Trisha Ziff’s Mexican Suitcase opens in Cine Luchana (Madrid) on November 11th. Screening times: 4:30pm and 8:30pm.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Trisha Ziff’s Mexican Suitcase opens in Cine Luchana (Madrid) on November 11th. Screening times: 4:30pm and 8:30pm.
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While poking around ancestry.com, I somehow ended up in a cache of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration –“Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835 – 1974- Spain, 1930-1939.” As you can imagine, each document there is the germ of a novel or film, and, not surpisingly, there are a significant...
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(Texto en castellano.) The astoundingly profound and widespread contributions of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to the promotion of justice and human rights have been everywhere on display these last two weeks of October (October 16-30, 2011). Though not always acknowledged in the headlines and soundbytes that are streaming in these days from...
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Two-thirds of the way into Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, two Mexican intellectuals comment on the donation of that vast archive to the International Center of Photography in New York. Photographer Pedro Meyer openly says...
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ALBA's Human Rights Film Series opens tonight in the Museum of the City of New York with the must-see documentary Impunity (2011; trailer), by Hollman Morris and Juan José Lozano. Impunity investigates the sudden interruption to “peace and justice” process in Colombia due to the political and economic interests of the...
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The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), one of the co-sponsors of ALBA's Human Rights Film Series this coming weekend, has just published an interview with Trisha Ziff, director of The Mexican Suitase, one of the documentaries screened there. Listen to it here.
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On Friday, the same day the film opens at movie theaters in Spain, Trisha Ziff's gripping documentary The Mexican Suitcase is being screened at ALBA's Human Rights Film Festival (Museum of the City of New York, tickets here, trailer here). See here for coverage in the Spanish press today. The Suitcase...
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ALBA joins the international community in its denunciation of the appalling vandalization of the recently inaugurated monument to the International Brigades on the campus of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. See El País coverage here.
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We are sad to report the passing of Fanny Edelman aka Fanny Jabcovsky, Argentine political activist and feminist, one of the most charismatic among the women volunteers to join the Republic's fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and President of the Communist Party of Argentina. See here for a touching video;...
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As part of the events surrounding the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigade, a group of Lincoln vet family members took a tour of some of the central sites of the US Medical Services in the Spanish Civil War. The tour, led by Alan Warren, visited several hospitals directed by Dr....
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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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