affectively and imaginatively in immersive theatrics as a kind of vicarious victimhood.” @thediasporist.bsky.social
thediasporist.de/schlock-and-...

Happening tomorrow, on what happens to be the two year anniversary of October 7 and all the horror that has ensued from it. We hope to have a timely conversation about new work in Holocaust studies and why it still matters in this moment.

Drove past this evangelical church today outside Chicago and was blinded by a dozen giant Israeli flags
ingrace.us/about/

Please join me for a virtual conversation with Dan Stone on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 12:15pm Eastern, about his many new publications on the Holocaust in Romania, the International Tracing Service, and volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Register here:
events.rochester.edu/event/the-ho...

Pleased to share my interview with Kathryn Brackney about her award-winning new history of Holocaust consciousness from @uwiscpress.bsky.social & @glmosseprogram.bsky.social. The spooky cover art is from a 1966 edition of Damiano Malabaila (a pen name of Primo Levi).
www.jhiblog.org/2025/10/01/s...

'For the sins we have committed': Reimagining Yom Kippur liturgy in a post-Oct. 7 world Hovering over this 5786 holiday season is a sense of moral and spiritual crisis that calls out for liturgical innovation.

The powerful moral legacy of Yeshayahu Leibowitz lives on: "We also must resist the inclination, as the Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz admonished in his famous 1953 article 'After Kibiyeh,' to wrap state actions in the veil of religious sanctity." @forward.com
forward.com/opinion/7726...

Tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 2) is the last day to submit abstracts for our ACLA seminar on new concepts and representations of catastrophe. Please join us!

Me when university admin suggests I tone down the wokeness

Judge issues blistering opinion against Trump policy to deport pro-Palestinian students Judge rules non-citizens have the same free speech rights as US citizens under the first amendment

“Judge rules non-citizens have the same free speech rights as US citizens under the first amendment”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

New York friends and colleagues: I'm presenting my work on the failures of German Holocaust memory culture at Columbia in two weeks! Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The Brain as Economy: Intellectual Labor and Mental Efficiency in Twentieth-Century Poland by Marek Maj This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History”

In a new think piece for the JHI Blog’s forum on political economy, Marek Maj discusses how, before the Soviet Union's détente with the West, Polish scientists attempted to render intellectual labor more efficient by adapting and revising the Western managerial turn to motivation.

The separation of antisemitism from all other bigotries in the US, by banning DEI for other minority communities while effectively mandating it for Jews, is unfair to all those other communities, but it also ensures a whole generation will not truly understand antisemitism.

Overseen at Berlin’s 100,000 strong demonstration in solidarity with Gaza

Northwestern students blocked from enrollment after refusing controversial antisemitism training Students say mandatory training video is biased in favor of Israel and could inflame campus tensions over Gaza

This sort of thing is unfair to these students, but it is also ultimately going to backfire against Jews: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

From Moira Wegel’s talk this morning at the GSA: Andrew Breitbart on his hatred of the Frankfurt School (aka “Berlin Franklin School”)

JD Vance appropriating the term "blood libel" to describe legitimate criticism of ICE agents is one of the most antisemitic things I have heard in US politics in the past few weeks. Yet this administration has somehow managed to convince a lot of people it actually cares about fighting antisemitism.

The Fruits of Rank | Samuel Huneke The A-Gays of Trump’s Washington are nothing the new—the past is littered with homosexual hypocrites.

Smart piece from @schuneke.bsky.social on the naughty bad gays (closets full of them, even) pervading the second Trump administration. “It’s a pattern that repeats again and again: elites fuck who they want, regardless of what the law says.”
thebaffler.com/latest/the-f...

Hire me!

"A question of intent: Is what's happening in Gaza genocide?"
www.npr.org/2025/09/25/g...

Opinion | Trump Is Building the Blue Scare

For the first time in a while, Ezra Klein platforms a brilliant scholar with sharp political instincts (Corey Robin) rather than right-wing demagogues. The analogy for our post-Kirk moment isn’t the Reichstag Fire or Grynspan assassination but McCarthyism.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

Catastrophe for sale once again in Deutschland.
www.the-berliner.com/politics/is-...

Judith Butler is being targeted by the US government. We must stand up | Joel Swanson What is happening to Judith Butler – a Jewish intellectual – in the name of fighting ‘antisemitism’ is outrageous

I'm in the "Guardian" writing about Judith Butler and the new McCarthyism: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Staatsräson presents the irresistible temptation of turning guilt into self-righteousness. Horror and self-hatred are transubstantiated into pride and patriotism when the Great National Genocide becomes an origin story for how and why Germans know better about antisemitism.”

Tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/23) on Zoom!

Opinion | I Look at This Country and I See a Stranger

This new essay by @mashagessen.bsky.social sadly strikes all the right alarm bells: we are in our Herschel Grynszpan moment, in which violence by a lone angry young man is used as a pretext for state violence against entire groups deemed terrorists or sympathizers.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/o...

This explains quite a lot about how people think about Jews in the US, actually.

Which Lessons are to be Learned from the Holocaust? A Personal Account of the History of the IHRA 2000–2025 from the Viewpoint of a Memory Scholar Published in Journal of Genocide Research (Ahead of Print, 2025)

Excited to read this new open-access article by Aleida Assmann: "Which Lessons are to be Learned from the Holocaust? A Personal Account of the History of the IHRA 2000–2025 from the Viewpoint of a Memory Scholar"
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I'm pleased to share the first piece in the forum I'm co-editing with Jacob Saliba and Paige Pendarvis on "The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History." Much more great work to come!

The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History: A JHI Blog Forum by Jonathon Catlin, Paige Pendarvis, and Jacob Saliba In recent years, intellectual history has been said to be undergoing a renaissance at the same time as it has been institutionally hollowed out. R...

Officially marking the first of many pieces in the Blog's forum "The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History," Mikkel Flohr offers a novel reading of Marx's historical materialism for a "political economy of ideas."
@mflohr.bsky.social

Why Adorno Read His Enemies: An Interview with Mikko Immanen by Lilia Endter

For the blog, Lilia Endter interviews Mikko Immanen about his most recent book, Adorno's Gamble (
@cornellupress.bsky.social ), which reconstructs and analyzes Adorno's integration and overcoming of the ideas of Weimar-era “conservative revolutionaries” like Klages and Spengler.