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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ALBA’s new film series, hosted as part of the Peter N. Carroll Antifascist Education Fund, continues on December 18, at 4 pm ET, with a discussion of Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), led by Lisa Berger, a Barcelona-based producer who collaborated with Loach on the film. Anyone registering for the event will receive...
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In late 2023, we sent out a call to the ALBA community requesting short videos from grandchildren of Brigadistas. Given the quality of the testimonies, we decided to create an 18-minute compilation, which will be premiered on December 7.
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For Edward Barsky, political and humanitarian activism were two sides of the same coin. Those who persecuted him begged to differ.
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I am very grateful to all the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for their selfless participation in the Spanish Civil War. I am the proud grandson of a Republican soldier from the Aragon front, who gave his future (and almost his life) in the defense of freedom. I know that the Lincoln Brigade...
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In the summer of 1939, well into writing the For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway heard that Frank Tinker, a volunteer American pursuit (fighter) pilot for the Republic had killed himself. Hemingway had first met Tinker soon after the writer arrived in Spain in the spring of 1937. A couple of years later, Hemingway...
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Michael Bailey, son of Lincoln vet Bill Bailey, passed from natural causes June 22 in Seattle. He was 77. A red-diaper kid in a family threatened by right-wing anti-Communists, his parents changed his surname to Maguire, his mother’s name, for his safety. Like his dad, Mike shipped out with the Sailors Union of the...
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Carlos Rodríguez del Risco, Yo he estado en Mauthausen, edición crítica. Edited by Sara J. Brenneis. Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Haciendo Memoria.
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An Anti-Communist on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of a Russian Officer in the Spanish Blue Division, 1941-1942, by Vladimir Kovalevskii, edited by Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas and Oleg Beyda. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2023.
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In the 1930s, documentaries were shut out of mainstream commercial movie houses. Joris Ivens’s legendary film about the Spanish war reached thousands of viewers nonetheless.
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This month marks the centenary celebrations for the Valencian poet Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924-1993), born 100 years ago on September 4, 1924. While he is widely considered the greatest poet in the modern history of the Valencian language, the political Right seems bent on silencing his legacy.
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As SNL is preparing for its 50th anniversary, Tyler Goldberger speaks with Chevy Chase about his legendary gag on Franco’s death.
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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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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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