Spain in/and the United States Screening and discussion of two documentaries about Spaniards in the US. NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and its King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, together with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Comisión de Archivos de La Nacional, are pleased to present filmmaker Luis Argeo, who...
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From the English edition of El País:
The ages of the men range from the late fifties to mid-sixties. At the drop of a hat, they have been taken back 33 years, the length of time they have been at liberty.
"Who are you?"
"We are former prisoners."
"No,...
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Today's papers feature another series of reactions to yesterday's news that the second Supreme Court trial against Garzón has been opened. Many commentators, including El País in an editorial, brand the obvious rush with which the presiding judge, Barreiro, is proceeding, opening the trial with several appeals pending, and denying Garzón and...
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Juan Salas was in Paris in March, alongside ALBA's Robert Coale, to present With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, the rediscovered film by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline (clip here), at Cinéma du Réel, the prestigous international documentary film festival. Here is an interview with Juan (in French) from the Festival...
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ALBA has just issued a press release (versión en español) with further details on the May 14 annual celebration, featuring ALBA/Puffin Awardee Baltasar Garzón:
A pre-event benefit will feature a question-and-answer session and the opportunity to meet Judge Garzón over a light lunch. Judge Garzón will be interviewed by Jonathan Turley,...
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A news item buried in yesterday's edition of the Spanish e-paper El Plural called attention to a little-known case pending in Spain's Constitutional Court, whose outcome could have definitive repercussions on two of Garzón's three cases.
There is an anomalous figure in Spanish law known as "acusación popular", which allows unharmed citizens to press...
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Some additional English-language coverage from the Associated Press:
In his latest altercation with the Spanish legal system, Garzon was probing a network of businesses that allegedly paid money and gifts to members of Spain's conservative opposition Popular Party in exchange for lucrative contracts in towns and regions governed by that party. As part...
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There seems to be no end to the legal and historical ironies associated with Judge Baltasar Garzón, who is currently facing three sets charges in the Spanish Supreme Court. If he loses the first one--for opening an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime--he, the judge, would be the first person...
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"Judge Baltasar Garzón is soon to appear in the Supreme Court over wiretaps that he ordered to listen in on conversations between lawyers and the heads of the corrupt "Gürtel" business network," the English edition of El País reports:
The judge in charge of the case, Alberto Jorge Barreiro, announced Monday that the...
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Nest Tuesday, April 12th, at 6pm, the Center for Worker Education, City College, CUNY & The Frances S. Patai Fund is hosting a talk by Prof. Isabelle Rohr on American Medical Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The lectures is free and open to the public, at the Center for Worker Education, 7th Floor Auditorium...
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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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