Vol. 22.2, published in Fall 2022, is a memorial tribute to Bat-Ami Bar On, who died on November 16, 2020. Bar On was a feminist philosopher of social and political violence, a longtime member of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, and, in the editor’s description, someone whose analytical work was inseparable from her moral seriousness: “When The Acorn asked Bar On to review a book on refugee policy, she felt compelled to teach the book in class to get the fullest possible grasp on its value.” Guest editor Court Lewis, who shepherded the memorial section from a 2022 CPP panel at the APA Central Division, describes Bar On as committed to producing “carefully reasoned arguments that were not only intellectually and academically insightful, but more importantly, contributed to the creation of a more just, peaceful, and nonviolent world.” The three tribute essays that follow are edited versions of those panel papers. A fourth article, by Jyotsna Kapur on Tagore’s play Dak Ghar in the Warsaw Ghetto, arrived independently while the issue was coming together — a coincidence the editor reads as “cosmic synchronicity,” since both strands of the issue converge on the same imperative: in the face of authoritarian violence, never relinquish your humanity.
Jennifer Kling opens the tribute section with “Resettling Refugees: State Obligations, Egalitarian Concerns,” a direct continuation of Bar On’s final research project on the international refugee system’s accelerating collapse. Kling recalls a formative encounter with Bar On at a CPP conference where Bar On — characteristically matter-of-fact — told the young graduate student that her paper was definitely philosophy, identified two distinct arguments in it, and said, “Keep going!” The essay itself argues, following Bar On and Serena Parekh, that refugee camps are morally and politically untenable extra-legal structures that warehouse people without political voice rather than protect them, and whose average stay has reached twenty years. The burden therefore falls back on states to resettle, but Kling’s principal contribution is to show that equitable resettlement faces a dilemma under both distributive and relational egalitarianism — either the distribution of goods is unfair across receiving states, or the social and political relations in hostile states impose further oppression on the resettled. Her way forward, drawing on King’s 1965 UCLA speech on law and attitude, is to argue that states carry secondary obligations: not only to resettle, but to enact laws, policies, and programs likely to cultivate the social norms of inclusivity that make equitable resettlement possible over time. Wim Laven’s tribute, “Daring to Be Good,” works from Bar On’s co-edited collection of feminist ethico-political essays to reconstruct her five-step method for confronting evil as a practice of meaningful political citizenship: acknowledge the atrocities present in daily life; refuse to participate in evil done in one’s name; engage critically and specifically with the suffering of real people; ask what future self you are willing to become; and act politically rather than theoretically. Laven anchors the argument in Bar On’s critique of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” rhetoric, where he shows how her Arendtian analysis of fascism cuts through the false dichotomy between denouncing terrorism and condemning the violence carried out in response to it. Court Lewis rounds out the tribute in “Citizen-Soldiers in the American Cultural Revolution,” using Bar On’s framework on nationalism, fascism, and citizen-soldiers to analyze the contemporary MAGA movement as a Cultural Revolution in the Maoist sense: a propaganda-driven mobilization of “culture-soldiers” who deploy ethnic myth, mind viruses, and manufactured existential threat to wage a war for cultural purity that undermines democratic institutions and politics itself. Lewis argues that what makes Bar On’s work urgently relevant is precisely her insistence on naming the phenomenon clearly — fascism is fascism — without thereby legitimating the rhetoric of the demagogue who invokes evil to justify his own violence.
Jyotsna Kapur’s “When Children Die, What Can Theater Do?” stands apart from the tribute section in its archival and philosophical method, but it belongs unmistakably to the same moral territory. On July 18, 1942, children in Janusz Korczak’s orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto performed Tagore’s 1912 play Dak Ghar (The Post Office). Three weeks later, Korczak, his co-teacher Stefania Wilczyńska, and nearly two hundred children were marched to the trains for Treblinka; none survived. Drawing on Korczak’s Ghetto Diary, Walter Benjamin’s theory of children’s play, Hans Jonas’s concept of eternity, and Tagore’s expansive understanding of death as reintegration into the cosmos, Kapur reconstructs why Korczak chose Dak Ghar — a play about a dying boy who waits for a letter from the King — as a final gift to children facing certain death. Tagore himself conceived Amal not as a child but as a metaphor for the adult soul awaiting liberation from convention; Korczak saw Amal as a child, cast the play entirely with children, and apparently gave them space to improvise rather than memorize lines. The poet Władysław Szlengel, who wrote the performance invitation, described the result as transcending “mere acting” because it was “the work of children.” For Kapur, the performance was simultaneously an act of political internationalism — a Jewish children’s performance of a supposedly “Aryan” play, subverting Nazi mythologizing — and an act of philosophical defiance. By staging Amal’s starlit death in the cramped orphanage, Korczak helped the children taste what Jonas calls eternity, the transcendence that connects individual life to all life, and to assert through art their membership in a humanity the Nazis were trying to erase. The issue closes on the image Kapur draws from Korczak’s diary: as Abrazka, the boy who played Amal, led the last march to the trains — violin in hand — he embodied the violinist from the Isle of Parrots that Korczak had written about months before, the player whose defeat he had already foreseen and whose beauty he had already mourned. The universal injunction that unifies Bar On’s philosophy and Korczak’s pedagogy is the same: even in the death grip of fascism, do not relinquish your humanity.
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