Jeremy Cohan

LATE IN 2011, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a series of roundtable debates on the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. Speakers at the event held on December 9, 2011 at New York University included Hannah Appel (OWS Think Tank Working Group), Erik Van Deventer (NYU), Nathan Schneider (Waging Nonviolence), and Brian Dominick (Z Media Institute), with Jeremy Cohan (Platypus Affiliated Society) moderating. The original description of the roundtable reads as follows: “The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party politics, and, for some, the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an equitable society. [Read More]

JEREMY COHAN PUBLICLY INTERVIEWED DAVID WILSON, coauthor of The Politics of Immigration (2007), on April 19th, 2011 at NYU. The original description of the event reads: “Mass marches on May Day 2006 in the U.S., banning of minarets in Switzerland, pogroms in Libya against blacks from Central Africa feared to be mercenaries: Immigration is a central issue faced by the contemporary Left. But as mobilization has waxed and waned, the question of what constitutes an emancipatory response to the problems of immigration in modern society too often remains unaddressed. [Read More]

AT THE MARXIST LITERARY GROUP’S Institute on Culture and Society 2011, held on June 20–24, 2011 at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, Platypus members Spencer A. Leonard, Pamela Nogales, and Jeremy Cohan organized a panel on “Marxism and the Bourgeois Revolution.” The original description of the event reads: “The ‘bourgeois revolutions’ from the 16th through the 19th centuries – extending into the 20th –conformed humanity to modern city life, ending traditional, pastoral, religious custom in favor of social relations of the exchange of labor. [Read More]

PERSEPOLIS IS A FILM that does not take itself seriously enough. This is not a comment on the unadorned animation style. Nor am I referring to the narrative of the protagonist: a story of a girl raised in a left-wing milieu that succeeds in arousing quite a bit of empathy in the audience. It is the film’s treatment of depoliticization as a fait accompli and its persistent retreat to the safety of the personal that make it a fascinating symptom of politics today. [Read More]