Alice Bernstein & Friends
Welcome to my website, where you can read articles by me and persons I am proud to have as friends and colleagues. They have been published in many newspapers, including Charleston Chronicle, Tennessee Tribune, La Vida News/ The Black Voice (Texas), Birmingham Times, Harlem News, Omaha Star, Philadelphia Sun. They show the importance of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the great American educator and critic Eli Siegel, in understanding the questions of people everywhere about the world and our individual lives.     — Alice Bernstein

   Latest News

Tuskegee Airman Dabney Montgomery and The Force of Ethics in Civil Rights                  This new article is by David Bernstein, writing as cameraman for the oral history project. Mr. Bernstein movingly describes the interview with Mr. Montgomery in relation to what he learned from Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism about what it means to be fair to the suffering of other people.             Link to the story.

Envisioning Emancipation and the urgent question: how should we see people?                  A new book from Temple University Press, published in honor of the Emancipation Proclamation's 150th anniversary, provides an opportunity for everyone to address this urgent question, still raging in America: How should we see other people?             Link to the story.

Poetry, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Dr. Martin Luther King                  January 1, 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, stating that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” In 1968, with enormous respect for Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Eli Siegel expressed what America and every person in our troubled world is hoping for, in "Something Else Should Die: A Poem With Rhymes." What would it mean for injustice to die?             Link to the story.

Honoring Unsung Heroes in Somerset, NJ - Link to the Story

Link to an Article Rediscovered - Benedict College Luncheon Highlights Works of Alice Bernstein

"The People of Clarendon County" —
A Play by Ossie Davis, & the Answer to Racism
This educational performance event, based on the play by Ossie Davis and the book by Alice Bernstein, travels to schools, libraries, museums, churches, and universities around the country. The following are only the most recent events that have taken place since November 28, 2007.

•  Somerset Run Clubhouse, Somerset, NY  •  SE Regional Black Male Summit, Columbia, SC
•  North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh   •  Tulane University Law School, New Orleans
•  Elmont Memorial Library, Elmont, NY    •  Hamilton Fish Park Public Library, New York, NY
•  Medgar Evers College (CUNY), Brooklyn, NY      •  Baruch College (CUNY), New York, NY
•  South Carolina State University, Orangeburg & the I.P. Stanback Museum     & Planetarium
•  Congressional Auditorium, US Capitol Visitor Center,
    Washington, DC

                Washington, DC: House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn opens Clarendon event
                                       with Alice Bernstein at the Congressional Auditorium, US Capitol
                                            Visitor Center, October 21, 2009. Photo credit: Robert Murphy

The People of Clarendon County
—A Play by Ossie Davis
with Photographs & Historical Documents, & Essays
on the Education That Can End Racism
Edited by Alice Bernstein

Ruby Dee, Academy Award Nominee, says of Alice Bernstein and this book: "In her commitment to telling the story of the civil rights struggles...Alice uncovered the play, "The People of Clarendon County."... It moved my husband to think that fifty years later, school children might learn about history by reading or acting in his play. In addition, Alice's book will also inform people about the success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method in enabling children to learn every subject, and ending prejudice in the classroom." Read the article about the play, Ossie Davis, and Third World Press!

Right: Book launch, November 28, 2007, at the Harlem School of the Arts, which included:
1) Alice Bernstein's account of conversations with Ossie Davis, research which led to his play and her book; 2) performance of the play by drama students, 3) interactive lesson based on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method by educator Monique Michael, and 4) comments by legendary actress/activist and Academy Award Nominee, Ruby Dee, wife of Ossie Davis.

Also by Alice Bernstein:
AESTHETIC REALISM AND THE ANSWER TO RACISM This book is being published with a sense of urgency and hope; urgency, because racism is still rampant in the world; hope, because there is a true, practical, kind, learnable, and yes—even beautiful—answer. That answer is in the study of Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great American poet and critic Eli Siegel (1902-1978), who identified the cause of all human injustice as contempt, the "addition to self through the lessening of something else." Racism, he explained, does not begin with race, but with the human tendency to have contempt for the world, for everything the self sees as different.  This book documents how, through study of Aesthetic Realism, contempt changes—not into tolerance, but into true respect for other people, and a conviction that we need the difference of the world to be all we can be.  >> Click here to read more....

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