Mishpoche Berlin in 1911. Dubulti, Jurmala in Latvia. Isaiah Berlin would have been 2yo.
There is an interesting read, Steven Lukes’ 1998 interview with Isaiah Berlin – From Riga to Oxford (pdf). Berlin is being very specific about the details of his childhood in Riga, his relatives and his life. (photo via isaiahberlin.org)
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The interview was thoroughly enjoyable. Many thanks. Berlin was a great raconteur, and it’s fun to hear him talk even when there are other fuller versions in print, e.g. Akhmatova. I found the last section relevant for today because he does have a point about the absence of intellectual leadership on the left. It’s interesting, at least for me, to see the situation in both England and France changing. The Labor Party has chosen Ed Milbank and hopefully turned from the neoliberalism of Tony Blair. Today there are riots in London because of the tuition issue. Israel is hopeless when it comes to left humanist politics and in America we have Obama who seems to be governing in so many ways from the right of center, as you pointed out in your recent post.
On another matter, you link here to your post on Berlin and John Gray, which in turn links to a post on your old blog by Ephraim Rothenstein, which then linked to your post on the Golden Age of Russian Jewry. All of this is quite interesting, to use a favorite term of Isaiah Berlin. Is there any way you might open up your blog for a period of time to allow people to reread some of the material? Thinking it would be on line forever, I was slowly working my way through the posts, and I am sure others were doing the same. Mentalblogs would provide a background to your work here, even if in recent years your thinking has taken a somewhat different turn.
ej, mentalblog is online with all the posts, on the right there is a drop down menu for the archives, it will take you to each monthly archive from the beginning. If you have trouble with it, please let me know. With mentalblog I was trying to go back, I didn’t succeed but I became a different person. This discipline is the only way I know how to learn.
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