Jonathon Catlin

The special issue of New German Critique on "German Memory Politics at a Crossroads," which I co-edited with Andreas Huyssen and the late Anson Rabinbach, is finally starting to look real! It will be out in February 2026.
ngc.arts.cornell.edu/forthcoming....

‘Germany’s far right still hates Jews. They just hate Muslims more’ Podcast Episode · Haaretz Podcast · 11/20/2025 · 34m

Meron Mendel: Right-wing German politicians do not “love Jews.” “They hate Jews, but they hate Muslims more.” So they say, “we are for Israel” to  “justify discriminating against Muslims for a ‘good cause’ – the cause of fighting antisemitism.”
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

Excited that my paper ‘Staatsräson as State Racism’ is part of this forthc. issue on ‘German Memory Politics at a Crossroads’
thanks to @joncatlin.bsky.social for including me along fantastic colleagues @danielloick.bsky.social, @vethompson.bsky.social & others!
ngc.arts.cornell.edu/forthcoming....

So you call yourself an eco-Marxist? @alybatt.bsky.social and her dream team of respondents would love to know why, if capitalism is so good at commodifying everything, it‘s failed to put a price on nature to protect it from destruction. Excited to read her book! @princetonupress.bsky.social

Still reeling from the intellectual richness and political urgency of Dagmar Herzog's talks this week at @urochester.bsky.social! We have a final event on 11/25: A hybrid Zoom event with Kathryn Brackney on her history of Holocaust representation. Register here:
events.rochester.edu/event/surrea...

Disconnecting Acts: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman Part II | Los Angeles Review of Books Part II of a two-part interview with one of Europe’s foremost thinkers, Zygmunt Bauman.

In a 2014 interview, he said the following words, which still haunt us today in our time of technofascism and accelerating climate emergency: “Does one need catastrophe to happen in order to admit its coming? A chilling thought, indeed.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/disc...

Bauman also figures prominently in my dissertation as a theorist or “the permanent possibility of catastrophe” insofar as the society that enabled the Holocaust is in many respects the same society we live in today.

Bauman, the Frankfurt School, and the tradition of enlightened catastr Receiving the Adorn Prize in Frankfurt in 1998, Zygmunt Bauman called himself a ‘student’ of its namesake, the German-Jewish theorist Theodor W. Adorn, and

I wrote here about Bauman’s identification as a “student of Adorno” from their correspondence in 1968 to Bauman receiving the Adorno Prize in 1998, with a laudatio by Claus Offe: www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...

Zygmunt Bauman’s Century Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was born 100 years ago today. He is best known as the theorist of “liquid modernity,” in which social bonds decline in favor of an atomized individualism.

Today is Zygmunt Bauman’s centenary! Born in Poznan, Poland in 1925, he survived the Holocaust by fleeing into the Soviet Union, returning to become a professor of Marxist-Leninism in communist Poland, only to be expelled in the antisemitic campaign in Poland in 1968.
jacobin.com/2025/11/zygm...

Thrilled to be hosting the brilliant historian Dagmar Herzog in Rochester this week for events on her two (!) new books, which explore sexuality, racism, and anti-disability politics in 20th century Germany and on the far right today. Details here:
events.rochester.edu/search/event...

Fantastic virtual event going on right now (I believe it’s being recorded). Valentina Pisanty: In official, institutionalized Holocaust memory in the West, “Never Again” has become code for “There Is No Alternative” to (failing) capitalist liberal democracy.

At Smith College for the annual Critical Theory Roundtable. My paper, “‘Nichts Ähnliches’: The Uses and Abuses of Adorno in a Time of Genocide,” attempts to map the growing divide between (German) particularist vs. universalist readings of Adorno's "after Auschwitz" after the devastation of Gaza

Brilliant piece by Bartov on how denial has always been an intrinsic component of genocide, from postwar Germany to today: "the reality in which most of the population in Israel lives is founded on layers of denial, amplified by the vast majority of the country’s media"

Holocaust Historian Omer Bartov: How Germany Enabled the Genocide in Gaza Podcast Episode · Nullpunkt – mit Hanno Hauenstein · 11/09/2025 · 34m

Omer Bartov, in conversation with @hahauenstein.bsky.social: “After some thinking, I decided that I can’t go to Israel anymore, at least as long as this government is in power.”
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech - Jewish Telegraphic Agency A leadership shakeup, a defunded graduate student and political pressure from above have turned a storied program into a flashpoint for Trump-era campus politics.

In the name of "fighting antisemitism," Indiana University appointed a Christian scholar to tell Jewish scholars what they can and cannot say - all while they invited Tucker Carlson to speak on campus. www.jta.org/2025/11/07/u...

A sneak peek at the cover of next week’s issue, which celebrates Zohran Mamdani’s historic win. #NewYorkerCovers
https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/451hFM

Opinion | Capitalism Is Constantly Reinventing Itself. That’s Why Things Feel So Volatile. We are in the middle of the capitalistic order reinventing itself.

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com

“If Americans want to challenge their country’s illiberal turn, they need to stop clinging to the recent past,” Sven Beckert says in a guest essay. “Like other economic regimes before it, it is gone. Resurrection is impossible and to aim for it is politically disastrous.”

Aufarbeitung der Verbrechen in Gaza: Wer verfolgt die Komplizen? Europa und die USA sind für Menschenrechts­verletzungen in Gaza mitverantwortlich. Der Krieg ruft Assoziationen zu den Nürnberger Prozessen wach.

„Wer verfolgt die Komplizen?
Europa und die USA sind für Menschenrechts­verletzungen in Gaza mitverantwortlich. Der Krieg ruft Assoziationen zu den Nürnberger Prozessen wach.“ Nitzan Lebovic (nach langem vor-sich-hin-schieben, wie er berichtet) in der TAZ

taz.de/Aufarbeitung...

Names of 5 million of 6 million Jews killed in Holocaust now identified Five million of the more than six million Jews killed in the Holocaust have now been identified, and with the further help of artificial intelligence (AI), even more names could be recovered, Israeli researchers said on Monday.

As of today, five million of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust have been identified. www.reuters.com/business/med...

Deborah Feldman: Deutschland, das Land ohne Immunsystem Nach dem Terrorangriff vom 7. Oktober fühlt sich Deborah Feldman in Deutschland entfremdet und kritisiert die Instrumentalisierung jüdischer Menschen.

"If, for the supposed safety of Jewish people, one is prepared to unleash a great wave of dehumanization once again because a German majority feels threatened by foreigners, then the consensus is merely the same old German tradition..." @deborahfeldman.bsky.social
www.fr.de/kultur/debor...

Jonathan Boyarin:
www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/...

Mark Mazower speaks on his new history of the term “antisemitism” and its distortion and abuse in recent years: newbooksnetwork.com/on-antisemit...

Opinion | We Need to Rethink How We Think About the Holocaust

Such an important conversation between @mashagessen.bsky.social and Marianne Hirsch about Holocaust memory, genocide, and Palestine.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/o...

Tomorrow!

Can Democracy Survive Political Violence? Assassinations, coups, and street brawls may be symptoms of democratic decay—or an intentional strategy wielded by democracy’s enemies.

I wrote about what the Weimar Republic tell us about political violence: time.com/7321664/poli...

Nothing to see here, Volks!

The Intellectual History of Worker Education: An Interview with Edward Baring by Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch

Today on the blog, Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch interview Edward Baring about his forthcoming book, "Vulgar Marxism," which studies how projects for worker education shaped 20th-c. Marxist thought.
@uchicagopress.bsky.social @samfranz.bsky.social

Ominous...

Excited to be hosting historian Doris Bergen at the @urochester.bsky.social Humanities Center on Oct. 29 for a lecture on the collapse of German democracy in the Nazi era. Could there be any parallels to today, I wonder? 🤔
events.rochester.edu/event/how-ea...

My next book has a cover! I Will Not Abandon You is a new history of queer women under Nazism that calls for us to rethink how we understand fascist persecution as well as the very foundations of progressive politics today. You can preorder it anywhere you buy books

bookshop.org/p/books/i-wi...