Hrishabh Sandilya

Trouvère to a generation, Hollywood screenwriter, distinguished professor and amongst the ‘100 coolest people in Los Angeles,’ James Ragan has read for six Heads of State, with Bob Dylan, and to a standing ovation from 100,000 people in the USSR. Not a politician, but his politics have long played a role in both his poetry and his life. From protests in the 60s to reading for the Supreme Soviet and at the United Nations, Ragan has always been an astute social commentator and chronicler through his work.  His most recent anthology of poems “Too Long Solitude” was published in 2009 by the University of Oklahoma Press. A summer Prague resident, he talks about President Havel, the current state of America, the survival of the Arts and other things dear to him, in this expansive interview with Hrishabh Sandilya. (more…)

Marissa Miller

In 1899, a Jewish man named Leopold Hilsner was accused of raping and murdering a young Catholic girl in the small village of Polna in southern Bohemia. Immediately after the murder, a great deal of anti-Semitic press surrounded the case and fomented riots and acts of violence against the Jewish community throughout the Czech lands. During this time, the outspoken Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a philosophy professor at the time and future first president of Czechoslovakia, protested the charges that were brought against Hilsner and espoused his support for the Jewish people. Although Hilsner was still convicted of murder, Masaryk’s public defense was a harbinger of future relations between the Czech Republic and the Jewish community – and the future state of Israel. (more…)