Category: Peace and War

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thrilled to read that the left-center national Jewish organization JStreet polled Jewish voters and discovered some amazing transformations in Tuesday’s elections in the US: 72% of Jewish voters supported Democratic congressional candidates; 76% disapprove of President Donald Trump’s job performance; democracy and the economy were the leading electoral concerns; 76% support sanctions against violent West Bank settlers; and most amazingly of all, 66% believe AIPAC’s campaign spending against candidates who criticize Israel increases antisemitism in the United States—and 80% believe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank increase antisemitism in the United States.

These are the actual subheads on their results press release, except that I added the phrase “and most amazingly of all” and combined their last two points. AIPAC is the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby.

The group also raised $13 mm for its candidates. And 98 percent of the ~200 candidates JStreet endorsed won or appear to be headed toward victory!

This is a dramatic shift in the way mainstream Jews view Israel—AND a complete rejection of Trump’s attempts to drive wedges between the Jewish community and other constituencies—as well as a refutation of the despicable argument that any attack on Israel’s policies is antisemitism (especially if that false criticism provides cover for suppressing the speech of Arabs and Muslims).

The credit for that shift is partly the abject horror with which many Jews view Netanyahu’s policies. But it also represents decades of work within the Jewish community: progressive Jewish organizations like New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s and Jewish Voice for Peace in our own day—whose protests have been extremely visible since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas—Jewish-Palestinian partnership organizations like Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (an intercultural village), Combatants for Peace (joint appearances by speakers who fought on opposite sides), West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a bicultural youth orchestra), and Standing Together (a solidarity organization), to name a few among many. And this in turn meant that groups like JStreet were not seen as too far to the left, because there were a lot of Jews and Jewish organizations well to their left.

Disclosure: I was an active core member of the Western Massachusetts New Jewish Agenda chapter and of the intercultural Middle East Peace Group and have donated to several of the organizations listed above. And when I was involved with Agenda, which was early to call for a two-state solution, the mainstream Jewish community was openly hostile to us. Now, there are many Jewish and mixed organizations who want to go farther, and many synagogues have had speakers from some of these groups.

 

What this means:

Jews and lawmakers in the US finally have cover to take positions that would have been anathema a decade ago. Israel’s repressive warmongers and racists in government can no longer count on the support of US Jews and the lawmakers of any religion who want to keep that constituency happy. And the new Congress is likely to be a lot less sympathetic to funding Israel’s attempt to dehumanize and destabilize Arab and Muslim communities—not just in Palestine, where the military has stood by while ultra-right Jewish settlers have forced Palestinians from their homes and communities, interfered with the olive harvest, and committed acts of violence—but in Lebanon and elsewhere. It also means T’s dream to wipe out or expel 2 million Gazans and turn Gaza into a fancy beach resort for wealthy people from the US isn’t going anywhere.

So, over the next couple of years, we can expect a significant realignment. Many prominent members of the US Congress have been openly supportive of Israel’s openly racist government—not just in their rhetoric but in their massive funding. Many of those folks felt they had to do this because Jewish voters are a significant constituency that votes in high numbers, and supporting Jewish causes means kowtowing to AIPAC. We who’ve been saying for decades that AIPAC has no authority to speak for the entire Jewish people now have solid evidence that US Jews are willing to be harshly critical of Israel, and those who do will not be ostracized. It might even mean a reluctance to participate in asinine foreign policy blunders of the sort that got us into an unnecessary, completely avoidable, and damaging war with Iran. That war, and both the human and economic consequences, are a big part of the Republicans’ losses this week.

And from my canvassing and door-knocking in the 2024 campaign, I can say with certainty that some people who would have voted for Harris chose not to over the Biden administration’s refusal to hold Israel accountable for the Gaza war. Would it have been enough to prevent T’ second term? We’ll never know?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Take a Moment to Celebrate! We Saved the Soul of the US
Wow, just wow! Thank you, US voters. Thank you to the thousands of organizers and democracy cheerleaders who have worked their butts off for a year or more to make this happen.
This blue tsunami isn’t just about salvaging the wreckage of an economy that had been the world’s best at the end of Biden’s term. Yes, people are hurting from higher prices, job losses, and stagnant wages. Yes, T has throttled the economy for the people while skimming a lot off the top. But this goes far deeper. T’s own niece Mary put it this way:
“Some Democrats who shall not at the moment be named would have you believe that this election was about affordability. I am not saying it was not also about affordability, but to say that this almost incomprehensible election was only about one thing, in this case the economy, is to miss the point entirely. This election was, I believe, about the soul of America, about who we are and who we refuse to allow ourselves to become. It was a tipping point. It was a massive rebuke. It was a wholesale repudiation of every single thing Donald, the Trump regime, and the Republican Party stand for.” (emphasis added)
I agree. This was an epic battle to save the very soul of our nation. And this repudiation was based in a lot of organizing over a long time. To quote Heather Cox Richardson,
The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule…

Trump and appointees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have purged the government of minorities and women and undermined the health and well-being of nonwhite Americans, immigrants, and women. But rather than benefiting regular Americans, those policies have hurt them. And administration leaders have been quite open about their intention of using the government to loot the country for themselves and their cronies.

In their determination to stop Trump and MAGA, Americans came together across the artificial lines that Republicans have exploited for more than a generation to stand against what the nation’s founders would have called tyranny. The rural areas that have made up the backbone of MAGA support joined more Democratic urban areas to elect Democrats. The racial, gender, and cultural divisions Republicans have exploited to stay in power have collapsed in the face of a rising oligarchy.

Even billionaire Elon Musk’s investment of close to half a billion dollars in Republicans in the midterms could not overcome voters’ frustration with a government that works only for the very wealthy. People across the country, organized in No Kings rallies, along overpasses, in webcasts, and in everything from political clubs to knitting communities, have come together to stand against the extraordinary corruption of the Trump regime, to oppose Trump’s rejection of constitutional limits in favor of autocratic power to declare tariffs and start wars, to demand the government address the needs of Americans, and to insist on the rule of law.

WHY We Won—and Where
As I see it, all that organizing, those millions of people showing up for No Kings rallies, those thousands who stood holding banners at busy intersections and on highway overpasses, those tens of thousands of community members who gave support to their immigrant neighbors in a hundred different ways when their cities were invaded by our own government, those who wrote letters to the editor or took the microphone at a street demo or knocked on doors and wrote postcards to get out the vote—all of that gave a neighbor’s face to the resistance—and gave strength to those who hadn’t felt comfortable resisting publicly to at least get out and vote. It was an effective counter to the narrative in the mainstream media that we were powerless.
It proved that no matter how hopeless and powerless we might feel, there’s always something we can do.
Yes, we lost a few races that we were counting on. But we gained so much more, and we gained a lot of it in places like Texas, Iowa, Kansas—which hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years—and the Carolinas. And we got the happy proof that T’s gerrymanders backfired, as did the racist/misogynistic campaigns of people like Mike Rogers and Vivek Ramaswami backfired big time. Who would have ever predicted that a Mississippi US Senate seat would be essentially a draw (no winner called as of this writing)? Who would have predicted the huge margins of victory for the candidates who faced those onslaughts? (El Sayed was up over Rogers by 7 points, while Amy Acton beat Ramaswami by nearly 8.)
Immediate Shifts Need to Happen
But our work isn’t done! The next steps are to:
  1. Make sure that the Democrats understand that they need to exercise the mandate they just got in the firm repudiation of trumpism to make sure a power-mad would-be dictator can never grab so much power, use the office for personal wealth, and trample so many human rights ever again. Among other things, we need to hold the perpetrators responsible, clean out the incompetents in the Cabinet, and find some way to hold T legally and financially responsible for the abuse of taxpayer dollars, the open bribery and corruption, the destruction of government property without permission, and all the rest of it.
  2. Build the floor back up to support all those who’ve suffered so egregiously under the current regime. We need to undo all the harm created by ICE, DOGE, and the gutting of agencies like OSHA, EPA, and even the DOJ that he turned into his personal vindictiveness machine. We need well-paying jobs that can support a family, housing that people can afford, protections from harassment, energy improvements that lower carbon footprint AND utility/fuel bills at the same time…
  3. Rebuild the shattered alliances with our allies around the world, and put an immediate stop to the enablement of dictators and thugs like Putin, Netanyahu, Bukele, and the rest.
For that reason, I support finding a much stronger Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader than Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. While I respect them both and think they’re well-intentioned, Jeffries, 56, is very much in the tradition of those a generation older who’ve been afraid to take true progressive stands—and unwilling to match action to their rhetoric. And Schumer, 75, is not only part of that older generation that has supported the Democratic Party’s turn away from its labor roots toward its corporate funders, but has been a leader in that effort.
It’s not a coincidence that the pro-Netanyahu organizations (including AIPAC, which has been a consistent apologist for Netanyahu’s worst extremism) have donated $1,1495,512 to Jeffries and $411,980 to Schumer. Jeffries also gets money from a mortgage banking  association and private equity/investment management megafirm Blackstone. Schumer’s top 5 corporate contributors include managed care and pharma companies, Nasdaq (the stock market for new companies and especially tech), and a multi-player game company. This cycle, Jeffries also raised $12.7 million from unspecified individual donors out of $17mm total, while Schumer raised “only” $680k from individuals out of a total $1.2mm.
The Bigger Picture, The Longer Struggle
Getting out from under the thumbs of the oligarchs and major donors is part of a larger process that might include:
  • Embracing the issues of class, identity, environment—but in ways that speak to inclusiveness for ALL and that don’t burn bridges with cultural centrists, that elevate people across all classes, colors, genders, ages, etc. The party has some great models for this, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Yes, I know, Bernie’s actually not in the Democratic Party—but there’s a fair chance he could have won the 2016 election if the party hadn’t put not just a finger but an entire fist on the scale—because his campaign energized a lot of folks who don’t always participate, because the people were so desperate for change that many defected from Bernie to T, and because HRC ran an entitled, elitist, warmongering campaign that didn’t make space for working-class folks and progressives—and I say this as someone who knocked on doors for her.
  • Building—and beginning to carry out—an economic platform that sees housing and healthcare as basic human rights, sets the minimum wage high enough to live on, subsidizes college and public transit, and provides a good safety net for those unable to work—funded by measures such as a millionaires’ tax, cutting fat from the military budget, and ending government subsidies for industries that cause more harm than good. Maybe a slogan like “If [name of country] can afford guaranteed housing, health care, and education, surely we can too.”
  • Transforming our energy and resource use patterns to slash our carbon footprint, provide full employment, and lower our costs (all of which is possible at the same time if approached systemically)—and maybe even cut the work week to 30 hours so there are enough jobs to go around.

In short, we are at a transformational moment. The potential for sweeping change to benefit ordinary people is greater than it’s been since FDR. If we can seize this moment, turn the Democratic Party into a force that benefits the whole society, and finally banish hunger, poverty, homelessness, all types of othering, environmental destruction, and even war and catastrophic climaechange to “the dustbin of history,” we can build a permanent, lasting society that works for the good of all of us (including the nonhumans).

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Responding to something I posted on Facebook saying the US “has signed a colonialist and exploitative agreement with Venezuela on oil rights (an unsurprising outcome after the US coup against that country some months back),” someone responded, “Yeah, let’s have China control Venezuelan oil.”

This is how I answered:

I’ve got a better idea. How about we let VENEZUELA control Venezuelan oil. And while we’re at it, support the democratic elements in Venezuelan politics (who are not a part of the new T-backed government). And simultaneously with that, let’s get serious already, 40 years behind when we should have, about switching to fully renewable green energy. We have the technology. We know the benefits. And we sure as heck have the sun, wind, and water.

I didn’t get into the weeds about the Venezuelan pro-democracy movement. It’s enough to know it exists and has been heavily repressed by the last several Venezuelan presidents.

But this isn’t the whole story. The comment from this other person reflects a mindset that I find disturbing. If you follow the thinking implicit in that post, it says that the US should control all the important resources in the world.

Historically, most economic or political empires (and in the last 500+ years, especially the US and our European allies) have been exploiters and colonializers of resources that should be under the control of the Indigenous people whose land they’re on—and when our control is questioned, we go to war. Every modern war, and many ancient ones going back at least to Biblical times, is based on wanting resources someone else claims or protecting resources someone else wants. The ethnic and religious cloaks these struggles might be wrapped in don’t change that underlying reality.

In 2026, we are even seeing our own president blowing up decades long alliances that have kept a fragile peace in Europe and North America, because he wants the resources of places like Venezuela, Canada, and Greenland. But in 2026, we are old enough to know better. Diplomacy-based peace and stability are hard to obtain and easy to lose. But the past 80 years have shown they are indeed possible and can spread to other corners of the world—not by force, but by the power of example.

It will take decades to undo the damage T has inflicted, to create better safeguards against authoritarianism here in the US, and to rebuild the shattered trust of the US around the world. It’s difficult—but it’s doable.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics: General, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trying to make sense of these complex issues isn’t easy. It’s something most progressive Jews struggle with constantly. This is very much a personal piece, based on grappling with this situation since I was a small child. I don’t claim that this post speaks for anyone other than myself.

To complicate things, the words “zionism” and “antisemitism” have wildly different meanings to different people. I define zionism as the tenet that Jews, like other ethnic and cultural groups around the world, have the right to a homeland of our own.

The version of zionism I was raised with was an idealistic extrapolation of this principle that embraced the social experiments in Israel, such as intentional communities (notably the kibbutz and the moshav), women’s equality extending even to compulsary military service, and the commitment to agriculture and reforestation that would “make the desert bloom” as it had in biblical times. This happy, upbeat vision even had a soundtrack: happy, upbeat Israeli songs in Modern Hebrew such as “Tzena, Tzena,” popularized here in the US by the politically progressive quartet The Weavers in 1951.

But it was also rooted in the shameful slogan, “a land with no people for a people with no land”: a racist lie that ignored the thousands of years of Palestinian history dating back at least as far as the Old Testament battles with the Philistines, a lie that was used to justify the Naqba (also spelled Nakba)—the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel—and the continuing oppression of Palestinians both within the Green Line that marked Israel’s 1948 borders and in the West Bank and Gaza, which are still majority-Palestinian but have been under Israel’s control since the 1967 war.

Another myth underpinning the idealistic version of zionism is the idea that Israel, the lone democracy and only non-Muslim country in the region, was our democratic outpost, the only place championing human rights in a region that was openly hostile to Jews and to Israel: the little David surrounded by heavily armed Arab Goliaths who wanted to drive Israel into the sea.

The human rights champion part would be great if it were true. But Israel’s society is stratified. In 1986, when we first visited, there was still a clear prejudice in favor of Jews of Eastern European origin or born in Israel or Palestine; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal were second-class citizens, third class for those from Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries, fourth class for those from Africa—and the non-Jewish Arab populations, whether Muslim, Christian, or Druze, were at the very bottom.

The first two classes had integrated by the time we returned in 2014, but the rest of the stratification remained. Discrimination against Arabs and Palestinians remains rampant. From roadside checkpoints to destruction of their villages and orchards, long imprisonments, and more, Israel has fomented oppressive conditions for the populations under its heel.

This certainly didn’t start under Netanyahu, but he has made it much worse, culminating in the genocide of the Gaza war and its continuing aftermath.

Another strain of zionism is the post-Holocaust push for a Jewish homeland so there would always be a refuge for Jews, historically marginalized, ostracized, expelled, and murdered for more than a thousand years—a way of giving teeth to the “Never again” slogan that sprouted as the truth of those awful years started to come out. It was that experience that gave wings to the dream of a Jewish state.

The movie “Israelism” is a really good analysis of how we Jews in the US were raised to believe we were doing good for the world in our zionism—how good a job the propagandists for Israel did at inculcating these messages and beliefs across US Jewish society—even as our heroes from David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzmann to Golda Meir secretly embraced ethnic cleansing and driving the Palestinians out.

*                                   *                                   *

Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews. It’s an odd choice of word, because Arabs are also Semitic peoples. For progressive Jews, it is something completely separate from criticism of Israel or sympathy to the Palestinian cause. I claim a right to criticize Israel, just as I criticize the government of my own country (especially in its brutal and disgusting current incarnation). In fact, I’ve criticized and protested against every US president since Nixon, who was elected when I was eleven—yes, even Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. They all did things I thought were wrong, and I wasn’t shy about writing letters or showing up for—or even organizing—demonstrations or lobbying my elected officials to change those policies.

But in the right-wing Jewish world, any criticism of the Israeli government, even the current genocidal one that by comparison makes even the horribly cruel Stephen Miller look relatively tame, is labeled antisemitism. Ditto any endorsement of the Palestinian cause. Somehow, these people can’t envision a world that has room for both Jewish and Palestinian homelands.

These would-be censors have gone so far as to add a rider to a military spending bill protecting Israel from boycotts. This passed the US House last September but, thankfully, as far as I can tell, has not been taken up in the Senate. We’ve also seen the punishment of pro-Palestinian students such as Lebanese Mahmoud Khalil and Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk, imprisoned and deported (Khalil) or threatened with deportation (Ozturk) over their criticism of Israel.

This ridiculous conflation of opposing the Israeli government with hating Jews goes back decades. In the 80s, I was in a group called New Jewish Agenda that advocated a two-state solution. For this, we were ostracized and marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community. We did not get speaking opportunities at synagogues. I am amazed to watch Jewish Voice for Peace emerge from similar marginalization in recent years to become the main US Jewish voice for Palestinian rights. I’ve been thrilled to see integrated Israeli-Palestinian peace groups such as Combatants for Peace and Standing Together get those synagogue speaking opportunities in the last 20 years or so.

And yet that right-wing narrative is so embedded in mainstream Jewish institutions that I know many people who are in pretty much basic agreement with me on so many other issues but can’t overcome their own Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias. They still see any criticism of Israel, especially from non-Jews, as antisemitism. They call NYC Mayor Sohran Mamdani, who constantly makes pro-Jewish statements and has Jewish advisors, an antisemite even as they paint their signs for the next No Kings march—because Mamdani has accurately called out the Netanyahu government’s war crimes, protection of anti-Arab extremists, and oppression of its own Palestinian population.

In fact, this post was inspired by a conversation on Facebook that started with me praising Mamdani for his comment in response to having higher poll ratings than Netanyahu among NYC Jews: “My focus is on delivering for each and every New Yorker, and I’m proud to be the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country” and pointing out that he has made many pro-Jewish statements in his time campaigning for and serving as Mayor.

That generated two comments from this camp. “I am not at all impressed with him. His stance on Israel and Jews is dangerous and deplorable.” and, in response, “I agree. Look, he’s entitled to his opinion about the Middle East. But keep it to yourself, Zohran. Your job is to make NYC a more liveable city. Focus on that and you’ll get great support. Stop talking about Bibi (who I dislike, too, but for different reasons).”

My immediate response was:

I have actively looked into a bunch of accusations that claim Mamdani is antisemitic. If I could find any, I’d immediately stop supporting him. However, what I find each time are the ACCUSATIONS of antisemitism rather than any actual speech or action that is against Jews. He has been loud and consistent in condemning Netanyahu and Israel’s present government, yes. But that’s not antisemitism. It is condemning genocidal, brutal attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese and claiming to do so in the name of all Jews. Well, I am Jewish and I condemn Netanyahu and his genocide. Just as I speak out as a citizen of the US against the brutal policies of this government and its insistence that the government only has to represent right-wing so-called able-bodied, cis, straight, mostly male Christian Nationalists—who are not Christian, if you read Christ’s words—so I speak out against what is happening in my name over there.
What’s even worse is the way right-wing Jews insist on conflating criticism of Israeli policies with hating Jews. IMHO, that leads directly to more antisemitism, because the haters say, “look, the Jews are telling us that all Jews support Israel’s government and that government represents all Jews. THAT leads to wildly negative outcomes. Ignorant people will ingest that sick messaging and then commit pogroms—just as ignorant people in the US right have attacked immigrants, trans people, and others who got on this administration’s bad side.
This post is a longer response.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Today should have been the joyous 250th anniversary of the world’s first modern-state democracy. (Yes, I know, the structure borrowed heavily from the  Haudenosaunee Confederacy.) Instead, it feels all-too-much like a family gathering at the bedside of someone on life support, someone who may not make it too much longer.

Democracy has taken such a beating in the year and a half since an open fascist, racist, sexist, anti-planet, convicted criminal, self-dealing monster—the greediest and cruelest president in history, a man who has used his office not for good but for personal enrichment and war against his perceived enemies that this anniversary feels like a deathbed watch. He so embodies all the reasons the Colonies left the paternalistic mix of oppression and protection provided by King George that Andy Borowitz wrote this updated Declaration of Independence. Here are the first three of his long list of grivances:

  • He has engaged in corrupt schemes to profit from his office, plunder the Treasury, and steal from the taxpayers.
  • He has desecrated the People’s House and the nation’s capital.
  • He has perverted the Department of Justice to take revenge on his perceived enemies.

But the patient—our democracy—while bleeding profusely and crying out in pain, is not dead. We are in charge of the miracle cure, and it’s called nonviolent resistance.

And this powerful and honorable tradition, which has brought down many governments and reformed many others, goes back thousands of years. The earliest documentation I know of is from Exodus 1:1-19, which tells the story of how the midwives Shifra and Puah disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew male babies, telling him that the women gave birth so fast, they couldn’t get there in time. Which is why, today, I chose to wear a t-shirt that proclaims, “Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh,” even though the protest march I planned to wear it to was canceled due to an extreme heat advisory.

In recent days, we’ve seen the impact of nonviolent resistance. We’ve seen the impact of mass protests like No Kings in the slow and grudging willingness to resist at least a few of T’s irrational and unconstitutional demands from both the Supreme Court and the Republican majorities in Congress—both of whom could have easily reined in T’s authoritarianism and attacks on democracy just by holding to the settled body of law, as they were more willing to do during his first term. It’s too little and too late, but it’s a sign that the voices of ordinary citizens are being heard even when those in power claim to ignore them.

We’ve also seen the impact of courageous individual actions taken at great personal risk, such as USAF Major Jason Watson, who has 23 honors and decorations in his long military career and was arrested on July 1, in uniform, for holding a sign saying “Impeach Convict Remove” on the steps of the US Capitol. His action could not only cost him his job (three years before retirement). He could also serve considerable prison time and forfeit his retirement pay. Fully aware of the consequences, he carried out the action anyway, in the long tradition of people like Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers, vastly strengthening the peace movement during the Vietnam war) and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Also this week, we’ve had prosecutor Jack Smith finally talking about the cases against T that would have almost certainly resulted in another round of convictions had they been allowed to go to trial. Smith says openly and directly that he “will not be intimidated.” But if the treatment of James Comey, Leticia James, Mark Kelly, and others is any clue, it’s a pretty safe bet that he will be harassed in some powerful way by government stooges who act as if the First Amendment only applies to Trumpistas. The first link is to the video, the second, to a written summary.

These brave actions are perhaps even more important than the mass demonstrations—because they show raw courage and a willingness to sacrifice everything for what’s right. Many have died for these principles, both here in the US and elsewhere. To name four prominent non-US examples: Alexei Navalny in Russia, Salvador Allende in Chile,  Steve Biko in South Africa, Gandhi in India.

This is even more remarkable considering the level of repression this government has engaged in, including:

Yet, we persist. Millions of people in the US have participated in at least one No Kings march or at least one mass organizing call by a broad coalition of progressive groups (among them Public Citizen, MoveOn, Movement Voter Project, 50501, and several others) spearheaded by the Working Families Party. Voting turnouts are high, and many “safe Republican”seats have been switched. Numerous administration policies have been overturned or cancelled under public pressure, though not without doing substantial damage first. Activists from many groups have trained other activists in peaceful protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, finding levers to encourage noncooperation among the officials carrying out these brutal policies, and so much more.

And we have not only inspiration, such as the photos of protests around the country Robert Hubbell publishes daily in his Today’s Edition newsletter (usually a mix of sidewalk and park protests alongside “bridge brigades”displaying banners and signs from highway overpasses.

We also have road maps, such as…

  • An amazing list of 346 nonviolent tactics, the first 198 compiled by Gene Sharp in the pre-Internet, pre-Covid era, and another 148 compiled by Michael Beer of Nonviolence International. Personal note: I’ve been a fan of this list for years and have cited it several times. Two weeks ago, I got to meet Michael, chat with him as we hiked our neighborhood mountain, and have dinner with several others as we hosted a gathering for a mutual friend who was in from California. He told me he could have expanded the list again with many more tactics, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them.
  • The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, especially Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2011). This scholarly study compares the success of violent versus nonviolent struggles and provides evidence to explain why nonviolent ones have both a higher success record and, usually, more lasting effects. The above link takes you to the book’s page on Bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice, instead of the billionaire who continues to be one of T’s most prominent enablers in the second term. I believe in using our economic power to help accomplish our goals, so I avoid shopping at the world’s largest online store, just as I do most of my searching and much of my web browsing on Ecosia.org, a nonprofit which plants a tree for every search (and I think another tree for every tab opened on its browser).
  •  Chronicles of the current struggle, the history of resistance, and of people you may not have heard of but whose contributions matter. A few among dozens: Waging Nonviolence, Choose Democracy, Black Lives Matter, Rebecca Solnit, Heather Delaney Reese, Heather Cox Richardson, Jessica Craven, especially her Sunday Extra Extra good news roundup, the aforementioned Robert Hubbell (link is above), Black History Stories, A Mighty Girl (feminist history), Josh Helfgott (LGBT and political news), Moments from the Past (Black and general history)…
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

This post started on Facebook, as a response to replies to this article by an Israeli expat living in the US who’s an expert on genocide, which I posted on April 22. There’s a spirited discussion going on at that post, which you can read by clicking on this sentence. Be sure to read the replies to the comments, and the replies to the replies—and to make sure that you’re viewing either “all comments” or “newest” and not “most relevant,” which will block some of the responses.

What follows is a response to Richard, who defends Zionism as providing a safe haven for Jews in a world that never had one before, a place where Jews can seek refuge from the pogroms of their particular generation—and to Robert, the person he was responding to, who posted that trauma often begets trauma, unless there is a deliberate effort to “alchemize” it into something positive, and who criticizes Zionism as “designed by colonialist and brutally implemented, and is now more ruthless than ever.” It’s posted there as a reply to Robert

This post is a substantial expansion of what I wrote—with considerable updating here but not in the original response, including several links to back up my claims:

Robert, Zionism had two impulses: One was protection against antisemitic violence, as Richard so eloquently describes in his response to you. The other was the one we progressives were hoodwinked into believing: that this was the chance to create a utopia, a place where women and men were equal, a place to recover a desert “land with no people for a people with no land”—(as I was told at the yeshivas [Jewish day schools] I attended as an elementary school student and again in the meetings of the Jewish Student Union at my secular city-wide high school), a semi-socialist endeavor based on cooperation.

It’s a bit hard to find, but the movie, “Israelism,” has an excellent analysis of how that idealism didn’t match the reality on the ground. Something I don’t remember if the movie addresses is the way the land itself was colonized. In my childhood, we were always sending money to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. But just as we didn’t know about the Palestinians forced into exile, we also didn’t know that JNF was ripping out native species to plant non-native pine forests that have not been kind to the ecosystem—and of course, the Israeli government frequently bulldozes Palestinian olive trees in retaliation for perceived injuries, while Israel also often narrows the land of the local Palestnians so the settlers end up harvesting stolen oil.

The racist plans of Golda and Ben-Gurion [Perplexity.ai search for “statements against arabs from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir made before 1967”, conducted April 24, 2026) were not in the open, and neither was the reality that, ahem, this was NOT “a land with no people.” It was a land whose people had largely been kicked out in 1948. So you had the yin and the yang, protection from evil and creation of good. But the creation of good was largely built on a lie and certainly doesn’t match the cruelty of today’s Israeli government agains tthe people their parents and grandparents threw off their land. Yes, Palestinians within the Green Line can vote and even have representation in the Knesset. But they have been actively discriminated against the whole time, just as Blacks in the US have been. Housing and job opportunities are not equal. Open racism is common.

Richard, I’ve been to Israel twice, in 1986 and again in 2014. Both times, Dina and I have sat and talked with Palestinians—and on the first trip, we interviewed several leaders of different organizations within the Israeli peace movement. We stayed part of the time with a Palestinian family in the Galilee, part of the time with my right-wing settler relatives, and even in an Arab-owned hotel in East Jerusalem. And we visited the ultrareligious Yiddish-speaking branch of my family that had fled to Israel to escape the Holocaust. On the first trip, we stayed in a traditional kibbutz, and on the second trip, a kibbutz for people in the Transcendental Meditation world. My right-wing Orthodox sister made Aliyah [moved to Israel] with her husband and three of their four grown children, who have all had kids born in Israel.

So I have sat down and broken bread with people on all sides of the spectrum—including a man who was ten years old in 1948 when the soldiers told his family they’d be back in their homes in two weeks. That was not a planned encounter; he was conducting a one-person Occupy movement at the one surviving building (the Orthodox church) in his childhood village WITHIN the Green Line, which the Israelis had bulldozed and turned into a national park that he now had to pay to enter.

That interview was conducted in Hebrew and translated for us by our host, a Dutch Holocaust refugee. He and his fellow refugee wife were two of the three Jews in a Druze village (the third was an elderly woman we didn’t get to meet, the last of her line, whose family managed to stay during the Babylonian Exile of 70 A.D. when the Jews were thrown out of present-day Israel). He also took us around to meet a bunch of his neighbors. And this couple were also the custodians of the actual carob tree that sustained Shimon Bar Yochai when he was hiding out from the Romans in a cave, 2000 years ago.

To me, if Zionsm is to remain viable, it MUST “alchemize” into something far more humane—something that would bring reality to the Koolaid we collectively swallowed as the utopian vision that didn’t exist was spooned out to us through a wall of lies, false promises, and exceptionalism. In its current form, not only is it attacking others, it also makes Jews LESS safe around the world. This is in part because conservative elements of the Jewish community insist on conflating antizionism with antisemitism—a conflation that I utterly resist and abhor. This division within the Jewish community is not new. It goes back at least as far as the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

But most Jews who get interviewed on national newscasts—politicians and college presidents, assorted right-wing pundits—claim that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, and punish anti-Zionists (Palestinians especially, but also groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace). At the same time, the current US government has weaponized false claims of antisemitism to extort money from universities and attempt to control college curricula and suppress student activities—while, ironically, waving a banner of free expression.

These actions from the government and from right-leaning Jewish officials give the real enemies of Jews something to cling to and organize around, and creates a climate where hate crimes against Jews are somehow seen as forgivable because those who attack Jews just because they’re Jews can claim that Jews themselves have said that Jews must support the Israeli government’s vicious actions. We Jews are stereotyped as suppoters of an evil empire, and thus fair game for whatever mayhem comes our way. Thus, they claim they’re just opposing the racist and brutal incarnation of Zionism as conducted by the Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu has given advocates of peace and human rights real things to worry about (e.g., the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and looking the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinian civilians in the West Bank or within the Green Line)—never mind that a huge percentage of Jews both in Israel (which has had a massive peace movement for decades, though it had to rebuild after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023) and in the Diaspora.

It’s important to note that many of these right-wing ideologues spouting this nonsense identify as so-called Christian Nationalists (not Christian at all, if you read Christ’s teachings, as I have). And many have a public history of antisemitism themselves. Here are some of the president’s anti-Jewish remarks and actions. And here are more of them (slight overlap) along with notes on antisemitism from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, and several other appointees.

I condemn the violence on all sides, including the violence of lies that demonize either people.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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A very merry and soulful Christmas to all who celebrate it today. May you be inspired not only by Christ’s holiness but by His words and deeds in the Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan parable about welcoming and finding good in those from other cultures—even despised ethnic groups, His challenge not to kill a sinner unless you yourself are without sin, and his anti-greed action in the temple. May He inspire you to be a nonviolent warrior for social and economic justice, as He was. Have a blessed day.

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I admire your constant calls for peace, Donald. I just wish I could believe them. You see, there’s this little problem: saying you want peace isn’t enough. You have to actually BE a peacemaker. And you haven’t been one.

You’ve claimed to end eight wars. Independent fact checking shows that you did in fact have a role in bringing several of those countries to the table, and I commend you for that. However, your grand, sweeping claims that peace wouldn’t have happened without your aggressive diplomacy are highly exaggerated. And several of the peace agreements aren’t exactly working out. For example, the United Nations reports that 339 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the six weeks following the ceasefire. We’ll give you a B-.

You renamed the US Institute of Peace after yourself.  You spent months telling Oslo you deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it’s true that some recipients didn’t deserve it either: Barack Obama was new in office and hadn’t done anything significant toward peace at that point. Henry Kissinger was a war criminal responsible for much harm during the Vietnam War, the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship that followed the US-aided coup, and many other foreign policy debacles. But still, if you have to nominate yourself for the peace price and name an institution that is supposed to be independent after yourself, it doesn’t scream “qualified.” It actually says “laughably insecure and demanding.” Grade: D-.

Then there’s Ukraine. You’ve been so inconsistent that nobody knows where you stand. You berate the Ukrainian president in person on national TV. Next, you tell Putin to negotiate. Then you bring forward a proposal so lopsidedly Russia-centric that even Mitch McConnell dismissed the plan and said Putin had made a fool of you. One key principle of peacemaking: It has to include all the sides and let all of them at least claim some small victory, which this plan utterly fails to do. Grade: F.

How about relations with our near neighbors? You’ve killed at least 87 people in 22 separate attacks on vessels in the Caribbean, claiming that they were smuggling drugs. You’ve provided no evidence that this is true (and your long record as a massive serial liar doesn’t boost our confidence). And even if it were true, the proper procedure is to interdict and seize the boat, arrest the crew, and hold the cargo as evidence—not to blow it out of the water without warning. Both Colombia and Venezuela have accused you of extrajudicial murder. At least two of those were killed while clinging to the wreckage after you destroyed their boat, in clear violation of international law.  And it’s hard to believe that you really care about keeping drugs out of this country when you just granted a full pardon to the former president of Honduras, who had just started serving more than 40 years for a huge cocaine smuggling operation. There’s widespread speculation that this is really about setting your sights on Venezuela’s oil, and that you’re willing to start a war against them. Grade: F.

And then there’s your “peacemaking” right here in the  good old United States of America.

  • You send armed, masked goons to snatch honest, hard-working non-criminal immigrants away from jobs, loved ones, and decent places to live,  without a shred of due process. Sometimes, your goons snatch up people who have citizenship or permanent residence. Other times, you target people who are going through all the proper steps of being able to stay legally. This creates terror, not peace. It serves no useful function, disrupts families and the economy, and makes the whole country unsafe. Grade: F.
  • You rip the safety net apart, causing economic dislocation of the kind that encourages crime, making our streets less safe and less peaceful.
  • Your energy policies, pushing the most destructive, resource-intensive, and economically unworkable energy options, will lead to resource conflicts, which will lead to more wars. Grade: F.
  • Finally, your public language is the opposite of a peacemaker’s. You issue all sorts of smears against people of color, non-Christians, people with disabilities, even those who happen to belong to a different political party, as well as people you have specifically named and declared they are your enemies. You are an attack dog with a remarkably thin skin who insults others but has zero tolerance for dissent. To paraphrase Three Dog Night, “That ain’t the way to make peace, please.” Grade: F.

So if you want to be seen as a peacemaker, you have to become one. That’s going to take major restructuring of your whole way of being president. Are you up to the challenge? I’d love to see you succeed at embracing peace and would cheer you on publicly if you’re sincere. I’m not optimistic that you’re up to it—but I’d love to be proven wrong.

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In response to my Facebook repost of AOC’s suggestion that instead of ICE thugs, we send 5000 caseworkers to the border to help people immigrate the right way, a friend asked, “Do you really feel “calling out” the GOP will make any difference?”

This is how I answered (embedded links were not part of my answer):

There is something to be said for the throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks school of activism. We never know what will be effectual. Did Randy Kehler know when he went to prison for draft resistance that he would directly inspire Daniel Ellsberg to copy and release the Pentagon Papers?

Did Claudette Colvin know in March 1955 when she was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus that only a few month later, Rosa Parks (a trained activist, BTW—her action was NOT random) would repeat Colvin’s action and become the face of a powerful and successful national civil rights movement?

Did whoever said something that opened the mind of a Nazi skinhead know that this particular tormentor (Christian Picciolini) would do a 360 and become a voice of outreach between the Islamic community and the racist right? [NOTE: That incident is not in the BBC link above but was mentioned by Picciolini in a talk he gave to Critical Connections, a human rights group in my area.]

Did the speaker (whose name I don’t know) at my first peace demonstration, at NYU Uptown (now Bronx Community College) on October 15, 1969, have any clue that one sentence of his speech would reach 12-year-old me and turn me into an activist for the past 56 years?

Did I know when I marched at Seabrook in 1977 and spent an incarcerated week as a “guest” of the state of New Hampshire that we were creating a national and international safe energy movement that kept us out of the nuclear fission fiasco for the next 40 years? (We have to do it again, now—that technology is far more about creating new problems than solving the existing ones. I wrote my first book on why nuclear fission makes no sense and updated it after Fukushima. We don’t need it and it’s quite harmful.)

Did the midwives of Exodus, Shifra and Pu’ah, know they were inventing nonviolent civil disobedience and that we would be using it to outsmart dictators more than 3000 years later?

I am an activist because my soul would not let me rest if I weren’t. I’ve been lucky enough to do a few things that worked, including starting the movement that saved a local mountain. But even when it’s defeat after defeat, I keep at it, knowing that if I change one mind or move one person to take action that day, my work has been worthwhile—and if I didn’t, I still made the effort.

Here are a few more examples:

What small step can YOU take that might turn into something much bigger—and where will you get the support to carry it out?Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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Most of these are singable songs that can be used at rallies, though I snuck in a few harder to learn ones that tell really inspiring stories, marked with *, as well as some in other languages. Vaguely sorted but many of these songs could be in multiple categories. Authors’ names included where I have them. These are living songs. You will find versions with different lyrics, verses in different order as they evolve—adapted for new causes or new definitions or new sensibilities. You’ll also find some older works that don’t reflect the nth degree of what’s currently considered politically correct. They were important songs in their time, and part of what I’m trying to do is provide a sense of movement history. You’ll also find some musings about what a particular song means to me, sometimes with a memory thrown in. Enjoy!

 

The Strength of Ordinary People who “Activize” and Resist

Tyrants Always Fall (Nerissa Nields). When I got depressed during the first DT term, I often turned to this song for comfort. Western Mass folks will recognize the Northampton scenery, as The Nields are local and filmed their video downtown.

Something Inside So Strong (Labi Siffre). The Black Gay British man who wrote it was shocked by a video of South African police shooting into a crowd of anti-apartheid demonstrators—and also drew on his own background growing up gay and marginalized. It’s been widely adapted in the movements both to end apartheid and to gain LGBTQ rights. The couplet “The more you refuse to hear my voice/ The louder I will sing” is the earworm that’s been in my head a lot lately—and what inspired me to compile this resource.

*Denmark, 1943 (Fred Small) documents the incredible night when the people of Denmark rose up to smuggle almost the country’s entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden, just before the Nazis planned to swoop in to arrest and deport them. It has a singable chorus but I wouldn’t try to teach it to crowd that’s never heard it.

Never Turning Back (Pat Humphries). A great zipper song, easy to teach and lead.

Power to the People: We Rise (Laurie Woodward Garcia). Released in June, 2025, this song draws lyrics, energy, and photos from many struggles, including many from 2020 to the present.

If I Had a Hammer (Pete Seeger and Lee Hays). The original lyrics had “All of my brothers.” Decades ago, activist Libby Frank asked Pete at one of his concerts, “Why only brothers?” So Pete discussed it with Lee and they came back with “my brothers and my sisters.” In this version, Emma’s Revolution changed it to the more gender-inclusive “all of the resisters.” We still need to come up with something that has love not just for the resisters but for everyone, without reintroducing the gender binary. Got an idea?

Song of the Soul (Cris Williamson). An anthem of the women’s and lesbian movements, but I put it here because it’s also applicable generally.

Swimming to the Other Side (Pat Humphries). Like Song of the Soul, a song of spiritual renewal.

How Could Anyone Ever Tell You (Libby Roderick). I always thought of this as an LGBTQ community song. Turns out it’s been used in dozens of social movements. You’ll find a long list at the link, as well as several different recordings.

Rebecca Jones (Bob Blue). An ordinary mom steps into her greatness and gives a speech that inspires peace workers. I don’t know if this is based on one real person and one real incident, but I’ve met dozens and there have been tens of thousands of ordinary people who created massive social change, from 11-year-old Malala Yousafzai and 15-year-old Greta Thunberg (ages at the times they became activists) to Doris “Granny D” Haddock and Frances Crowe, both still activists on their hundredth birthdays. Despite dying at age 57, Bob was a prolific songwriter who left behind dozens of great songs. He’s probably best known for the feminist song “The Ballad of Erica Levine,” sung here by Kim Wallach. I’ve heard that one at several feminist weddings.

We’re Still Here (Holly Near). An upbeat, almost vaudevillian celebration of the resistance’s resilience and power.

What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye). That link is to an “official” video, released in 2019 (35 years after Gaye’s death) that includes images and sounds of protests and repression. If you would rather have it straight up, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-kA3UtBj4M

 

LGBTQ

Singing For Our Lives (Holly Near). I love this video because not only do we have Holly’s beautiful rendition as it had evolved by 2004, but hugely inspiring footage of the massive march for women’s reproductive rights where she performed it. And some new lyrics put up at the end of the video. Holly literally wrote this song while carpooling to San Francisco to protest the murder of San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk—one of the first openly gay politicians in the US—and Mayor George Moscone by a right-wing homophobe. The driver, Holly herself, and a few others discuss the song’s origins and power in this short video.

*Scott and Jamie (Fred Small). Another true-story ballad from I Will Stand Fast (the same album as Denmark, 1943). How, in the 1980s, a gay male couple provided a loving, nonjudgmental home for two abused brothers only to have them ripped away by a homophobic government. Glad we have made big progress on this issue, at least.

*My Name is Joanna (Flight or Visibility). Misgendered once too often, my nonbinary younger child, a professional musician and music educator who also runs a school for social justice, wrote this after an encounter with a particularly clueless server in a cafe. Language warning: One f-bomb in the last line.

*When I Was a Boy (Dar Williams). A gender-bending song from the early 1980s that amazingly enough, I discovered because my local commercial FM rock station played it regularly! I very much identify with this song, especially the ending.

Thank You Anita (Charlie King). Released back in 1979, King counters Florida orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant’s very public homophobia by saying she united people who hadn’t worked together before but now were joining forces to oppose her bigotry.

 

Peace

Oh What a Grand and Glorious Feeling (I think this is traditional, but it could have been written by Earl Robinson, who I learned it from at a house concert around 1978. Since then, I’ve taught it at many sing-alongs and rallies. I didn’t find a recording, just the lyrics, but the tune is the same as Oh How Lovely Is the Evening.)

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream (Ed McCurdy). My folk-music-loving 4th grade teacher taught us this song and many other great ones!

*The Hammer Has to Fall (Charlie King). This song actually changed the way I felt about property-destruction civil disobedience that resulted in long prison terms. I used to resent the Ploughshare 8 for removing themselves from activism for decades. This song humanized them for me and touched my soul deeply.

Imagine (John Lennon). I could have put this in the general resilience category, or made a new section on visioning. But I’m putting it here because of the second verse that contains both “Nothing to kill or die for” and “Living life in peace.”

 

Safe Energy/No Nukes

Acres of Clams (Charlie King). Theme song of the Clamshell Alliance’s 1977 Seabrook occupation (one of my proudest moments in 55 years of activism).

We Almost Lost Detroit (Gil Scott-Heron). You may have never heard of the 1966 accident at the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant in Michigan, or the one at Browns Ferry in Alabama in 1975—or dozens of other near-calamities. Gill Scott-Heron helps us remember Fermi. By the way, I am convinced that the reason we DID hear about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima while most of us have not heard of more than 100 other serious nuclear accidents was because of the safe energy movement, which inspired the movie, The China Syndrome, that came out right before the TMI accident. Lyrics.

 

US Civil Rights Movement

Oh, Freedom (traditional). I love Odetta’s version but could only find it as part of her Freedom Trilogy, so I went with Harry Belafonte’s.

I Ain’t Scared of Your Jail ‘Cause I Want My Freedom. From Pete Seeger’s 1963 Carnegie Hall concert, one of my favorite albums ever. More of this is telling the story than singing the very short song. But only Pete’s own recording turned up in a search.

We Shall Overcome (many authors over multiple generations). The anthem of the Civil Rights movement, carried over to many struggles since—in part, because it’s a “zipper song” where it’s easy to add new verses. Great article on the history of the song from Encyclopedia Britanica.

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (adaptation of a traditional Black gospel song). This performance by civil rights activists the Freedom Singers doesn’t have a date, but according to this university curriculum citation, it can’t be older than 1962 or newer than 1980. My guess is sometime between 1962-65. I think I first heard it at a community rally in Atlanta when I lived there briefly in 1976, during a college internship at a socialist community newspaper.

 

Immigration and Immigration Justice

Yes I Am (American) (Malini D. Sur, MD). This 2010 song joins Brown, Black, Yellow, and Red people through the common experience of coming from someplace else—even if it was 10,000 years ago across the Bering Strait.

Mexican Chef (Xenia Rubinos) celebrates the jobs immigrants, especially Latines, do for people in the US and how our society would grind to a halt without them. I could do without the fake-sexy dance moves, though.

Where You Go (I Will Go) (Shoshana Jedwab). Based on the Old Testament Book of Ruth, one of the earliest voluntary migration stories we have. The Old Testament contains many migration stories across many centuries: Adam and Eve leaving the Garden, Abraham leaving Iraq and later experiencing several temporary migrations, Hagar and Ishmael forced into the desert, climate refugees Jacob and his adult children seeing refuge in Egypt, where he reunites with Joseph, the son he’d been told had been killed, Moses and later Joshua leading the Israelites out of slavery…I’d say these migration stories contain a lot of the power in those texts.

Deportee (Woody Guthrie, words; Martin Hoffman. music). The ugliness of US immigration policy is nothing new; this song was written following the death of a plane full of migrants in 1948. Judy Collins’ voice is achingly beautiful.

Using the same melody and parallelling the lyrics, Yosl Kurland ties together the tragedy of the Ashkenazi (Northern European) Jews aboard the St. Louis—which was refused entry by several countries including the US, and most of whose passengers were killed in the Holocaust after being sent back to the country they’d sailed from—and the modern tragedies of refuges from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Latin America still being turned away or imprisoned or abandoned, in a powerful 2017 update called Refugee.

Leaving Mother Russia (Robbie Solomon). A song written for Natan Sharansky in the 1970s, when he was imprisoned for Jewish rights activism by the USSR.

*Revelación (Genie Santiago). Bilingual English/Spanish rap with lots of images of protests and of people trying to cross the border. Like so many immigration songs, this could also go easily into the Class section.

*Immigrants (We Get The Job Done) (Lin-Manuel Miranda). A remix with pieces from various songs in his musical, Hamilton. Lyrics here.

Running (Refugee Song) (Keyon Harrold, Andrea Pizziconi, and Jasson Harrold) describes the hard life in refugee camps—and why they had to flee in the first place.

American Land (Bruce Springsteen). With a rollicking Irish melody, Springsteen contrasts the dreams of wealth and ease shared by so many immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries with the harsh realities they found here. This version, appropriately, was filmed live in Dublin. Also of note are the words Springsteen speaks at a 2025 concert in Manchester, UK before singing Land of Hopes and Dreams (another song from the same album).

Kilkelly, Ireland (Peter Jones). A 19th-century Irish farmer dictates letters to his son living in the US across several decades. This hauntingly beautiful song reminds us that until quite recently, people who emigrated left behind loved ones and had only very slow postal mail to keep in touch. And despite the magic of video calls and emails, what’s still true today is that for many, there is no going back.

 

Class, Labor, and Economic Justice

This Land is Your Land (Woody Guthrie). In 1975, I found myself co-leading a march of several thousand people through the streets of Washington, DC, playing this song on harmonica along with a violinist, a kazoo player, and I think a guitarist. Not only didn’t we rehearse, I had no idea I was going to be drafted into this impromptu marching band. The two string players were also singing. That day was memorable both because it remains the only time I’ve ever performed music for an audience (other than teaching “Oh What a Grand and Glorious Feeling”)—because it was the first time I heard the long-suppressed politically progressive “secret” verses. I used to own an LP where you could actually hear the needle scratch as it was pulled away to cut those verses out of the master. Guthrie wrote hundreds of lyrics but to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a tune.

This particularly moving performance is led by Pete Seeger, less than four months before he turned 90, with some help from his grandson Tao Rodríguez Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and a mostly Black chorus—recorded at the Lincoln memorial during Obama’s inauguration concert.

Talkin’ About A Revolution (Tracy Chapman). Chart-topping class-based anthem about those who are “…standing in the welfare lines/
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation”

Is This the World We Created? (Freddie Mercury and Brian May of Queen). A British comparison of desperate hunger in the Global South with “a wealthy man…sitting on his throne.”

Step By Step (Words from a 19th-century union rulebook; music by Pete Seeger). We are strongest when we work together.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney). Written in 1932 during the Great Depression and a hit for both Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, it starkly illuminates the way corporate greed casts aside those who built that wealth. This much more recent version, soulful if a bit overblown, is by George Michael. Good backgrounder on the Kennedy Center website. In case the MAGAs have taken it down, this is the most recent version (April 12, 2025) on Archive.org. BTW, Harburg is a major Broadway songwriter probably best known for songs like “Somewhere, over the Rainbow” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler (Tom Paxton). A scathing response to the bailout of US automakers during the Carter years (not to be confused with the similar bailout under Bush II). Arlo Guthrie recorded the song when it was new, then recorded it with Tom’s updated lyrics for this 2008 Farm Aid benefit.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). Hard-rocking ‘60’s hit about love amidst terrible working conditions.

 

Liberation Struggles Around the World

*Would You Harbor Me? (Ysaye Barnwell, USA, of Sweet Honey in the Rock). A beautiful song asking the title question about a wide range of people who are part of oppressed groups.

Woyaya (Sol Amarfio, Ghana, of Osibisa). You may know versions by Art Garfunkel or the Fifth Dimension. This is the composer’s band, Osibisa, from 1971.

Si se calla el cantor (Horacio Guarany, Argentina). “What will become of life if the Singer/Does not raise his voice in the stands/For those who suffer, for those for whom there is/No reason that condemns him to walk without a blanket.” Full lyrics and translation here.

Mbube (Solomon Linda, South Africa). Americanized as Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight, this was a huge hit for the Weavers in 1951 and again 11 years later for the Tokens. This version by Ladysmith Black Mambazo is closer to the original but with lots of unique LBM touches. And this is very much what a local Black chorus sounded like when we heard them play this song on the streets of Cape Town. There is an upsetting chronicle about the way Mr. Linda was defrauded of proper compensation on Wikipedia.

Falasteen Biladi (Hamood Alkuder). A Palestinian cries out for justice in Gaza. Arabic with English subtitles.

Zahrat al-Mada’en (Assi Rahbani, Mansour Rahbani). The Palestinian narrator mourns the isolation from Jerusalem (whose name literally translates as “city of peace”), beloved by both Palestinians and Jews. Performed here by Fairuz. Translated lyrics here. For a Jewish perspective, listen to Ben Snof singing “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” from Psalm 137 (many translations into English here). Interestingly, the same Biblical psalm also contains “By the Waters of Babylon,” another song of exiles longing for their homeland.

 

Resources

This list of 50 songs is a drop in a roaring river of great social change music. Find more in the songbooks Rise Up Signing and its second volume, Rise Again, compiled by Peter Blood and Annie Patterson, in We Rise: A Movement Songbook available for no-cost download, at the websites of Peoples Music Network and Sing Out magazine, at this Spotify playlist, and on the websites of many of the authors and performers.

 

Thank-yous to the many people (alphabetically) who suggested songs:

Janet Beatrice

Stephanie L.H. Calahan

Donna Cooney

Lisa Diaz

Raf Horowitz Friedman

Luis-Orlando Isaza Villegas

Riqi Kosovske

Yosl Kurland

Lauchlan Mackinnon

Oscar Martinez

Marcia Miller

Amanda Risi

Andrea Rudnik

Phil Stone

Sandy Sulsky

Melody Tilton

Dianne Turausky

Debbie Ward

Cat YurakaFacebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail