Ruth Balint
Ruth Balint is an Associate Professor in History at the University of New South Wales. She writes and teaches about histories of migration and refugees. Her forthcoming book, Destination Elsewhere: Displaced persons and their quest to leave Europe after 1945, is published with Cornell University Press. A co-written book with Julie Kalman, Smuggled: An illegal history of journeys to Australia is published with NewSouth Publishing, and will be out in 2021.
In late August, it took only a few days for the Taliban to secure control of Kabul in the wake of the final withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan. The breakneck speed of the takeover was accompanied by images of mass terror, alongside a profound sense of betrayal. As in the closing days of the Vietnam War in 1975, the international airport quickly became the epicentre of scenes of chaos an ... (read more)
‘Half a Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers,’ wrote Joseph Roth, in The Wandering Jews (1937), his little-known collection of essays written not long before the Holocaust. ‘The struggle for papers, the struggle against papers, is something an Eastern Jew gets free of only if he uses criminal methods to take on society.’ Faced with police demanding to see ‘exotic, im ... (read more)