The renowned social documentary photographer and activist Milton Rogovin died last week, aged 101. From the Buffalo News:
Mr. Rogovin turned to photography not long after being hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1957 for leftist political activity. ... His photography would take him from West Side...
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Celebrated triennially, Cine-Lit is the premiere international conference devoted to Hispanic film and literature and linked with the Portland International Film Festival. This February, Cine--Lit VII will feature a series of lectures and film screenings focusing on the cinematic representation of the role of the Lincolns in the Spanish Civil War. Juan Salas...
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Last night a young Spanish poet, Isabel Cadenas, showed me her blog: nuncafuiagranada.blogspot.com. When I asked her why she chose that line from Rafael Alberti's homage to Federico García Lorca, victim of a fascist firing squad in the first month of the civil war, she replied "Because I've never been to Granada." Alberti...
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In my family's photo albums is this shot of General Miaja (seated with round spectacles) --leader of the defense of Madrid-- in the living room of the Brooklyn home of my grandparents at some point during the Spanish Civil War.
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To the surprise of many, El País reports, the programming for the Berlin Film Festival this February includes a feature-length documentary about Baltasar Garzón by the Catalan director Isabel Coixet (The Secret Life of Words, My Life Without Me), based on a long interview that the novelist Manuel Rivas held with...
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A propos of Susie Linfield's new book on Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and others, Jed Perl reflects in The New Republic on the importance of "great photojournalism":
Photojournalists are yesterday’s heroes. ... Few photographers are any longer seen as providing definitive information about some national or international trouble spot, at...
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Another clip from Facing Fascism:
"No pasarán"--"They shall not pass"--was the antifascist rallying call throughout the war. The phrase referred to the defense of Madrid from the Fascist onslaught. A Spanish cigar maker living in Tampa, Florida, composed a song with those words as the refrain; it was recorded on a...
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Earlier this week, the Diario de Teruel covered the trip of a group of family members of Abraham Lincoln Brigade took this past fall to visit some of the Brigade's "sites of memory":
Viento glacial, aire siberiano y frío ártico son algunos de los adjetivos con los que el escritor y...
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Juan María Gómez Ortiz sends this image of Maynard Goldstein at the Jarama front, in the spring of 1937, which illustrates the cover of the Spanish edition of Harry Fisher's book Comrades. He writes:
The photo was taken by Sam Walters. Harry Fisher was very close to Maynard all along his life and...
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Jay Greenfield was 5 years old when his brother Hy enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; James D. Fernández interviewed him for the Facing Fascism exhibit. Read Hy's letters home here. Video here.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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On May 3, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Community received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Executive Director Audrey Sasson delivered the following acceptance speech.
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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