Len Crome lecture: Taking Sides: Artists and Writers and the Spanish Civil War Date/Time: Saturday, 1st March, 2014 11 am – 5 pm (optional Spanish evening meal 6pm – 9pm) Speakers: Republican Education and the Arts: Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom The Representation of the International Brigades in Spanish Cinema: Carmen Herrero Gerda Taro and Robert Capa: Photographing War: Jane...
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ALBA is pleased to present Impugning Impunity: A Human Rights Documentary Film Series, which will be held from November 22-24, 2013 at Pace University in the Multipurpose Room, 3 Spruce Street New York, NY 10038 (press release here). Now in its third year, this annual film series activates a community-wide dialogue on human rights...
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In 2011, David Graeber’s monumental book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" was published. In that very same year, he burst into national consciousness with the Occupy Wall Street movement he helped to spark.
This year, he has written a daring book “The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement.” Part reflection on Occupy...
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Spain's cooperative newspaper La Marea, which just launched its new website, has published an op-ed column about last year's verdict by the Spanish Supreme Court that closed the judicial avenue as a way to seek reparation and justice for the victims of Francoism (while acquitting Baltasar Garzón after having disbarred him in another case). Reading the...
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Last month, an Argentinian judge named María Romilda Servini de Cubría, called for Antonio González Pacheco's extradition. One of the Franco's most notorious torturers, Antonio González Pacheco, was reportedly spotted running in a Madrid half-marathon.
On Sunday, El Mundo newspaper published a photograph of González Pacheco that shocked many of his alleged...
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While Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon was giving a speech on proposed abortion reforms three pro-abortion activists, associated with the feminist group Femen, staged a protest in the public gallery of Madrid’s parliament. The three women who had written “abortion is sacred” on their chests while chanting the phrase were taken into police custody. Lara...
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In his new book, Franco’s Crypt, British biographer Jeremy Treglown challenges the idea that during the years of the Franco regime Spain was a intellectual and cultural wasteland. Mr. Treglown writes about subversive elements in the arts. Many paintings, books, and other works of arts in Spain, he argues, used symbolism, hyper realism, and...
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Raphael Minder, writing for the New York Times, highlights the recent indictments of former Francoist officials by the Argentine judge who, invoking universal jurisdiction, has taken up the case brought by victims of the Franco regime:
When the Argentine judge in the case, María Romilda Servini de Cubría, issued arrest...
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The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances closed its visit to Spain yesterday with a poorly attended press conference at which the two UN representatives presented the Spanish government with a long list of urgent tasks: “The State must assume a leadership role and engage more actively to respond to the demands...
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The exhibit “Chile Vive” featuring historical posters from Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Government in Chile (1970-73) is on show at El Taller Latino (2710 Broadway, NYC) until November 2. (See here for a review in the Indypendent.) Curators are Andrea Arroyo and Carol Smith, who sends along the following: I had the great privilege...
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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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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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