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
How the Dream
Can Become a Reality |
Thousands of people came |
The Right to Vote Is
a Human Right |
Demonstrators at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, just across from the United Nations, voice their opposition to states' attempts to roll back voting rights.
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 February 28, 2007.
• 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with Photographs & Historical Documents, & Essays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, February 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....