Volume 54 - Issue 1

VOL 54 / ISS 1 / MAY 2021

THE NEW JOURNAL

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

SEX WORK

IN NEW HAVEN INSIDE: NAZIS, PARAKEETS, YALE LAW'S LEFTISTS

Editors-In-Chief Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Executive Editor Jack Delaney Managing Editor Eli Mennerick Associate Editors Nicole Dirks Jesse Goodman Rose Horowitch Caroleine James Noa Rosinplotz Dereen Shirnekhi Will Sutherland JD Wright Katherine Yao Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Madison Hahamy

Copy Editors Meg Buzbee Anna Fleming Ella Goldblum Kaylee Walsh Creative Director Annli Nakayama Design Editors Laura Padilla Castellanos Ally Soong Ada Griffin

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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T HE NEW JOUR NAL

54 T H E VOLUME ISSUE 1 SEP 2021 NEW JOURNAL

THE M AGA ZINE AB OU T YA LE & NE W HAVE N

cover SEX WORK IN NEW HAVEN Facing stigma and criminalization, six women find community at the Sex Workers and Allies Network.

Dereen Shirnekhi

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Zachary Groz

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Jack McCordick

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LEFT WING AT YALE LAW An emerging legal movement challenges a long-held consensus.

Laura Glesby

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OUT OF DOORS Many New Haven residents choose to risk it on the streets rather than sleep in shelters.

features WHEN YALE HARBORED A NAZI Vladimir Sokolov was a beloved Russian professor at Yale. Then his past caught up with him.

STANDARDS Rose Horowitch 4 Elliot Lewis 6 Jesse Goodman 8

points of departure SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS A WELCOME PATCH OF GREEN

snapshot BEAUTY AND THE ‘KEETS

poems John Nguyen 29 BÁT QUÁI (BAGUA MIRROR) Aaron Magloire 37 MOT

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asides Eli Mennerick 17 THE FARMINGTON CANAL 29 EDGEWOOD AND EDGERTON PARKS 42 EAST HADDAM Alexandra Galloway FLOODS, SEPTEMBER 2021 Nicole Dirks 43 ON THE ROOF OF WATSON Nanki Chugh SALOVEY'S GARDEN

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SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS Enter the weird world of academic celebrity, where leading scholars double as perfume ambassadors.

BY ROSE HOROWITCH

The fashion house had selected the Yale psychology professor for its ad campaign celebrating the 100th anniversary of the creation of Chanel Nº5, the scent that Coco Chanel said smelled “like a woman, not like a rose.” Chanel was recognizing a new sort of celebrity—a nontraditional, more egalitarian one exemplified by writers and journalists. In the video, Santos, who both studies celebrity and has become famous herself, suggests that a fascination with celebrity is intertwined with human DNA—it has always been present, albeit in different forms. However, the rise of social media, she notes, has altered the way people relate to celebrities: famous people are more accessible to their fans, and ordinary people can become famous overnight.

“The famous people are becoming not so different from us and the everyday regular people are becoming famous,” Santos said at the end of the commercial. “So I think this is a real revolution in the way celebrity is playing out in our culture right now.”

Santos’ research centers on animal psychology.

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But she is well-known beyond academic circles for her class titled “Psychology and the Good Life,” the most popular course ever offered at Yale. In 2018, Santos began teaching the course online under the title “The Science of Well Being.” In the three years since, more than three million people have taken the class.

In 2019, Santos expanded her audience and launched The Happiness Lab Podcast, which has more than thirty-five million downloads. In recognition of her status, she was named TIME’s “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Since launching the podcast, she’s been recognized in the airport and while completing curbside pickup at Target.

“That feels really weird, but it’s [only] a few people,” Santos said. “It’s not like I’m Beyoncé.”

Santos told me that she does not consider herself “fashion commercial material.” She remained adamant that she does not fit into the category of academic celebrity and said she doesn’t know of many academics who have become famous for their work. She seemed to suggest that fame is outside of the realm of academia and scholarship—an idea that might once have been true but which researchers now call into question.

Though Santos said she does not see herself as a celebrity, she is part of an emerging trend that Oxford University researcher Peter William Walsh has dubbed “celebrity academics.” He provided the examples of Judith Butler and Anthony Giddens.

Academic celebrities, he explained, differ from scholT HE NEW JOUR NAL

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rofessor Laurie Santos stands before a dark background, wearing a simple blue shirt and black jacket. She speaks deliberately and warmly—almost like a grade school teacher—as she traces celebrity’s etymology from the ancient Greeks’ devotion to their constellary gods on Mount Olympus to cosmopolitan stars in the modern era. Then a giant bottle of Chanel Nº5 fills the screen.

ars who are merely respected in their field because of the adulation and emotional attraction—and sometimes jealousy and derision—they inspire among their peers.

Through the podcast, Walsh said Santos might even have ascended to the status of a public intellectual—someone who is recognizable to the average educated person, like Cornel West or Stephen Hawking. By contrast, a celebrity academic is known by nearly everyone in their field but would be unrecognizable to most members of broader society.

Social media blurs the distinctions between the two groups, allowing academics to reach a far broader audience. It also allows scholars to display their personalities beyond their research—what Walsh called the “veridical self.” For example, Tufts University Professor Daniel Drezner and University of Manchester Professor Brian Cox have each launched successful Twitter accounts that share both research and personal anecdotes. This access facilitates a subjective and emotional relationship between the celebrity and their supporters, Walsh added.

When I called Walsh over Zoom, I interrupted his listening to Santos’ podcast—a discussion of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, from The Nicomachean Ethics. Santos is unusual in her ability to convey such complicated ideas clearly, Walsh said. “She speaks so well,” he said. “There’s something about her personality, about the relationship that I form with that personality by listening to her podcast, that makes me like her and that makes me give her my attention, which feeds into her celebrity status.”

In Walsh’s telling, the phenomenon of celebrity in academia arose in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, when mass media began allowing people to learn about the lives of researchers beyond their scholarly output. Since then, celebrity in academia has surged ahead, with the most famous scholars, including Richard Dawkins and Michael Porter, amassing thousands of Twitter followers and massive citation counts on their papers.

Becoming famous usually confers an advantage upon scholars. Academia is generally a cutthroat industry, with pressure to rapidly accrue funding and publish to gain a competitive edge in the tenure process, Walsh told me. Celebrated academics can be released from teaching engagements to have more time for research and are much more likely to receive tenure or job opportunities, he said. Journal editors likely know their research areas and can tell who the SEPTEMBER 2021

author is, meaning their work is much more likely to be published, he added.

Walsh also noted that celebrity in academia is often accused of lowering the quality of scholarly output. Some argue that academic celebrities spend time on speaking engagements instead of research, that their work is published in part because of their status, and that journals do not subject famous academics to standard reviewing procedures. On the other hand, celebrity academics can communicate their research much more widely than most scholars; Santos, for example, shares her research with people who might not otherwise have access to academic articles or university courses.

Still, the idea that celebrity is at play in scholarship often receives resistance from members of the profession because it seems antithetical to the value of reason in academia, Walsh said.

“That kind of stuff is frivolous…Celebrity is the froth of modern life. Academia is supposed to be the substance. It’s truth. It’s beauty,” Walsh said.

He argued that the decreased barriers to academic fame—facilitated by social media’s rise—would lead not to democratization but to further inequity among scholars. Although more people have the potential to reach celebrity status, only a few will do so—and only they will reap the benefits of fame.

“It’s still on this upward trajectory, we’re going to see increasing differences, more inequality within academia,” Walsh said. “Inequality in status, in pay, in fame, in citation count, in Twitter followers— we’re going to see that continue to grow.”

As Santos told it in the Chanel commercial, celebrity seemed limitless and open to all. She spoke of the democratization of celebrity with optimism—now, she said, people truly feel they can become a celebrity, or at least become friends with one. But as Santos finished sharing her message, and her image gave way to a $220 bottle of perfume, it was hard to be so optimistic.

Rose Horowitch is a junior in Davenport College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

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A Welcome Patch of Green New Haven’s urban farmers work to make the city’s public gardens a source of empowerment and an answer to food insecurity

he garden had been used as a dumping ground. Raised beds strangled by overgrown weeds, trash strewn about, wet slabs of mushroom-speckled wood perfuming the area with a mildewy odor. It was our job—myself and a crew of New Haven residents—to revitalize this less-thanone-acre plot on Adeline Street, run by Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). It was March of 2021, and the weather was unseasonably warm. I spent hours pruning tree branches with a saw to let crops catch sunlight; shoveling hot woodchips into wheelbarrows; yanking weeds from the soil, then depositing them into a white bucket. Occasionally I’d find a used Band-Aid or the plastic lining of a Doritos bag, a reminder that I was not in a pastoral countryside but in New Haven, that I was flanked not by farms and forests but by tire shops and gas stations.

Even during the rehabilitation process, though, on a street lined with blue-grey houses, the garden was a welcome patch of green.

Karen Grossi has spent her life tending to such patches of green. She started gardening at age four, and for a few years worked as a small-scale organic farmer in Holyoke, MA. During the pandemic, while volunteering as a food delivery driver for the Semilla Collective (an organization that distributes food among Latinx New Haveners), Grossi watched community hunger escalate in real time. She knew she could be doing more. In March of 2020, Grossi and a group of acquaintances began planting crops in unused garden plots across the city, including the Adeline Street garden. The “ad hoc group,” as Grossi calls it—believing the term “organization” too official for the rotating cabal of five to twelve gardeners—took on the moniker Mutual Aid Growers.

Some of the empty garden spaces were abandoned because of the pandemic; others, like the Adeline Street garden, were in complete disarray.

Volunteers also grew in their personal gardens; Tina Dodge, another leader of the organization, built two new beds in her backyard to accommodate extra 6

seedlings. Over the course of the summer of 2020, Mutual Aid Growers grew more than 500 pounds of produce, all of which went to hungry New Haven families.

Mutual Aid Growers is not the only New Haven organization using horticulture to fight hunger.

With well over fifty community gardens, New Haven has one of the highest rates of community gardens per capita of any city in the United States.

Most of these gardens are run by Gather New Haven.

Eliza Caldwell, the community garden manager for Gather, explained to me, “The goal is to get food close to people’s houses, so they don’t have to go somewhere and get it.”

But when the pandemic hit, Gather was caught off guard. The group had only formed two months before mass closures and quarantine, through a merger of the New Haven Land Trust and New Haven Farms in January 2020. Its staff was mostly new and therefore unprepared for the administrative nightmare of COVID-19. “There was so much change at that time that it feels like we were just trying to navigate how to do things,” Caldwell said.

“And I feel pretty bad saying that because, we should [have] been, I don’t know, more active, I suppose.”

However, Gather was certainly not inactive during the early pandemic. Individual gardeners like Mary-Ann Moran took it upon themselves to improve food accessibility in their local communities. Moran, who serves as the community garden manager for the gardens in Fair Haven, on the city’s east side, has worked throughout the pandemic to make fresh produce available in libraries, substations, and schools across her community—free of charge, available to be picked up by anyone in need.

Still, it’s easy to understand why Caldwell felt that Gather should have done more: after national hunger rates reached a twenty-year low in 2019, they spiked in 2020. In New Haven, food insecurity rates hit 16.2 percent, the highest of any county in Connecticut, marking a 33.5 percent increase since T HE NEW JOUR NAL

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BY ELLIOT LEWIS

2018. The pandemic exposed and exacerbated an existing hunger crisis in New Haven, as rising rates of poverty and unemployment resulted in smaller portions and more skipped meals.

To Grossi, although charities like Gather have a necessary role to play in fighting the crisis of food insecurity, mutual aid often has advantages over these more bureaucratic organizations. “Mutual aid is folks who are experiencing the unmet need working together to get those needs met,” she said. “[Charities] are constrained by red tape and bureaucracies”—to get food from charities, a person often needs to fill out federally mandated paperwork and supply an ID. “It's also very demoralizing to be on that end of having to prove that you both need this food and that you're worthy of it.”

Yet, without larger organizations like the Semilla Collective, which had the infrastructure necessary for distribution, Mutual Aid Growers would have had difficulty delivering their produce. As well, charities like Gather and IRIS provided Mutual Aid Growers with the necessary garden space for their seedlings. These organizations—both mutual aid and charity—work best when they work together.

In the future, Grossi, Dodge, and the rest of their team hope to continue providing food for those

in need in New Haven. However, there are currently limits to how much this group can provide.

Dodge told me, “Our group is small. We need a lot more volunteers. We need donations of seedlings, which we've been pretty lucky getting. But we could also use fertilizer. We could also use tomato cages.” Mutual Aid Growers has recently established a GoFundMe to bolster their network and funding. At the moment, most expenses come out of the pockets of volunteers. And a larger network means more backyards, more gardens, and more produce.

Of course, it is difficult to provide food for entire communities on single acre plots that do not survive the winter. But the gardens are a start. They are food sources, yes, but they are also a source of recreation, empowerment, stress relief, community bonding, and the opportunity to reclaim dominion over our diets from a corporate food system. And while walking through a neighborhood lined with grey sidewalks and chain link fences, it’s a nice break to stare into these gardens, watching tomatoes climb up a green stem.

Elliot Lewis is a junior in Branford College.

Graduation at the Clinton Avenue School. Photos taken by Patricia Perez.

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Beauty and the 'Keets

As parakeets take over New Haven, City Point residents must decide whether to protect the birds or exterminate them.

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ea Street and Howard Avenue is just like any other intersection in City Point, a neighborhood at the southern tip of New Haven. It’s a quiet, residential area, with colonial-style houses, wellmown lawns and chairs set out on the porches. Today is Wednesday, trash day, and the garbage bins have been rolled down to the curb. This, I’ve been told, is the best place to find a Monk Parakeet.

Up where the branch of a nearby tree hangs over a parked car, there’s a giant bundle of dead twigs, like an enormous, desiccated beehive. As I look, a bird flutters out of the nest and lands delicately on a utility pole. It’s about a foot long and the color of lime candy, with blue-tipped wings and a short, rounded beak, like a pair of pliers. I hear a snapping sound and look over just in time to see another shock of green feathers wrestling a twig from a dead branch. The two of them look like something you might expect to find on a Jamaican doorstep singing a sweet song to Bob Marley—not here, a block away from the Connecticut Turnpike, their squawks blending with the rumble of a passing garbage truck.

Monk Parakeets are native to the savannas of South America, but for the last fifty years, they’ve 8

established wild and self-sustaining colonies up and down the coast of Connecticut, as well as New York, Florida, and even parts of Texas. By nesting communally–each condo-like structure big enough to fill the back of a pickup truck–they insulate themselves against frosty New England winters. It’s still unclear how they settled here, over five thousand miles from their native habitat. But that hasn’t stopped people from theorizing.

“I actually know the origin of the parakeets,” Heather writes at the bottom of an article in Damned Connecticut—an online journal featuring the “weird, the odd, or the unexplained” in Connecticut. “They appeared in Stamford in the early nineties after a truck transporting them was involved in an accident.” Lenny disagrees. “The truth of the matter is this,” he writes. “The parakeets escaped from the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport about fifteen years ago.” Another commenter, aptly named MY2CENTS, interjects. “Lenny was close ... the birds escaped from the Railway Express Terminal in Bridgeport.”

The truth is probably less spectacular than the readers of Damned Connecticut would have you T HE NEW JOUR NAL

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BY JESSE GOODMAN

believe, involving some combination of exasperated pet owners and crafty parakeet escapees in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. “They are noisy pets and perhaps irresponsible pet owners grew tired of the constant squawks and released them outside,” the Connecticut Audubon Society speculates. Free from the private serenading of their pets, those owners—and everyone else in City Point for that matter—suffer now from a very public army of wild squawkers. “[The parakeets] are up at dawn and you can often hear hundreds of the birds chattering at the same time,” said Noble Proctor, a former Professor of Ornithology at Southern Connecticut State University, in an interview with the website CTMQ. “It’s penetrating.”

Standing below the nest on Sea Street, I watch two more birds emerge and hop along the branch, their tail feathers fluttering. They cock their heads in quick, jerky movements, like dogs staring at a treat. I forget myself and watch them move for a few minutes, my heart beating fast. It feels like I’ve been granted special access to a private zoo enclosure.

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“I love them,” one New Haven resident, Mindy Roseman, tells me on the phone. “I came to visit the house five years ago, and there were parakeets in the tree. I thought, ‘my God, we’re moving to a tropical paradise!’” When I ask her about the noise, she laughs and says, “You know, I-95 is only six blocks away. I’d rather hear bird sounds than the sound of motorcycles.”

But Roseman acknowledges that she doesn’t speak for everyone in the neighborhood. Some people are openly fed up with the birds and their antics. “Particularly the old-timers,” she adds.

They cock their heads in quick, jerky movements, like dogs staring at a treat.

I forget myself and watch them move for a few minutes, my heart beating fast. It feels like I’ve been granted special access to a private zoo enclosure.

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We’ve established a way of life that requires animals to die – to keep our homes infestation-free, to upholster our furniture, to fill the back orders at McDonalds.

A couple weeks ago, I opened my phone to a voicemail left by one City Point resident, Earl Benson, who preferred to use a pseudonym. “Leave a message at my house number, because I’m illiterate when it comes to texting and stuff of that sort.” His voice is slow and raspy, and he occasionally allows himself to wander from subject to subject, but he is succinct when it comes to the parakeets. “They are dangerous. I would be very much in favor of removing them.”

He has a point. For one thing, the four-hundredpound nests have been known to fall unexpectedly.

“The largest nest recently fell off the tree, even after it survived the last wind storm,” City-Pointer Raquel Seacord wrote to me. “It was the size of a small car.

Thankfully it fell on the street.” What’s more, the tropical birds like to nest near warm places, often on top of electrical transformer boxes at the top of utility poles, which has led to unexpected fires and power failures.

“My real concern is that it would fall on somebody or even kill somebody,” Benson tells me. “I care more about human beings than parrots.”

From 2005 to 2010, the utility company United Illuminating Co. (UI) and local Connecticut governments jointly led a piecemeal campaign to rid the area of parakeets. Small bands of uniformed UI workers worked covertly to tear down the nests, often in the dead of night. They removed hundreds of nests from their utility poles and lighting fixtures, setting flocks of anxious birds loose, without the shelter they rely on to survive this far north. For good measure, UI workers also netted hundreds of parakeets and turned them over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for asphyxiation with carbon

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monoxide gas. But a public outcry spearheaded by the Darien-based animal rights group Friends of Animals—which included a threat to forego decorating their homes with holiday lights—eventually put enough pressure on the company to stop the euthanizations.

Priscilla Feral has been president of Friends of Animals since 1987. She was a staunch advocate against United Illuminating, leading multiple lawsuits against the company. Fifteen years later, Feral still has an edge to her voice when she talks about UI. “I remember I was sitting at my desk,” she tells me, “and there’s a blizzard outside. The snow is blowing sideways, and they’re yanking nests down.

It seemed draconian to me. It seemed especially heartless.”

Feral has spent her life fighting for the rights of animals. “This company has contempt for [the parakeets],” she said in a 2008 interview, referring to UI. “They were compared to cockroaches and rats.

They are keen on wiping them out of this environment.”

*** Earlier this year I was living in a house in Utah, when one night I woke up to find two mice scampering across my bedspread. I jumped out of bed and turned on the light. They were fat and patchy, with wiry grey hair and naked pink tails that jerked back and forth as they scampered across the floor and squeezed themselves beneath the crack in my closet door. Revolted, trying to forget the image of the twitchy little rodents crawling over my pillow as I slept, I spent the rest of the night on the couch. The next morning, I steeled myself to open the closet door, and found that the mice had made a nest out of an assortment of random household items: shreds of newspaper, wood shavings, string, and a used tissue harvested from my bathroom trash can.

On YouTube, there are hundreds of videos showing cheap, DIY ways to deal with mice. You can drown them in bowls of water, trap them in plastic bottles, crush them beneath falling weights. After watching one video of five or six slicked-black mice

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slathered in peanut oil, struggling to climb up the smooth surface of a glass bowl, I realized I didn’t have the stomach for this. So I drove to the supermarket and found a Tomcat mousetrap—a minimalist black box advertising “Clean, no Touch Disposal!”—and checked the price on the back. Only $3.99.

Mice and parakeets both cause damage to property, both inhabit spaces they aren’t meant for, both get in the way of regular human activity. But in Connecticut, mice are killed by the thousands, and parakeets galvanize a five-year conservation movement. The explanation, as far as I can tell, is the same reason there’s a Connecticut Audubon Society but no Connecticut Arachnid Society. We put a premium on beauty—one animal has it, the other does not. This kind of selective compassion demonstrates itself all the time, in the pets we adopt and the foundations to which we donate. A study conducted

by Washington University, for example, found that participants more reflexively offered to donate money to aid traditionally beautiful animals—like koalas and giraffes—and felt happier when their money went to an attractive species than a needy species.

There is also the question of whether an animal is “deserving” of its death, which, to my mind, refers to an animal’s direct responsibility for its own inconvenience. Cockroaches, rats, pigeons, squirrels—they’ve adapted to encroach on our space, and are therefore somehow implicated. But the parakeets were brought here against their will. Should this matter? Do we owe an extra measure of protection to animals we’ve directly screwed over—like parakeets shipped across the ocean just to make our living rooms more colorful—than animals that made room for themselves?

Of course, our calculus of life-valuation takes a host of other criteria into account: lifespan, experience of pain, evolutionary complexity, proximity to “humanness,” ecological importance. All this informs our decisions about which animals deserve to live. But when it comes to New Haven’s parakeets, it seems clear that one element played the primary role in shaping public opinion. “[The parakeets] brought joy to people’s lives,” said Priscilla Feral. “They were treasured in a way

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that cockroaches are not treasured.”

Is it okay to kill an animal based on subjective measures of beauty? I don't know. But at the end of that line of reasoning remains the unavoidable reality of parakeet nests ripped down in the swirling snow, and panicked birds choking on carbon monoxide. That kind of senseless brutality is hard to look away from.

But here my moralizing is almost beside the point. We’ve established a way of life that requires animals to die—to keep our homes infestation-free, to upholster our furniture, to fill the back orders at McDonalds. And especially within a culture that unironically features both doggy hairstylists and twenty-four-hour extermination companies, the decisions about which animals deserve to die, and which don’t, have a lot to do with the way they look.

*** Friends of Animals and local advocates were successful in putting a stop to the parakeet euthanizations. “We were able to capture the imagination of people outside the organization,” Priscilla Feral tells me. “They could not believe something so beautiful was subject to that kind of hostility.” Mindy Roseman seems to agree. “The way I see it, the parakeets are part of the great food chain of the planet. Live and let live, that’s my motto.” Now City Point and areas up and down the coast of Connecticut reverberate with the squawking of a thriving community of Monk Parakeets.

I bought the mouse traps, three of them, and placed them against the wall outside the closet door.

The next day, I woke to find two small brown lumps crammed inside. A thin, spaghetti tail drooped from one of them. Careful not to make contact, I picked up the traps and rushed them to the garbage can, tied up the bag and dropped it in the bin outside.

Jesse Goodman is a junior in Berkeley College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

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SEX WORK IN NEW HAVEN Facing stigma and criminalization, six women find community at the Sex Workers and Allies Network.

BY DEREEN SHIRNEKHI 12

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N NOVEMBER OF 2020, a spider bit Glenda. Swollen and in pain, her finger began to necrotize. But she refused to visit the hospital. She’s a sex worker and drug user, and knew how she’d be treated there: security guards would accost her, confiscate her belongings, and strip her clothes. Phil Costello, a registered nurse practitioner and the Clinical Director of Homeless Care at Cornell Scott - Hill Health center, urged her to go, to save her life, but when Glenda finally went, it was exactly as she feared.

She felt judged and violated by doctors. So she left. After a few weeks, her finger had worsened to a point she could no longer bear, so she came back. She was lucky, doctors told her, that she only lost the pointer finger of her left hand.

Most people wouldn’t think twice about seeking medical attention for a necrotizing finger.

But Glenda was willing to risk her life to avoid it, signifying how the criminalization of sex work and its accompanying stigmatization make even the most basic protections difficult to access.

I met Glenda and five other women (Christine, Kimberly, Lindsay, Jasmine, and Lil’ Bit) at a Leadership Development Program hosted by the Sex Workers and Allies Network (SWAN)—a harm-reduction organization that mostly services Fair Haven and distributes items like syringes, Narcan kits, safer sex supplies, and fentanyl test strips throughout the neighborhood. Since its founding in 2016, SWAN has worked closely with social service organizations in the area to connect sex workers to drug treatment facilities or local shelters, and members advocate for policy reforms like decriminalization. They also SEPTEMBER 2021

facilitate conversations with the police when sex workers want to file reports, and collaborate with local health providers to bring medical care directly to women on the street. They’re a kind of pillar in the community.

We met in a sparsely decorated room at New Reach, a non-profit organization in Fair Haven that supports housing insecure local families. Seats were placed in the formation of a large square, and we all sat so we could face one another. Beatrice Codianni, SWAN’s founder, organized the Leadership Development Program so that I would be able to talk to the organization’s members individually. SWAN intentionally refers to the New Haven sex workers they service as their “members” rather than their “clients” or “patrons.” I asked those present in the room at New Reach what they considered the greatest threats to their safety. The responses ranged from the men they serviced (known as “dates”) to the harassment they received on the streets. They described robberies, drug usage, housing insecurity, and their lack of trust in resources such as the police or hospitals.

These women are forced to confront danger in almost every facet of their daily lives.

Beatrice, herself a former sex worker, established SWAN five years ago after watching a prostitution sting in the neighborhoods of Fair Haven and Dwight-Kensington. She was devastated by what she saw: fourteen women, between the ages of 24 and 59, staring down up to a year of jail time when, more than anything, they needed help. Beatrice knew sex work couldn’t be arrested away. Frustrated, she rallied with community activists to protest the sting operations, and they held

demonstrations outside City Hall with signs that read “Sex work is real work” and “Stop the stings.”

Beatrice went down to the police station and insisted on talking to then-police chief Anthony Campbell. She explained to him that sting operations were harmful and would never stop what they purportedly set out to. Eventually, he agreed with her, promised to call them off, and his successors in the department have kept his word. Since that early settlement, SWAN has grown into one of the only organizations in Connecticut that sex workers can come to when they need care.

Christine, who is the daughter of a retired police officer, described to me how her drug usage threatened her life, explaining that she is an active heroin addict. She also mentioned the danger posed by dates. Lindsay echoed the sentiment.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lindsay added. “Some people are really crazy.”

Jasmine agreed, saying that the greatest threats to her safety were “creepy ass men,” and that she also sometimes worried about stickup kids robbing her after they thought she’d been on a date.

When I asked Lil’ Bit the same question regarding threats to her safety, she immediately named the police.

“I just feel like they’re very judgemental, especially if you have a past history or a record,” she said.

She wouldn’t go to them if she needed help. “Especially if they look your name up and see your history. If you’re a drug addict or prostitute, forget about it. You’re not a human. You’re just some, you know, junkie. If you’re in a situation or predicament, they feel as if it was your fault.”

13

Stigma pervades the hazardous relationship between sex workers and police, even as members of law enforcement, like Zannelli, work to mend that dynamic.

Kimberly, who said that dates were the largest threat to her safety as well, quickly shook her head when I asked if she would feel comfortable going to the police if she were harmed. Most of the women had the same reaction.

“They’re just too judgemental,” Kimberly said. “Very judgemental. I don’t trust them ‘cause there was a cop out there who was raping women, too.”

Kimberly was referring to Gary Gamarra, a former member of the New Haven Police Department who was accused of sexually assaulting two sex workers after serving as an officer in Fair Haven for four years. Gamarra resigned in December 2020. An Internal Affairs report, obtained in April 2021 by the New Haven Independent, details months of investigation into the allegations.

Both women, who have remained anonymous, told investigators that they felt they had no choice but to have sex with Gamarra due to his position as a police officer. But at first, they were reluctant to come forward.

“They didn’t think we would listen to them,” Captain David Zannelli told me. Zannelli is in his seventeenth year of law enforcement and oversees the Internal Affairs unit of the New Haven Police Department. He emphasized that he and his detectives did everything they could to get the victims’ statements anyway, and 14

they had Beatrice’s help, because the two women were SWAN members.

When Gamarra was confronted with evidence, according to the IA report on the investigation, he burst into tears, said that he had “fucked up,” and shared a version of the events that was almost identical to what both women shared independently. The only discrepancy was that Gamarra claimed the sex was consensual.

Gamarra’s admission was good enough for Internal Affairs, but not for the State’s Attorney’s Office, which, for now, has decided not to press criminal charges against him due to a lack of probable cause. Beatrice and her team at SWAN vehemently oppose this decision, but Zannelli acknowledges that the physical evidence is not in their favor. At times, it was difficult to corroborate the victims’ stories because they had changed them or forgotten details.

Gamarra has an upcoming decertification hearing with Connecticut’s Police Officer Standards and Training Council, where the NHPD may bar him from serving as a police officer in the state. The process is long and tedious, possibly taking many months until a hearing is held.

The Attorney’s Office’s refusal to press charges hasn’t helped the already tense relationship between New Haven sex workers and the police. The women often feel that they won’t be taken seriously when filing claims because they aren’t perfect victims, and the Attorney’s Office’s decision has reconfirmed that to them.

Stigma pervades the hazardous relationship between sex workers and police, even as members of law enforcement, like Zannelli, work to mend that dynamic. A

2020 joint report by Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership (GHJP) and SWAN titled “Mistreatment and Missed Opportunities” surveyed forty-nine New Haven sex workers, and found that 83 percent of respondents believed that they have been stigmatized or disrespected by police. 89 percent of respondents had been incarcerated at some point—sex workers are often charged with crimes related to homelessness, drug use, and the sex work itself, such as loitering, trespassing, and possession. Having a criminal record can make it harder to find housing or alternate forms of employment, which traps sex workers in a cycle; they may not be able to leave the industry even if they’d like to.

Beatrice cited incidents relayed to her by SWAN members that echoed the findings of the survey, in which police have supposedly said that sex workers can’t be raped, or that their stories aren’t credible because the women may have been using drugs at the time.

While some women told me they were comfortable going to the police and some said they were comfortable seeing doctors, all of them had experiences in which they felt uncomfortable when trying to access services that did not fully cater to their particular needs as sex workers.

Christine told me that she has been raped before, but was never able to bring herself to get a rape

Because of the criminal status of their labor, sex workers in the United States have struggled to effectively organize to defend themselves against exploitation.

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DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA

kit done or file a report with the police. Just talking about it is hard for her. “A few times I tried to share with a few people, and nobody wants to listen,” she said. “Or they don’t believe you anyways, so [you] just swallow it,” she said. “I’ve had women cry on my lap and give me every utmost detail of rape or assault, and I’m writing everything down. I can’t do that. I’m not that brave.”

“What makes people safer in strawberry picking or christmas tree farming—which have been big areas of exploitation—is their ability to organize and work legally in a country,” Miller said. “The safer you are from the predation of the law, the more able you are to organize with others to protect

occurs when individuals are coerced into performing labor, and it can happen anywhere that workers have insufficient legal protections in the event of abuse. In the strawberry industry, for example, migrant agricultural workers on farms in Spain and California have described poor compensation, dangerous working conditions, and the threat of deportation if they ever retaliated against employers. “If you are disempowered, if you can’t organize, if you can’t tell people what you’re doing, and if you can’t leave what you’re doing—if all of those things are true, then you are at risk of being trafficked,” Miller said.

That feeling of isolation and distrust is fueled by policy criminalizing sex work, says Alice Miller. She is an adjunct associate professor at Yale Law School, assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Public Health, and the Another danger arico-director of the Glosing from the conflabal Health Justice Parttion of sex work and nership, a research and trafficking has been the advocacy-oriented orgaFOSTA-SESTA (Fight nization that operates at Online Sex Trafficking the intersection of health Act-Stop Enabling Sex and justice. Miller has Traffickers Act) laws, been working with sex ostensibly intended to worker organizations hold websites accounaround the country for table for allowing ads the past twenty-five to featuring trafficked thirty years and has seen children. But according first-hand how criminato Karolina Ksiazek, lization feeds stigma, and SWAN’s Director of how stigma leads to inaAdvocacy, the law was dequate social support, written with such broad especially in the case of language that it essenChristine in a photo taken by Graham Macindoe. labor rights. Because of tially made it illegal for the criminal status of their labor, any website to support prostitusex workers in the United States your rights.” tion in any way. This included have struggled to effectively orgaViewing sex work through a banning websites that sex workers nize to defend themselves against labor rights lens shifts the terms used to keep themselves safe, such exploitation. Progress has been of policy discussions, Miller as forums where they could warn made in the past five to ten years explained. She emphasized that each other about dangerous dates. as sex workers have increased their human trafficking—which poli- Because of FOSTA-SESTA, it’s visibility, but this has not eradica- cymakers often conflate with sex harder for sex workers to screen ted the barriers to security that sex work itself—can take place in clients and negotiate before meeworkers face. any industry. Human trafficking ting them. Even something as SEPTEMBER 2021

15

innocuous as the SWAN website has to be hosted on a server in Iceland, because it could be seen as illegal in the United States.

they often have reached compromises—but that he couldn’t disregard crimes. “We can’t ignore community members that actually live in the Ferry Street area who have a complaint,” he said. Ferry Street is a high-traffic road in Fair Haven, lined with businesses and densely packed houses. During

the behavior to stop.” By behavior, he’s referring to drug-use and sex acts in public, loitering, and leaving needles in playgrounds. “We can’t allow that. I’m not gonna have that,” he said. But he would prefer to do that without arresting sex workers. Zannelli recognized that sex workers are often caught up in cycles, and he tries to call Beatrice so that she can arrive at the scene and talk to the sex workers herself. He also said that he sometimes talks to churches to help find the workers a place to go for the night. Zannelli acknowledged that there was progress to be made. “We have some work to do.

I’m not saying that we do everything perfectly, ‘cause we don’t, and we do have mistakes,” he said.

Some of the sex workers I spoke with at the Leadership Development Program, like Glenda, cited housing insecurity as the greatest threat to their safety and the most revelant factor in their susceptibility to trafficking and coercion. In the GHJP and SWAN joint report, 58 percent of respondents said that they were housing insecure. Sex workers’ safety is inextricably intertwined with socioeconomic insecurity, addiction, the legal system, and gender-based violence, and reformers have their eyes set on foundational change.

“Systemic overhauls are what we need,” Miller Jaclyn Lucisaid. “And the way bello, SWAN’s Christine, working at the SWAN mobile outreach van. to do the overhaul Director of Photo courtesy of Beatrice Codianni. is created by the Outreach, belieday-to-day undersves there is still plenty of room for tanding of your interaction with the day, kids play outside and resi- improvement when it comes to those systems. It’s not an either/ dents walk to local markets and repairing the relationship between or—it’s a both, and.” Progress, churches. It’s also where many sex sex workers and the police.

Miller explained, is tied to efforts workers gather to find work, and “Things are definitely getting betcurrently underway to decrimi- members of the community have ter,” she said. “But we're far away nalize homelessness, to establish been complaining about that to from those open lines of commuoverdose prevention facilities with the police department for a long nication between sex workers and an adequate number of beds for time. Zannelli explained that it police officers.” women, and to reform drug and was difficult to appease the comIn the meantime, sex workers munity while also transitioning criminal policy. are doing what they can to keep away from a punitive status quo.

Captain David Zannelli unders- Still, he claimed to be happy to themselves safe. According to tands the criticism of his officers, work with SWAN when he could. Glenda, it gets worse every day and he said that he tries to work on the streets. Kimberly agreed, “At the end of the day, we want saying, “People drive by—a few with SWAN when he can—and 16

T HE NEW JOUR NAL

years ago on Halloween, there was people throwing eggs and stuff.

And then there were people going around shooting the workers.” She was referring to a recent pattern of people shooting sex workers with paintball guns. “It was really bad.

And there are a lot of people dying and shit, too. From addictions and stuff like that. Depression too… you get very depressed. There are times when I just want to end it.

But God put me here for a reason.”

Being able to comfortably talk to someone is important for these women. “The group’s really helpful for venting,” Lindsay said, referring to SWAN. Beatrice helps her “get help, get counseling.” She sees the therapists who work with SWAN. All the women make use of the resources SWAN distributes, such as needles and condoms, and they all said that they carry a blade to protect themselves. Some also carry mace.

Christine said, “I carry a knife because once you’re in a car with somebody and something really fucked happens, it’s just you and them.” She referenced self-defense classes that SWAN hosted before the pandemic. “I was asking questions like—and I wasn't trying to be funny—if my head is in somebody’s lap, I'm in the car with somebody, and somebody comes down like that”—she brought her elbow down hard—“how am I going to defend myself? Self defense is person-to-person, faceto-face.”

Kimberly, who is 50 years old and has been a sex worker since she was 14, also said that it was necessary to be able to defend yourself. “If I do have to fight somebody, I'll fight them. I carry a blade on me.”

Jasmine said that she trusts her SEPTEMBER 2021

instincts, and if she has a bad feeling about a date, then she won’t go. “When I'm scared about being [robbed], I'll try to go somewhere I know there’s a camera, like a street camera or security camera.

Preferably somewhere really welllit or populated.”

Still, many of the women have people they can depend on for support. Christine said that she knows there are people who are invested in her safety. “If there’s ever an emergency, I can call on people all the time… My people [at SWAN] and my people on the street, and I got family that support and love me.”

Kimberly was wearing a SWAN shirt, bright purple with a small sketch of an actual swan on the front. She said her husband was a source of support, who she endearingly referred to as a “big baby.”

He’s blind, so the two of them take care of each other. She told me that his protectiveness sometimes annoyed her. But she affectionately added, “That’s what I signed up for when I married him.”

Christine also said that she and the other workers look out for each other.

“All of us street people, the majority of us, it’s like we’re a big dysfunctional family,” she said.

“Even though one day one person might hate the other person, they may be angry at the person, somebody may steal from somebody or do something stupid—for the most part, there’s a big group of people that wouldn’t let the other person get hurt. There’s a lot of loyalty.”

“This one’s always helping people,” Jaclyn said, and everyone laughed while Christine smiled.

“They call me the mother,” Christine said. “‘She's our mother out here.’ And I do, I even scold them.”

Dereen Shirnekhi is a junior in Davenport College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

ASIDE

THE FARMINGTON CANAL HERITAGE TRAIL

BY ELI MENNERICK

In the 1830s, a canal ran from Northampton, Massachusetts to New Haven Harbor. Horses hauled boats through water four feet deep.

The canal failed to profit, and soon it became a railroad. The railroad failed, too, and in the nineteen-nineties, it became an eighty-four-mile bike path called the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail. In summer and fall, when the trees are leafy, dappled shadows spill over the pavement. Biking into New Haven, you ride through Newhallville, then past Yale Health and Benjamin Franklin College. The path ends at a closed gate beneath Temple Street, about ten blocks from the canal’s original terminus at Long Wharf. For a decade, New Haven tried and failed to close that gap. Finally, in August, construction began.

I asked her what that looked like, and she explained. “Let’s say I get thrown out of a car and Kim comes across me, she’s walking down the street and I’m beat up.

She’s going to pick me up. We’ve got a tight group of people.”

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When Yale Harbored a Nazi Vladimir Sokolov was a beloved Russian professor at Yale. Then his past caught up with him.

By Zachary Groz

COLLAGE BY ZACHARY GROZ. Photo source: U.S. Immigration and Nationalization Service, visa photo (1951).

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T HE NEW JOUR NAL

F

or seventeen long years, from 1959 to 1976, Vladimir Sokolov had been a respected, well-liked Senior Lecturer in Russian at Yale. He was a skilled teacher, reserved, revealed little of himself, and students and colleagues knew not to ask him about his life in Russia during the Second World War. In conversation, his story was skeletal: he came of age under Stalin’s purges, fled as a political refugee, eluded death too many times to recount.

But in the nineteen-seventies, a part of Sokolov’s past that he had concealed for three decades flooded his present. By 1985, he was facing death threats and imminent deportation from the United States. Sokolov wasn’t the dissident he insisted he was. He had been a Nazi.

The threads began to unravel in February 1976. A short article appeared in the daily newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party’s Youth League, alleging that a Russian professor at Yale had written propaganda for the Nazis during their assault on the Eastern Front. Then a longer piece was published a couple of months later in a Soviet Yiddish magazine describing that professor’s wartime actions. Sokolov, the author wrote, had been the deputy editor-in-chief of a Nazi-controlled newspaper in the Russian borderlands, pumping out exhortations to genocide.

In May 1976, Sid Resnick, a New Haven-based writer for the Morgen Freiheit, a large communist Yiddish daily in New York, sent a translation of the article, along with photocopies of the original pieces it referenced, to Robert Jackson, then-chairman of Yale’s Slavic Languages and Literatures department.

SEPTEMBER 2021

Twice before, the department had been tipped off about Sokolov’s Nazi history by anonymous sources in the Soviet Union.

Both times, the faculty met behind closed doors and asked Sokolov to explain himself. In both cases, he convinced them that he was being smeared. The KGB hated him for his anticommunism, his writing in the emigré press, his work at the university; they had declared him guilty of outlandish atrocities to discredit his activism. The department dropped the inquiry, and Sokolov stayed on the faculty. The tips stopped coming.

But now Jackson had pages of Sokolov’s broadsides in the Nazi newspaper Rech on his desk, and he couldn’t look away. What he saw was “Goebbels-like,” he told the Nazi hunter and journalist Charles R. Allen, Jr., who was reporting on the Sokolov affair for the progressive quarterly Jewish Currents. “In this struggle, Zhidostva [the Kikes] will be destroyed finally and forever,” one of them read. In another, he told readers, “For twenty five years, the Zhids [Kikes] hit us, for twenty-five years, the zhids [kikes] tormented and ripped pieces from the Russian people.

Finished! Never again will their foot trod upon our soil. And there where they continue to torture the people, there will sooner or later be an outcry: ‘Beat them!’”

I. The documents circulated around the department that summer, and a third meeting was called between faculty in the department; Jackson; Horace Taft, the Dean of the College; Jarislov Pelikan, the Dean of the Graduate School; Hanna Gray,

the Provost; and Sokolov. The articles weren’t Soviet forgeries, Sokolov said this time, but he’d been coerced into writing them under penalty of death.

Who forced him to join the paper to begin with? He had to survive.

He had to feed his family. Did he have to urge people to slaughter innocents? Did he have to call Jews “yellow rats?” He had been ill. He couldn’t work in the mines or the forests. He had to write. He wrote what the Nazis told him to. Did he believe what he wrote? He only wanted to write against the Bolsheviks. The censor twisted his words. But when pressed for concrete examples of edits from the censor, Sokolov could only give one: All his references to “Jews” had been changed to “zhids,” the Russian equivalent of “kike.”

That was enough for four professors in the department— Carol Anschuetz, Victor Erlich, Riccardo Picchio, and Edward Stankiewicz—to draw a line in the sand. In late June, a few weeks after the meeting, they wrote an open letter to Sokolov, saying that he could “under no circumstances...count on the undersigned for any support whatsoever.” They sent the letter knowing that the university had already decided what it intended to do with him, which amounted, in essence, to whatever Sokolov wanted to do with himself. He was 63, two years shy of retirement, and, on the books, hadn’t done anything to violate his contract. As an institutional matter, the university said its hands were tied.

Provost Gray met with Sokolov alone that summer. He was inconsolable, she recalled in her memoirs, “an aging and seemingly broken man who felt that he was 19

Meanwhile, Jackson went wading through the department’s records to try to understand how Sokolov had been hired in the first place and to study his track record on the faculty. He interviewed former students and colleagues Sokolov socialized with, some of whom said that his gentle persona was an act that occasionally got sloppy. “We knew many things about him from students,” Jackson, now 98 and nearing 20 years emeritus, told me. “We knew that he was rather outspoken with those students. One of them informed me that he said he had ‘dogs who can smell out Jews.’”

Using the department’s internal documents and what he’d gathered from interviews, Jackson wrote up an 11-page account of Sokolov’s time at Yale, which has since, it seems, been lost. “I had studied his background,” he told me, “how he used it to bring other people into the department with similar ideas as his own, vicious anti-Semitic ideas. I gave this account to the Provost at a meeting of her staff, and she cast the whole thing aside rather haughtily.” Jackson thought about publishing what he’d written, then thought better of it. “I played a role as a spokesman of the department. At the time, I thought it would have upset the apple cart,” he said. But the case, and what it meant for the department, stuck with him. When the dust had settled, he went back to look through the department’s in-house files on

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Sokolov, the ones he’d extensively sourced from for his probe. They had vanished.

***

Alexander Schenker, ex-chairman of the Russian department and one of Sokolov’s closest allies on the faculty, had been on leave as the crisis around Sokolov deepened that summer. When Schenker got back to campus before the fall term, Sokolov had already resigned, and he was “outraged” by the department’s handling of the case, according to Jackson.

Schenker, a Polish-Jewish emigré who fled Krakow for Russia as a teenager amidst the Nazis’ advance, and had been sent to a labor camp with his mother, kept a lifelong hatred of the Soviets and charged that the department had indulged in a witch hunt.

Weeks later, at the start of the semester, the Yale Daily News picked up the story of Sokolov’s resignation and sought Schenker’s comment. “Here you have a man who had suffered during those years, who has been arrested, who has risked going to concentration camps,” he told John Harris ’78 at the News. “The German occupation, paradoxical as it may seem, was the only real chance to escape.” Sokolov, he continued, “believed that the temporary evil of Hitler, who was bound to be defeated by the West, was better than the Russians. People have a right to change. He is not anti-Semitic now. In fact, he is probably the most pro-Semitic Russian in the department… The question is, do we recognize redemption or not?”

The article set off a monthslong debate in the News’s opinion section. First, in September 1976, the editors of the News published an editorial defending Sokolov on

the grounds of academic freedom and good behavior. “Although we are somewhat alarmed by the vast ideological distance one man can travel in 30 years,” the Board wrote that it was inclined to trust Sokolov when he said that “he is no longer anti-Semitic and that he ‘loves his students.’” “The lesson is simple,” they wrote, “all men grow when they leave the house of intellectual bondage.” The same day, the scandal breached the national news orbit under a loud New York Times header: “YALE TEACHER QUITS OVER PRONAZI ROLE.” Throughout the week, letters streamed into the News from professors, students, and alums, some castigating, others praising the editorial. Sokolov’s defenders repeated a variation of Schenker’s character reference: he had been a helpful and kind teacher, a “pro-Semite,” a Zionist, who at the time never knew of the Nazi genocide, who had been caught in a Soviet plot, framed with counterfeits, framed as a personal vendetta, framed in order to delegitimize emigré dissent, Yale, and the U.S., whose present redeemed his past, whose past couldn’t be judged through a contemporary moral lens from a “New Haven armchair,” and, even if it could, whose speech was coerced and wasn’t, in itself, so bad, or was edited by the censor, or was written by a boss, or was conscious, but for calculated and politically respectable reasons, or was a last resort to live. Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of Leo and then-chair of the Tolstoy Foundation, a resettlement organization for Russian refugees, was one of several prominent figures to publicly vouch for Sokolov in the News.

Sokolov’s detractors, for their

T HE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ALEXANDRA GALLOWAY

about to lose everything, and was desperately concerned about what would become of his family.” She promised that Yale wouldn’t force him out. He chose to resign and received a full year’s salary as severance, plus funds from a TIAA pension he and Yale had contributed to over the years.

part, said that his advocacy of genocide was willfully undertaken out of conviction and expedience, and bore an absolute immorality; that however he presented himself now was irrelevant to his crimes, that there had been other ways of surviving the war, that he was a chameleon; that a seething antisemitism was a part of his sense of self, which left him privately raging, even at Yale, that he was under Jewish domination.

Finally, Sokolov spoke for himself in a letter to the YDN. Writing against the Bolsheviks, whatever the venue, had been his “sacred duty,” he wrote, and the Nazi press ended up being the only venue. The Nazis made him inflect his anti-Bolshevism with anti-Semitism, and he only wrote against Jews in power, he insisted, in “key positions in the party appartus.” By the time he was writing, there were no Jews left in the area, and it wasn’t until after the war that he learned of their “tragic fate.” And after the “Doctors’ Plot”—a 1953 Stalinist campaign animated by a lie that nine prominent doctors, six of whom were Jewish, had planned a mass-poisoning of the Soviet leadership—Sokolov wrote that, at the time, he had told himself: “From now on the Jews have become allies in the struggle against our common enemy—Communism.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Friends and enemies. This was the activating principle of Sokolov’s life. You were either an instrument of or an obstacle to his future, deserving acceptance on the one hand, annihilation on the other. And when he held the tools of annihilation, he used them to devastating effect.

SEPTEMBER 2021

This was the activating principle of

Sokolov’s life. You were either an instrument of or an obstacle to his future, deserving acceptance on the one hand, annihilation on the other. And when he held the tools of annihilation, he used them to devastating effect.

II. The city’s name was Orel. At the turn of the 20th century, it was home to about 75,000 people, mostly farmers who worked the land and nobles who owned it. It was situated deep in “wooden Russia,” the agricultural heartland 200 miles south of Moscow, and its main export was grain, huge amounts of it: both to feed the Empire and to sell abroad. It was laid out the way Russia’s agrarian towns typically were—radial streets spiraling outward from a central market, ploughlands on the outskirts, deep birch forest beyond.

Sokolov was born in Orel in 1913 into a world that was about to be destroyed. His father, active in local politics, was a nobleman, a lawyer, and a landlord. His mother, the daughter of the Rector of the city’s theological seminary, taught Russian literature at a local school. He and his younger brother were homeschooled until age nine, which, as he would later recount in an essay on the Soviet education system, was “customary in the families of the intelligentsia in those years.”

Even before Sokolov was born,

the area showed signs of a looming crisis, and the nobility was anxious. The price of grain was plummeting and the land tax was high. Peasants were swimming in debt. Famine had set in. The Tsar’s ministers warned him in the early 1890s that his hold on the region was slipping away. So the government built railroads—by 1895, 22,000 miles of track. They were meant to help the cities industrialize fast, a trick borrowed from America and Prussia. It worked.

With the industrial setting came an industrial proletariat, a new intellectual class, an immiserated peasantry, and enormous private wealth. Contradiction meant crisis.

By mid-1905, the empire was in the throes of its first revolution, and rioting paralyzed the cities.

That winter, Orel had its own night of mayhem. In the Tsar’s newspapers, the revolution was labeled a Jewish plot. The charge was meant to quarantine the spread of Bolshevism by association with Jewry, to whet the mob’s appetite for broken glass and blood. Orel had a relatively large Jewish population for a city outside the Pale of Settlement—about 2,000 at the time—and on October 18th, 1905, hundreds of the city’s Jews were

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beaten in the street and rows of houses were burned.

Over a decade later, in the early days of Bolshevik rule, the atmosphere of reactionary violence lingered in the area, and became a formative experience of Sokolov’s youth. In the summer of 1921, on a school-sponsored “cultural trip” to the Verkhovsky District, a few miles to the east of Orel, he got a glimpse of fighting in the Tambov Rebellion, a grain farmers’ revolt against the Bolsheviks that devolved into vicious conflict.

It was a war that the Red Army feared it could lose. Both sides slaughtered civilians, prisoners, and the families of their enemies.

By June, the forests on Orel’s outskirts, where the farmers staged attacks on Red Army encampments in town, were clouded with poison gas. The scene was ripe with material for Sokolov’s personal mythology of persecution— destruction seemed to chase him everywhere—and he’d tell it for the next 50 years as a kind of origin story.

By the time Sokolov graduated from secondary school, in 1930, his father had fled for Siberia to avoid Stalin’s purges. He was still in Orel, living at home and contemplating the future. He applied to universities in Moscow and Leningrad to study literature, but his “social origin”—as an heir to an old marriage of gentry and clergy—disqualified him. He went to work at a factory in the city for two years to try to scrub his aristocratic past. Then, like other children of White Russia, he applied to the local Teachers’ College, enrolled undercover as an ex-laborer, and graduated in four years.

In 1937, he was hired at a Technical College in the nearby town of Ramon, commuting daily from

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Orel.

Late one night in December 1937, he returned to the city by train. On the walk home, the streets were silent and dark. The river was high. He approached the gate of the house where he was renting a room. A light was on in the window, and the owner of the house was waiting for him there in silhouette. The NKVD— the secret police—had come by earlier in the evening looking for him, the owner told him. He had to leave. Immediately. So he fled a thousand miles west by train to a city called Samara and hid there for several months.

In the summer, he came back east to Voronezh, a city near Orel that he knew from his youth. He lived under an assumed name and stayed with friends, who helped him get a position at a local college before the start of the school year, teaching literature. At the school, Sokolov laid low. He taught Russian classics and American ones in translation. Dreiser, Sinclair, and Hemingway were all on his syllabus. In class, he nursed a dream of becoming a novelist. Outside, he nursed a chronic heart condition, which, he later said, had saved him from the draft.

By the fall of 1941, the Nazis had voided their non-aggression pact with the Soviets and begun a war of annihilation on the Eastern Front. Sokolov was still comfortable, monitoring the progress of the war by radio. He had been promoted to educational director of the college, fielding questions from the staff, who were growing uneasy about the city’s fate. “She was asking about her family,” he would write in 1957 about a meeting with a Jewish teacher at the college, who sought his advice on whether to stay or go. “Her father,

a simple tailor, did not want to be evacuated with the Bolsheviks.

I advised her, of course, to leave immediately, since the rumours of German extermination of the Jews were being confirmed. However, neither she nor her family believed these rumours, regarding them as Bolshevik propaganda.”

In September 1941, Sokolov returned to Orel for several days to see friends in the military and hear about developments on the front. “They said the Germans had camped in the forests around Bryansk and weren’t expected to begin an offensive for a while,” he wrote in 1954. But the attack began the next week, just days after Sokolov had headed back to Voronezh. By early October, the Nazis had made Orel a colony of the Reich and the central outpost for the eastern campaign. On the eve of the invasion, about 100,000 people lived in the city. The next summer, only 38,000 people were left. Many were killed by artillery, guillotined or garroted in the public square, set on fire, starved, marched to the forest and buried alive, or enslaved and sent by train to forced labor camps in Germany.

Others fled the city for Soviet territory further east or walked into the woods to join the partisans— bands of Soviet-aligned soldiers scattered throughout the region.

Nazi commandos hunted the Jews of Orel door-to-door until as late as November 1942, torturing them publicly before massacring them in the forest.

Orel was more than a military anchor for the Nazis. It was an experiment in Hitler’s vision for a pan-continental Reich, where the frontier was cleared of Jews and Slavs by genocide and repopulated by Germans. The Nazis leveled the city and slaughtered its

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people, but to sanitize their image and subvert the Soviets, they built institutions after the fact and recruited locals—especially local professionals. They restarted the schools, repaired infrastructure, opened orphanages, subsidized a theater for anti-Bolshevik orators and entertainment that didn’t offend the new command—bread and circuses for those who stayed to see what the Nazis would do.

But the most important institution was the newspaper.

Sokolov didn’t need recruiting.

Voronezh fell to the Nazis about a year after Orel, in July 1942. The battle for the city was among the most apocalyptic on the eastern front. Over half a million people were killed in under a month of fighting. Sokolov, his wife, Alevtina, a teacher at the college whom he had married that March, and her young daughter from a previous marriage, left after the city fell and walked through neighboring villages, 30 miles a day for two days, until they reached a train line that would take them back to Orel.

for a way to join the war against the Soviets, and his friend recommended going to city hall, where he applied for an editorial job at Rech, the paper that caught his eye back at the station. The Nazi propaganda unit screened him, liked his background—young ex-aristocrat, ex-teacher, devout, anti-Bolshevik to the bone—and called him for an interview. He showed up at the paper’s offices the next week, and met with two of its leaders, the head writer, an ex-Soviet journalist named Mikhail Oktan, and the editor-in-chief, a German officer named Artur Bay.

III.

They hired Sokolov as a staff writer and copy editor. For his byline, he chose the pseudonym Samarin, after the 19th century Russian reformer and Slavophile philosopher, Yuri Samarin, “a great patriot,” he would later say.

Now Samarin, Sokolov saw the position as a kind of patriotic calling to resurrect a fallen Russia. He became a fixture at the paper. He climbed the ladder, wrote frontpage editorials, was promoted to literary editor in charge of the paper’s tone and style guide, and was then made deputy editor-inchief. He read what the Nazis’ propaganda heads put out and wired to the frontier, imitating their style. The Nazis wanted the press in their colonies to sell copy, entertain, outrage, and addict the population to their line. Those were the merits Sokolov learned to judge his work by. By late 1942, the paper’s circulation had grown to 100,000, with distribution channels throughout the region.

The family settled in Orel.

They stayed with an old friend for a few weeks while Sokolov looked for work. He was looking

Sokolov proved he was reliable, and the Nazis rewarded him. They bought him a well-appointed villa in the old aristocratic section of the city. They ensured he

When they got to the Orel station, Sokolov picked up a copy of the local paper. He read it cover to cover in the terminal. The name, printed across the top of the page in rounded Cyrillic, was Rech— “Speech”—and it stayed in his head for days. “I waited and hoped,” he later wrote of the moment, “and now I saw a word, a new word of truth. What was in it? What was in that word?”

SEPTEMBER 2021

had good food and sharp clothes.

They flew him on Luftwaffe flights to Germany on “fact-finding” expeditions to see how the Germans lived and to tour Russian slave labor camps in Stuttgart and Munich so he could advertise them back in Orel. And they decorated him with a medal for “Bravery and Services” to the Reich on Hitler’s birthday. The world the Bolsheviks destroyed was now his again.

At the paper, he built up a reputation as a skilled propagandist with preferred themes: “Kike-Bolshevism,” Jewish “conquest of the world,” Jewish provocation of the war, Jewish “domination” in England and America, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Russian Liberation Army— the Nazis’ corps of 50,000 Soviet defectors.

Sokolov was useful because he combined four traits the Nazis looked for: venom, obedience, striving, and kitsch. What he wrote for the paper was graphic but also completely unoriginal, repeating the tropes of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, which, as the historian Paul Hanebrik writes in his 2018 book A Specter Haunting Europe, “was constructed from the raw materials of anti-Judaism, recycled and rearranged to meet new requirements.” Of a piece in a Soviet newspaper on the occupation of Orel, Sokolov wrote: “I was so disgusted and repelled that I wanted to spit in a frenzy (will the reader forgive these harsh words of mine) because right out of the page there was staring at me a face with a hooked Kike nose.” On the Nazis: “The world has been divided into two parts.

Germany and its allies represent a force intended to bring mankind order and justice.” Of the Allies: “In this war the people of Europe

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The Nazi propaganda unit screened him, liked his background—young ex-aristocrat, ex-teacher, devout, anti-Bolshevik to the bone—and called him for an interview. and Asia are fighting against Jewish plutocracy and Jewish Bolshevism, against two outwardly different but inwardly like systems, systems which have brought the peoples only suffering.” About the Russian Revolution: “The Kikes made it their goal to cause bloody clashes within states by means of their deceptive, hypocritical slogans, and to rush to power themselves.” On religion: “The Kikes waged a relentless and cruel war against religion, not despising any means, not even terror.”

Together, Sokolov’s words constituted a worldview he could justify and weaponize—and later deny he ever had. It was a system of belief he and people of his milieu were devoted to, both as an explanation for their sudden loss of control over Russia and as a strategy for clawing it back. It was as expedient as it was sincere, as radical as it was typical, as Tsarist as it was Nazi.

In the spring of 1943, Sokolov wrote a piece that became the magnum opus of his career at the paper. It was called “The Former Masters of Orel,” and it began with a reminiscence: “Memories of the Soviet times are connected with memories of the Kikes, the true masters of the USSR.” He remembered being in Kharkiv, a city in the northeast of Ukraine, on his way back from a trip to

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Crimea. It was 1941, and the war had just begun. “As much as the Jews were self-assured and impudent before the war,” he wrote, “so much were they frightened and disturbed after it began...The city was like a disturbed anthill. It was easy to see: the Kikes are scared!”

The terror the Jews of Kharkiv felt at the onset of the war brought Sokolov glee. So did the certainty of what would come next. The Nazis took Kharkiv in October.

That winter, they killed 15,000 of the city’s Jews and buried them in a mass grave in the Drobytsky Yar ravine. To conserve bullets, the Nazis threw children alive among the piles of corpses and waited for the cold to kill them.

Sokolov dedicated the rest of the article to listing Jews in the city by name and profession, to prove that they had ruled the city in the shadows before the Nazi “liberation.” Most of the 47 people he lists were teachers, doctors or bookkeepers. Later, in his defense, he said that he knew at the time that he wasn’t endangering any of the people he named. After all, they had already been killed or enslaved by the Nazis.

***

By August 1943, the Soviets were on the verge of retaking Orel, and Rech was pulping its archives. The Nazis evacuated west and took Sokolov and the rest

of the staff with them. They went to Bryansk, then Bobruisk, which they still occupied, and restarted the press. In Bobruisk, Sokolov joined the last gasp of organized Russian collaboration on the frontier, a small phalanx called the League for the Struggle Against Bolshevism, which his Rech superviser Mikhail Oktan had founded soon after they arrived in the city.

To be admitted, members had to swear an oath to Hitler. Bobruisk fell to the Soviets less than a year later. When the city fell, the Nazis evacuated to Berlin, where they parked Sokolov in the offices of one, then another of their fatiguing newspapers, still courting Russian defectors as the war drew to a close.

After the war, he moved with his wife and daughter to the British Zone in West Germany, rented a one-bedroom apartment in Hamburg, and edited the anti-communist weekly Put for a couple of years. He then moved four hours south to the city of Limburg an der Lahn to edit Posev, the journal of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), a global network of militant nationalist Soviet emigrés who spent the early decades of the Cold War planning an anti-Bolshevik revolution. The NTS preached a kind of big tent anti-communism, but the origins of its German chapter were Nazi, and its reactionary goals resembled every other attempt at fascism. In Sokolov, they found a leader.

But by 1951, the work was getting stale. Soviet emigration had shifted to the U.S. and with it went the center of emigré anti-communism. Sokolov was looking to get out of Germany and into America. On May 21, 1952, he went to the Displaced Persons Commission in Wen-

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torf to apply for a visa. Sokolov’s strongsuit had always been pleading his case, explaining and ingratiating himself to an interrogator.

When he interviewed for the visa, he told the Commission a version of his story that he thought they’d like best. He came from a family of landowners close to the Tsar.

He had been a fugitive from the Soviet secret police. He had been a “proofreader” for an “anti-communist” newspaper in occupied Russia. He rose through the ranks in the emigré press in Germany.

He wanted to take his talents to America. He wanted to fight the communists.

He was approved for the visa in a matter of weeks and arrived in New York on June 27. The Tolstoy Foundation—which earlier that year had been saved from bankruptcy by the CIA—helped him and other White Russian notables settle into the new country.

IV. At 38, Sokolov was determined to make himself an important literary figure and was already contemplating his memoirs. He was still writing as Samarin—his Nazi pen name—in America, and never thought to change it. He was sure the Nazis had gutted the files at Rech during their slash-and-burn retreat to the west. Even if his articles still existed somewhere, he was convinced they wouldn’t affect his new life.

Through the Tolstoy Foundation, he got a job as a copy editor at the Chekhov Publishing House in Manhattan, another CIAfunded operation, which printed a hundred or so books by Soviet dissidents. Chekhov was meant,

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in the words of its biggest benefactor, George Kennan, America’s foreign policy sage of the early Cold War and one-time Ambassador to the Soviet Union, to break the “monopoly of the Soviet Government on current literary publication in the Russian language.”

While at Chekhov, Sokolov prepared proofs for several books by the Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin, who became a personal hero and a model for his own reconstruction.

In America, he wanted to form himself in the image of Bunin, and freely admitted it. “I love Bunin as an artist, as a true master of words,” he wrote in a 1954 letter to the playwright Boris Zaitsev. On the face of things, they had similar stories—sons of the rural gentry, who got their starts at newspapers in Orel, in Bunin’s case, the local daily before the Nazi takeover.

But the similarity ended there.

During the war, Bunin had been thoroughly anti-Nazi. At his home on the French Riviera, where he lived throughout the German occupation, he sheltered Jewish friends and escaped Soviet prisoners of war. After the war he kept himself out of politics and kept politics out of his art.

But Sokolov’s politics couldn’t be contained, and he preferred it that way.

In New York, though, his career progressed. He impressed his superiors at Chekhov, developing a persona as a fastidious reader who could fall into a rage at basic grammatical mistakes. He befriended Alexandra Tolstoy, a lynchpin in the emigré world. He wrote editorials for major emigré papers, especially the New Russian Word. He joined the North American branch of the Coordinating Center for the Anti-Bolshevik

Struggle (later rebranded as an NTS chapter) and soon became its chairman. He traveled abroad and spoke at political conferences. His time was in demand.

In 1954, the prominent Columbia historian Alexander Dallin invited him to write a monograph for the university’s Research Program on the USSR. Sokolov accepted the offer. It was his chance to write the memoir he had been rehearsing in his head for over a decade. It was his chance to explain everything. He sat down with his diaries and scraps of published writing he had from the war. He called the monograph Civilian Life Under German Occupation, 1942-44.

The project’s stated goal was to illustrate the “dilemma confronting Russians in the occupied areas who opposed the Bolshevik regime as well as the policy of the Germans, but could evolve no third force strong enough to serve as the vehicle for realizing their goals”—a kind of revisiting of what the YDN later would call Sokolov’s “house of intellectual bondage.” The piece was billed as journalism, and, for it, Sokolov claimed he had interviewed a crosshatch of Russians who lived through the occupation. The source material was meant to serve multiple prongs of a single argument: to prove that true Russians hated the Soviets more than they hated the Nazis, that many welcomed the Nazis as liberators, that a small minority of alien (read: Jewish) communists had enslaved Russia and had to be exorcised, and that that same small minority posed a more extreme threat than the Nazis—in essence, that his and others’ collaboration with the Nazis was a popular, morally sanctioned measure to defeat a

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world-historical conspiracy.

In a ninety-page manuscript about the horror visited upon civilians during the Second World War, he mentions Jews four times—all in the context of what the Nazi party line was at his newspaper—and interviews none. His time at the newspaper he almost completely elides, aside from a scene at the town hall, in which the German-appointed mayor of Orel tells him that the Nazis are essentially non-offensive busybodies, and begs him to work for Rech as a holy obligation to the city: “Help us, help us protect our people,” the mayor tells him. (While on trial decades later, Sokolov admitted the whole scene was fictional; when he met the mayor for the first time, he said, he had already been working at the paper.) Now out of his “house of intellectual bondage” and at Columbia, Sokolov was writing a more coded version of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth. In it, he cast the Nazis as banal managers who were half as brutal as the Soviets, whose genocide didn’t merit comment, and with whom collaboration was both righteous and non-ideological.

Later that year, a Russian emigré, who claimed to be an old acquaintance from Orel, read what Sokolov had written, and told the American Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that they had let a Nazi collaborator slip into the country. INS brought Sokolov in for an interview, and again he repeated the lines he knew by heart: he was an anti-communist, he never served in the Red Army or any army because of a heart condition, he had been a proofreader at a Russian language paper in occupied territory.

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After INS released Sokolov, the FBI took an interest in him. One FBI informant reported back, following a brief inquiry in the days after the INS interview, that Sokolov was a “burning anti-communist.” Field reports declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 show that this assessment was enough for the FBI to make contact with Sokolov in September 1954. They wanted him to give them information on another anti-communist emigré whom Sokolov had met on a few occasions and whom the FBI suspected was susceptible to Soviet blackmail. In April 1959, Richard Bissell, Jr., the Deputy Director of Plans of the CIA, gave J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, the all-clear to interview Sokolov about his willingness to inform, in an official capacity, on potential Soviet infiltration in his New York branch of NTS, whose global offices, at the time, received CIA backing.

Here the trail gets somewhat murky. After the April 1959 memorandum from Bissell, no other declassified documents appear in Sokolov’s file until 1980, soon after the Justice Department began its investigation of him, and even those have been redacted. Sokolov may have interviewed well, been on-boarded, and assigned an FBI informant ID soon after, accounting for the sudden dropoff in internal docs mentioning his name. He may also have been insulted by the suggestion that his organization would ever harbor communists and refused the offer.

But doing so would have raised suspicion about his own sympathies—something Sokolov had a talent for avoiding—and having the FBI’s blessing would have alleviated the burden of proving his allegiances were genuine.

Norman J.W. Goda, a scholar of the Holocaust at the University of Florida, was one of four historians commissioned by Congress in 2000 to examine the millions of pages of declassified documents on the U.S. intelligence apparatus’s recruitment of ex-Nazis, and write a report on their contents.

He wrote that the 1959 memorandum may have been the beginning of Sokolov’s stint as an FBI informant at Yale—at the time, a hotbed of intelligence recruitment and Cold Warrior training.

“Clearly the FBI protected him,” Goda told me. “I don’t know how he got his position at Yale. I posited that the FBI might have had some kind of role in that, but I really don’t know. And I said that perhaps the FBI was using him as some sort of source on Yale, but I really didn’t know that either. I was just sort of guessing. It didn’t make sense. He was a Russian Lit person, but he really didn’t have any credentials. It didn’t make sense to me why Yale would hire him.”

FBI informant or not, Sokolov was hired by Yale for his politics and the kind of ideological training he could provide. He landed on the university’s radar thanks to Vladimir Petrov, a lecturer in the department who had taught Russian there since its inception.

Petrov was the one who recommended him for an interview in 1959, something that required an almost irrational confidence in Sokolov’s political reliability. In the world of emigré anticommunism, anyone could turn out to be a Soviet spy and any unlucky believer could be browbeaten by kompromat. Any recommendation, especially one for a position as a teacher of the next generation of American diplomats and spies, came at grave personal risk.

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But Petrov had more than faith to go on: he had the same connections as Sokolov. When Sokolov was writing editorials for a Nazi paper tied to the Russian monarchist Andrey Vlasov, Petrov was arranging meetings between Vlasov and high-up Nazi generals to coordinate military strategy for overthrowing the Bolsheviks.

When Sokolov came to the U.S., he found employment through the Tolstoy Foundation, and so did Petrov. Both wrote memoirs about their experiences of communism that doubled as salvos.

And both contributed often to the emigré press.

In 1959, there was a vacancy in the department. Petrov’s recommendation of Sokolov to fill it carried weight. William Cornyn, the chairman at the time, was out of town, and asked Schenker, the professor who would become Sokolov’s most vigorous advocate after others in the department repudiated him, to interview him in his place. They met in New York and talked credentials, politics, Europe, and family. They hit it off. Sokolov was hired that summer.

Seven years into Sokolov’s tenure at Yale, he paid Petrov’s favor forward. In 1966, he recommended the department interview Rurik Dudin, a close friend from the NTS and a broadcaster at the radio program Voice of America.

He was hired shortly after. Dudin was another good teacher—charismatic and funny. He had also been an ex-soldier in the youth division of a Nazi paramilitary made up of Russian volunteers.

Edward Stankiewicz, a full professor in the Russian department, survived the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. Emmanuel Sztein, a lecturer, lost fifty-two SEPTEMBER 2021

Together, Sokolov’s words constituted a worldview he could justify and weaponize—and later deny he ever had. family members in Auschwitz. In the mid-ninteen-sixties, during a wave of state-sponsored antisemitic repressions in Poland, he was forced, while being tortured in prison, to share a cell with the Nazis’ former territorial governor of the region. At Yale, Dudin, Petrov, and Sokolov were the colleagues they had to make small talk with by the doors to the Hall of Graduate Studies.

V. In November 1985, Sokolov, now 72, sat in the Federal District Court for the District of Connecticut, at the Post Office Building in Waterbury, flanked by an interpreter and his defense attorneys, Brian Gildea and Kevin Smith.

The defense had been approved for a trial by judge, who in this case was something of a celebrity on the legal circuit: Thomas F. Murphy, formerly the chief prosecutor on the Alger Hiss trial. No jury was present in Waterbury, and the room seemed somewhat empty for it. The government sent three lawyers from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at the Department of Justice—two trial attorneys, Bruce Einhorn and Aron Goldberg, and Joseph Lynch, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, ex-NYPD detective, and the lead prosecutor on the case.

OSI began in the mid-1970s as a preliminary list of suspected Nazis living in the U.S. and evolved, by 1979, into a task force of over thirty lawyers, historians, forensic

specialists, and translators with a $2.3 million budget. Its mission was to prosecute ex-Nazis in the U.S., not as war criminals, but for lying to immigration officials and illegally obtaining American citizenship. A guilty sentence meant denaturalization and deportation—not prison or death, like Nuremberg—and the script each complaint followed was similar.

In Sokolov’s case, the government set out to prove that he had 1) concealed past advocacy of persecution to his interviewer at the Displaced Persons camp where he applied for a visa; 2) voluntarily assisted an enemy combatant of the U.S.; 3) misrepresented his background—the “proofreader” falsehood—to gain entry into the U.S.; and 4) procured citizenship despite a “lack of moral character.” “It’s a high burden of proof to revoke citizenship—as it should be,” Allan Ryan, Director of OSI at the time the initial complaint was filed, told me. The Office filed suit in January 1982.

Trials typically began with testimony from Holocaust historians, explaining how one figure fit into the complex machinery of the Nazi genocide. Robert Herzstein, whose research later helped OSI uncover that Kurt Waldheim, former Secretary General of the UN and then the sitting President of Austria, had been a Nazi paramilitary soldier, testified at the start of Sokolov’s trial. Sokolov’s role in the Nazi apparatus was to ensure that it grew, Herzstein said, to wage “ideological and psychological warfare” on its behalf, and to 27

evangelize Nazi ideas to populations that had no choice but to hear them. Tapping the talent of people like him was essential to the Nazis’ war effort.

Now OSI had to prove Sokolov was eager for the call. So they went to Moscow. There, under Soviet supervision, OSI took depositions and dug through thousands of Gestapo files the Red Army had seized after the fall of Berlin, translated and forensically authenticated them, and crosschecked any names they found against U.S. immigration records.

If they got a positive ID, they opened an investigation.

For Sokolov, they found a Nazi background check dated July 8, 1943, just before the Germans evacuated Orel, which read: “Enthusiastic co-worker and trustworthy propaganda orator.

As a consequence of his marked anti-Bolshevist attitude is slightly inclined to tendentious statements.” There it was, in handwritten German: enthusiastic.

The defense denied every charge OSI laid: that Sokolov knew about the Nazi genocide, that he had volunteered his services out of anything other than desperation or anticommunism, that he had written the antisemitic portions of the articles, that he had downplayed his involvement with the newspaper when interviewing with Immigration.

The logic was knotted, but their point was to bypass the mounting archival indictment of his character with a human story.

This story followed a string of clichés. At the paper, he said he was “under orders” or doing what he could to support his family. Through contacts at the Expert Commission of Russians Abroad—a monarchist organi 28

zation working to preserve the bones of dead Romanovs—the defense managed to track down Clifford Smith, a former employee of the Displaced Persons Commission, to tell the court that Sokolov, whom he hadn’t met until several days before the trial, was actually a “forced laborer” in Nazi-occupied Orel, and that “as a forced laborer he has no control over what he says.” In cross-ex, Joe Lynch asked Smith point-blank: “Are you telling me that you have agreed to testify on behalf of a man about whom you know absolutely nothing?” Smith replied, “Yes, sir.”

The rest of the defense amounted to a total denial of any responsibility for the words that appeared under Sokolov’s byline.

Sokolov himself testified that Mikhail Oktan, whom the Nazis eventually made editor-in-chief, “demanded that we, the employees, write against Jews and if we wrote different [sic] he took them and changed them, and sometimes I didn't recognize my own articles. I didn't recognize them.”

Sokolov’s lead attorney, Brian Gildea, was familiar with these sorts of cases. From 1977 to 1984, he had defended, eventually before the Supreme Court, Feodor Fedorenko, an ex-guard at Treblinka, the extermination camp where the Nazis killed nearly a million Jews. Gildea got into the business of defending Nazis on trial for deportation while working the immigration circuit at a New Haven law firm. He told me that he had always been fascinated by the Second World War. The work let him revisit fragments of it in the flesh.

Throughout Sokolov’s trial, Gildea was meeting regularly with William F. Buckley, Jr., the face of patrician Yale and the founder of the National Review.

Buckley had become obsessed with the Sokolov case as a kind of frontline in the Cold War, calling Gildea at least a dozen times over several years, dining with him in New York, and writing a personal letter to President Ronald Reagan, pleading for his intervention in the case. The letter landed on the desk of future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who at the time was working as an assistant to the Attorney General. In the letter, Buckley mentions that Strobe Talbott, a former student of Sokolov’s who later became Deputy Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, had vouched for him and called the scandal a KGB ploy.

Reagan stayed out of it and the DOJ let the investigation proceed. In 1986, the court revoked Sokolov’s citizenship; a year later, he and Gildea took the case to the Court of Appeals. And when the Court upheld the first verdict, Gildea pressed for an encore at the Supreme Court. But Sokolov didn’t want the trouble. Instead, he wrote a letter to a Russian Orthodox monk at a monastery in Montreal, who agreed to give him sanctuary, and fled the country. Sokolov died there five years later, outliving the Soviet Union by a month.

***

In 1966, long before his flight to Canada, still a fixture of Yale’s Russian Department, Vladimir Sokolov attended the thirty-fourth International Congress of the P.E.N Writers’ Club. The scene must have been poignant to him, in a way. He was in the important room at the literary congress, where he always wanted to be.

But he received no awards. He wasn’t a star. He was spectating.

The fiction he wrote had never been especially well-received. It T HE NEW JOUR NAL

was never even translated into English.

But even as his career as a novelist was going, and went, nowhere, Sokolov had invented a powerful literary character, creating and recreating a fictional version of himself that was the perfect piece of propaganda: a falsehood so total and so flexible that it held for decades, across borders and governments, among Nazi officers, FBI agents, and members of the Yale faculty. The character was a Russian patriot, impressed into service by an occupying power; he had survived the war by a miracle, provided for his family, and worked hard to establish himself in America as a man of letters; he had convictions, stuck to them, and championed the oppressed; he was kind to students, patient in class, modest to a fault; he led a quiet life in suburban Connecticut.

This character was believable, sympathetic even. But he was not Vladimir Sokolov. Sokolov was a Nazi.

Zachary Groz is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College and Co-Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

EDGEWOOD AND EDGERTON PARKS

BY ELI MENNERICK

East Rock and West Rock, the twin deities of New Haven parks, each have an attendant god. Just west of East Rock, across Whitney Avenue, is a park called Edgerton; four blocks south of West Rock is one named Edgewood. Edgerton is small, squarish, and manicured.

It has tall stone walls, a greenhouse, a conservatory of exotic plants, a terrace with a fountain, and chickens. Eli Whitney’s niece once lived on the grounds in a mansion called Ivy Nook. Edgewood, meanwhile, is lanky, and sometimes overgrown. There is a skate park, and a dog park, and a duck pond. There are nice trails, particularly along the tiny, ruler-straight West River. Once, I saw the river teeming with hundreds of alewives, which swim from Long Island Sound into the West River to spawn. The water was low, and the fish flopped on top of one another, straining upstream.

POEM

BÁT QUÁI (BAGUA MIRROR)

BY JOHN NGUYEN

To my many siblings, the alive and lingering.

He cooks sticky rice cakes, brings orchids and forsythias in from the car, hangs that octagonal golden charm on the front door to ward off evil spirits—all in preparation for the Lunar New Year. The house is clean, though only in the living room. That’s okay, guests won’t enter the others. While his baby wails and he lulls her with shhh, the TV plays in a tongue he has yet to tame: A 55-year-old woman was punched to the ground in Chinatown.

A poppy bloomed on her nose—another bullet point on a list longer than all rivers of a motherland.

It’s supposed to protect us, he tells his kids, who stare at the just-hung, teal-eyed talisman. Then fireworks fly.

Bang.

John Nguyen is a sophomore in Davenport College.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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Pictured, a window in the courtyard of the Yale Law School. Photo by Alexandra Galloway.

LEFT-WING AT YALE LAW

FEATURE

An emerging legal movement challenges a long-held consensus.

BY JACK MCCORDICK 30

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I.

Nearly every student and professor at Yale Law School assumed that fellow Yalie Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 would coast to an easy electoral victory in the fall of 2016. In the weeks and months following Trump’s surprise upset, feverish conversations about what the election meant for the future of the country—and especially for the future of the legal profession— spilled out of student apartments, bars, and other gathering spaces around New Haven, into lecture halls and seminar rooms at the law school, and back out again.

Yale, like much of America, was in a state of shock.

The election spurred a wave of student organizing at the law school, much of it focused on resisting the immediate threat Trump posed to vulnerable communities around the world. That January, for example, a group of law students in Yale’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC) made national headlines for its role in challenging Trump’s Muslim ban and staunching the flow of deportations. But for a smaller group of left-wing law students (many of whom were also involved in the immediate wave of organizing), Trump’s election demanded a longer view of things.

“The feeling was that while Trump would be a four or eightyear President, Trumpism was a longer-term phenomenon, and the need to have a very thoughtful and coherent response to that—and not just a political response but a new intellectual framework for rethinking the law and rethinking policy—seemed extremely urgent at that time,” remembers Adam Bradlow LAW ’18.

SEPTEMBER 2021

The beginnings of that framework came together ten days after the election, at eight in the morning on Friday, November 18. Professor Amy Kapczynski, whose work focuses on intellectual property and health justice, convened a group of five students in her office. The students—Nick Werle LAW ’17, Conor Reynolds LAW ’17, Lina Khan LAW ’17, Solange Hilfinger-Pardo LAW ’17, along with Bradlow—knew Kapczynksi and each other well from previous political and academic work at the law school. In the weeks before the election, a

But for a smaller group of left-wing law students (many of whom were also involved in the immediate wave of organizing), Trump’s election demanded a longer view of things. few of them had been planning a future conference on how to push a would-be Clinton administration to the left on economic policy.

In the meeting at Kapczynski’s office, the group talked about how Clinton’s loss represented what Werle described as “the failure of the Democratic Party and the left more broadly” to appeal to working people after decades of wage stagnation and spiralling inequality. They talked about the rise of the conservative legal movement, which had steadily shifted many

legal fields to the right over the past half-century. And they talked about how they felt their legal education had left them ill-equipped to grapple with the longstanding social, political, and legal structures—from the evaporation of union jobs, to the corporate capture of the political process, to the persistence of racialized violence against nonwhite people—that had made Trump an attractive candidate to tens of millions of Americans.

At the core of the group’s frustration was their feeling that their legal training consistently separated economic questions (how markets are structured and resources distributed) from political ones (who holds power and how they wield it). Trump—the loutish heir to a real estate fortune who exploited America’s business-friendly bankruptcy laws, defrauded its threadbare tax code, and stiffed undocumented workers on his way to the presidency—perfectly encapsulated their interest in the intertwining of economic and political power, and the role of law in mediating both.

Toward the end of the meeting, Kapczynski asked the group how she could be of use to them. After some discussion, they decided they wanted to create an entirely new course—it was their education, after all, that they’d found wanting. Werle suggested they frame the class around the concept of “political economy,” an intellectual tradition with roots in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries that interrogates how the economy is shaped by politics and vice versa. For “political economists” in the classical sense, like Karl Marx and Adam Smith, the economy is inherently politi 31

And thus the “Law and Political Economy” seminar was born.

“I was super excited,” said Werle, who called his dad right after the meeting to tell him how, even in its early days, he felt the idea of a course on political economy “had the potential to be far-reaching.” Reflecting on that moment—and everything that followed it—almost five years later, Werle said the seed he helped plant in Kapczynski’s office that November had blossomed into something greater than he ever could have imagined.

II.

On the evening of January 19th—the first day of the class—Kapczynski asked each of the seventeen students, most of whom were entering their final semester of law school, to explain why they’d decided to join.

“The sort of answers people were giving were that they wanted to understand where legal thought had fallen short, and that they wanted to be the generation that makes a difference, not only in terms of providing a framework that accounts for political economy in legal thought but also in terms of advancing policies and priorities that addressed some of the glaring injustices that we were seeing in our country,” Bradlow remembers.

That the students had a broadly similar set of reasons for taking the class was not a coincidence.

Like the smaller group that ini 32

tially approached Kapczynski, the students in “Law and Political Economy” had frequently crossed paths at Yale.

Two years earlier, several of the students in the class ran a successful left-wing campaign in a contentious election for the board of Yale’s American Constitutional Society chapter, which represents its progressive law students.

Their campaign had criticized the ostensibly progressive society’s careerism and chummy relationship with the Democratic Party establishment. Will Bloom LAW ’17 sardonically remembered hav-

“The late meeting time, combined with the subject matter and the fact that much of the syllabus came together in real time, lent each session a frisson of subversive energy. ing run on “a platform of ‘We’re not going to bring Tim fucking Geithner’”—Obama’s Treasury secretary, who had orchestrated the bank bailouts during the Great Recession—“‘to Yale Law School anymore.’” Many were also involved in WIRAC and other clinical work, and a few had been part of reading groups on Law and Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.

A handful had also been involved in supporting Yale’s grad student union campaign, which had reached a fever pitch that August

after the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate students at private universities had the right to unionize. The group—and especially its 3L students, whose time at Yale was bookended by the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown and the insurgent campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—represented the “cohering of some left-wing force in the law school,” said Bloom.

They “wanted something beyond the bounds of what you can usually find” in the gilded halls of 127 Wall Street.

“We all kind of agreed that the system was broken, that the ownership class had outsized power in our political system and that was influencing the way the law was structured,” Bloom added.

“Having all of that out of the way as the set terms of discussion meant that we could actually have very fascinating conversations.”

From mid-January to early April, the group met each Thursday evening in a cramped seminar room in the basement of the law school. Sometimes they’d go out together for drinks after.

The late meeting time, combined with the subject matter and the fact that much of the syllabus came together in real time, lent each session a frisson of subversive energy. “It almost felt underground,” Reynolds recalled. “Or as far underground as you can be in Yale Law School’s fancy building.”

They began the course by reading Karl Polanyi, a twentieth century Hungarian political economist whose most well-known argument—that the economy is not a self-regulating machine that T HE NEW JOUR NAL

DESIGN BY ALEXANDRA GALLOWAY

cal, both in its origins and in its effects. It was exactly the kind of framework the group was looking for.

follows its own rules, but rather is embedded in non-economic institutions, including the legal system—became “an essential organizing principle” of the course, Werle said. The next weeks covered constitutional law, racial justice, trade, incarceration, labor, environmental law, antitrust, and human rights, with each class focused on how the specific area of law could be moved in a more democratic and egalitarian direction. Most weeks, one or two students volunteered to lead the class discussion. (Just over four years after Lina Khan led the course’s session on anti-trust law, she was named by President Biden as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, a decision hailed by progressives as auguring a new era of trust-busting.)

“It was the best class I’ve taken in my life—best in law school, best period,” reflected Brian Highsmith LAW ’17. “And I think we all felt that there was an urgency there, where this perspective is so sorely missing from our law school curricula. We all realized toward the end of the class that there was something here that needed to be explored further, but we didn’t know exactly what form that would take.”

III.

As spring gave way to summer, the group gathered one last time around a seminar table to figure out how they might continue the momentum the course had generated. They considered initiating LPE-inspired service projects or starting a regular LPE reading group, but both proposals felt too insular. They wanted to see whether their ideas would resonate outside of Yale’s cloistered walls. Ultimately, they settled on continuing the course’s mission SEPTEMBER 2021

in what Kate Redburn LAW ’19 called “the most Web 2.0 way ever.” They started a blog.

As the class scattered across the country for summer internships, clerkships, and first jobs, Redburn, Werle, and Bradlow took the lead. Kapczynski invited David Grewal LAW ’02 and Jed Purdy LAW ’01, then law professors at Yale and Duke, respectively, to be co-founders of the blog (they’d both been guest speakers in the class). Building the blog became a particular obsession for Redburn, who suffered a herniated disc at the end of the summer, causing them to withdraw from Yale for the semester. “I was just lying on my back with this contraption that had my iPad hanging over my face,” Redburn said. “Working on the blog was the only thing preventing me from losing my mind.”

In October, the blog made its debut with a quasi-manifesto, written by Purdy, Grewal, and Kapczynski. “This is a time of crises,” the co-founders began, situating the blog in the context of accelerating inequality and wealth concentration, the climate emergency, and the rise of authoritarian political movements around the world. But it was also, they noted, a time of enhanced possibility. A new generation of left movements, from Occupy and the Fight for 15 to the Movement for Black Lives and #Not1More, was “challenging economic inequality, eroded democracy, the carceral state, and racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination with a force that was unthinkable just a few years ago.”

Their choice to frame the blog in generational terms wasn’t a coincidence. Purdy, Grewal, and Kapczynski were around the same age and all had gone to Yale Law

at the turn of the millennium.

Their political consciences were forged in the miasma of what Purdy called “the Long 1990s,” a moment when the Clinton administration’s embrace of austerity gave a bipartisan gloss to the Thatcherite dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. Nearly everywhere you looked, Purdy reflected, you encountered “the idea that markets were not only the most viable form of social organization but that they were basically compatible with democracy—and indeed that liberal democracy basically meant market democracy... and that anything that would stand in the way of this trajectory was sort of churlish or reactionary or irrational.” By the time they arrived in law school, transformative change no longer appeared on the horizon.

The blog signaled that things were changing.

Kapczynski remembered its early days as shaped by an “ethos of students and faculty thinking together, and trying to figure out what the old frameworks we as faculty were taught as students and come to from our political culture, and what’s wrong and missing.”

Among many other subjects, they published pieces that first year on the anti-capitalist racial justice politics of the Movement for Black Lives, the structural violence of Uber and Lyft, and the political economy of freedom of speech.

“I was just blown away that LPE existed,” said John Whitlow, a law professor at CUNY and former tenant lawyer who started writing for the blog that spring.

“As soon as I saw it, I recognized that it filled a lack that had existed in the legal academy that was much more profound than I had 33

even realized until I came across it.”

In the spring of 2019, after nearly two years of unpaid volunteer work, mostly by students, the blog’s faculty co-directors secured a $610,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation through its Beyond Neoliberalism initiative.

The grant allowed the professors to officially launch the “Law and Political Economy Project” and to hire Corinne Blalock, who had just finished a JD/PhD at Duke, as its Executive Director.

Like Whitlow, Blalock was shocked by the sheer existence of the project. Back in 2015, she’d written a journal article lamenting the decline of left-wing legal theory in the academy. The heyday of Critical Legal Studies, a leftist legal movement that originated at Harvard Law School and flourished in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, was long past.

Gone were the days when law professors were proclaiming themselves “guerilla warriors” and urging their students to seek out employment at big corporations just to sabotage them from within. Blalock remembers being laughed at for ending her article with a “sort of cheesy call to arms” for a reinvigorated left legal movement. “The idea of a leftist legal movement, even in 2015, was unthinkable,” she said.

Yet here Blalock was four years later, at the center of just that kind of movement. Demand for Kapczynski’s seminar swelled to nearly a hundred students—just under a sixth of the entire law school. Suddenly, LPE student groups were popping up at law schools all around the country 34

(they currently number over a dozen). The blog’s readership continued to grow, and the project began holding events that drew scholars from every legal field and other academic disciplines. “We grew way faster than we expected,” Blalock said, reflecting on the beginning of her tenure. “LPE really took off.”

But Blalock warned against seeing the early growth of LPE as the sign of a broader bellwether.

“Sometimes I feel like we’re a little bit of a Potemkin Village,” she said. “The project is only two

Over the coming decades, law and economics utterly transformed the legal academy, thanks in large part to the dogged efforts (and deep pockets) of one man: John Olin. years old.” If LPE represented an American law school version of German radical Rudi Dutschke’s famous 1968 call for leftists to embark on a “long march through the institutions,” then it was just taking its first baby steps.

Plus, Blalock added, “You have to acknowledge what we’re up against.”

IV.

On September 3, 2014—his very first day of law school, twoand-a-half years before he’d find his way into the first LPE semi-

nar—Will Bloom sat in his 1L contracts course and listened to his professor’s disquisition on Lucy v. Zehmer. A 1954 Virginia Supreme Court decision commonly taught in first-year contracts courses, the case considered whether a farmer who had drunkenly sold his farm could renege on the agreement (the court ruled against the farmer). Midway through the class, Bloom’s professor went on a “weird economics tangent,” arguing that if the farmer valued his property more than the person he sold it to, he could have just bought it back.

“I remember raising my hand and asking, ‘What if the farmer doesn’t have enough money to buy it back?’ and the professor was like, ‘Well, we just don’t think about that because then the theory won’t work,’ and then stared at me and waited for me to accept that,” Bloom said. “It was a moment when I realized, Oh, this is all made up.

These people just have some wild fucking ideas that don’t really have any bearing on the world—except they do have a bearing on the world because they’re part of a decades long political project to impose them.”

Central to that political project is the rise of “law and economics,” an approach to jurisprudence that attempts to apply the principles of neoclassical economics to the study of law.

In the early nineteen-seventies, law and economics was the marginal remit of a group of libertarian eccentrics, most of whom were based out of the University of Chicago. Keynesian economics and legal liberalism had won the day following the New T HE NEW JOUR NAL

Deal, and few in the legal academy took Chicago’s libertarians seriously. Yet over the coming decades, law and economics utterly transformed the legal academy, thanks in large part to the dogged efforts (and deep pockets) of one man: John Olin.

A chemical and munitions magnate, Olin was radicalized after a group of militant black students took over the student union at Cornell, his alma mater, during parents weekend in 1969.

Following the uprising—the first-ever armed occupation of a building on an American campus—Olin vowed to use his fortune to “to help to preserve the system which made its accumulation possible.”

The Olin Foundation went on to spend $68 million underwriting the growth of law and economics, dishing out millions of dollars to Harvard, Yale, and other elite law schools to establish law and economics programs and hire law and economics scholars (the investigative journalist Jane Meyer dubbed Olin an “academic Johnny Appleseed”).

Over more than two decades, Yale received nearly $20 million from the foundation, much of it dedicated to establishing the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy.

“We had a really large investment in ideology that had no match on the left or even among centrist liberals,” said Frank Pasquale LAW ’01, a professor at Brooklyn School of Law and a frequent writer for the blog.

By 2000, the foundation considered its donations to Yale to be an “excellent investment” and “one of our most influential Law and Economics grants.” As early SEPTEMBER 2021

as 1993, Yale Law Professor (and future dean) Anthony Kronman LAW ’75 called the rapid expansion of law and economics the “most important change in American legal education in the last twenty-five years.” Internal Olin Foundation documents praised Kronman for “doing all he can to assure the permanency of the program.” In 2008, political scientist Steven Teles crowned law and economics “the most successful intellectual movement in the law of the past thirty years, having rapidly moved from insurgency to hegemony.” Olin’s dream of yanking law schools to the right had come true. As James Piereson, the foundation’s long-time director, bragged to Teles, “Law and economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral but isn’t.”

For Ted Hamilton, who entered Harvard Law School in 2013 and is currently a PhD student in comparative literature at Yale, the influence of law and economics could be captured in one mantra. “The most repeated word in my first year law curriculum was not justice, or liberty or order,” Hamilton wrote in a 2014 essay reflecting on his first year at Harvard Law School. “It was efficiency.”

Indeed, “efficiency” is the watchword of law and economics, its guiding shibboleth. At its core, law and economics holds that the law should be oriented above all to achieving economic efficiency, with “efficiency” largely defined as the pursuit of “wealth maximization,” in which goods and services flow to those with the largest “willingness to pay” for them.

(It was a version of this argument that Bloom’s contracts professor made on his first day of class.) The rise of law and economics firmly cemented this form of legal reasoning as the default framework in “private law” courses—such as property, torts, and contracts—which are frontloaded in Yale’s legal curriculum. As Bradlow put it, “The dominant legal framework made you ask the question, ‘Given the current set of power relations, what is the most efficient way to distribute resources?’ It wasn’t asking the prior question, ‘Is the current distribution of power in our country just, and how is the law structuring the distribution of that power?’”

Part of why law and economics methods took such a powerful hold in law schools was that little else in legal teaching or scholarship offered much in the way of a countervailing force.

During the same decades that saw the rise of law and economics in private law, public law fields such as constitutional law—which were dominated by liberals for most of the 20th century—almost universally retreated from engaging questions of economic power and structural inequality. “In public law classes, the common sense is still the same [as in private law classes],” added Blalock.

“You don’t talk about class disparities, and you don’t talk about power.”

By the turn of the twenty-first century, legal fields considered “about the economy” had little to nothing to say about political life, while those considered fundamentally political lacked a robust 35

account of economic power. For anyone in law schools interested in crossing those boundaries (or in pointing out their artificiality to begin with), the prospect of even coming across intelligibly to professors and peers was dim.

“There was something about the dominant vocabularies that sort of baffled and almost numbed any attempt to get hold of the most important questions,” said Purdy of his time as a student at Yale. “It always felt as if to raise issues of distribution, of power, of the role and nature of the state, was to commit a kind of jejune mistake.” Sam Aber ’17 LAW ’22, a current student editor of the blog, echoed Purdy’s feelings. “It can feel like this huge narrowing in what you’re allowed to say, in what kind of arguments are permissible or even make sense.”

For most Yale Law students, that narrowing came to feel natural. At the end of his 1L contracts class in 2014, Manfredi remembers a group discussion where he explained a simple hypothetical, in which a maximally “efficient” world—one with the “largest possible pie,” as economists are wont to say—entailed extreme satisfaction for a minority of people and mass suffering for the rest, whereas a "less efficient" world might have substantial satisfaction, but for all people. “One of my classmates turned around and said, ‘Oh my god. I’d never thought about it like that. I thought that we were supposed to think in terms of efficiency because that was just the goal of law and that it would always make things better,’” Manfredi remembered. “And I just thought to myself, This is how Yale Law School is teaching people to think: they tell you to accept "maximizing efficiency" as an 36

end in and of itself—and that idea becomes unquestioned common sense for people who are going to go on to be extremely powerful, who will go on to run elite institutions someday.”

Indeed, Manfredi’s classmate was far from an outlier. A 2015 study co-authored by Yale Law professor Daniel Markovitz ’91 LAW ’00 surveyed Yale Law students and found that nearly 80 percent displayed a preference for “efficiency” over “equality,” while less than half of average Americans exhibited the same preference. It also found that the Yale Law students were significantly more likely to display “selfish” economic preferences than their non-elite peers. Such a commitment to efficiency—which Markovits and one co-author called “overwhelming, indeed almost eccentric”—was especially striking given the Yale students’ stated political affiliations: over 90 percent identified as Democrats.

Over half a century, the methods, assumptions, and values of law and economics so deeply permeated legal scholarship and pedagogy that they faded into the background, enshrining a set of market fundamentalist orientations as just part of what it means to “think like a lawyer.” “What the common sense makes unsayable is just as powerful as being asked to, for example, determine if this or that regulation is efficient,” Blalock said. “It’s incredibly hard to argue with precisely because it’s invisible.”

V.

Over the first weekend of April 2020, the LPE Project was scheduled to bring over a hundred scholars and students to New Haven for its first major

conference, with dozens of panels on subjects ranging from the international law of money to the political economy of motherhood. While Covid-19 spoiled the conference plans, the pandemic and the many disruptions it precipitated also provided a near-daily confirmation of LPE’s foundational intuition: that politics and the economy cannot be separated.

Early pandemic discourses around “essential workers”—disproportionately women and people of color, chronically underpaid and precariously employed—illustrated the centrality of racialized and gendered subordination to the structure of the American economy. As the pandemic plunged the country into a recession, the federal government’s spending on aid exploded neoliberal budget orthodoxy, even as most of the stimulus ended up lining the pockets of wealthy investors. The summer’s protests drew renewed attention to the links between municipal finance, residential segregation, local economies, and chronic disinvestment in Black communities. And the environmental backdrop to it all—a swelling tide of climate disasters, from the Australian bushfires to the heat waves and hurricanes of this summer—offered a potent reminder of what climate activists have been saying for decades: that anything less than a fundamental transformation of our current economic and political order courts utter catastrophe.

Whether the Law and Political Economy movement will push legal scholarship and practice to live up to the exigencies of this moment is ultimately an open question. In many ways, the movement faces an uphill bat-

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tle. “Starting something new at a law school, especially an elite law school, is really hard, especially when it’s something that goes against the grain of what people are typically taught and is not particularly well-funded by outside organizations,” said Sarang Shah, a former student editor of the blog who founded Berkeley’s LPE student group in 2019.

Right-wing potshots, centrist co-option, or simply running out of steam (or money) are all real possibilities.

“You know how you have rocks in a river, and if you’re right behind them you can avoid the power of the current? That’s kind of what LPE feels like,” added Conor Reynolds, who took part in the first LPE seminar and returned to Yale to teach environmental law after he graduated.

What the movement does have in its favor is the nascent hunger of a younger generation to get a grip on the crisis-riven world it was born into, and to find the terms and the means to remake it. As Redburn put it, “We’re the children of the total failure of austerity politics. We’re the Occupiers and later the Black Lives Matter people, where our theory of change involves the wisdom of social movements and mass organization and not elite technocracy, which we’ve experienced as a total failure.”

“What’s really happening is that you have a millennial and post-millennial generation that just doesn’t believe what their law professors tell them anymore,” said Sam Moyn, a law professor at Yale and contributor to the blog.

“We’re talking about a limited number of people, but there’s a group of them in a lot of places

SEPTEMBER 2021

and it’s big enough to matter.”

While the last decade of left social movement ferment has yielded no shortage of incisive critiques of the present order of things, the pressing question, according to Purdy, is “what is going to get built that lasts?”

has been profoundly constructive—we’re still living in the world it helped make. Much hinges on whether LPE will be able to make a new one.

“Critical work is just not nearly enough, and rejectionist stances have very limited scope,” he said.

“Constructive vocabularies— which is not to say conciliatory or ‘nice’ vocabularies, but vocabularies which are worldmaking and institution-making—are really important.” In its own way, the law and economics vocabulary that LPE so stridently resists

Jack McCordick is a senior in Branford College.

POEM

MOT

BY AARON MAGLOIRE Death is a day trip. I drowned myself in the river and then got bored of it.

One can only spend so long small talking with murk. My dreams, my firm works, my honey and bread. It is time to dine again. Enough fucking around.

Watch now, as I emerge fully dry from the water that could not stomach me, my mouth ablaze with aphids and blue moths, my fresh deerskin dress. There is no myth here. Only the fact of my body warming as it walks forth into the clearing. Tell me again, the name of your god.

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38

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ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY ALLY SOONG

T

here’s a side to New Haven that comes alive in the quiet of night, while most people in the city are dreaming. The city’s animal residents wake up and wander through the darkness: Families of rabbits. Colonies of stray cats.

Packs of coyotes and deer.

Scott Cadwell knows this side of the city better than most. He has lived in New Haven's Hill neighborhood for the past four years, and he often doesn’t sleep through the night. His home, beneath a bridge in the Hill, has a ceiling but no walls. The rain and snow can’t reach him, but the rest of the natural world can. Some nights, he watches the creatures dance between fight and flight as they weigh options for survival. He can clearly picture a wild rabbit he once saw by a ravine near his bridge, on a night he had stayed up late to smoke a cigarette. He remembers the rabbit was trembling. After looking around, he spotted the threat: a bobcat about fifty feet away.

Predators can turn into prey, depending on the context. Cadwell has seen clusters of thirty coyotes scuttling atop garbage mounds. The creatures are known for eating small animals and occasionally attacking human beings, but Cadwell likes to say, “They’re more scared of you than you are of them.” One night, according to Cadwell, a coyote darted beneath his bridge. It lay down, shuddering in fear. “There’s gotta be a bigger predator right around here,” Cadwell recalls thinking. When he turned, he saw the silhouette of what looked like a mountain lion slinking by. “I didn’t sleep that night really,” he said with half a laugh.

It’s possible that the mountain lion was really a bobcat, since SEPTEMBER 2021

environmental agencies believe that cougars have gone extinct in Connecticut. But Cadwell is convinced it was a cougar. A former hunter, he claims to have seen mountain lion tracks in the city before.

Cadwell, a 52-year-old white man with a crooked, bony frame, has been homeless for five years.

“I’m a survivor,” he said. While he has spent brief stints in homeless shelters, away from the cold, most of the time he is one of the nearly three hundred Connecticut

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residents living on the streets. He can twist and bend his chronically dislocated left shoulder in nearly any direction; he’s a certified welder, but his shoulder prevents him from finding work. While some can’t fathom why he would choose the outdoors over a shelter, Cadwell doesn’t mind the wildlife that prowls through the city at night. His animal neighbors don’t bother him, and he doesn’t bother them back. “They’re just trying to live out there,” Cadwell said. “Just trying to live.”

*** Cadwell’s bridge hangs over a set of train tracks, where New Haven borders the town of West Haven. He doesn’t technically live

on transit property, but railroad workers sometimes interrogate him regardless. One day in early spring, he said, a maintenance worker began taking photographs of his encampment, without even greeting him. “I need to report this,” the worker had said. No one has formally required Cadwell to leave yet, but the thought of his image stored in a stranger’s phone bothered him.

Cadwell is no stranger to encounters like these, in which people who do not ask his name pressure him to take his things and go. One Thanksgiving, he and his mother wandered into West Haven to watch the boats docking at the Long Island Sound. A police officer approached them and asked what they were doing, where they were from. When Cadwell mentioned he was from New Haven, he recalls the cop replying: “This is what I want you to do: get in that car and go back to New Haven. If I see your fucking ass over that bridge again, you’ll get arrested and go to jail.” Cadwell and his mom had not been breaking any laws. They had simply been sitting by the water. The pair walked back to New Haven, rattled.

People who live outside, like Cadwell—on park benches, in tents, beneath bridges—often need to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice. In New Haven, police and city officials have historically moved to clear and disperse outdoor encampments. In defense of one such eviction, the city’s homeless services coordinator, Velma George, told the New Haven Independent in 2019 that “we want people to move out of these unsafe conditions to more safe conditions.” Other forced movements, like the West Haven officer’s command to Cadwell and 39

drug tests on clients, compounding the difficulties of finding a place to sleep for people living with addiction. They impose stringent curfews and often close down during the daytime, requiring residents to enter and leave according to a uniform and preset schedule. Many shelters limit the amount of consecutive days that a client is allowed to sleep there.

Scott Cadwell at the Amistad Catholic Worker in March.

Photo by Laura Glesby. his mother, have been motivated more explicitly by prejudice.

In addition to hostile police interactions, people living on the streets are vulnerable to theft, sexual assault, and the weather.

Despite the instability of this life, many unhoused people choose to live outdoors rather than in a shelter. Cadwell once stayed in Emergency Shelter Management Services, a notoriously derelict establishment known as the “Grand Avenue Shelter.” The shelter houses seventy-five people in a room with rows and rows of orange-blanketed cots. As documented in the New Haven Independent, the shelter operates within a one-story building that garnered multiple allegations of mold and fleas around when Cadwell lived there between 2014 and 2017. In 40

theory, no one is allowed to be intoxicated at the Grand Avenue Shelter, but according to Cadwell, that wasn’t the case when he stayed there five years ago. Cadwell himself is addicted to crack cocaine. Still, the atmosphere bothered him. The shelter was “the nastiest place I think I’ve ever been in my life,” he said. “I got disgusted.” He decided to leave, and eventually found his spot by the railroad, under the bridge.

The shelter system does not fit the needs of everyone without a permanent place to live. Most homeless shelters for single adults, like Grand Avenue, are communal spaces that offer little opportunity for solitude. They are also intensely regulated. Shelters generally check for drugs and alcohol at the door, and some perform

“We don’t acknowledge the fact that there is a whole subset of people who are homeless that either cannot or will not comply with the rules of a shelter,” said Mark Colville, a white-haired homeless rights’ activist with a full-throated voice. Colville co-runs the Amistad Catholic Worker house on the Hill’s Rosette Street, which offers food and other resources for those living in poverty. “What you do when you walk into a shelter is the same thing you do when you walk into a jail,” Colville said. “You give up your freedom, you give up your privacy, and most importantly, you give up your agency.” *** When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in New Haven in March 2020, the city’s homeless shelters underwent a radical change. At first, they turned more and more people away, in an effort to “de-densify” and enable social distancing. As public health officials urged residents to “shelter-in-place,” those without a place in which to shelter heard no answers about where they could go.

By then, all the tourists had abandoned town, leaving the city full of empty guest rooms. So the city’s Community Services Department decided to rent newfound space from a handful of local hotels and motels to serve as expansion sites for shelters. Shelter clients relocated, two to a room, to establishments T HE NEW JOUR NAL

mostly on the outskirts of the city, like Best Western and the Regal Inn. Just under a year after the program’s start in March 2020, some people were still waiting for a hotel room. Jeff, who decided to share only his first name, was living outdoors in March 2021—“here and there,” as he put it. He wanted, more than anything, to find a place to stay inside. When he first heard rumors that the city of New Haven was going to open up hotel rooms for unhoused city residents during the pandemic, he didn’t believe it.

“Like, really, you’re gonna give me a hotel room?” he recalled thinking.

“It just seemed too good to be true.”

ing out event spaces for a handful of nights at a time. Throughout his first several months at the hotel when he was unemployed, Emmett would take a series of buses across New Haven each day, traveling between potential job opportunities in film and event staging, as well as stores he likes to patronize and neighborhoods he simply likes to walk in. When we spoke last spring, he sat on a

For many homeless individuals in the city, including Cadwell, the promise of a hotel room took months to materialize. Jeff managed to get on the waitlist for a hotel room in December of 2020. Three months later, he had still not secured one.

Emmett, a 50-year-old event producer-turned-filmmaker who asked to use a pseudonym, had been all right with sleeping outdoors in an encampment for most of the pandemic—until the cold came. As winter crept over New Haven, he accumulated piles and piles of blankets inside his tent, but still shivered at night. While Emmett heard that every hotel room was full in December, rumors trickled throughout the city that the hotels were like a revolving door—that people were getting kicked out all the time, especially for drug-related violations. In January, Emmett received a call that a room had become available. To accept it, he simply had to show up.

Emmett is a man constantly in motion. He once worked as a pop-up nightclub organizer, traveling across the country and rentSEPTEMBER 2021

wooden fence in an East Rock parking lot, carrying a leather cross-body bag and wearing a lanyard from his high school honors society back in California. He is used to coming and going from place to place, from bed to bed, when a new opportunity comes his way. So Emmett arrived at the hotel the day he received the call from the state’s centralized resource intake center, 2-1-1, in New Haven’s Long Wharf neighborhood.

New Haven Village Suites is right by the highway, in a part of the city known for its big box stores, food trucks, and parking lots. Emmett and his roommate shared a microwave and stove, a television, and a bathroom to themselves. In the hotel, “I could get up, I could shower, and I could go to work. That’s valu-

able to me,” Emmett said. “There’s a freezer there. I could keep cold food.”

In hotel rooms, clients can secure far more privacy and personal space than at the majority of the city’s crowded shelters. But they aren’t quite treated like regular hotel guests. They remain subject to the same rules, surveillance, and disciplinary consequences of a homeless shelter. At random, and sometimes without warning, shelter employees working at the hotel would knock on his door to do a room inspection, searching for contraband.

They were “casual,” Emmett said.

“If you don’t argue and all that shit, they just come in and go.” He didn’t mind these inspections “too much,” he said. He never expected to move in with his privacy fully intact.

“You either utilize the service or you don’t.”

Emmett mostly kept to himself in the hotel room. He wasn’t there to make friends. “They’re not gonna end up paying your bills,” he said.

If there’s one thing Emmett learned from years of couch-surfing and tent-sleeping, it’s that “nobody’s ever gonna pay for your car, put gas in your tank, pay the lease on your house,” he said. “You must always spread your wings and move away from people, no matter how good they are, or nice they are, or friendly.”

After roaming around the city on his job search, Emmett would usually go to the store to pick up something to eat. He loved barbecue food, and he developed a recent habit of mixing lemon iced tea-flavored powder into his water. After eating, he would return to the hotel, checking his email and text messages. Then, he would switch on the TV. Emmett didn’t often remember the names of the films he watched 41

alone in his hotel room at night.

The particular stories weren’t as important to him as the way those stories are told. He isn’t the kind of person to switch on the television simply to escape into someone else’s narrative. Instead, he took note of each movie’s production strategies.

He digested the lighting, the camera’s motion, the rhythm of the dialogue. He tried to measure the gaps between what a director might have envisioned and what the film turned out to be.

After the movie was done, he would shower. Sleep. Wake up in the morning. Eat a bowl of cereal.

Then, he would leave to look for work again. Emmett carried a stack of three-page resumes nearly everywhere he went, to hand out to prospective employers. In a letter on the final page, he wrote, “I plan to be available whenever the offer may become valuable for you. I shall respond upon notice at any time.”

He took his desire to find a job more seriously than any other commitment; in a few months, he would go on to find work at a local steakhouse and as a personal assistant.

“The person who has the company with the job is the most important person to me,” he said. “I know there’s bigger, better, brighter days out there. I just can’t let it get out of my mind or my sensibility.” His left knee trembled as he spoke, as if preparing to resume walking again at any moment. *** Cadwell often sits inside the front yard tent at the Amistad Catholic Worker, the free kitchen and gathering place that Colville and his wife Luz Catarineau have run for decades out of their own home. Cadwell lingers for hours. He likes to tell stories about his family. He calls his mom, who lives in senior housing in the town of Branford, every day.

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“She’s my everything,” he said in March. “My best friend.” One day when he was 25, he recalled, his mother came to him, crying. He’d been raised as an only child, but his mom revealed that morning that he had a biological sister two years older than him, who had been given up for adoption. He met his sister for the first time in 2005. Every so often, she comes to visit. “We’re close, but not as close as I’d like us to be,” Cadwell said.

His sister works in the Life Insurance industry. “She does really well for herself,” Cadwell said inside the Amistad Catholic Worker tent, as he ate from a paper plate of rice and sausage.

“I’m proud of her.” She works remotely in a “beautiful” house on the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border. She cares for a number of pet spaniels and horses. “She’s got a trailer for the horses, and it’s got air-conditioning and everything.”

After living outside for five years, Cadwell decided to sign up for a hotel room one frigid December day. Months later in March, he was still on the waitlist.

(When I tried to reach him again in September, his cell number redirected to someone else's line.)

“I respect what they’re doing with the hotel beds,” he said. A hotel room, he knew, would pose its own challenges. He’d heard of dozens of people getting thrown out for drug use. The curfews, the searches, the structure—it would all be unfamiliar for Cadwell, and probably difficult. “It would be hard for someone like me to adjust.” But it was freezing out, so he signed up anyway.

Laura Glesby is a senior in Timothy Dwight College and a former Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

ASIDES

EAST HADDAM

BY ELI MENNERICK

For our day trip, we drove to East Haddam—forty minutes from New Haven and home to the Devil’s Hopyard State Park. Supposedly, The Devil grows his hops there.

We hiked around for a while—past a waterfall, over some boulders— without seeing anything very satanic. For lunch, we stopped at a café called Higher Grounds. Along with our fifteen-dollar breakfast burritos, the barista placed on our tray a fresh marijuana leaf. We sat out back at a damp picnic table; the other patrons sat in a circle and passed around a joint. Drew found a hair in his burrito, then a small, wiggling worm. None of us found the courage to ask for a refund.

FLOODS, SEPTEMBER 2021

BY ALEXANDRA GALLOWAY

From our fifth floor Davenport suite, we stick our heads out the window to feel the rain kiss our faces. We peel the red wax off all the Babybel cheese in our fridge.

“Before it goes bad,” we say, eating it all. Below us, white tents in the courtyard sag and collapse, little empires going to shit. We can’t hear the alarms blaring, but we can see the white strobe flash through the windows of the library. Blinking, blinking, blinking, sending a futile Morse code as barefoot first-years and upperclassmen, brandishing flashlights, wander in the dark floodwaters. The start of the end, my suitemate muses.

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ON THE ROOF OF WATSON

SALOVEY’S GARDEN

This weekend, I found myself at a party with twenty strangers on the roof of the Watson Center. It felt unlikely and illegal, and thus important and correct— probably the sentiments of every person who’s ever hung out on a roof of an institutional building. There was cheap, sweet rosé. There was talk of holy shit I’m so glad we aren’t first years anymore and are you kidding at least we aren’t in high school anymore. Every minute or two, a motion-sensitive floodlight blinked on, at which point whatever conversation I was jiving with was met with a horrible overhead brightness, pointing out flaws in faces you would normally choose to ignore in the gush of meeting someone new and interesting.

It was as if a helicopter were hovering above, blaring its spotlight and shouting STOP You Have Been Caught In the Act of Trying to Be NICE and Make FRIENDS, and then turning off to signal never mind and that actually you may carry on. After a year and a half of constantly halted socialization, it’s nice to carry on. Even if it’s stop and go.

Last year, as “let’s grab a meal” gave way to “let’s go for a walk,” Yale students stumbled upon 43 Hillhouse, a quasi-public garden of rolling lawns and sprawling oaks that makes up the backyard of President Salovey and Marta Moret, design courtesy of Master Gardener Moret. “It feels like we shouldn’t be allowed to be there,” said one undergraduate student.

But the pandemic transformed the once-exclusive space into a more inviting one, as the community began to use the yard for walks, picnics, and reflection. I celebrated my 21st birthday there, laying my blanket under the shade of a gracious oak, enjoying the balmy breeze with friends as we munched on grapes and cheese. It seems the space is here to stay this fall; Salovey told me via email that he’s “delighted to share this beautiful open space with the community.”

BY NICOLE DIRKS

BY NANKI CHUGH

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T HE NEW JOUR NAL