Literati Bookstore celebrates the release of a new edition of Operation Mind, featuring readings by Silke-Maria Weineck and Alan Wald.

Tuesday, SEPTEMBER 16, 2025 - 6:30pm
Literati Bookstore
124 E. Washington St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104

About the book:
Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan’s Operation Mind is a body of evidence, a prophetic warning, and a call to action about the urgency of doing all we can to prevent thought control in America. In 1952, this meticulously researched pamphlet documented the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ attacks and impact. The HUAC abused its charge to intimidate and silence academics, union members, social critics, scientists, artists, teachers, political opponents, rabbis and other religious leaders, to make them appear suspect and “un-American” in the eyes of the American people.

The 2025 reprint of Operation Mind offers a foreword by comparatist Silke-Maria Weineck and an essay by historian Alan Wald connecting Operation Mind’s history of McCarthyism with present-day attacks on academic freedom.

Silke-Maria Weineck is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is interested in figurations of power, be they literary, cultural, or institutional.

Alan Wald is H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The author of nine books on the US literary and intellectual Left, he is a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and the University of Michigan Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.