Women Academics From The United States

"There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels antiwoman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before."

"To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it?"

"[On the slow growth of the number of female conductors] With women, historically, it's been, you know, "You should be happy for what you have. Don’t push people — they’ve done a lot already!" There’s always this sort of patronising approach."

"We are not ready to fight because we love fighting. We are ready to fight because we are worth fighting for."

"So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian."

"We could have been programming work by under-represented people for the last 50 years, but the choice was not to. We could have had women on the podium, but the choice was not to."

"Black Americans are residents of a settler colony, not truly citizens of the United States. Despite a constitution laden with European Enlightenment values and a document of independence declaring certain inalienable rights, Black existence was legally that of private property until postbellum emancipation. The Black American condition today is an evolved condition directly connected to this history of slavery, and that will continue to be the case as long as the United States remains as an ongoing settler project. Nothing short of a complete dismantling of the American state as it presently exists can or will disrupt this."

"[On a perceived orchestra's retreat to conservative stances after the pandemic] I thought classical music institutions would come back with a new approach, new ways of connecting with audiences. Have we seen that? In some ways I see these organisations trying to go back to the way they used to do it. I'm not saying that what we do — the actual music-making — needs to drastically change, but everything around it does. And it can’t just be, ‘Oh we’re going to include a piece by a woman composer, or a person of colour’. It becomes perfunctory rather than celebratory."

"Many of the arguments (and counter-arguments) made for reducing cars have centred on the environment. But the real reason that cities such as Amsterdam adopted a less car-centric approach in the mid-20th century had to do with a more immediate concern: children being killed by speeding cars. In 1971, more than 400 Dutch children died in traffic accidents. It was a parent group, Stop de Kindermoord (stop the child murder), angered by the large number of deaths that forced politicians to rethink the design of once car-dominated cities in favour of more inclusive urban planning. In 2021, 17 children across the Netherlands were killed in traffic accidents."

"There is a balance to be found between people getting to where they need to go in reasonable time and a safe travel speed. But "anti-motorist" policies aren't the real cause of traffic slowing down. There are simply too many cars on the road, resulting in jams and standstill traffic, and the obvious solution is to provide alternative, affordable options."

"Similarly, Brexit – and the wider tightening of immigration policy – has made it difficult to hire (and retain) international faculty members. This has ramifications for science collaboration and research. Building a research team is similar to building a top football team: you recruit the best players with the right skill set, expertise and training, regardless of nationality."

"But it's also true that if people want to have children, governments should remove the financial and practical blocks that often make it an impossible choice. So far, however, even extensive support hasn't put any rich country back on track to grow its population in the future. This means we must think about immigration as a solution, too, including tackling where resistance to immigration comes from – and how to have a nuanced and balanced debate without making racial concerns the focal point."

"[T]he people who make up universities: students, researchers, teaching fellows, support staff, lecturers and professors. Brexit, and the associated drop in immigration, means that we are attracting less top talent at all levels than before leaving the EU. This is clear from the student numbers: roughly 40% fewer EU students applied to UK universities in 2021 than in 2020."

"I've personally learned that lies spread faster than truth. People have written entire blogs attacking my expertise and sharing clear falsehoods – such as the claim that I have no published scientific papers, or that I'm a global plant by the World Economic Forum or Gates Foundation, or that I am a philosopher rather than a scientist (because I have a DPhil from Oxford). It's easy to laugh at such obvious untruths, until it sinks in that this clickbait gets shared thousands of times. People believe it, and then they too share it. And there is no way to counter every single falsehood. These lies carry more weight among some internet communities than the fact that Edinburgh University evaluated my expertise and granted me a professorship."

"The only real difference between Webster’s project and YIVO’s is that, for six million devastating reasons, YIVO’s failed and Webster’s succeeded. Its success can be measured by the millions of viewers who watched this year’s national spelling bee — and by the bee’s many gifted contestants, who are too young to appreciate the pain and loss that hides behind so many of the words they get “right.”"

"Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility — and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all. People who hate us know this. You don’t need to read the latest screed by a hater to know that unhinged killers feel entitled to freedom without any obligations to others. The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit anti-Semitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence. Societies that accept Jews have flourished. Societies that reject us have withered, fading into history’s night. I don’t know what to tell my children about this horror, but I do know what to tell you. The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to each other: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility. Our night of vigil has already begun."

"Judaism is much bigger on commitment than fulfillment."

"I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong. This fact should have been obvious to me from the beginning of my writing career, when my most acclaimed early published piece, the one nominated for a major award, wasn't the one about Jewish historical sites in Spain but rather the one about death camps. I made a point of resisting this reality, asking people at my public talks if they could name three death camps, and then asking the same people if they could name three Yiddish authors-the language spoken by over 80 percent of death-camp victims. What, I asked, was the point of caring so much about how people died, if one cared so little about how they lived? (Introduction)"

"My understanding of romantic relationships in literature, where men endlessly pursuing women is regarded as idealistic and romantic, whereas women endlessly pursuing men is regarded as pathetic."

""Censorship" is beside the point, the insane extremes of "cancel culture" extravagantly irrelevant, because this double helix of hate and art is built into our world. ("Commuting with Shylock")"

"[W]hen a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum's managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might "interfere"” with the museum's "independent position." The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding."

"It reminds me of that anemic element of the way I grew up in a community where it was like, here’s Jewish history: There was a shtetl, and there was a Holocaust, and now there’s Israel."

"The desire for immortality usually comes from a desire to fulfill one’s ambitions, but women’s lives have traditionally been focused not on ambition, but on obligation. So while immortality might be attractive to a man who sees it as a way to fulfill endless ambitions, an immortal woman in most historical periods would more likely be thinking, “Seriously? I have to do all that AGAIN?”"

"Our world may be a waiting room, but it is a crowded one, filled with people shouting, singing and whispering words that those sitting right beside them only rarely understand. Perhaps the World to Come is best understood not as an afterlife, but as the future — an unexpected place where possibilities will travel on rafts of language, ready for someone to draw them up onto dry land."

"You can’t write without inventing."

"How old we all are, eternally old, forever holding hands with the past."

"The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down. This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews' bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don't experience bigotry because they are "white," itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don't experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white)."

"[M]y question is, what are the ways that we might be erasing ourselves to make other people comfortable?... [W]e are so often asked to erase ourselves too, and to devote ourselves to making other people comfortable. Is there a way that making people uncomfortable could make all of us be more able to flourish?"

"That's what all activists need to do: we look at the ugliness of the world and we keep on working."

"The human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities."

"The culture of suppressing women composers and performers goes centuries back in Germany and other countries."

"Civil-Civility depicts the acts and writings of courageous women who I felt defied all odds to help women and humanity."

"[About unfair methods of competition:] What are the dimentions on which firms are or are not permitted to compete? Should we be having firms competing on who can surveil users the best or who can undercut their workers the most, or do we want to be having companies compete on dimentions or privacy that are actually better serving consumers or workers?"

"Call in is actually a callout done with love and respect. Because you're really seeking to hold people accountable for the potential harm that they cause, but you're not going to lose sight of the fact that you're talking to another human being. And so you extend a hand of active love and active listening to help them maybe stop and think about what they said."

"I think we overuse that word ‘trigger’ when really we mean discomfort,and we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations."

"If a Black woman can learn to have civil conversations with someone who's been in the Ku Klux Klan, we should be able to have civil conversations with everybody."

"Even if you can't see the changes that you want to see immediately, you just keep on doing the work and eventually they will radically change in a way that's totally unanticipated but at the same time is what you're working for."

"Do the work, but also make sure you intentionally bring joy into your life because our job is to look at the worst things people do to each other, the ugliness–what I call the vomit of humanity."

"My best advice is to party as hard as you work and have fun doing good work! And that way, you'll be in it for 50 or 60 years, like I’ve been."

"I find that people who take themselves too seriously burn out really quickly because they become very cynical because they've become very overwhelmed. When you're overwhelmed, the most common response is to check out mentally because everything is so overwhelming."

"We have to remember that there is humanity behind the words, that there is humanity behind the action."

"Reproductive justice can’t become a reality for Black women around the world until human rights become a reality. Reproductive justice is based upon the global human rights framework."

"It’s the tendency, which is unfortunate, for people to want to publicly shame and humiliate people. And it's based on what they say, or what they look like, or what they wear, or who they're hanging out with, or who they agree or disagree with. It's attaching labels to people without really doing any kind of nuance."

"College is where you're supposed to find out things about yourself, discover your voice, and discover what moves you and what makes you passionate."

"One way that they [Kachinas] can be thought of is if you think of the entire earth as being one being and we as small beings living on that large being like fleas on a cat."

"the way I think of it-now I don't really know where the poems or where the art comes from, I don't know where the images come from-but however they come or wherever they come from is like communicating with a person. It's a whole person. That person shows you things and has a certain appearance but also tells you things. So as you receive images, they are either received through the ear or through the eye or through the tongue and that's just the way it feels."

"anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it only has the literature and the arts that are produced by Americans of European heritage, even then largely Northern European. We are left out of the books. Black people are left out; brown people are left out; Indian people are left out. So you get the impression, going through the American education system, that the only people here are white people. It's not just a cultural matter, but it's a political matter. There is a reason for a society to be that way, that has the literary capacity and the technological capacity that America has; there's no excuse for the people being so blind, for the people to be wearing a blindfold that way. The only possible reason it could happen is because it's not an accident; that it's planned. Somebody is benefiting by having Americans ignorant about what non-European Americans are doing and what they have done; what European Americans have done to them. Somebody is benefiting by keeping people ignorant."

"I think it's impossible to be governed with any sense of integrity when you don't recognize each other and have no obligation to each other."

"Wendy is an intensely serious person-though not slow to laughter-and her well-informed anger showed in both the poem she chose to read and in the directness of her responses."

"Native American writers have always been a major influence on me, like Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen, just to name a few."