Book cover for Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics by Paul Berman, Sergei Lebedev, Assaf Sharon, Rosanna Warren, Ekaternia Pravilova, Mosab Abu Toha, Carlos Fraenkel, Justin Smith-Ruiu, Kit Wilson, Benjamin Balint, Mitchell Abidor, Matthew Zipf, Adrian Nathan West, Daniel Halpern and David Thomson
2024 Released
342 Pages
5-7 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
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Liberties JournalISBN 9798985430257

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, award-winning and well-known non-fiction and fiction writers, next generation rising talents, and poets from around the world. There's a reason why cultural warriors, political leaders, opinion makers, and engaged citizens from across political and cultural spectrum read and cherish Liberties.


Paul Berman

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Assaf Sharon

Assaf Sharon is Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Cofounder and Senior Fellow at Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, he has written for the New York Review of Books, Boston Review, and Liberties.

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Mosab Abu Toha

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Carlos Fraenkel

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Justin Smith-Ruiu

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Benjamin Balint

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Mitchell Abidor

Mitchell Abidor is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to his many translation works, he is the author of May Made Me and I'll Forget It When I Die!: The Bisbee Deportation of 1917. Abidor is the translator and editor of Victor Serge's anarchist writings, Anarchists Never Surrender, and translated with Richard Greeman Serge's Notebooks (1936-1947).

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Adrian Nathan West

Adrian Nathan West has translated more than thirty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German, including Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a finalist for both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. An essayist and literary critic, he is the author of the novel My Father’s Diet. He lives in Philadelphia. 

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Daniel Halpern

Daniel Halpern is the president and publisher of Ecco. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Tango and Something Shining, and the founder and long-time editor of the literary magazine Antaeus. He was born in Syracuse, New York, and lives in New York City.

Julie Strand is a retired psychologist in Seattle.

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David Thomson

David Thomson is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Biographical Dictionary of Film, biographies of Orson Welles and David O. Selznick, and the pioneering novel Suspects, which featured characters from film. He lives in San Francisco, California.

More by David Thomson

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