We are proud to announce the first in a series of courses presented in a partnership between the Center for Jewish History and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as part of a shared mission to promote open, rigorous, and critical academic study for the general public.

ENROLLMENT IS NOW CLOSED FOR THIS COURSE  (Tuesdays, 7-9pm, July 24, 2012) at Building on Bond  Enrollment is capped at 12 and will include some of the texts!

This is a supplemental episode of our podcast series. While preparing for our most recent podcast, I (Ajay) came across a piece that Gideon Lewis-Kraus had written critiquing an article by Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi which was, in turn, a critique of Azar Nafisi’s bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. I was quite taken aback by Gideon’s piece →

This is the fourth episode of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.”In this episode I (Ajay) fail to get the show edited and annotated in a timely fashion, we fail to come to an agreement on how to proceed in philosophical discourse, and we quarrel with unexpected passion about Downton Abbey. We never →

(Tuesdays, 7-9pm, April 10, 2012) If you want to understand and critically engage with life in twenty-first century New York, there is no better place to begin than with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the sprawling, ambitious, unparalleled examination of “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Spaces are limited! Enroll today and and get a free copy →

(Mondays, 7-9pm, starting April 9, 2012, 6 weeks) A class for people who love or fear (or both) their iPad/Kindle/Twitter/Facebook/etc.  Readings in the literature and philosophy of communication technology, from Charles Dickens and Henry James to Michel Foucault and Terry Gilliam. Spaces are limited! Everyone who enrolls before the 4/5 gets a free copy of →

This is a supplemental episode of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.” In this episode, I (Ajay) have an informal conversation with of our Fellows, Soraya Batmanghelichi, about the situation within Iran after the controversial 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We discuss the current political situation in Iran, a bit of history, the status of the “Green →

This is the third episode of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.” This week we talk a bit about our first class, a bit more about Kamila Shamsie’s essay “The Storytellers of Empire,” and quite a lot about Evgeny Morozov’s essay “The Death of the Cyberflaneur,” Walter Benjamin, the Internet, subjectivity and a heck →

Our faculty are hard at work not only for the Brooklyn Institute but also in other venues. Please check out some of their recent work around the web:

This is the second episode of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.” This week we talk about the video game Shadow of the Colossus, Plato’s beef with poetry in The Republic, and quite a bit in between. For more information on the podcast series, please see the Introduction and Notations to Episode 1. As with →