On March 9, one of several memorial gatherings for Peter N. Carroll, ALBA’s chair emeritus, was held in New York City, in the presence of his partner Jeannette Ferrary and his children, Natasha and Matthew. The event included fragments of a long biographical interview with Peter by Sebastiaan Faber that was filmed in the...
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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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The Spanish Senator Carla Antonelli will discuss the role of the LGBTQ movement in the anti-fascist movement. ALBA’s film series continues on June 5.
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On May 3, the nonprofit Jews for Racial & Economic Justice received the 2025 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Jews For Racial & Economic Justice Community (JFREJ) is a 6,000-member grassroots organization, widely considered to be the home of New York’s Jewish Left.
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Thank you to all those involved in the preparation of the Barsky issue, including Nancy Phillips for her financial support. I always read the magazine with interest, but this issue was of personal importance to me.
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Shirley Mangini, a professor emerita of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach, who served as ALBA Board member and Volunteer book review editor, passed away on October 11, 2024. Born near Pittsburgh, she lived in Madrid in the early 1970s before earning her graduate degrees at the University of New Mexico. After teaching...
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When Barbara Dane accepted the Clara Lemlich award for social activism in 2021, she drew a distinction between singer-activists whose songs deal with injustice, and activist-singers, who are out there on the picket lines fighting injustice themselves. She was definitely one of the latter. Barbara, who died at her home in Oakland, California, on...
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Keefer Street, by David Spaner. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024. 307pp.
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Journey Through the Spanish Civil War, by S. L. Shneiderman. Translated from the Yiddish by Deborah A. Green. Amherst, MA.: White Goat Press, 2024. 139 pp.
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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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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Dear Friends, We know that many of you are working hard to transform your indignation and disbelief at political developments in our country into the mobilizing energy needed to build a new Popular Front against fascism. At ALBA we are well aware of the small but significant role we play as an educational organization...
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While ALBA's online film workshops continue apace, we also honored Dr. Edward Barsky on the 50th anniversary of his death.
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The Watt Essay Prize committee was excited to receive 45 submissions this past year from students from the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America with an especially robust number of submissions from undergraduate and graduate students. This year, the Watt Committee awarded three prizes for wonderful pre-collegiate student submissions. Taryn Cunningham’s historical fiction...
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The crowdfunding for the installation of a plaque honoring Robert Merriman, the legendary commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, has reached its goal. The plaque, which will be affixed to a boulder and placed at the center of campus near Memorial Glade honoring Berkeley veterans of World War II, is a copy of one...
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As this issue is going to print, ALBA’s Human Rights Committee is hard at work to finalize the process of selecting this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Keep an eye on your email and social media for an announcement. One of the largest monetary awards for human rights in...
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On Saturday, December 7, the ALBA community gathered in Lower Manhattan for “A Grand Tribute”, an event focused on first-person video testimonials of the grandchildren of the antifascist volunteers who fought fascism in Spain. The centerpiece of the event was the world premiere of the film based on their videos, also entitled, A Grand...
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The Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) has expressed concern about the inexplicable delay affecting article 33 of the 2022 Law of Democratic Memory, which allows descendants of International Brigade volunteers to apply for Spanish Citizenship. The 166 applications AABI has helped prepare to date are in bureaucratic limbo as long as the Boletín...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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The Colour of Poppies, by Lola Alemany. Translated by David Roe. Editorial Cuadranta, 2023.
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Franco’s Mass Graves: Breaking the Silence in Spain, by Emilio Silva Barrera. Translated by Veronica Dean-Thacker and Shelby G. Thacker. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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Self-effacing and shy though he was, Dr. Edward Barsky’s experience in Spain made him an outspoken activist, tireless organizer, innovative frontline surgeon, and political prisoner. “Eddie is a saint,” Hemingway wrote. “That’s where we put our saints in this country—in jail.”
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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Dear Friends, The past couple of months have been marked by losses. As we were still reeling from the sudden passing of Peter Carroll, longtime ALBA chair and editor of The Volunteer, we had to find a way to process the outcome of the elections—in the runup to which we partnered with 18by Vote...
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On Election Day, ALBA held its annual workshop for New York teachers on “The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond.” The full-day workshop drew participants not just from New York City but also from other parts of the United States, as well as Spain...
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This election season, ALBA joined 18by Vote, winner of the 2024 ALBA/Puffin Award, in a campaign to draw young voters to the polls. ALBA’s contribution included a social media blitz and video messages from members of the ALBA board and honorary board, including Karen Nussbaum.
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On November 20, Marion Nestle gave ALBA’s annual Susman lecture, reflecting on her upbringing as a red diaper baby. A leading nutrition scholar and the author of award-winning books on food politics, Marion Nestle is professor emerita at NYU. Her father, Ted Zittel, was a labor publicist, most notably for the strike against the...
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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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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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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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