Edward Berenson

On his book The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story

Cover Interview of May 06, 2012

A close-up

I hope browsers will look at the book’s prologue, since I open the story by describing an excursion to the Statue of Liberty, my first trip there since my 6^th grade.

Our “mother of the harbor,” as Emma Lazarus called her, attracts more than three million visitors a year—but few of them are New Yorkers like me. Those who take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and then climb to the top must endure security procedures far more rigorous than at any airport. As I waited in the long security line snaking slowly toward the dock, I thought about what a choice terrorist target Lady Liberty would be and about the ways her symbolism has changed since the terrible attacks of ten years ago. With the lower Manhattan skyline now cut low, the Statue of Liberty stands all the more prominently as the symbol of New York and gateway to the United States.

history / america / 19th century / architecture / france / symbols / monuments / bartholdi frederic auguste / statue of liberty /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009