Author: Danny Postel

Twenty years ago today, on August 9, 1998, I delivered this eulogy at the dedication ceremony, or unveiling, of Eugene Zucker, my next-door neighbor growing up and a formative influence on my life. I was, and remain, deeply honored that the Zucker family asked me to deliver these reflections on that profound occasion. It has never been published or appeared anywhere until now. 

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Growing up next door to the Zuckers, Eugene (or Professor Zucker, as I preferred to call him) was my lifeline to another world. The world I inhabited as a child and as a young man in the Chicago suburb of Skokie in the 1970s and 1980s was light years removed from the one I discovered in Professor Zucker’s study, listening to him talk about his days as a young radical in New York in the heady 1930s and 1940s.

It was in that study that I first learned about Marx and Engels, and about Lenin and Trotsky. It wasn’t through books or documentaries that I came to understand these figures and their ideas and their roles in shaping history. Rather, it was through hearing the first-person accounts of my next-door neighbor, a man who participated in struggles begun by these revolutionaries. Professor Zucker actually knew the leaders of the radical movement and witnessed the historic discussions in which the fate of the movement was decided. He listened as the insurgents of the era debated whether their faction of the Left had the correct interpretation of Lenin’s formulation of this, that, or the other question. As bizarre as it seems to us now — and as bizarre as it seemed to me hearing about it then — Professor Zucker came from a world in which ideas mattered a great deal. It literally felt to the radicals of his time like the future of mankind depended on how you made sense of the world and, given that worldview, how you planned to act on it.

Continue reading “Eulogy for a Formative Influence”

It just so happens that two friends of mine have new books out on hope — one fiction, one nonfiction. And both are doing readings in Chicago this month:

The Hope Store, by Dwight Okita

Book launch at Women & Children First, Thursday January 11 at 7:30 pm

Two Asian American friends, Luke and Kazu, discover a bold new procedure to import hope into the hopeless. They vow to open the world’s first Hope Store. Customer Jada Upshaw arrives at the store with a hidden agenda, but what happens next no one could have predicted. Meanwhile an activist group called the Natural Hopers emerges, warning that hope installations are a risky, Frankenstein-like procedure and vow to shut down the store.

We: Reviving Social Hope, by Ronald Aronson

Reading at The Book Cellar, Saturday January 20 at 6:00 pm

The election of Donald Trump has exposed American society’s profound crisis of hope. By 2016 a generation of shrinking employment, rising inequality, the attack on public education, and the shredding of the social safety net, had set the stage for stunning insurgencies at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Against this dire background, Ronald Aronson offers an answer. He argues for a unique conception of social hope, one with the power for understanding and acting upon the present situation. Hope, he argues, is far more than a mood or feeling—it is the very basis of social will and political action. It is this kind of hope that Aronson sees brewing in the supporters of Bernie Sanders, who advocated the tough-minded and inspired disposition to act collectively to make the world more equal, more democratic, more peaceful, and more just.  And it was directly contrasted by Trump’s supporters who showed a cynical and nostalgic faith in an authoritarian strongman replete with bigotry and misogyny.

Beneath today’s crisis Aronson examines our heartbreaking story: a century of catastrophic violence and the bewildering ambiguity of progress—all of which have contributed to the evaporation of social hope. As he shows, we are now in a time when hope is increasingly privatized, when—despite all the ways we are connected to each other—we are desperately alone, struggling to weather the maelstrom around us, demoralized by the cynicism that permeates our culture and politics, and burdened with finding personal solutions to social problems.

Yet, Aronson argues, even at a time when false hopes are rife, social hope still persists. Carefully exploring what we mean when we say we “hope” and teasing hope apart from its dangerously misconstrued sibling, “progress,” he locates seeds of real change. He argues that always underlying our experience—even if we completely ignore it—is the fact of our social belonging, and that this can be reactivated into a powerful collective force, an active we. He looks to various political movements, from the massive collective force of environmentalists to the movements around Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, as powerful examples of socially energized, politically determined, and actionably engaged forms of hope. Even in this age of Donald Trump, the result is an illuminating and inspiring call that anyone can clearly hear: we can still create a better future for everyone, but only if we resist false hopes and act together.