Category: Whatever

New York, New York!

Reading Mary Wollstonecraft in Time

For Mary Wollstonecraft’s birthday, my little piece on our almost 50 year history together,  “Reading Mary Wollstonecraft in Time.” In Eileen Hunt Botting, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp.280-88 (2014). ReadingMWInTime

I’d Vote for a Woman, but Others Won’t So They Probably Aren’t Electable

A blast from the past article about how folks think they’re ok …. it’s everyone else. NewsfromtheFront

Emergency! Emergency! Everyone to Get a Wall!

Given the recent discussion of emergencies, real and created, I thought back to my dear, late colleague Murray Edelman, and the chapter he wrote on the political uses of “crisis” in his excellent book, Political Language.  I doubt younger generations have read much of his work. I share this particular chapter here. EdelmanCrises

Civility in a Time of Terror

I am very grateful to have received the 2015 International Society for Political Psychology Harold Lasswell Award for distinguished scientific contribution in the field of political psychology. As a result of that, I was asked to deliver a brief (~15 minutes) lecture at this year meeting, held recently in Warsaw, Poland.  I chose the topic, […]

What is a Boy?

Planting season means no time to blog, but in working on my history of higher education in the U.S. (Nebraska phase), I ran across this in the July, 1951 issue of Mennonite Life: An Illustrated Quarterly. Just had to share. Don’t miss the fact that they credit the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company in […]

Reinventing Myself after Deanship

I was recently asked to write a little essay on how I am reinventing myself after a long time in university administration. Exciting and intimidating. I thought I might title it: “A Twelve-Step Program: Take Twelve Steps and Keep on Walking.” Here’s the essay: http://www.bu.edu/polisci/virginia-sapiro-essay/ .

Detroit on My Mind: Lost Communities

My father, Bill Sapiro, grew up in Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s. His parents moved there from New York in very different ways. My grandfather, Abram, was born on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1880s, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Unusually, he made his way to Ann Arbor to […]

Appreciation of the Brave Rabbis of 1964

The New York Times published an article-length obituary of Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz on January 30, who died at the age of 91. He was a scholar and teacher whose thoughtful and distinguished work is among the best of modern Jewish philosophy and ethics in the Reform Jewish tradition. For a person of “a certain […]