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.

We are living through difficult times, tough times, and we’re not alone. Genocide, catastrophic capitalist climate collapse, increasing inequality, unapologetic imperial dreams and white supremacist policies unleashed, fascism on the rise—people all over the world are suffering, they get hurt and they get hard. Our rage and our sadness for all the unnecessary suffering, while understandable, can easily lead to despair and worse. But despair is deactivating, distorting, and destructive—a weapon of the powerful. Activism is a necessary antidote to despair, and activism opens a practical space where hope can come alive. Join us in conversation with one of the most joyful freedom fighters we know: Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a primer about everything that matters! Vijay is the author of forty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of Global South, and (with Grieve Chelwa) How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa. He is an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi), Inkani Books (Johannesburg), and La Trocha (Santiago).

Once again the US is at war in the Middle East, and once again the “coalition of the willing” is Israel standing alone, hand-in-bloody-hand with the US. If history is a guide, when the US boot comes down, freedom and humanity are not the winners. The autocratic and sclerotic regime in Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of protestors in recent months, and the murderous medieval rulers of that land were widely reviled and resisted by their own people. During the protests, and now with the war, desperation, rage, sadness, fear, and uncertainty characterize the reaction of many Iranians of good will, both in-country and in the diaspora. We dive into the contradictions and begin the agonizing process of sifting through the wreckage with Sepehr Vakil, an associate professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, and an engaged scholar/activist, author of Revolutionary Engineers: Learning, Politics, and Activism at Aryamehr University of Technology.

Power habitually lies in public to make a particularly egregious point: We can lie in public, and you can’t stop us. “We didn’t murder that protester, she was a domestic terrorist determined to kill police;” “I strangled that Black man to death because I feared for my life.” The debate over whether the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank is indeed a genocide is a fraudulent diversion—the genocide was pre-announced by government leaders in October, 2023: “We will starve them; we will deny them medicines and fuels; we will make Gaza uninhabitable.” The so-called ceasefire is also a ruse, a phony attempt to change the international narrative while continuing to murder, drive out, and erase the population. We’re joined in conversation with Nell and Leta Hirschmann-Levy, two brave and intrepid sisters from New York City whose opposition to the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine has led them to picket lines, boycotts, rallies, organizing campaigns, and to Palestine itself.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were used by the powerful in the government and the bought media in the most manipulative and shameless way, whipping up Islamaphobia and xenophobia to justify and accelerate a rush to war. This would be a war without boundaries, justified battlefields, or any identifiable end-point—a “war on terror.” The war-makers never elaborated on the objectives of their war—where it would be fought, how it would be conducted, or how it could be won—simply that it would be a crusade against faceless and nameless evil-doers wherever they might be lurking. The message boomed forth: shut up, salute, and march in step with a revitalized imperialist project. Remarkably, amidst the manufactured frenzy and panic in every direction, an antiwar movement was brought to life that created a significant counter-narrative that stood up against the tide. We’re joined in conversation with co-host Jeff Jones and Jeremy Varon, an activist-scholar, Professor of History at the New School for Social Research in New York, and author of Our Grief is not a Cry for War, a social history of the movement against the “war on terror.”

Here is the proposed preamble to a new Constitution for Public Education, conceived by the visionary teacher and organizer Jay Gillen: “Every middle-schooler will have the expectation that when they are in high school they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with peers, younger children, or other people in their communities.” He offers this radical proposal in order to propel a conversation and an organizing focus toward building a broad national consensus about how children should be prepared to grow up with dignity and strength in all of our communities. When he recasts the language of the preamble slightly—“If we could pay teenagers to do things that benefit their communities, contribute to the education and culture of younger children, and incidentally advance their own educations, it would be a good thing”—Gillen argues that we already have enormous sympathy in principle. And so we move on to specific steps we might take and concrete principles we might adopt which are surprisingly practical—and within reach. We’re joined by Jay Gillen, author of Educating for Insurgency and The Power in the Room, and Jamarria Hall, a student advocate and lead plaintiff in Gary B. v. Whitmer, the Right to Literacy case that argued the Detroit public schools were “functionally incapable of delivering access to literacy,” and resulted in a $94.4 million settlement in 2023.