The Magazine of the Graduate Center, The City University of New York | Winter 2013 | Winter York of New City University The Center, Magazine of the Graduate The folio Integration: Are We There Yet? Beinart vs. Dershowitz on Zionism in Crisis | Janet Gornick on Inequality TABLE OF CONTENTS FEATURES INTEGRATION: ARE WE THERE YET? 7 No, we’re not, but we are getting closer. Interactive maps, created by the CUNY Mapping Service at the GC’s Center for Urban Research, show how urban America changed during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing on census data, the maps display the racial and ethnic composition, block by block, for many major metropolitan areas, revealing a pattern of black neighborhoods becoming less intensely black and white neighborhoods becoming less intensely white. What is surprising are population shifts that few urban DEPARTMENTS sociologists would have previously predicted were possible. AT 365 ................................................... 2 14 News of public programs and other INEQUALITY: IT MATTERS highlight events at the Graduate Professor Janet Gornick, who addressed the question of inequality in her Center commencement address last spring, pursues the issue further in her interview with Folio. As director of LIS, an international data archive and ART OF 365 ...................................... 19 research center, she works to provide data that researchers throughout Featuring art in the Graduate Center’s the world use to assess income inequality. Her own research, on twenty- collection five of the world’s richest nations, indicates that the United States has the most unequal distribution of income, more low-wage earners, and HONORS............................................. 25 fewer worker rights and benefits than nearly all affluent nations. Awards, prizes, and other distinctions for faculty 20 FACULTY BOOKS............................ 26 IS ZIONISM IN CRISIS? A listing, with brief descriptions, of The debate between Harvard Law School’s Professor Alan Dershowitz recently published faculty books and the Graduate Center’s Associate Professor Peter Beinart, whose book The Crisis of Zionism has raised tempers and tantrums within the ALUMNI............................................... 28 American Jewish community, found the two disputants of much the News of alumni: where you’ll find same mind about Israel’s future. They clashed, however, over Beinart’s them and what they’re doing call for a boycott of Israel’s West Bank settlements, which Dershowitz contends “plays into the hands” of Israel’s enemies, and over when to support a military response to Iran’s nuclear threat. FOLIO is a publication of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. © 2013. The Graduate Center | The City University of New York | Winter 2013 Visit our website: www.gc.cuny.edu folio Send comments and questions to: FOLIO WILLIAM P. K ELLY IRA S. MOTHNER BARRY DISMAN Office of Communications and Marketing President Editor, Folio Director of Graphic Design The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016 JANE E. TROMBLEY JENNIE KAUFMAN DONALD CHERRY Executive Director Copy Editor Graphic Designer Send letters to the editor by email to: Communications and Marketing [email protected] Contributing Writers: ALEX E. IRKLIEVSKI JANE E. HOUSE Graphic Designer Cover: Racial and ethnic composition of New York AMELIA EDELMAN Director of Publications JACKIE GLASTHAL City’s neighborhoods, from the CUNY Mapping ELIZABETH FRASER RACHEL RAMIREZ Service at the GC’s Center for Urban Research Editorial Support MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT The current issue of Folio highlights what might be called “the third mission” of the Graduate Center. We are firmly established as a leading seat of graduate education, with a growing reputation for academic excellence, and we are among the largest of the nation’s doctorate- granting institutions in the humanities and social sciences. We are also—with the inauguration of the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) this fall—the hub of an international, interdisciplinary research network. This network embraces the GC research centers and institutes, brings together the wealth of research activities taking place throughout PHOTO: PETER WALDVOGEL the City University’s colleges, and reaches across the world for new concepts and approaches to those urgent global issues on which ARC scholarship is focused. No less significant than teaching and research is our role as a forum where our faculty members engage in public discussion of the daunting challenges of our times. This issue of Folio captures the broad thrust of this third mission, with feature articles on inequality, integration, and the crisis in the Middle East. This issue of Folio The cover article, “Integration: Are We There Yet?” examines the changing demographics of urban America, highlighting the views of highlights the Graduate Distinguished Professors John Mollenkopf and Richard Alba of the Center for Urban Research, and featuring the work of that Center’s Center’s role as forum, Mapping Service and its director Steven Romalewski. where faculty members In an interview with Folio for “Inequality: It Matters,” Professor Janet Gornick follows up her commencement address on the subject with a address the daunting detailed and thoughtful analysis of the growth of inequality in America. The interview notes the work of British social epidemiologist Richard challenges of our time. G. Wilkinson on the social and health consequences of inequality. As ARC’s first Distinguished Visitor in Inequality Studies, Dr. Wilkinson lectured at the Graduate Center in November and met in seminars with faculty and students engaged in ARC’s inequality initiative. Also featured here is the clash of high-profile public intellectuals at Proshansky Auditorium in October, when Associate Professor Peter Beinart, senior political writer for the Daily Beast, met in debate with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. At issue was Beinart’s call for a boycott of Israel’s West Bank settlements and his disagreement with Dershowitz about the threat presented by Iran’s nuclear program. The topics covered on the following pages are integrated matters; equity, human rights, and global security are all pressing issues at this difficult moment. Integrated as well is our approach to these concerns, for the scholarship our faculty brings to these matters derives from their teaching and research. It is the strength of a robust academic base that enables the Graduate Center to enlighten public discourse. William P. Kelly President The Graduate Center THE GRADUATE CENTER | The City University of New York 1 AT 365 Jochaud du Plessix, a French diplomat in Warsaw, The Extraordinary Life of Poland, at her birth in 1930, and Tatiana, a so- In “Crossing Boundaries” Francine du Plessix Gray phisticated White Russian émigré and a muse to Three Gifted Singers Blend poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Then, from age ten, after the death of her father in World War II, hers Genres, Styles, and Ethnic was a privileged if immigrant life among the cul- Musical Traditions tural elite of New York, where her stepfather Alexander Liberman was editorial director of Condé Nast. “Are you in Haiti now?” Emeline Michel asked the But a history of hardship and adversity was also audience, laughing. “In Haiti, we cross boundaries part of her heritage, and she told how her mother, every day!” Michel was one of three spirited per- reduced to poverty in Russia during the 1917 rev- formers who headlined in “Crossing Boundaries,” olution and the 1920–21 famine, “stood on street the season’s first concert of the Live@365 World corners and recited poetry to Soviet soldiers in ex- Music Series on September 20. Their venue was the change for pieces of bread.” In her own case, Gray intimate Elebash Recital Hall, whose rich acoustics explained that, despite the governess, Latin tutor, rival the best concert halls in the city. debutante ball, and upper-class salons, she consid- Bulgarian Vlada Tomova, often called a “vocal ered herself to have endured an upbringing of sorceress,” and oud player Harvey Valdes, along “privileged neglect,” which forced her to become with percussionist Mathias Kunzli, started off the both creative and self-reliant. evening, bringing traditional and contemporary Kelly remarked on her fascination with themes Slavic music to life in a whirlwind of trilling vo- of displacement and exile, of “one world coming cals, staccato drums, and haunting melodies. To- into another,” such as the disintegration of Rome mova sang stories of love, life, and loss on the at the time of St. Augustine, the French Revolu- shores of the Black Sea. tion, the Russian Revolution, the post–World War II period, and the 1960s cultural revolution. Gray PHOTO: MIKE DI VITO agreed, noting her particular enthrallment with the “Predictability in writing is like saltpeter in sex,” eighteenth century as a transformative time, which said Francine du Plessix Gray, in a lively exchange saw the birth of modernism and democracy. with Graduate Center President Bill Kelly at the Other topics Kelly probed in their wide-ranging October 10 program of his Extraordinary Lives se- exchange included the diverse styles of reporting ries. These hour-long conversations celebrate for radio and fashion magazines and finding a dif- “thinkers, artists, and visionaries who have indeli- ferent voice for fiction and nonfiction. When asked bly impacted the fields in which they work.” On how she could write about cruelty and describe Martha