The Victor Klemperer Case – How Political Language Shapes What Happens

In Hitler’s Germany linguistic habits shaped attitude and culture, and eventually acquiescence to a system of segregation and dehumanization. The language of the Third Reich was corrosive, and contagious. Forced to repeat “the Jew Klemperer” enough times, one thinks of that person not as Victor Klemperer but as “The Jew.” The Jews were in effect deprived of their name, and in turn of their humanity. – The American Interest

Grantmaking in the #MeToo Era

Bess Rothenberg, senior director of strategy and learning at the Ford Foundation: “The scale and momentum of the #MeToo movement compelled the Ford Foundation to take a long, hard look in the mirror. What should be our role in responding to abuses of power within the organizations we support? In preventing them? Had we been doing enough?” – Stanford Social Innovation Review

Early Black Feminist Theatre and Lynching Dramas Revisited

“In the 1910s and 1920s, a number of African American women poets and authors turned to drama to address racial violence. Writers such as: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Myrtle Smith Livingston were among these writers who did so. With the majority of these Black women living in the heart of Washington, D.C. they were constantly confronted with symbols of democracy that they found their lived realities falling outside of. These women contributed to the genre now known as lynching dramas.” – HowlRound

A Time to Grow Our Souls: On the Foundry Theatre’s New Book ‘A Moment on the Clock of the World’

David Dower: “[Foundry co-founder Melanie Joseph has] been so far out in front of the field for thirty years, in a place the American theatre — with its templated, collectively bargained language, practices, and values — can’t reach. And she’s been urgently trying to make herself understood — about what she sees, what she’s learned, and what we could dream, make, become, and do if only we could follow what she was saying. … [Now] Joseph has released a book — a collection of essays from various authors that makes startlingly clear not only what was accomplished but, more crucially, what was attempted.” – HowlRound

Displaying, not Hiding, the Reality of Slave Labor in Art

Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles and the Conflict of Ideals … at the Chrysler Museum, in Norfolk, Va., is one example of how some museums are working to incorporate the impact of slavery in exhibitions and permanent collections in a way not commonly done even a decade ago. … Other museums are also grappling with how they can rework or revise their collections, even in small ways, to acknowledge the role of slavery in the art itself or people represented by the art.” – The New York Times

Drawing a Line

“We work at StageSource, which represents both the individual theatre artists and the theatrical organizations of New England. Part of our mission is to provide resources to empower our community to realize its greatest potential — and for us, that potential is impossible to reach without a definitively safe and inclusive environment. … [To that end, we created] the Line Drawn Initiative to address sexual harassment in the New England theatre sector. Through that initiative, we released a survey to uncover the scope and specifics of the problem. Unsurprisingly, the results were bleak.” – HowlRound