News and Events

  Olin Humanities, Room 102  7:15 pm – 9:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Set against the backdrop of the worst European migrant crisis since WWII, It Will Be Chaos unfolds between Italy and the Balkan corridor. Five years in the making, the film features two refugee stories of human strength while capturing in real time the escalating tension between newcomers and locals. The cinema vérité documentary intertwines the harrowing journey of Aregai, an Eritrean shipwreck survivor fleeing his country’s dictatorship, with the story of Wael, embarking on a life-threatening trip to bring his Syrian wife and four kids to safety in Germany.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and Franco Baldasso (Italian) and Ziad Dalal (MES).

A talk from Sandipto Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. For the academic year 2024-25, he is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in Social Sciences and Historical Studies. He is the author of Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, which reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience. 
 Sponsored by 
Dean of the College, Division of Social Studies, Asian Studies, Global and International Studies Program, Human Rights Project, Politics, Middle Eastern Studies, and Union College Political Science Department, and Dean of Academic Department and Programs

Hudson Valley Political Theory Workshop is a new collaborative project organized by Bard College and Union College. The workshop aims to bring together political theorists  working in the Hudson Valley Region in a series of workshops to share their work in progress, create new networks, and open up possibilities for new collaborative research projects that further advance humanities.

  Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This panel on the terms "Anti-Semitism" and "Anti-Palestinian Racism" is part of the Spring 2024 common course Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine and will be open to the Bard College community as a whole. The course critically explores the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine with a focus on contemporary Gaza, and the vocabularies we use to understand it. The course brings scholars from a range of disciplines together to help students understand the histories of and contestations around important concepts and ideas that define our contemporary moment, and to stimulate informed dialogue within our community. Participating in the panel on the terms "Anti-Semitism" and "Anti-Palestinian Racism" will be Ken Stern of Bard College and Radhika Sainath of Palestine Legal.

Kenneth S. Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. He is an award-winning author and attorney, and was most recently executive director of the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation. Before that he was director of the division on antisemitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee, where he worked for 25 years. Stern is the author of numerous op-eds and book reviews, appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and elsewhere. He most recently published The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (New Jewish Press, 2020), and previously published Loud Hawk: The United States vs. The American Indian Movement. Mr. Stern graduated from Bard College in 1975.

Radhika Sainath is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, where she oversees the organization’s casework on free speech, censorship, and academic freedom. Prior to joining Palestine Legal, Radhika represented clients in individual and class action civil and constitutional rights cases involving discrimination, human rights abuses, and prison conditions at one of California’s most prestigious civil rights firms. Radhika has successfully litigated numerous state and federal class actions and other federal civil rights cases. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Jacobin, and Literary Hub. Radhika is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and the University of California, San Diego. She is based in Palestine Legal’s New York City office and is admitted to the California and New York state bars.

This event is cosponsored by the Politics Program, the Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Global and International Studies Program, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema  10:00 am – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
With the recent upsurge in migration at the southern border, the United States may be witnessing the most significant challenge to migrant rights, including the right to asylum, and to the protection of workers in decades. The goal of this conference is to make space for a sober assessment of our present moment by shedding light on the acute and systemic challenges to our current immigration system, their relevant economic dimensions, and by highlighting the role of organizations working to protect the rights of all immigrants in these challenging times.

PROGRAM

10–11 am Coffee, sign-in, and tour of student research projects (Bertelsmann Campus Center lobby)

11:00 am – 12:30 pm Panel 1: How communities respond to the needs of newly arrived migrants

Laura Garcia, New York Immigration Coalition - Strengthening immigrant rights in the Hudson Valley
Valerie Carlisle, Grannies Respond/Reunite Migrant Families - Volunteer response and mobilization
Karin Anderson Ponzer, Legal Director, Neighbors Link - Community law practice on legal services for newly arrived migrants

An estimated 180,000 migrants have arrived in NYC and across the state since the spring of 2022, and state and local governments, community organizations, and volunteer groups have mobilized to meet their immediate needs. The panelists will reflect on the direct-response work they are engaged in, how they understand community needs to be evolving, how they navigate (mis)information flows and common frustrations, and talk about their strategies for marshaling community resources to help sustain their work amidst a public climate where immigration has become a flashpoint of political debate.

1:30–3:30 pm Panel 2: Are we in an asylum crisis?

Alex Aleinikoff, Dean and University Professor, New School for Social Research, former Deputy High Commissioner, UNHCR
Shannon Lederer, Director of Immigration Policy, AFL-CIO
Lenni Benson, Distinguished Chair in Immigration and Human Rights Law, New York Law School; Founder, Safe Passage Project

The upsurge at the border has focused attention on asylum, the right to remain for those who have a well-founded fear of persecution. With fewer alternatives available, asylum has become an option of first resort for legal advocates and migrants seeking protection and the opportunity to work after fleeing their countries. The number of applicants in the system has grown exponentially over the past decade and the processing times of nearly five years are increasingly theoretical. No one disputes that asylum is ill-suited to addressing the vast and diverse flow of immigrants arriving at a time of massive labor demand. There are increasing fears—or hopes, depending on the political position—that the current situation will spell the end of asylum as we know it. The participants in this panel have decades of experience in immigration law and policy, and they will explore the place of asylum in understanding and addressing the current situation as well as what has been overlooked or obscured by that focus.

4:00 pm: Screening of Borderland | The Line Within (109 mins.)

Followed by a panel discussion featuring filmmakers Pamela Yates, Paco de Onis, activist Kaxh Mura’l, and Joe Nevins, Dept. of Geography, Vassar College.

Borderland | The Line Within exposes the profitable business of immigration and its human cost while weaving together the stories of immigrant heroines and heroes resisting and showing a way forward. 

All events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

This program is supported by the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education

About the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education: In early 2016, Vassar, Bard, Bennington, and Sarah Lawrence colleges founded the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education to explore what role institutions such as ours could play in addressing this development. Since then, the New School has joined our Consortium and we have partnered with the Council for European Studies. We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support of our goals.

  Olin Auditorium  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture on the term “Genocide” is part of the Spring 2024 common course Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel/Palestine and will be open to the Bard College community as a whole. The course critically explores the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine with a focus on contemporary Gaza, and the vocabularies we use to understand it. The course brings scholars from a range of disciplines together to help students understand the histories of and contestations around important concepts and ideas that define our contemporary moment, and to stimulate informed dialogue within our community. Presenting the lecture on the term "genocide" to the course and the wider campus community will be Omer Bartov, the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

Omer Bartov's early research concerned the crimes of the German Wehrmacht, the links between total war and genocide, and representation of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently, he has focused on interethnic relations and violence in Eastern Europe, population displacement in Europe and Palestine, and the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. His books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). Bartov is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine. His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published this year in the United States and Israel.

This event is cosponsored by the Politics Program, the Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Global and International Studies Program, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Arie M. Dubnov, George Washington University
Hegeman 106  4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Three pivotal terms— "refugee," "return," and "repatriation" — played an exceptionally significant role in shaping international planning and discourse after World War II.  Exploring the interconnections of international history and the history of political and religious concepts, the talk examines how these terms acquired distinct meanings within the framework of international policies and how they echo to this day in the context of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.  

Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.