Sarah Watling is an award-winning author who recently published Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, in which she weaves together the stories of women whose lives were affected by the Spanish Civil War, including Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf, Salaria Kea, and Gerda Taro. Your first...
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Dear Friends, The three threads running through this issue are directly linked to ALBA’s mission and history. The first thread underscores how important it is to identify fascism wherever it shows up—and to face it head-on. We don’t have to explain to you why that is particularly important today. “We can no longer teach...
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As part of the Alvah Bessie Program, launched last year, the government of Catalonia has confirmed the identities and places of death of 212 International Brigade volunteers from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands who died in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Next, the government will attempt to document the place of death for...
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In June, Iago Macknik-Conde, the New York high school senior featured in our last issue, performed his play about the Lincoln Brigade at the National History Day competition for Senior Individual Performance in Maryland, winning an Outstanding Entry medal. Together with his mother, Dr. Susana Martínez-Conde, Iago wrote ALBA’s summer fundraising appeal and recorded...
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Labor Activist Karen Nussbaum to be Featured in Susman Lecture November 14 This year’s Susman Lecture will feature longtime labor activist Karen Nussbaum, co-founder in 1972 of 9to5: Organization of Women Office Workers and founding director of Working America. Born in Chicago Illinois into an activist family, Nussbaum joined the anti-war movement as a...
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Sacco and Vanzetti: Film Screening and Discussion Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—two Italian immigrant anarchists who were accused of a murder in 1920 and executed in Boston in 1927 after a notoriously prejudiced trial—are the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti, a documentary by ALBA board member Peter Miller that was screened and discussed at...
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The Right’s culture war on schools, universities, and history teachers—thinly disguised as a crusade against straw men like “divisive concepts” and “critical race theory”—is showing no sign of letting up. According to a tracking project at the UCLA Law School, between September 2020 and July 2023, “a total of 214 local, state, and federal...
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As the labor movement occupied the front pages, in other words, so did news about fascism spreading across Europe. It was no coincidence that many union members saw their struggle as part of a united front against fascism and volunteered to fight in Spain.
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Has fascism arrived in the United States? Will it soon? Or has it been living among us for many years? These are the questions that drive the twelve essays gathered in Fascism in America: Past and Present, a new collection edited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, two prominent historians of the Holocaust.
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Few people would think of the Spanish war of 1936-39 as a conflict about race. For some, it was primarily an international war, while others think of it as an event with inherently Spanish components. When New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews looked back in his 1973 memoir, Half of Spain Died, he...
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One of the winners of ALBA’s 2022 George Watt Award, Maza Reyes, chose as his subject “Bernard Knox: Soldier and Scholar.” Another renowned historian, Peter Stansky, took the opportunity to contact Maza Reyes and added some personal touches to Knox’s biography.
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To the Editors: I’ve just read Nevine Abraham’s article about the Palestinian volunteer Ali Abd el-Khaleq in your last number (“Liberating Palestine in Spain”). I’m very happy you touched this topic and raised a bit of light into this little-know participation. Thanks. But I’m sorry to say there are some important mistakes in the...
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To the Editors: Wonderful to see a photo of Irving Fajans and to read about him (“The Working Class Legacy of the Lincoln Brigade”, March 2023). He was a marvelous human being. In 1963, I hired him to be an instructor in production at the Film School, School of Visual Arts in New York...
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The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War, by Peter Stansky. Stanford University Press. 150 pp.
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Freda Tanz (née Gerson), born in Pittsburgh, PA, died on March 3, 2023, at the age of 99. Freda was married to Lincoln vet Alfred Leo Tanz, who pre-deceased her in 2000, and with whom she shared her love and political activism. Freda was previously married to Gilbert D. Olmstead in Los Angeles in...
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Harry Belafonte, performer and political activist, was a longtime friend of ALBA and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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At its annual board meeting in early May, ALBA welcomed its newest member, Steve Birnbaum, a Bay Area labor attorney specializing in workers’ compensation under the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Act. Steve has long been fascinated with the history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and will be a welcome addition to the board. For...
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This photograph of Lincoln brigaders Bill Aalto, Alex Kunslich and Irv Goff, with a Spanish comrade, depicts something rare, possibly unique. But unfortunately, all physical copies of it are lost—or, at least, their whereabouts are unknown.
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Stuart Christie, who died in August 2020, was best known as the 18-year-old Scottish anarchist who, in the summer 1964, was part of an attempt to assassinate General Francisco Franco. It was only the beginning of a long life dedicated to left-wing activism.
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The day after Franco’s troops entered Barcelona, Otília Castellví, a young seamstress, woke up to a city she could barely recognize.
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Lincoln veteran Hugo Heurich (1908-1982) was born in Germany and had emigrated to the US in 1929. He arrived in Spain in March 1937 and returned to the US in December 1938. In November 2020, his great-nephew, Armin Heurich, contacted ALBA in November 2020 looking for additional information to include in his great uncle’s oral history, These...
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After a yearslong campaign in the face of official resistance, a working-class Spanish soccer club can finally claim the cup they rightfully won during the civil war.
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Bruce Barthol, a fixture at the ALBA/VALB reunions, was the unapologetic, rebellious, musical heart of the Tony award-winning, never silent, always revolutionary San Francisco Mime Troupe. With sardonic wit, cutting sarcasm, a vast knowledge of history, and a broad understanding of everything political, Bruce Barthol wrote lyrics that outraged, broke hearts, and inspired. A...
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Few of songs in the antifascist repertoire became as popular as the “Song of the Peat Bog Soldiers,” written ninety years ago at the Börgermoor concentration camp. A history.
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The present is confusing because we don’t know what the future will look like. Still, some things are crystal clear.
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Eighty-five years ago, a dozen volunteers, part of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, lost their lives while providing cover for their retreating comrades in the town of Azuara. On March 11, 2023, Azuara hosted a tribute to these long-forgotten anti-Fascist fighters,
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For close to ten years, the historian Michael Koncewicz, the Michael Nash Research Scholar at Tamiment Library, worked with the ALBA collection on a daily basis. In April, he left the library to become Associate Director at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The author of They Said No To Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up...
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Iago Macknik-Conde, a high school student from New York City, performed his new one-man play, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade: The First Desegregated American Fighting Force for the National History Day competition this spring. He won 1st place for Senior Individual Performance at the New York City Regional and New York State Contests, moving to...
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As this issue is going to print, the ALBA office is busy preparing a series of events for the summer and fall.
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Between workshops, screenings, and panel discussions, the past couple of months have been busy for the ALBA staff and board. Here's an overview of our programming since the last issue of The Volunteer came out.
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At a moving ceremony in New York City on May 6, Rachael Guerra-Cordero de Lorenzo accepted the 2023 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism on behalf of Indigenous Women Rising (IWR). “Indigenous people’s rights throughout the world have been trampled by colonialism, disrupting our connections with each other, our children, our land and all...
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Kate Mangan, Never more alive: Inside the Spanish Republic. The Clapton Press, 2020. 346pp.
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Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. By Matthew F. Delmont. Viking, 2022, 374 pp.
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This spring, NYU’s Kimmel Windows—a 13-window exhibition space spanning LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street—will feature Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War, put together by students.
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