Author Description

Liberties is an independent quarterly journal of ideas that publishes serious, stylish, and controversial essays about significant issues in culture and politics. The Summer 2024 issue of Liberties: Paul Berman finds the history of antisemitism on the American left in a cartoon circulated at Harvard; Sergei Lebedev laments the limitations of Navalny's understanding of Russia's violent history; Assaf Sharon diagnoses the horrific condition of the Israeli-Palestinian "discourse"; Rosanna Warren celebrates Wallace Stevens's first masterpiece; Using new sources about the pogrom at Kishinev, Ekaterina Pravilova considers the exacting task of analyzing victim testimony in the search for justice; Carlos Fraenkel adjudicates between Plato and Aristotle in their views of public philosophy; Justin Smith-Ruiu unhysterically explains what the real threats of AI are; Kit Wilson treats the death of tonality and the temptations of historicism in the understanding of music; Benjamin Balint recovers the legacy of an extraordinary Austrian Jewish writer, Ilse Aichinger; Mitchell Abidor recounts the intellectual odysseys and battles of the great anti-Stalinist writer, Victor Serge; Matthew Zipf uses the case of Renata Adler's braid to explore the role of iconography in crafting history; Adrian Nathan West introduces perhaps the most overlooked deep thinker of our time, Vladimir Jankélévitch; David Thomson honors the intimate joy of small gestures in film; Celeste Marcus explains how to appreciate the brilliance of a great contemporary painter; Leon Wieseltier provides a close reading of an anti-Zionist screed from Naomi Klein; and, new poems by Mosab Abu Toha and Daniel Halpern. Liberties features essays from leading op-ed writers and scholars, awar