On a visit to sites important to the Spanish Civil War in October, 2010, Alan Warren took Josie Nelson Yurek, Parkie Parker, and me to visit the Ancient Major Synagogue in Barcelona. Historically, the Synagogue has roots dating back to the middle ages, although now it functions as a Museum in addition to...
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In a recent post in the Spanish-language blog FronteraD, filmmaker and novelist Alfonso Domingo reviews these two new books: Spanish translations of the memoirs of the Lincoln volunteer, James Yates (From Mississippi to Madrid: Memoirs of an African-American in the Lincoln Brigade) and of the complete writings of Langston Hughes about the war in Spain....
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Elizabeth Malkin reports in the NY Times:
The Spanish government asked the United States and El Salvador Friday to extradite 15 former Salvadoran military officers in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter. The arrest warrants were issued in...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, recipient of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award earlier this year, will stand trial on January 17 and 24 for two of the three cases pending against him at Spain's Supreme Court. In both, the principal charge is prevarication, that is, knowingly overstepping judicial boundaries. The January 24 stems from...
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Several months ago, President Zapatero appointed a committee of experts to put together a report with recommendations on the future of the Valle de los Caídos, the pharaonic monument and burial place of José Antonio Primo de Rivera (founder of Spain’s fascist party, Falange) and the Generalísimo himself, Francisco Franco. The committee issued its...
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The plaintiffs in the case against Franco's repression that is being handled by the Argentine courts (see previous Volunteer coverage here) have requested that the judge, María Servini de Cubría, travel to Spain to interview victims of Franco's repression, allowing them to testify. The plaintiffs have also presented a response to the report issued...
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This coming Wednesday November 30th, at 6pm ALBA is co-sponsoring a symposium on the Spanish Civil War Photographs of Agustí Centelles at the King Juan Carlos I Center in New York City (53 Washington Sq S), where the exhibit Centelles in_edit_oh! is up for another couple of weeks. With the participation of...
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The Spanish daily Público reports: Spain’s Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts has uploaded to the Ministry of Culture’s youtube channel a selection of 93 film documents from its historical archive and from the Spanish Civil War holdings of Spain’s Filmoteca. Many of the Civil War documentaries were included on a wonderful DVD collection...
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A day after the landslide conservative victory in Spain’s general elections on Sunday, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has announced the discovery of the remains of Nicomedes Fernández, miner from the town of Nerva (Huelva) who was killed in February 1938 at age 34. The new government of Mariano Rajoy,...
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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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