// from the editors //
Fall 2019
From the Editors
As students, we are often told that Columbia is our home. Yet our experience often feels transitory; we tend to focus more on our winter break plans, securing summer internships, and our post-graduation goals than on our time actually spent on campus. In this way, the university feels less like a home, and more like a holding cell where we incubate for a while, only to leave for bigger and better things.
One of the victories of our campus discourse is that students are encouraged to feel embedded in their identities, and to bring their own experiences to bear on how they engage with life on campus. But what is the identity of a Columbia student? Are we all members of one community, or representatives of vastly different communities, with identities that distinguish us from one another, instead of binding us together? We may thrive on campus, but as representatives of disparate identities which originate off campus, instead of as representatives of a cohesive “Columbian” identity. So is Columbia really our home?
In this edition of The Current, our writers bring their full selves and disparate identities to their writing.They discuss memories from childhood, and educational experiences which have formed who they are. Our articles tackle how a poem can change the way one sees themself, or how engaging with the same texts can bring a family together. A student’s major is shown to implicate how they understand the world, and encounters with a Jewish immigrant past shed light on who we are in the present. The complicated relationship between personal identities and a Columbia identity is explored through acts of protest. This edition of The Current shows the dynamism of personal identity, but does not lose sight of societal issues in a subjectivist fog.
Our writers offer their own nuanced ideas of home. Home for the writers of The Current is a bookstore, a trip to the ballet with a loved one, a memory of a fractured past, the galvanizing indeterminacy of a political present. Home is not one thing; instead, it is an attitude. As Columbia students searching for community, our writers demonstrate how, in moments of thoughtful reflection, we can create our own independent and collective homes. This issue reaffirms what we at The Current have always known: that young writers have clear and powerful visions of who they are and who we might all become. It is our mission to listen to them.
Yona Benjamin, Editor in Chief; Yaira Kobrin, Managing Editor
Cover art "Ancient Recording" by Ary Stillman, Art Properties, Columbia University
One of the victories of our campus discourse is that students are encouraged to feel embedded in their identities, and to bring their own experiences to bear on how they engage with life on campus. But what is the identity of a Columbia student? Are we all members of one community, or representatives of vastly different communities, with identities that distinguish us from one another, instead of binding us together? We may thrive on campus, but as representatives of disparate identities which originate off campus, instead of as representatives of a cohesive “Columbian” identity. So is Columbia really our home?
In this edition of The Current, our writers bring their full selves and disparate identities to their writing.They discuss memories from childhood, and educational experiences which have formed who they are. Our articles tackle how a poem can change the way one sees themself, or how engaging with the same texts can bring a family together. A student’s major is shown to implicate how they understand the world, and encounters with a Jewish immigrant past shed light on who we are in the present. The complicated relationship between personal identities and a Columbia identity is explored through acts of protest. This edition of The Current shows the dynamism of personal identity, but does not lose sight of societal issues in a subjectivist fog.
Our writers offer their own nuanced ideas of home. Home for the writers of The Current is a bookstore, a trip to the ballet with a loved one, a memory of a fractured past, the galvanizing indeterminacy of a political present. Home is not one thing; instead, it is an attitude. As Columbia students searching for community, our writers demonstrate how, in moments of thoughtful reflection, we can create our own independent and collective homes. This issue reaffirms what we at The Current have always known: that young writers have clear and powerful visions of who they are and who we might all become. It is our mission to listen to them.
Yona Benjamin, Editor in Chief; Yaira Kobrin, Managing Editor
Cover art "Ancient Recording" by Ary Stillman, Art Properties, Columbia University