Nancy Kurshan invented a robust, creative, and riotous Movement life. From the early days of the Black Freedom Movement and the anti-war struggles against the US invasion of Vietnam, through the Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial, radical solidarity with Puerto Rican independence and Palestinian liberation, and her feminist insistence on speaking up and being heard, Nancy Kurshan is an extraordinary and wise woman. She was a Red Diaper baby, raised as a child of the communist movement, a veteran of demonstrations for racial equality and against nuclear arms while still in high school. Nancy Kurshan was a founding member of the Yippies—the Youth International Party—engaged in wholesale disruption and widespread resistance as well as ridiculing the kings who had no clothes and dramatizing the hypocrisy of the war mongers, the rulers, and the captains of capitalism. She is the author of Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, and we’re excited to be joined in conversation with her at Pilsen Community Books.

Israel and its sponsor, enabler, and co-conspirator, the United States, extends it’s Forever War against Palestine and Palestinians, doubling-down on the genocide in Gaza, escalating ethnic-cleansing in the West Bank, and igniting fresh conflicts in Lebanon and Iran. The madness grows as war fever sweeps the region, and Israel sets itself on a suicidal path. We’re joined at Pilsen Community Books for a public conversation about war, peace, art, history, and resistance with our friends and comrades Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness; and Ismail Khalidi, a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter theater director, and author of Tennis in Nablus, Truth Serum Blues, and a critically-acclaimed adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani's novella, Returning to Haifa---work that tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war.

In the late 1960s Detroit was ripe for revolution: a wave of urban insurrections had swept the country from coast to coast, and the 1967 Detroit rebellion was one of the largest and most consequential; Black auto workers who had experienced marginalization and discrimination in the industry as well as from their own union (UAW) were organizing grass roots resistance; and Detroit was a center of Black radical thought, notably fired by the presence of the Marxist leader CLR James, as well as James and Grace Lee Boggs. On May 2, 1968, 3000 workers at the massive Dodge Main plant participated in a wildcat strike, and soon the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) was born, and workers began organizing radical caucuses at other factories. There are several useful accounts—books, articles, films—about the life of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, its history and its impact, but with Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries Walda Katz-Fischman and Jerome Scott add a necessary and illuminating element: Oral History. The focus is meaning as it’s constructed by human beings—meaning made by actors in their particular situations—and this leads to story, to narrative, to approaches that are person-centered, shamelessly interpretive, and unapologetically subjective. Far from a weakness, the voice of the person—the narrator’s own account—is the singular achievement of this work, a worthy antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition, and stereotype.