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Brian Levin, Cal State San Bernardino expert on extremism and hate, retires
The Sun
Oct. 10, 2023
After nearly a quarter century of leading Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, founding director Brian Levin decided it was time to step down. “Right now, things are very upsetting, which is how I knew it was time to go,” he said.
He’s been studying extremism for years, and the tide of hatred and intolerance keeps rising. “What’s frustrating now is how mainstream bigotry has become,” he said. “Now the hate is an a la carte system. You don’t have to belong to a big hate group or even a hate group at all. The number of hate groups, according to the (Southern Poverty Law Center) actually went down, because people are freelancing.”
Shock and stepped-up security in Southern California as Israel-Gaza battle rages
Los Angeles Times
Oct. 8, 2023
Brian Levin, former director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said Saturday that he was “shocked and saddened” to wake up to images of fire and violence in the conflict between Israel and Hamas fighters from the Gaza Strip.“As a citizen of the world who has been working with diverse groups here and elsewhere to promote peace, it’s beyond heartbreaking,” Levin said. “But additionally, as a Jewish person whose father was a POW to the Nazis and has relatives who have faced the horror of the Holocaust, to see photos of bloodied women and elderly grandmothers held hostage is jarring. So I guess I have two incredible disappointments.”
Invisible women, invisible abortions, invisible histories
Zócalo Public Square
Oct. 9, 2023
Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, assistant professor of history, published an article that “reflects on why society immortalizes a man’s daring cliff dive, but chooses to forget a woman’s fatal abortion.” The article focuses on Elizabeth Poole, daughter of the cliff diver, Horace Poole. “Young women of Elizabeth’s time are nearly invisible in our history books,” Gutierrez-Romine wrote. “They are silent, transient figures in a historical record that obscures about as much as it tells. How should we understand the persistent erasure of women’s history—particularly of centuries of life altering experiences—that society has ignored, forgotten, or dismissed as quotidian and mundane?”
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