Editor's Introduction

this issue, which follows our 90th anniversary issue, also harks back to our beginnings, and it too celebrates our 90th anniversary. As many of our regular readers know, Social Research was launched in 1934 by the University in Exile scholars who were brought out of Germany to the New School in 1933 as Hitler was consolidating his power. How better to celebrate this than by organizing an issue on exile?

However, this issue on exile speaks not only to our past but also, sadly, very much to our present, as we witness the mass flows of people forced out of their homelands by war, economic peril, environmental disaster, and political persecution. These appalling conditions led me and a few New School colleagues to create a present version of the original University in Exile. In 2018 we initiated our New University in Exile Consortium (www.newuniversityinexileconsortium.org), which is based at the New School and has now grown to be a group of 67 universities worldwide hosting over 200 threatened and displaced scholars.

To give you a sense of why the subject of exile is both vast and compelling, I quote from Edward Said's haunting introduction to his 1984 essay "Reflections on Exile":

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile's life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

Some of the pieces in this issue look at exile forced by war and political persecution. Some reflect on the difference between being an exile and being a refugee, and one in particular argues that a new vocabulary is needed.

I hope you will find the papers in this issue as interesting and illuminating as I have and that you will consider supporting the New University in Exile Consortium, which needs and would be very grateful for your support.