Joseph Sassoon Semah, My Beloved Country – That Did Not Love Me, rug and black oil paint, 100X70 cm, 1977 Photography: Ilya Rabinovich  – Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

Joseph Sassoon Semah, a Baghdad-born artist who now lives and works in Amsterdam, is about to embark on an extensive multi-site project, in Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and Baghdad. Berlin-based poet and author Mati Shemoelof talks with him about his years living as an artist in Israel versus being a Babylonian Jew and an artist in Europe. They discuss Judaism, diaspora, exclusion, and acts of concealment and building.

The artist Joseph Sassoon Semah has never before given an interview to an art publication in Israel. The Israeli art world has not adequately recognized his work. Although he showed in several important institutions in Israel and worked with key curators, it was negligible compared with the scope of his oeuvre, especially following his move from Israel to Europe. What would have happened had he stayed in Israel? Was he stumped by his diasporic state or was he ahead of his time in dealing with the Jewish component of his art? It is not merely an objective issue to be measured by the number of exhibitions, but rather the artist’s subjective sense of his position in the art field. I gather from Semah that he has remained on the outside, beyond the walls of Jerusalem. In Europe, too, and especially in the Netherlands, his work is not widely known yet. This interview stems from my own interest in Semah’s identity (we are both of a Jewish Iraqi descent) and his work, but also as an intra-European process of an artistic, inter-generational analysis attempting to formulate the role of Jewish culture in Europe.

Semah was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1948. His grandfather, Hacham Sassoon Kadoorie, was the chief rabbi of Baghdad’s Jewish community until his passing in 1971, even after they had all emigrated. In 1950, Semah and his family were uprooted from Iraq, and they moved to Israel. He grew up in Tel Aviv. Traumatized by his military service in the 1967 and 1973 wars, he chose exile and has been living in the Netherlands since 1981. The grandfather’s continued residence in Baghdad, along with some 20,000 more Jews, brings to mind Semah’s own position in Amsterdam (his grandfather did not immigrate to Israel, and Semah emigrated from Israel – both had chosen a diasporic existence as a Jewish minority under a Muslim/Christian majority), where he now lives with his partner, Linda Bouws. She runs the institute they co-founded, Metropool – Studio Meritis MaKOM: International Art Projects. My grandmother, Rachel Kazaz, had also been among the displaced Baghdadi Jews. My acquaintance with the pain and the uprooting enabled me to write about the mysterious affair that drove the Jews of Iraq to abandon their property, their culture, and their way of life within just a year; the affair that involved bombing Jewish centers in Baghdad, including the synagogue of Semah’s grandfather. [i]

The religious component is always present in Semah’s art, in both form and content, as Judaism provides him with continual context. In some works, mostly those that look upon Israel as an object, he also addresses the Middle-Eastern identity. For instance, the work from the series My Beloved Country – That Did Not Love Me (1977) shows Israel as an alien white slice cut from a carpet of the Middle East. The carpet signifies an area, and also a place where Jews, Muslims, and others offer their prayers.[ii] The scholar Shlomit Lir wrote in the past year: “In My Beloved Country- That Did Not Love Me Joseph Semah demonstrates the binary perception and the Orientalist gaze by placing an outline of the map of Israel on top of a Persian rug. The virulent contrast created by the coupling of these two elements emphasizes an act of deletion where there should have been geographical continuity. The installation points to a place of conflict and unresolved dissonance between the Middle-eastern space, represented here by the brightly embroidered rug, and Israel, represented as a uniformly white cutout in the shape of the country’s map.”[iii]

Joseph Sassoon Semah, My Beloved Country – That Did Not Love Me, metal clothes hanger and egg-shaped marble, 33 cm, 1977 Photography: Ilya Rabinovich – Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

In the early 1990s, the well-known curator Sarit Shapira identified another central theme in Semah’s art – the motif of the victim. She wrote about it: “…in his work, too, it is handled through linkage to a Biblical myth.”[iv] Shapira discerns Semah’s process of reversal: rather than a discussion by the Christian culture about the place of the Jew within it, the Jew is viewing Christian society as the ‘other.’ “The production of paintings and sculpture in the West, Semah argues, is tainted by this Christian lust. His treatment of the border line between Judaism and Christianity is a maneuver that allows him to observe, from a remove, from the position of the ‘other,’ both the culture and his own Jewish-Israeli one.”[v]

If we looked closely at art that is being made in Israel today, we could detect the influence of Semah’s work, like the influence of other Mizrahi émigré artists such as Meir Gal, who is also mentioned by Shlomit Lir in her academic paper.[vi] However, throughout his years in Israel Semah has always been considered a bird of a different feather. The few, select occasions on which he has exhibited in Israel include “Routes of Wandering” at the Israel Museum (1991), curated by Sarit Shapira, and the Israel Festival of 1986, under the directorship of Oded Kotler, when his work, Take Sand and its Shadow is Blue (As the Mountains Surround Jerusalem), was presented near Armon HaNatziv, the headquarters of the British high commissioner in the 1930s and 1940s, built on the what had previously been the border between Israel and Jordan. For this work, Semah installed a series of blue cocoons that marked the seam between east and west.[vii]

Over the last forty years Semah has been preoccupied with identifying the strategy of the Western Imperium, to uncover its blank pages and through them to reveal that which is hidden, concealed – the universal Jewish narrative. His method is quite simple: he studies the canonical works of Western art by writing his interpretations of them. Sometimes, his artworks become footnotes in the text he is writing.

The 26th of November, 1965, Düsseldorf, Germany: Joseph Beuys is inside a gallery, an audience is watching him from outside. His head is smeared with honey and gold leaf, and he is holding a dead hare in his arms. He named the performance “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.” Beuys strolled along the walls of the gallery, which were hung with his Brown Cross (Braunkreuz) paintings– crosses painted with the hare’s blood – explaining them in a language unintelligible to the hare. Beuys died on January 23, 1986. And on February 24, 1986, on his birthday, Semah put on a performance, How to Explain Hare Hunting to a Dead German Artist (“hare hunting” was a euphemism for killing Jews during the Holocaust). It was Jewish theological tradition’s answer to Beuys, going back in time to Esau, who had come back from the hunt with a hare (a non-kosher animal) and thus lost his father’s blessing to his brother Jacob. The image of Esau with the dead hare slung over his shoulder is featured in many paintings in major European churches.[viii]

Joseph Sassoon Semah, Take Sand and its Shadow is Blue (As the Mountains Surround Jerusalem). Wire net covered in concrete and blue paint, 1986 Photography: The Israel Festival – Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

Mati Shemoelof: Have you met Beuys?

Joseph Sassoon Semah: I met him twice. Once in Berlin, at the National Gallery. He was a kind man, and he invited me to his home, but I didn’t go. We met again, also in Berlin, and talked for half an hour. Yes, he was aware of my work, but he was the clean, pure face of Germany after WWII, and myself a young artist.

MS: Your work reminds me of the writing of the Babylonian Talmud, in the sense that the interpretations are independent creations, and of Jewish literature, which is inter-textual and gathers in the layered writings of sages from different times. And you created a piece on the subject of the Babylonian Talmud, which was banned.

JSS: I couldn’t show An Introduction to the Principle of Relative Expression (1979), in which I have covered pages from the Babylonian Talmud in black paint. Moti (Mordechai) Omer, the late director of the Tel Aviv Museum, told me, in our last conversation, that he would “display these works at the Tel Aviv Museum over my dead body.” The first and last to show it was the curator Gideon Ofrat, at the “Time for Art” (zman le-omanut) space in Tel Aviv, in 2002.

According to Semah, Omer’s reaction, from thirty years ago, was a rejection of his symbolism and a result of the difficulty to understand his context as a Babylonian Jew. In the rejected work, he covered pages from the Babylonian Talmud in black paint intersected with white lines that marked entry and exit points to and from the Talmud. The same work was shown twenty years later in an exhibition curated by Gideon Ofrat.[ix] Perhaps Ofrat had understood the context and seen the work’s artistic value, which seems obvious today, with the increased recognition of the Jewish component in Israeli art. Omer was not alone in declining to show Semah’s works. According to the latter, Yigal Zalmona, of the Israel Museum, and Galia Bar Or, of the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod, rejected his work as well.

Joseph Sassoon Semah, How to Explain Hare Hunting to a Dead German Artist, February 24, 1986 Photography: Olaf Bergmann – Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

In 1979, the year Semah’s father died, Israel has died for him too, he says, and he had been reborn as a Babylonian Jew. From within the canonical European art, Semah has discovered that he was a guest, the ‘other.’ The discovery created a hidden, delicate equilibrium between the new personal identity (a Babylonian Jew), and his position in the West, that is Europe – being a universal Jew.

MS: Do the Dutch accept your artistic critique of the Holocaust discourse?

SJS: Since I started the project On Friendship / (Collateral Damage) with Linda Bouws, in 2015, the art world and the Dutch in general begun to comprehend the research in its entirety.

The project Semah is referring to will manifest itself this year, 2019, under a double title, comprising two subjects: “The Third GaLUT – Baghdad , Jerusalem, Amsterdam – On Friendship / (Collateral Damage) III.” He will reveal his full name for the first time – Joseph Sassoon Semah, the Babylonian Jew, of the third Exile (GaLUT). The project, created in collaboration with Linda Bouws, will be extended to Jerusalem and Baghdad as well. He will construct architectural models of the homes and synagogues and burial places of the Jews of Iraq, including his grandfather’s Meir Tweig synagogue and the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel (which is located about 100 kilometers outside Baghdad). He will present these models in public and private spaces in Amsterdam. With the help of local activists, Semah is planning to build, in close proximity to the Meir Tweig synagogue, where his grandfather had served as chief rabbi, The Doubling of the House – a house in which the entrance and the window form the Hebrew letters for chai (ח”י) – the letters that represent the number 18, and also mean “living.” The same structure will also be raised in Amsterdam. Today there are no Jews left in Baghdad. That is, Babylonian Jewry has been erased twice – once in Iraq, and for the second time in Israel. The very construction of the house opposite the synagogue proves that the Jews of Iraq are alive and present. Unlike works like Yael Bartana’s …and Europe Will be Stunned, here there is no repatriation of Iraqi Jews to Baghdad; there is only an anguished howl.

An Introduction to the Principle of Relative Expression, 1979, black oil crayon on pages from the Babylonian Talmud, 27X40 cm each Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

“To begin with, GaLUT is neither Exile, nor Diaspora, nor an existing Place; GaLUT is simply a disciplined activity, an intensive vision, and it is what GaLUT proceeds to do – to transform each and every temporary MaKOM of shelter, into a perpetual search for a Handful of Soil. At this point, one can say that the depiction of MaKOM in GaLUT is an idea of a constant doubling; A double mirror-image of itself by itself. But behind all these, there is another reality, that is of an absolute Reading, to be defined in terms of the enduring action of Writing.” (Joseph Sassoon Semah, 1986)[x]

MS: You make use of of the various meanings of the Hebrew words makom(place) and galut (exile), and find in their combination the term “city of refuge,” or “shelter.” This term resonates the public bomb shelters, which are non-existent in Europe but are part and parcel of Israeli epistemology, and also resonates to a place of escape – to immigration – and the search for a city of refuge. In biblical times, the six cities of refuge were in Transjordan.

JSS: We’ve served in the military, in addition to other things, and its business is to kill. We kill directly and indirectly. The army is not about dancing. In 1986 I made Amsterdam my city of refuge, and there I publicly confessed my past as a soldier.

The correspondence between Semah and myself is not related only to identity, Mizrahiness, ethnicity, or Jewishness – it is also about place. We both are Jews living in Europe, conducting a dialog with Israel that had defined us as subjects, and with the European continent. We have no choice but to deal with the multiple states of mind that had established the Jewish identity as we know it, without us (Iraqi Jews in particular, and Arab-Jews in general) having ever taken part in this continuum of thought and cultural production shared by the those who established the three identities we are confronting – either the Jewish-Israeli identity, the Jewish-European, or the European one.

Joseph Sassoon Semah, study based on the Meir Tweig synagogue in Baghdad, Iraq, from On Friendship / (Collateral Damage) III – The Third GaLUT – Baghdad, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, pen and pencil and paper,42X30 cm, 2018 – Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

Joseph Sassoon Semah, study based on the the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, al Kifal, Iraq, from On Friendship / (Collateral Damage) III – The Third GaLUT – Baghdad, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, pen and pencil on paper,42X30 cm, 2018- Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semaht

MS: Your criticism reaches far, as far as Martin Luther and his anti-Semitism. In 2017, you were permitted to present an intricate work in Nieuwe Kerk cathedral in Amsterdam. It contained your name, among other things, written above Luther’s. It is interesting to me that you, as a Babylonian Jew, are reversing the figure of the Jew in the very heart of Christian culture, even though our ancestors come from a different culture. You assume a task of deconstruction that contains an element of masquerade.

JSS: We connected to Martin Luther in this project by way of the 500th anniversary of his achievements, but the research had been written already thirty years ago. I can explain the connection to Luther as a private investigation – going back to things I explored thirty years ago in Berlin. Let us not forget, there has been an exclusion of the Mizrahi Jews in Israel, and we hardly ever listened to Arab music or read Arab literature. Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust became our origins. The establishment and the education system erased the culture of the Babylonian Jewry. Although I had not been a part of the Mizrahi struggle, after many years in Europe, and through study, I returned to the identity I had lost in Israel.

Notes:
[i] Shemoelof, Mati, “We are Writing a Nation State:– the Case of the immigration of the Jews of Iraq.” See:https://matityaho.com/2012/10/09/אנחנו-כותבים-אותך-מולדת-המקרה-של/
[ii]Lir Shlomit, “Black Panther White Cube: The Exhibition that Wasn’t Shown,” Visual culture in Israel: An anthology, Edited by Sivan Rajuan, Noa Hazan (Shenkar College: Ramat Gan and Hakibbuz Hameuhad Publishing: Tel Aviv, 2017), p. 322.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Shapira, Sarit, Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Voyages and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art. (Jerusalem: Israel Museum), 1991, p. 163 (in Hebrew). This quote was translated by the translator of the current essay.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] See Lir. p. 322.
[vii] This performance was restaged in 2007 at a church in Hildesheim, as part of a large project called Next Year in Jerusalem,  which took place in 12 churches throughout the Hanover region in Lower Saxony, Germany.
[viii ]See also: Gideon Ofrat, The Return to the Shteitel (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. 2001)
[ix] See Ofrat’s article about this work here, pp 52-53 of the PDF (in Hebrew)
[x] From the manifest Joseph Sassoon Semah wrote for his the project City of Refuge (Epistemic MaKOM), created in Amsterdam in 1986.

Joseph Sassoon Semah, MaKOM (The Doubling of the House), 200X200X200 cm, cement blocks, with entrance and window, 1979-2019 Photography: Ilya Rabinovich Courtesy of Joseph Sassoon Semah

Previously published: http://tohumagazine.com/how-explain-hare-hunting-dead-german-artist?

Vandaag snel een paar regels. Zaterdagavond tegen tienen was de opwindendste nacht van de oorlog tot nu toe. Om tien uur al weerklonk het eerste afweergeschut en onmiddellijk daarop gingen de sirenes. Sinds 14 mei hadden we dat niet meer meegemaakt.
De eerste minuten zaten we als verstard, want dat Engelse vliegtuigen Amsterdam wilden bombarderen, konden we niet geloven.
Maar de overburen riepen dat Engelse toestellen vuurwerk ter ere van de koningin afschoten en dat de sirenes afgingen omdat de mensen vanwege het afweergeschut in huis moesten blijven.
Tot ’s ochtends vijf uur sliepen we niet, gingen aangekleed naar bed, kwamen drie, vier keer naar beneden vanwege de sirenes die een vreselijk geloei lieten horen, dat je gelooft dat de hel is losgebarsten. Het leek of de wereld verging.
Sonja, die anders dapper is, huilde en was heel angstig. Inge ook. Alleen Hans en Coen hielden zich groot. Hans ging rustig slapen.

Robert Pollin – Photo: UMass Amherst

With the climate change challenge growing more acute with every passing year, the need for the adoption of a new political economy that would tackle effectively both the environmental and the egalitarian concerns of progressive people worldwide grows exponentially. Yet, there is still a lot of disagreement on the left as to the nature of the corresponding political economy model. One segment of the left calls for the complete overthrow of capitalism as a means of dealing with climate change and the growing levels of economic inequality in the era of global neoliberalism, while another one argues against growth in general. In the interview below, Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explains some issues raised by each of these positions, and how to move toward solutions grounded in a fuller understanding of economic development.

C.J. Polychroniou: Bob, let’s start with the “degrowth” argument for securing climate stabilization and realizing egalitarian aims. What’s wrong with this political economy model in an age of catastrophic climatic conditions brought about through 250 or so years of capitalist expansion via the use of fossil fuel energy sources?

Robert Pollin: Degrowth proponents have made valuable contributions in addressing many of the untenable features of economic growth. I agree with degrowth proponents that economic growth in general produces a wide range of negative environmental effects. I also agree that a significant share of what is produced and consumed in the current global capitalist economy is wasteful, especially most of what high-income people throughout the world consume. It is also obvious that economic growth per se makes no reference to the distribution of the benefits of growth and, more generally, offers no critique of capitalism as a mode of production.

But on the specific issue of climate change, degrowth does not provide anything close to a viable stabilization framework — that is, to stabilize the global mean temperature at a level that will prevent severe negative ecological feedback effects, such as increasing frequency of droughts and floods. Consider some very simple arithmetic. According to its most recent October 2018 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now concludes that a viable climate stabilization program will necessitate limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5° Celsius as of 2100. This in turn will require global net carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions falling by about 45 percent as of 2030 and reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Let’s focus for the moment on the 2030 target of a 45 percent CO₂ emissions contraction. Following a degrowth agenda, let’s assume that global GDP [gross domestic product] contracts by 10 percent between now and 2030. That would entail a reduction of globalGDP four times greater than during the 2007–09 financial crisis and Great Recession. In terms of CO₂ emissions, the net effect of this 10 percent GDP contraction, considered on its own, would be to push emissions down by precisely 10 percent. It would not come close to hitting the IPCC target of a 45 percent CO₂ reduction. At the same time, this 10 percent global GDP contraction would result in huge job losses and declines in living standards for working people and the poor. Global unemployment rose by over 30 million during the Great Recession. I have not seen any degrowth proponent present a convincing argument as to how we could avoid a calamitous rise in mass unemployment if GDP were to fall four times as much as during 2007–09.

A Green New Deal has been proposed by many over the years, including yourself, as the only viable way to tackle effectively climate change. How would the green growth path lead to climate stabilization?

The core feature of the Green New Deal needs to be a worldwide program to invest between 2 percent and 2.5 percent of global GDP every year to raise energy efficiency standards and expand clean renewable energy supplies. Through this investment program, it becomes realistic to drive down global CO₂emissions to zero by 2050, while also supporting rising mass living standards and expanding job opportunities. It is critical to recognize that, within this framework, a higher economic growth rate will also accelerate the rate at which clean energy supplants fossil fuels, since higher levels of GDP will correspondingly mean a higher level of investment being channeled into clean energy projects. In 2016, global clean energy investment was about $300 billion, or 0.4 percent of globalGDP. Thus, the increase in investments will need to be in the range of 2 percent of global GDP — about $1.6 trillion at the current global GDP of $80 trillion, then rising in step with global growth thereafter — to reach zero CO₂ emissions by 2050.

Investments aimed at raising energy efficiency standards and expanding the supply of clean renewable energy will also generate tens of millions of new jobs in all regions of the world. This is because building a green economy entails more labor-intensive activities — i.e. proportionally more money channeled into employing people for a given amount of total spending on any given project — than maintaining the world’s current fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure.

The consumption of oil, coal and natural gas will also need to fall to near zero over this same 30-year period. This amounts to an average rate of decline of about 8 percent per year. Of course, both privately owned fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, and publicly owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Gazprom, have massive interests at stake in preventing reductions in fossil fuel consumption; they also wield enormous political power. These powerful vested interests will simply have to be defeated. At the same time, unavoidably, workers and communities whose livelihoods depend on the fossil fuel industry will lose out in the clean energy transition. Unless strong policies are advanced to support these workers, they will face layoffs, falling incomes and declining public sector budgets to support schools, health clinics and public safety. It follows that the global Green New Deal must commit to providing generous transitional support for workers and communities tied to the fossil fuel industry.

I take it that you don’t place much value in the position adopted by a certain segment of the left which calls for the immediate and complete overthrow of capitalism as the only realistic option for addressing the climate change threat. What are your arguments against this position?

The Green New Deal program I advocate obviously challenges property rights and ownership forms within capitalism, starting with both the private and publicly owned fossil fuel companies throughout the world. I have also worked with unions, political parties and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] to advance a program that is committed to expanding good job opportunities, unionization rates, as well as racial and gender equality. I also focus on Just Transition for workers and communities that are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry.

At the same time, I am definitely not saying that we have to overturn capitalism completely before we can get serious about climate stabilization. I think there is a close to 100 percent chance that capitalism will still be around in 30 years as the predominant global economic system. We cannot waste those 30 years, failing to advance an effective global climate stabilization project. Moreover, the struggle for an egalitarian climate stabilization project — a Green New Deal — will serve, in my view, as one of the principal areas of struggle in advancing a democratic socialist alternative to capitalism.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been quite instrumental so far in raising public consciousness about the importance of a Green New Deal, which aims to cut US carbon pollution levels in half by 2030. How realistic is this proposal?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done a great job raising consciousness about the imperative of a Green New Deal as a serious climate stabilization project. I don’t think it would be fair to insist that she, and the people working with her, would have a fully laid-out plan as what this viable Green New Deal project should look like. It is, therefore, inevitable that various proposals have been put out recently. Based on my own research, as well as that of many other people, I do think it is feasible, if extremely challenging, for the US to cut its CO₂ emissions by 50 percent as of 2030 and to reach zero emissions by 2050. But it is not feasible for the US to get to zero emissions by 2030. The 2015 book by the outstanding Harvard University physicist Mara Prentiss, Energy Revolution, presents a compelling case as to the technical requirements for the US to reach a zero emissions standard within roughly 30 years.

One final question: How do you see the prospects of a “blue-green” alliance between the labor and environmental movements for tackling the climate change threat?

The blue-green alliance between the labor and environmental movements has been building for years and continues to strengthen. The earliest efforts at building solidarity between the labor and environmental movements was an organization called the Apollo Alliance, founded by Robert Borosage, Roger Hickey and others in 2001. This then merged into the BlueGreen Alliance. More recently, an important Green New Deal initiative (Initiative 1631) was led in Washington State by the labor movement in the state, including Jeff Johnson, who just recently stepped down as the president of the Washington State Labor Council. In the end, the Washington State Green New Deal ballot initiative was defeated in last November’s election, despite having been supported by a broad coalition of community, environmental, as well as labor groups. But the Green New Deal measure lost only after the oil companies spent $30 million on relentless and shameless propaganda to defeat it. Still, the Washington State labor movement created a template that can be developed further in other states. In Colorado, for example, the state-level AFL-CIO is again working closely with environmental and community groups to advance a viable Green New Deal project.

—

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. He is the author of Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books.

Previously published: https://truthout.org/

Insightful talks that offer fresh, thoughtful perspectives on Black identity.

https://www.ted.com/10_great_talks_to_celebrate