Because life is life-size, academic discourses, let alone grand worldviews, can only ever be approximations. Yet, direct observation and engagement with a specific situation raises the most complex and, at the same time, the most diverse questions. From this point of view, the experience the young Moriel Bareli recounts in his book When a Jew and a Muslim Talk is of such a dense and unusual nature. Yet his starting point was relatively simple: a young man growing up on Long Island, New York, who came to Israel when he turned eighteen. And since he lived near Jerusalem's Old City, inhabited mainly by Israeli Muslims, he developed a desire to learn Arabic – and in this way, to approach and become closer with his neighbor—the unknown being, as Rilke had named him. In practice, however, this wasn't quite so easy to accomplish because, at the time of the so-called Knife Intifada, Jewish students were only allowed to enter the Old City if accompanied by guards. So, as a digital native, Bareli downloaded an app and arranged to learn the language through various online conversations. Because he soon realized revealing his identity as a Jewish Israeli wouldn’t help him achieve his goal, he decided to focus on his New York background, presenting himself as an American college student who taught English in exchange for Arabic classes. And it was in this way that he was able to strike up conversations with all kinds of people in the Arab world—conversations that would have been impossible in everyday life. This experience, with its unmistakable anthropological significance, drew our attention to him – leading to the following conversation, which, despite the subject's dark and confrontational nature, was characterized by a wonderful sense of humor.

Moriel Bareli lives in Samaria, teaches Arabic and gives lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Sometimes, political landscape changes occur very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and not infrequently; a social step backward is disguised as a seductively progressive formula. In this context, Göran Adamson is one of those rare specimens whose awareness of undesirable developments of this kind was sharpened early on – not least because he connected the rise of populist parties to the failure of the political elite. Or, more precisely: their entry into what Adamson calls nationalist masochism. The roots of this peculiar self-hatred go way back to the 1970s – in the meantime, having produced a political class underpinning its political career with performative acts of self-flagellation. Consequently, Sweden's conservative prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt could claim: »Swedish roots are nothing but barbaric. The rest of the development has come from the outside.« If we take the problem of nationalist masochism seriously, we understand both that and how the ideology of multiculturalism has made the deliberate and always consensus-seeking Sweden into a form of mental paralysis in which turning a blind eye could become a form of civic duty. In any case, Adamson, already a sociology professor at the University of Malmö, observed how his colleagues had developed a groupthink—a group pressure that’s spread as a kind of mental mildew over the discourses and threatened to stifle free speech and research. Was this a reason for Adamson to leave the University? As a true citizen of the world, he subsequently spent many years in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Jordan. He currently lives in Berlin, teaches at the University of Europe, and has just submitted a study on the failed Swedish migration policy to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels.

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The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange, even dark question emerging. What if this promise can't be kept, and what if we’re now confronting the figure of the failed artist? This is a thought that the American philosopher Eric Hoffer made, in the early 1950s, the core of his work The True Believer – in which he argues that totalitarianism, as it raged in its Nazi and Stalinist varieties, could first and foremost be counted as failed artists. And this is precisely the idea of artist Megan Gafford, who sees the disappearance of beauty—exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's urinal—as one of the great catastrophes of the last century. Because what art denies itself seeks refuge in political activism. Since Megan Gafford, who taught design and drawing at the University of Denver and has been teaching at the University of Boulder for more than a decade, has been able to observe this logic of mobilization at close range, she's emerged as a journalistic voice with this idea, writing for magazines such as Quillette, Areo, and Tilt West.

Megan Gafford is an artist who lives and teaches in New York. Her interest in science and technology drives her artwork's strange sense of uncanniness. In her studio practice, she repurposes unsettling scientific tools like radiation and cybernetics as art materials, to create work that commingles eeriness and elegance. She also has a Substack blog called Fashionably Late Takes.

Recent Articles:

The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. In Quillette

and Megan Gafford recommends

Samuel Hughes: The Beauty of Concrete

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