At its annual meeting in New York City, the ALBA Board of Governors elected longtime board member Aaron Retish as its new Chair. The author of several books on revolutionary Russia, Aaron is a professor of Russian history at Wayne State, where he also oversees the Abraham Lincoln Scholarship program. For ALBA, he has...
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ALBA Celebrates Pride Month On Tuesday, June 25 at 3 pm ET/12 noon PT, ALBA will once again commemorate LGBTQ Pride month with an online event entitled “Telling Our Stories,” featuring Shannon O’Neill and Bettina Aptheker. O’Neill, Curator for the Tamiment-Wagner Collections at NYU Special Collections and ex-officio ALBA board member, will re-acquaint us with...
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“At the Barricades” Previewed at NYU On April 5, the theater company What Will the Neighbors Say? presented a selection of scenes from their current project, At the Barricades, as part of the Fridays on the Patio series at NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center. The preview of the play, which explores stories of volunteers during the...
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In a stirring ceremony on May 4th, the youth organization 18by Vote, represented by its President, Ava Mateo, received the 2024 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. The gathering, which took place in the historic building of the Spanish Benevolent Society on New York’s West 14th St that houses the ALBA office, also featured...
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With deep sadness, I write of the passing of Helene Susman, widow of Bill, at the age 103. She did not go to Spain with the Lincolns nor held a position with the VALB or ALBA, but to me and many others she was a founder of our small organization and a kindred spirit....
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Manuel Tiego, Eulalia's House. Translated by Eric A. Gordon. New York: International Publishing Company, 2022. 160pp.
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Anne Broyles, I’m Gonna Paint! Ralph Fasanella, Artist of the People. Illustrated by Victoria Tentler-Krylov. New York: Holiday House, 2023. 48pp.
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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If we have learned one thing from political and judicial developments over the past couple of years, it’s that we cannot trust that the basic rights that past generations fought so hard to conquer are, and will remain, secure.
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The overwhelming response from the grandchildren of Lincoln veterans to ALBA’s invitation to submit a video testimony has given rise to a webpage featuring 20 moving videos. See alba-valb.org/grand-tribute-project/ for details and stay tuned for an event in the fall featuring these testimonies. You can also click on the thumbnails below.  Tribute to:...
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Starting this spring, ALBA will launch a new series of workshops for teachers and the general public as part of the Peter N. Carroll Fund for Anti-Fascist Education: a Spanish Civil War Film club. Every three weeks, an expert will lead a discussion about a feature film inspired by the war in Spain. For...
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On April 14, the anniversary of the Second Spanish Republic, ALBA invites you to attend a theatrical performance of George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, written by Dan and Molly Watt and based on the letters that ALBA co-founder George Watt and his partner Ruth wrote to each other...
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ALBA Features Art Shields, Labor Reporter & Activist On January 25, ALBA’s Nancy Wallach and Josie Yurek, along with Richard Bermack, hosted a widely attended online event on Art Shields (1888-1988), a labor reporter for the Daily Worker who was in Madrid in 1939 to cover the last stand of the Spanish Republic when...
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The 2024 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be awarded this May 4 to 18by Vote, an organization that creates sustainable civic leadership among young people who have been historically excluded from positions of leadership and power. Founded in response to low youth voter turnout in the 2016 general election, 18byVote has since...
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For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling Spanish Civil War novel first published in October 1940, is still among his most widely read books. It is also widely misunderstood, says Hemingway scholar Alex Vernon. Vernon teaches at Hendrix College (Arkansas), is the author of Hemingway’s Second War and two army memoirs, and has...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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In Burgos, Spain, close to 700 people paid tribute to the victims of Francoist repression and the International Brigades. ALBA’s Nancy Wallach was there.
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The Biographical dictionary of Argentine volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, by Jerónimo Boragina, has just appeared in its first Argentine edition. The author has also donated his entire archive on the Argentine volunteers and the Spanish solidarity movement in Argentina to the historical archive of the Buenos Aires province. An interview.
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Peter N. Carroll, Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2024. ALBA Special Edition. 100 pp. In this powerful collection, poet and historian Peter Carroll crafts portraits of some eighty men and women who volunteered to fight in Spain. Carroll observes, “Valuable as the work of historians...
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The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. 432 pp.
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Ybor City’s history of Latino antifascist activism is now memorialized with a permanent historical marker and a stunning public art mural in the heart of the historic district.
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Sarah McNamara, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023, 266 pp.
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The letters of Paul Wendorf, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, have been translated and published in Spain by Salamanca University Press.
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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My father, Dave Smith, was a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “Spain changed my whole life,” he said. “I saw a country struggling—ordinary people, peasants, poor people. They couldn’t even read or write, but when these young people came up to the front, we became an integrated army, the people struggling against the...
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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Earlier this year, we received an unexpected email from Karen Nussbaum, the legendary labor activist, asking to be put on the mailing list for the Volunteer. She explained that she’d read the magazine during a visit to her father, the actor Mike Nussbaum, a longtime ALBA supporter. One thing led to the other, and...
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When a visit to Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid was canceled because of Covid, James Fernández instead delivered this lecture. This is the last of two installments.
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