Hershl Hartman writes: IB fighters remembered in Secular Yom Kippur program Since 1973, progressive Secular/cultural Jews — including many intercultural families — in Los Angeles have marked yonkiper/Yom Kippur (day of purgation/atonement) in an alternative observance in which personal reflections are combined with social concerns, and poetry replaces prayer. Reflecting our general anti-fascist heritage...
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"A former Guatemalan soldier accused of being involved in a 1982 massacre during that country's civil war was extradited Friday to California where he faces immigration fraud charges," the Associate Press reports:
José Sosa Orantes was brought to the U.S. from Canada, where he fled after American officials began investigating allegations that...
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Our friends at the IBMT write with the sad news of the passing of IB veteran Lou Kenton. Born on 1 September 1908 in the East End of London, Lou was a print worker and prominent anti-fascist before the start of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Spain in July 1937 on...
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Esperanza Aguirre, arguably one of the most important Spanish politicians in recent history, announced her resignation on Monday, due by and large to having been diagnosed with breast cancer. Aguirre, 60, served in the Spanish government for over thirty years, including a run as the head of the Spanish Senate. According to the...
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This past weekend marked the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Nancy and Len Tsou, intrepid photographers, were there to document. See their images here.
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According to Público, Spain's Ministry of Justice has created an archive in which one may access information about the 4,400 Spaniards who died in concentration camps in Austria and Germany during the Second World War. The database will provide names, dates of birth and death, and any relevant historical documents related to the...
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Santiago Carrillo, the historic leader of the Spanish Communist Party, has died. He was 97. An English-language obit from El País can be found here. See also coverage from MásPúblico and Público.
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Our friends in the UK at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have just sent us their latest newsletter, with articles on the new plaque at the IB memorial in London, the Pyrenees crossing, Republican refugees in Sussex, Christopher Caudwell, and much more. Read it in pdf here.
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Along with David Graeber, Richard Sennet--social and cultural theorist and proud son and nephew of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade--has an article in this week's issue of The Nation dedicated to the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:
It’s been a year since the Occupy movements of 2011, and like other participants,...
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David Graeber--anthropologist, anarchist, one of the originators of Occupy Wall Street, and son of Lincoln vet Kenneth Graeber--writes in this week's issue of The Nation:
The idea of the “99 percent” managed to do something that no one has done in the United States since the Great Depression: revive the concept of social...
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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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