In addition to ALBA's annual reunion, at the Museo del Barrio at 4:30pm on Sunday, May 2 (some tickets still available!), there is a whole series of other interesting events this week, including appearances by prominent Spanish authors such as Javier Cercas and Bernardo Atxaga. See the Hispanic New York site for...
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Almería's The Reader reports:
Baltasar Garzón had called on Varela to recuse himself after it became known that the Supreme Court judge had advised those placing written allegations against Garzón, the Falange and Manos Limpias, on how to edit those written admissions to make them acceptable.
More here.In contrast with Spain, Argentina's courts are putting an end to impunity. The New York Times reports:
The Supreme Court overturned pardons of a dictatorship-era president and economy minister on Tuesday, paving the way for them to be tried for kidnapping and extortion. Former President Jorge Videla, left, and his...
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Amy Goodman--recipient of the First ALBA Activist Award this coming Sunday, May 2, in New York (tickets still available!)--reports:
Rallies were held around the world this weekend to support a leading human rights judge facing trial in Spain. Baltasar Garzón is accused of overreaching his authority in a probe...
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The travelling exhibition ‘Antifascistas: British and Irish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War’ opens at the 12 Star Gallery, 8 Storey’s Gate, London SW1P 3AT, on 5 May and runs until 14 May. The gallery is open daily, Monday to Friday, from 10am to 6pm.
The exhibition and accompanying book tell the story of...
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The Voros family is publishing one chapter per week of the Hungarian-American Lincoln Brigader:
Innocent as I was about politics I nevertheless began to observe some ugly cracks in the façade of democracy. The corruption of the Harding administration, the lynchings and floggings by the Ku Klux Klan in the...
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Today, April 26, is the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Guernica. EITB reports:
Peace Research Center 'Gernika gogoratuz'awarded Basque Premier Jose Antonio Agirre with the Peace and reconciliation Award -coinciding with the 50th anniversary...
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The Guardian correspondent, and author of Ghosts of Spain, pens a long piece on the topic:
Many Spaniards are amazed by the protagonists who have suddenly reappeared into mainstream debate. The supreme court is acting at the behest of the Falange — the minuscule descendant of the party that provided...
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When Henri Cartier-Bresson died, he had taken a half million photographs. Of these, 300 are on display at MoMA in New York, twenty percent of which have never been seen in public before. The show is reviewed by the Boston Globe:
Few artists contributed as much to the visual texture of...
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Scott Boehm writes on the Garzón case in Counterpunch: If Martin Luther King were alive today, he would undoubtedly support Garzón and those brave enough to publicly challenge the state of impunity that is the glaring stain on the sunny, smiley surface that characterizes Spanish democracy. Long after Franco’s death, Spain is segregated...
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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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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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