Articles for author: David Abraham

Never Again to Us and/or to Anyone

There are few questions that have proven themselves more fruitless to pose than “What Are the Lessons of the Holocaust?” For very many Jews, and certainly for the Israeli state, the lesson, to be realized in law and policy, is “Never Again–to Us”. The more liberal or universalist lessons are a call for civil courage, democratic self-defense and early awareness of the possibility of dictatorship and mass murder, “Never Again–to Anyone. The tension between these two perspectives is found everywhere the matter is considered, even in Israel and even symbolically.

31. Juli 2024

Class, Identity and “We the People”

The great marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observed that the “long 19th century” repeatedly posed the question of “who is the people” while the “short 20th century” attempted to answer the question – often in the most bloody and regressive ways. It has been one of U. K. Preuss’s great contributions to grapple with and explain how constitutions have attempted to conceptualize and vindicate “the people” within a liberal and democratic order that can free us from those bloody and regressive ways.

26. Februar 2020

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More Is Less: Multiple Citizenship, Political Participation, and Mr Erdogan

I must differ with my colleague, Peter Spiro, and those who consider dual citizenship unproblematic or even progressive and a facilitator of immigrant integration. The devaluation of citizenship that widespread dual citizenship both reflects and worsens is in fact bad for those who need democracy and seek social equality. It is also another moment in which political power has yielded to market power. At the same time, making dual citizenship illegal, or even discouraging it, is a pointless effort since even after the current nationalist-populist wave passes, human mobility is highly likely to remain at high levels.

5. April 2017

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