A few years back I saw a remarkable documentary about a Jewish musician of Polish descent, Bronislaw Huberman, who changed cultural history by helping musicians escape Nazi-infested Europe. A child prodigy – he played Brahms’ Violin Concerto in front of the composer! – he became one of the most famos violinists in early 20th-century Europe. Sensitized to the shift in politics in the 1920s, he put his career and stardom on hold for two years to study at the Sorbonne to remedy what he perceived as lack of a general education. Politicized, inspired by the Pan-European ideas of the likes of Freud, Einstein and others, and eventually finding refuge in Palestine, he decided to spare no effort to get Jewish musicians to safety and offer them the opportunity to play in an Orchestra of Exiles which eventually became the Israeli Philharmonic. Hundreds (and their families) escaped with his help from certain death.

The documentary, attached below, is a must-see, intense, personal and informative, with comments by Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, and Joshua Bell among others.

https://tubitv.com/movies/435728/orchestra_of_exiles?autoplay=true&utm_source=google-feed&tracking=google-feed

The reason it came back to my mind was a conversation on Sunday with my former professor, mentor and friend at the New School, Arien Mack. Arien has a long and exceptional career as a scholar and a researcher in experimental psychology, with a focus on issues of perception and attention. More importantly, for me, was the fact that she provided a model of intellectual curiosity and political commitment that led to important projects outside of her achievements as a psychologist. How do I love renaissance women…

Since the 1970s she has edited the Journal Social Research, an international quarterly that describes itself as “theme-driven, combining historical analysis, and theoretical exploration in engaging discussions by leading scholars and thinkers.” The Journal had been in existence since 1934 as voice for the University in Exile, namely my alma mater the New School for Social Research, founded in 1919. (Full disclosure, I have translated articles for it in the past.)

https://www.socres.org

The school’s first president, Alvin Johnson, with some generous support by individual philanthropists and the Rockefeller Foundation, moved heaven and earth to rescue endangered scholars from Europe, who became founding faculty at the university. Adolph Lowe and Robert Heilbroner, political scientists Arnold Brecht and Aristide Zolberg, sociologists Emil Lederer and Peter Berger, psychologists Max Wertheimer and Jerome Bruner, historian Charles Tilly, and philosophers Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Reiner Schürmann were among the faculty whose names you’ll probably recognize (not all of them refugees, obviously, but shaping the academic environment.)

Somehow teaching, research and editing were not enough work – in 1988 Arien founded the Center for Public Scholarship through which she put up the Social Research Conference Series which has across the decades given voice to an amazingly diverse set of scholars. Did I mention she also created  the Journal Donation Project, which makes low-cost academic and research journals available to libraries and universities in countries where access to those publications has been difficult for political reasons? Or launched Endangered Scholars Worldwide to focus on the plight of scholars, students, and researchers around the world whose lives and livelihoods are under threat due to the nature of their work or political positions? A rich life of the mind combined with activism – footsteps of these dimensions are hard to follow for the rest of us.

Her newest venture started last September: The New University in Exile Consortium is an initiative that organizes universities and colleges to protect and assist international scholars who are endangered or persecuted. The hope is to find as many academic institutions as possible who put their money where their political mouth is to host and employ at least one scholar who would otherwise face a dire fate. If you are affiliated with a college or university, dear reader, you might bring the program to their attention.

https://newuniversityinexileconsortium.org

We might be vaguely aware of what’s going on with academics in Hungary, Iran, Syria, Yemen or Turkey, but there are so many more, sometimes in unexpected corners – informative link below: http://www.endangeredscholarsworldwide.net

Here we are, practically a century since Huberman’s rescue efforts, with yet another individual with vision, intellectual power and access to funding agencies (persuaded by a stellar grant history,) who is committed and able to make a difference for persecuted human beings who are her brethren.

Almost tragic that we still have to rely on individual activists. Certainly empowering that they exist.

Music today is Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D, Op. 77 played by Huberman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOR6YSByk70

Photographs from the Big Apple, my home through the New School years in the 1980s.