Gaza has been suspended in a bloody limbo for months. The so-called ceasefire with Israel has not brought peace. The bombings and demolitions persist, and Israel’s expanding occupation continues unabated. Since October 10, 2025, when the ceasefire was declared, more than 440 people have been killed and more than 2,500 buildings destroyed. Israel has only allowed a fraction of the essential equipment needed for cooking, heating, and construction to enter the Strip. Gaza is now buried beneath 680 million tons of rubble. Ninety percent of the population has been displaced, many of them several times. Hundreds of thousands live in threadbare tents.

The “ceasefire” is meant to breed apathy among us; the spectacle of modern genocidal warfare has been replaced by the slow bureaucratic proceedings of ethnic cleansing. Washington’s hollow promises to bring “technocratic governance” to Gaza mask a colonial project imposed on a people with no say: a people left to die, forgotten by the world.

This, then, is where we return. In early February, The Nation gave over its website for a day to writers from Gaza. We did this to make it clear that we will remain focused on Gaza and the Palestinian people. No diplomatic proceedings or political distortions will subdue our demand for their right to self-determination—or their right to speak for themselves.

The pieces in this series are an affirmation of that right: a record of Gaza’s refusal, in the face of the world’s neglect, to be exterminated.

—Rayan El Amine, Lizzy Ratner, and Jack Mirkinson
 

A Day for Gaza

Rayan El Amine, Jack Mirkinson, Lizzy Ratner

Today, The Nation is turning over its website exclusively to stories from Gaza and its people. This is why.
 
 

A Ceasefire in Name Only

Mohammed Mhawish

The language of ceasefire has been repurposed in Gaza: It no longer describes a pause in violence but rather a mechanism for managing it.
 
 

The Street That Refuses to Die

Ali Skaik

What I saw walking one block in Gaza.
 
 

A Catalog of Gaza’s Loss

Deema Hattab

Recording what has been erased—and making sense of what remains.
 
 

“We Have Covered Events No Human Can Bear”

Ola Al Asi

Journalists in Gaza have bartered their lives to tell a truth that much of the world still doesn’t want to hear.
 
 

What Edward Said Teaches Us About Gaza

Alaa Alqaisi

On Palestine and the geography of vanishing.
 
 

My Sister’s Death Still Echoes Inside Me

Asmaa Dwaima

Rewaa was killed by an Israeli bomb. Her absence has broken me in ways I still cannot describe.
 
 

What Gaza’s Photographers Have Seen

Huda Skaik

These pictures are records of a genocidal war, but they are something more, too—they are fragments of Gaza itself.
 
 

At the Doorstep of Tomorrow

Engy Abdelal

Faced with endlessly narrowing possibilities, I return to my diary in an attempt to dream, to imagine a future.
 
 

How to Survive in a House Without Walls

Rasha Abou Jalal

After their home was obliterated, Rasha Abou Jalal and her family remain determined to build a new one, even if it must be built out of nothing.
 
 

What Happens to the Educators After the Schools Have Been Destroyed?

Ismail Nofal

Hamada Abu Layla spent 22 years gathering three university degrees. Now they mock him from a garbage dump.

Gaza has been suspended in a bloody limbo for months. Despite the much-hyped ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—declared on October 10, 2025—peace has not arrived in the Gaza Strip. The bombings have continued, killing at least 509 people; hunger persists; aid trickles in rather than flows; and Israel remains in control of nearly 60 percent of the terrain. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in threadbare tents. Meanwhile, US promises of a “technocratic governance” mask a colonial project bestowed on a people with no say.

The ceasefire has bred apathy among us—and disinterest from a press that was already turning away. According to a recent study by the media watch group FAIR, US media coverage of Gaza has fallen to its lowest three-month average since the genocide began two-and-a-half years ago. The message is clear: There’s nothing to see here.

The Nation disagrees. We believe the story of Gaza remains as essential as it was on October 9, 2025, and that those who live in its ruins are the best ones to tell it. So today, February 3, we are turning our website over to Gaza and its people in an initiative we are calling “A Day for Gaza.” There will be no work shared that is not about Gaza, and no pieces published that are not written by people who are in or from Gaza.

The writers who have shared stories with us have done so in conditions that veer toward the impossible. They have written through hunger and grief, while huddling in makeshift shelters, and while listening to the thud of still-falling bombs—and they have done so, as Engy Abdelal writes, because they want “to tell the world that [they] have a future just as… [they] have had a past.” What they have created, in the process, is not only a record of Israel’s ongoing violence but also a testament to what Gaza was—and might yet be. 

Nation contributing writer Mohammed R. Mhawish opens the series with a piece exposing the hollowness of the ceasefire, asking, “What do you call a ceasefire agreement under which people keep dying?” It’s a question that echoes across many of the articles, including Ali Skaik’s “The Street That Refuses to Die,” which transports readers to the Colorful Block, one of the author’s favorite places in Gaza. There, Skaik introduces us to family members, old acquaintances, and a 33-year-old street philosopher who observes, “The suffering got worse after the ceasefire. The war of rockets ended, and the cold war began.”

Deema Hattab also ventures out in search of what is, and what was, in “A Catalog of Gaza’s Loss,” her loving reconstruction of some of the intellectual and cultural sites that have been destroyed. And in “How to Survive in a House Without Walls,” Rasha Abou Jalal, a PhD student and writer, explains what it’s like to try to rebuild a home out of rubble and determination. In “My Sister’s Death Still Echoes Inside Me,” Asmaa Dwaima grieves the unfathomable loss of her sister, who was “present in everything, leaving traces of herself everywhere.”

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The rest of the pieces (you can find the full collection here) pick up these themes and expand on them. Written by professional journalists as well as academics, poets, parents, and even a dentist, they represent the breadth of literary and political life that has persisted despite the ongoing war in Gaza. They include literary criticism, dreams, and personal testimony.

In sharing “A Day for Gaza,” we hope to breach the silence that has descended around Gaza, and to do so by offering a microphone to some of the 2 million people whose stories demand to be told. We also want to extend an invitation—and a challenge—to our colleagues across the media industry to recommit to telling the story of Gaza. We owe its people—and the hundreds of our fellow journalists who have given their lives to bring us the truth from Gaza—nothing less.

Collectively, the pieces from “A Day for Gaza” embody an enduring affirmation of Gaza’s refusal, in the face of the world’s neglect, to be erased. We are honored to turn The Nation over to these writers, photographers, and thinkers, to provide a place for them to tell their stories, and we urge other media outlets to do the same.

This story begins, for me, on an island—a small island that sits at the northeastern corner of New York City, in a shallow basin at the edge of Long Island Sound. It’s a lonely place, exposed and windswept, its shores eaten away by the currents. On maps, it looks like little more than a squiggle, a scratch left by a careless cartographer. If you didn’t know to look for it, you wouldn’t see it.

Like many New Yorkers, I didn’t know to look for it for most of my life. I had no idea this place, Hart Island, existed or that, for much of its recent existence, it has served as an offshore repository for those deemed alien or undesirable by the guardians of city life. Prisoners of war, victims of yellow fever, miscreant boys, sickly consumptives—all did time in the red brick buildings that once dotted the island. Mostly, though, for more than a century and into the present, the island has served as the final resting place for scores upon scores of the city’s dead.

Hart Island is New York City’s public cemetery, its potter’s field, where the unclaimed, unidentified, and indigent are buried. As many as a million people have been laid to rest here since 1869, both adults and children, and among them are the victims of almost every plague that has struck the city—from tuberculosis and typhus to AIDS and Covid—along with the more enduring afflictions of poverty and aloneness. Some people have chosen to be buried there—because it is free, because it is communal—but many have not. Instead, they more or less drifted there, pulled by the currents of addiction, mental illness, stigma, or neglect. From the margins they came, and to the margin they were sent.

To visit this place, as a living person, is a somewhat more complicated proposition. Much like another well-known netherworld, Hart Island can be reached only by ferry and is off-limits to most of the public. Even so, stories have made their way from its shores over the decades—legends and myths, shards and fragments, fables, yarns, and a few gemlike oddities. These include the usual paranormal fare—accounts of silhouettes in the fog and the like—but the majority, and by far the most interesting, are the tales bound in fact: the ones of real people, stacked three high in mass trenches, whose lives read like an alternate history of New York City.

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Among the most curious of these is the story of a child. This child lies in a grave that is different from most of the others: It is half-hidden at the southern tip of the island and is separated not only by distance but by the fact that it contains just a single body. On the grave’s marker, there is a runic sort of inscription that reads “SC-B1 1985.” If you Google about for an explanation, you will find—via both official New York City websites and various news sources—that it stands for “Special Child–Baby 1” and the year of their burial, 1985. You will also find this: The grave belongs to the first child to have died of AIDS in New York City.

This, however, is all that you will find. The child’s name and age, the date of their death, the reason for their interment on Hart Island—none of that is known. Nor will you find any of the hazier details that make up a life, like the color of the child’s eyes or the sound of their laugh or the timbre of their cries. There is only the one assertion—this was the first child to have died of AIDS in New York City—and the nothingness that surrounds it. A mystery.

In late 2022, I joined a dream team of journalists from WNYC, including my former Nation colleague Kai Wright, to work on a podcast about the early days of HIV and AIDS in New York City. Our mission was to chart the stories of the many people who were shoved to the sidelines of the epidemic—poor people, Black and brown people, women, injection drug users—but who refused to stay out of sight. We decided to call the podcast Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows.

Among the quests I set myself was to try to unearth the story of SC-B1. I had learned about this child in 2009—not long after I stumbled upon the existence of Hart Island and went on a days-long Google bender to find out as much as I could about the place. Until then, I had never heard of any child who had died of AIDS and been buried there. I had never even heard of a child dying of AIDS in New York City. I remembered Ryan White, of course, the brave teenager who was barred from attending his Indiana middle school for having HIV and later died, in 1990. But I could conjure up nothing from my own childhood in 1980s New York about a kid who had died of AIDS and then been transported to this isolated island-place. This fact ate at me.

So I became curious—obsessed, even—thinking about the child, wondering who they were. Years later, when I finally began reporting, my hope was that I would be able to uncover SC-B1’s identity and be able to tell their story—to explain how such a tiny person had come to have AIDS and why they had wound up on Hart Island, and who their parents were and what fate had befallen them. I came to suspect, particularly as I did more research, that this story might reveal something essential—about the early days of AIDS, yes, but also about New York City, and about the intimate, intertwined relationship between the two.

During the months I spent reporting, I interviewed dozens and dozens of people, revisiting a past that still has the power to pummel and cause pain. I spoke to doctors and nurses who had looked after children on pediatric wards—heroic types who’d helped walk people through the valley of the shadow of AIDS during the darkest years of the crisis. I interviewed a nun who had served as the first female chaplain at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex, and had spent nearly a decade ministering to women with HIV; she thought she might know who the child was—but, in the end, she did not. I even managed to track down a former prison inmate who had dug graves on Hart Island as part of the Department of Correction’s burial detail—because graves were dug by inmates from Rikers Island for most of the cemetery’s existence. This man remembered the prayers he said for babies before burying them, but he knew nothing about SC-B1.

When I ran out of Hart Island leads, I played investigative reporter for a spell, filing a series of records requests with city agencies. My hope was that by following the long paper trail of death that accompanies each body to Hart Island, I might finally find my way to the child. But here, too, I hit only dead ends: The agencies I solicited—the departments of Correction, Health, Social Services, and others in the city’s surprisingly vast bureaucracy of death—either refused to produce the documents on privacy grounds or said they didn’t have them. In the case of one particularly critical set of records—a series of log books in which the DOC recorded all Hart Island burials—both of the agencies I solicited insisted the other one had them. The DOC, which ran the cemetery on Hart Island until 2021, said that “all data regarding burials, interments, and disinterments at Hart Island” had been transferred to the Human Resources Administration, which now helps manage the island; HRA, in turn, produced only a single set of burial records—and all the burials were adults. HRA said these documents were the only ones currently in its possession.

None of this surprised Melinda Hunt, an artist and advocate whom I came to think of as the guardian of lost Hart Island souls. Hunt had come across SC-B1’s grave during a visit in early 1992, when she and the photographer Joel Sternfeld were working on a photo book about the island, and I’m pretty sure she was the first civilian to learn about the child. “We were told by the correction officers that there was a grave, of a child who was the first child to die of AIDS in New York City, in this more remote location,” she recalled. “I think in their own minds, they felt that the grave should be documented, that it was special.” When Hunt and Sternfeld made their way to the spot, they found the marker, surrounded by weeds and vines, and snapped the first known photo of the grave.

Hunt was pregnant at the time, and the story of the child stayed with her. So when she started an organization called the Hart Island Project, which is dedicated, in part, to connecting the living with the dead—that is, the families of those buried on Hart Island with their lost loved ones—she made a point of keeping her eye out for information about SC-B1. In 2007, she filed records requests with the DOC for burial ledgers going back to 1985—and, after threatening to sue, she eventually got hold of them. But she couldn’t find any trace of the child when she combed through them. “I looked for SC-B1 in the baby listings because I wanted to know the name of the child long before you contacted me,” she said. She came to suspect that SC-B1’s burial information had not been recorded properly in a ledger.

I should probably have quit the search around this point, given up the reporting ghost, but obsession is a hard habit to kick. So, despite the dead ends—and a dawning suspicion that perhaps SC-B1 did not want to be found, or, at least, did not want me to be found by me—I kept reporting, kept interviewing. And while none of this got me any closer to solving the mystery of the child—in fact, I will just say it now: I never did find SC-B1—it did begin to yield other discoveries.

One of those discoveries was a man named Capt. Eugene Ruppert. Ruppert was in charge of Hart Island for the Department of Correction for nearly 20 years, from 1983 until 2000, and he was the person who oversaw the burial of SC-B1. “That was me,” he proclaimed during our first conversation. When I asked him about the log books, he assured me that SC-B1’s burial details had been recorded in one of them—and then e-mailed to specify that he believed the child’s burial details had been recorded in a special notebook, one that was not used for general burials but for AIDS burials. “I think it was a Notebook possibly soft cover. Remember it has been over 20 years since I was there.”

When I met Ruppert, he was 74, chatty, and bursting with Hart Island arcana—about the choreography of interment and disinterment (which, he said, happened roughly 10 percent of the time); about the decommissioned Nike missile site at the northern end of the island; about the tulips he said he had planted to prettify the place. I had high hopes that he might be my big reporting breakthrough. But of all the many things he could recall, the only thing it seemed he could not was the identity of SC-B1—not the child’s name, not their age, not their gender, nothing.

Still, there was one thing Ruppert was able to tell me: He was able to tell me who the child was not—and that information opened up a vast new universe.

SC-B1, it turned out, was not “Special Child–Baby 1,” as the Internet insisted. Instead, Ruppert explained, SC-B1 was “Special Case–Baby 1,” and that single word switch—from the saccharine sweetness of “special baby,” which suggested that this grave had been created as a kind of memorial, to the blankness of “special case”—proved to be important to understanding SC-B1’s story. “Special case,” it turned out, was an official term, a designation that Ruppert said the DOC used for a whole group of people who had died of AIDS and been buried on Hart Island between 1983 and 1986. These people had been placed in a special, segregated site—fenced off from the rest, in individual graves dug extra deep—out of an excess of caution at a moment of high fear of contagion. “I had a responsibility, not only to the officers that worked for me but also the inmates that did the burials, to prevent body fluids from people that died of AIDS,” Ruppert explained. There are as many as 35 of these other “special case” graves, and all of them, except SC-B1’s, belonged to adults.

Ruppert also had another big revelation. While various websites—from Wikipedia to National Geographic to the New York City government’s own Hart Island information page—had told me again and again that SC-B1 was the first child to have died of AIDS in New York City, Ruppert (along with others, eventually) made clear that this part of the SC-B1 legend was plainly false. Special Case–Baby 1 was not the first child to succumb to HIV in New York, not even close. In 1985, the year of SC-B1’s burial, the city’s Department of Health listed 27 children between the ages of 1 and 14 as having died of AIDS—a number that was almost certainly an undercount. And in the years immediately before, dozens of children had likely died from the disease. Far from being an outlier, Special Case–Baby 1 was a representative, an emblem—one of many children who had died of a sickness that had blasted families apart throughout the city.

When I was beginning my search, one of the first people I reached out to was a pediatrician named Elaine Abrams, who had worked at Harlem Hospital during the grimmest days of the HIV and AIDS crisis. As I explained my quest to her, I heard her inhale deeply before saying, “You are opening a door to a very big room. It’s not exactly a haunted house…”

Dr. Abrams didn’t finish the sentence, but as I attempted to trace the story of SC-B1’s life, as I revisited an era that so many had tried to move past, I found that the world she was describing was, indeed, haunted. And it was very, very big.

In the annals of HIV and AIDS history, the beginning of the epidemic is often traced to June 1981 and the release of a Centers for Disease Control report alerting the medical community to five cases of an unusual pneumonia in “previously healthy” gay men. In the months that followed, troubling reports piled up—including of a “rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer,” Kaposi’s sarcoma, also in gay men—and soon medical experts were warning the world of “a new homosexual disorder.” They initially called it Gay-Related Immunodeficiency, or GRID, but by September 1982, they had come up with a new name for it: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. AIDS.

For many, these events have become synonymous with the start of the American epidemic, the moment the gun went off. But even before then, there were signs—clues picked up by a handful of people, both within gay communities and without: a strange and virulent pneumonia that was striking heroin users in New York; a sickness, which doctors dubbed “Rikers Island adenopathy,” that was hitting inmates in the city’s jail; and cases of immune-system collapse that were showing up in young children in clinics in the Bronx and Newark and a few other cities.

One of the first people to spot this last sign was an immunologist and pediatrician named Arye Rubinstein, who has worked for the past 50 years at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Rubinstein is an expert in immunodeficiencies—one colleague, at another hospital, described him as an “immunologic guru”—and this meant he was often the person whom other doctors called when they were stumped. This time, however, Rubinstein was also stumped. “We saw patients that we could not figure out what they had,” he told me as we sat in his living room, which was dense with plants and family portraits.

Rubinstein was 87 when we first met, with an enviable head of white-gray hair and a tendency to lapse into research-speak—into talk of epitopes and antibodies, B cells, T cells, and protein fractionation. I had first reached out to him in the hope that he might have insights into the mystery of Special Case–Baby 1, but he could offer nothing there—“I don’t know anything about this,” he said. He did, however, have another story.

In late 1978 or early 1979, a young child was referred to his clinic. This child was a boy—a fact I learned from a 1987 article in New York magazine, because medical privacy laws now prevent doctors from discussing details of their patients—and he was suffering from recurrent infections. Rubinstein took a case history and learned that the child wasn’t the only one in his family who was sick. His mother also had recurrent infections. She was a sex worker and an injection drug user, and she soon gave birth to another child who suffered from such severe illnesses—among them, bouts of septic pneumonia—that Rubinstein and his team considered giving the child a bone-marrow transplant. But they couldn’t find a donor, and before long, the baby died.

Rubinstein quickly began to suspect something unusual was going on, so he got to work in his lab, and what he found surprised him. All three family members were clearly suffering from an immunodeficiency, but it expressed itself somewhat differently in each. “We knew this is not a genetic disorder,” he explained. Instead, Rubinstein suspected they were dealing with a novel illness—a suspicion he noted in the last paragraph of the child’s chart notes, his colleague, Dr. Larry Bernstein, told me.

“I actually remember the very first patient that Dr. Rubinstein saw,” Bernstein said. “He described the immunological abnormalities in a handwritten note, and then he wrote ‘new immunodeficiency’ with six exclamation points.”

Rubinstein’s suspicions solidified into conviction over the next few years as additional children showed up in his clinic with signs of immune deficiency—failure to thrive, swollen lymph nodes, enlarged livers, pneumonia, recurrent infections. So when the CDC issued its first reports of a mysterious immune deficiency among gay men in 1981, they hit the Einstein team with the uncanny force of recognition. “I thought immediately: It’s related,” Rubinstein said. “It immediately turned on the light, and I said, ‘This is what we are seeing in children.’”

The problem was that few people outside of his clinic—and the one or two hospitals where other doctors had begun seeing serially sick children—believed him. The medical establishment remained unconvinced. “They thought it’s only affecting the gay community, and they would not accept something else,” Rubinstein told me.

In an attempt to nudge them toward acceptance, he submitted a paper to The New England Journal of Medicine about several children who showed signs of what he and his coauthors thought was a new immune deficiency, but the journal didn’t accept it. It wasn’t until mid-1983 that another publication, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, published his article alongside a report from another pediatrician, James Oleske, on eight cases of AIDS-like symptoms in children from Newark. While the articles didn’t get everything right, the fundamentals of what they described would prove devastatingly prescient: Children of poor Black and Latina women—many of them drug users, or partners of drug users, some of them sex workers, all living in communities that had been largely abandoned by the rest of the country—were being born with a devastating illness that looked strikingly similar to what was being seen in gay men.

Rubinstein’s and Oleske’s articles, along with the CDC’s own evolving research, helped push the medical establishment to acknowledge that children were getting sick with AIDS. And alongside that acknowledgment came the first drips of attention and resources. Rubinstein got a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study AIDS in women and children, ultimately discovering that the virus that causes AIDS can be transmitted to children in utero, through the placenta (the other two routes are during childbirth and through breast milk). He also began building up what would become one of the city’s largest programs to treat children with AIDS and their families.

But in many ways, by the time the broader medical world came to accept the reality of AIDS in children, it was already too late. The illness was steps ahead of the medical system, and the pediatric wards of New York’s public hospitals were filling up with children.

Dr. Stephen Nicholas was in the last year of his residency when he arrived on one of these wards, at Harlem Hospital, in 1982. He was a wide-eyed boy from Wyoming—tall, slim, soft spoken and very much committed to his cowboy boots. He was still figuring out his path but he was certain of one thing: He did not want to work with dying children. “I mean, who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Boy, that’s what I want to do,’” he explained. But within a short period of time, that was precisely what Nicholas and a team of doctors at Harlem Hospital were doing. “It started as one, then it was two, then it was four, then it was—you know, this sort of progression,” he said. “I would say that by the end of the first year, we had dozens. And before long, we had a couple hundred.”

This period of the AIDS epidemic ushered in a truly monstrous moment in this country’s history. As the illness shifted from a medical curiosity to an epidemic, it revealed itself as a wily and relentless disease, one that killed painfully, almost sadistically, attacking the immune system from within until the body was left wholly exposed to attacks from without. There was no treatment at that time, nothing to slow or stop the illness ravaging the body, and, for a period, people didn’t even know how it was spread. Was it through sex? Casual contact? Any and all bodily fluids? It wasn’t until 1983 that scientists finally determined that it was triggered by a virus—one they eventually named the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV—and it wasn’t until 1985 that they developed a test for it.

“It was an awful disease back then—they were just dying,” said Maxine Frere, a nurse who spent all 50 years of her professional life working at Harlem Hospital, much of it alongside both Stephen Nicholas and Elaine Abrams. Frere, who was born and raised in Harlem, grew up in the shadow of the hospital and knew from the time she was small that she wanted to be a nurse. “Doctors heal illnesses; nurses heal spirits and souls and everything else,” she explained. “Nurses take care of people.” Frere was taking care of kids in the pediatric ward when the first children with AIDS began arriving, in the early 1980s. They showed up with a range of symptoms—thrush and “fever of unknown origin” and that dispiriting catch-all symptom, “failure to thrive”—and the fear and uncertainty that swirled around this new sickness were so intense that many of Frere’s coworkers wanted nothing to do with them. Some wouldn’t enter the patients’ rooms. “They’d knock on the door and pass the food,” she said, describing how colleagues would slide trays of food through a crack in the door rather than bring them to the patients’ bedsides. “The nursing staff was afraid to touch HIV.”

Frere wasn’t afraid—or she wasn’t willing to let that fear stop her. When a doctor asked her if she wanted to begin working on AIDS-related clinical trials, she signed up. “I wanted to do the clinical trials,” she said, “because I wanted to make sure they were done correctly for my people, because those were my people, my neighborhood, my children.” AIDS had arrived in Harlem just a decade after the revelations about the Tuskegee experiment, in which white doctors deliberately withheld treatment from Black patients suffering from syphilis, and Frere was determined that nothing like that would ever be repeated on her watch. But she also had another reason for taking the job. “This was what I was supposed to do,” she said.

What Frere understood but so many others failed to see was that HIV was hitting Black and Puerto Rican communities with a battering force. These were neighborhoods like Harlem, the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, central Brooklyn, places where you could practically see the Federal Housing Administration’s red lines still glowing around their edges. It had been a bruising few decades for these neighborhoods—for all of New York, in fact, but for these communities in particular. They had suffered one blow after another. When the city’s manufacturing economy began to disappear in the 1960s and ’70s—the city lost a staggering 600,000 jobs between 1969 and 1976—it was working-class districts like these that endured some of the worst job losses. When the drug trade expanded into this breach, it was these neighborhoods whose streets were turned into open-air heroin markets and whose residents were then targeted by the new War on Drugs. And when New York City suffered a debilitating fiscal crisis in the mid-70s, and the city’s leaders embraced austerity, it was these neighborhoods that were marked for disinvestment. Now there was this virus, which was spreading through sex but also, crucially, through the shared needles people were using to inject heroin. And its emergence had everything to do with the collapse that had preceded it.

 “AIDS was not just a medical crisis,” my colleague Kai Wright explains in the first episode of our podcast, Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows. “It was and it remains a social disease, one that exploits the inequities that… define so much of American life.” It was, he says, “a systems-wide failure.

The numbers that began to emerge several years into the epidemic testified to this reality. In the late 1980s, researchers estimated that between 50 and 60 percent of New York City’s 200,000 injection drug users were infected with HIV, a stunning number that translated into harrowing case rates in several Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. In one 1988 study from the South Bronx, researchers estimated that 9.4 to 21.6 percent of men between the of ages 25 and 44 had HIV, while the rate for women in the same age range for women in the same age range was 2.4 to 5.5 percent.

What these numbers meant, in human terms, was that entire groups of friends and neighbors were getting infected—cohorts of young people who were simply disappearing. Sometimes, whole families fell ill as mothers, often unaware they had HIV, passed the virus on to their children during pregnancy, birth, or shortly after. At one hospital in the South Bronx, researchers reported that 5 to 10 percent of the women giving birth had HIV; in Harlem, a study found that 3 to 5 percent of the women giving birth were infected.

To be clear, not all of these women gave birth to children who were infected with HIV. Studies suggest that a little more than a quarter passed the virus to their kids, almost always without knowing, and the resulting numbers of children with HIV were never vast—nothing like the numbers of adults getting infected. But the pattern of illness that emerged during this period was nonetheless stark: One article from the late 1980s estimated that 90 percent of the kids with AIDS in New York City were Black or Latino.

And the world these children entered—the gritty, struggling New York of the 1980s—was largely unprepared to meet the challenge of the moment. “The kids were dying left and right,” Frere recalled.

From her perch at Harlem Hospital, Frere saw the shape of the AIDS crisis emerging early and understood its implications for the community where she lived, worked, and had grown up. So did her colleague Stephen Nicholas, even though he was newer to the neighborhood. All these decades later, he still keeps a photo of the first baby he treated who had AIDS, a little girl who arrived at the hospital in July 1983, 8 weeks old but already dying. The little girl’s mother was also young, only 22, and she too was sick. The photo is not easy to look at—it’s full of pain and has an intimacy that feels wrong to breach—so I will just say this: The little girl stares up at the camera with wide, slightly alarmed eyes, a red barrette in her hair and a slender tube taped to her nose. “She turned out to have pneumocystic pneumonia, which was the same thing that was being seen in adults with AIDS,” Nicholas said. She died not long after the picture was taken.

“So that,” he concluded, “was the beginning.”

In the months and years that followed, the story of this little girl repeated itself again and again on Harlem Hospital’s 17th floor, as well as at other city hospitals. There were differences among the cases, to be sure: Some children lived into their toddler years or even made it to the double digits before their immune systems gave out; others had mild cases that enabled them to make it, somehow, to the miracle era of antiretroviral therapy, which began in the late 1990s. But one theme that bound many of these children together was that they were dying alone.

Because HIV was inevitably a family disease in the cases where kids were concerned—spread from mother to child or sometimes from father to mother to child—one or both parents were always ill as well. Sometimes, they were so ill they couldn’t care for their kids or had already died; other times, addiction sent them into the streets and kept them there for days, weeks, or even longer; and all too frequently, mothers lost their kids to a foster care system whose solution to the drug epidemic was simply to take children away. This system then proved utterly unequipped to look after children with a stigmatized and often fatal disease.

What this meant was that a number of children with HIV wound up sick and alone on hospital wards, spending months and sometimes even their entire brief lives there. “We had many children who lived in the hospital because they couldn’t go home,” Abrams said. By the mid-’80s, the problem had become so pronounced that someone, somewhere, came up with a name for these children: boarder babies. At Harlem Hospital, which became the home of necessity for more of these children than any other hospital in New York, the average length of stay, according to an article written by Nicholas and Abrams, was 339 days.

Within this bleak landscape—one where sick children lived out their days at underfunded hospitals, in communities that the wider city had abandoned—there were nonetheless acts of remarkable decency and goodness. There were people who stepped into society’s breach—nurses and doctors who held kids when others were scared, tasted their medicine to make sure it was palatable, celebrated their milestones. In several cases, nurses adopted their young patients. “We were a family,” Frere said.

Still, even in families, children sometimes fall through the cracks, and almost every time I asked a nurse or doctor to describe how a child like SC-B1 might have ended up at Hart Island, they shared some version of the boarder-baby scenario. “That child could be so many different children from all over New York City. Particularly in the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, and Harlem, there were children dying from HIV who were nameless, who had no family, who could be that little boy or little girl there,” Abrams told me. “There were many children like that—not hundreds and hundreds, but there were babies like that.”

Like several other doctors I spoke with, Abrams had specific children in mind—a little girl who “had no visitors, or maybe one visitor, over the course of many, many months,” she said. “She just was a ward of the state.” Abrams didn’t know where she was buried after she died, but she wondered. And when I asked Nicholas about the possibility that children from Harlem Hospital’s 17th floor ended up at Hart Island, he said that, early on, a nurse had told him that some of the children who died alone were buried in the potter’s field. But “once we became aware of that,” he said, “the nurses at the hospital oftentimes would pool money to make sure that the baby got a funeral.”

Frere doesn’t recall any children with AIDS getting buried on Hart Island—certainly not on her and her colleagues’ watch. “Maybe before we all started,” she said. But after that, “I can almost swear that no kid who died in Harlem went to potter’s field.” Instead, she remembers staff chipping in to help with burials. “People would give their grave sites and buy the clothes and everything for them to be buried.”

There were other possibilities, of course, other scenarios by which a small child who died of AIDS might have found their way to Hart Island: they might have died surrounded by family, but that family couldn’t then afford the high expense of a burial; or perhaps that family couldn’t find a funeral home that would prepare the body and arrange the burial, as was all too common in those days. In 1983, the New York State Funeral Directors Home advised its members not to embalm the bodies of people who had died of AIDS.

Still, the grim truth is most of the doctors and nurses I polled suspected that SC-B1 had died alone in a hospital—at Jacobi or Lincoln in the Bronx, Bellevue or St. Vincent’s in Manhattan, Kings County Medical Center in Brooklyn—or any number of others—with no family to usher it to its final resting spot. “There were so many of these really special little kids who didn’t have the luxury of a home,” Abrams said, “or, really, a life.”

This story could end here, in the lonely corner of an underfunded pediatric ward, in a city that was unprepared to meet the challenges of a deadly new virus. And yet, if the story did end here, it would be incomplete. It would be a story that described only who Special Case–Baby 1 might have been—and not who they could be, even now, if HIV had moved slower and the world had moved faster. It would be a story only of death, when the story of pediatric AIDS is also, ultimately, one of life.

In 1996, more than a decade after SC-B1 died, a mother waited outside her daughter’s room at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. This mother was Michelle Lopez, and she was still baby-faced at 29, still carrying traces of Trinidad, where she grew up, in her voice. Her daughter, Raven, who was 6, was in the hospital as part of a clinical trial for a new drug to treat HIV—a protease inhibitor that was being developed, for the first time, to give to children as well as adults. Lopez was anxious.

“I had friends of mine who were like, ‘Michelle, you’re crazy. They could kill your kid,’” she told me recently, her voice rising to a taut squeak. “But,” she recalled, “I looked at them, and I said, ‘What more does she have to lose?’”

Raven had been diagnosed with HIV in 1991, when she was roughly a year old, and by this point her immune system was buckling. She had bouts of pneumonia and frequent ear infections; one doctor had told Lopez that Raven probably wouldn’t make it to the age of 7.

Lopez was also sick. She had been infected before Raven was born, by Raven’s father, she believes, and like far too many women during that era, she hadn’t known she had the virus when she was pregnant—hadn’t even known she was at risk of getting it. She had found out only after she had fled with Raven to a domestic violence shelter, where a caseworker suggested that she, and then Raven, take a test. HIV was still a death sentence at this point—in 1990, AIDS was the leading cause of death for Black women in New York State between the ages of 15 and 44—and the discovery that both she and her daughter had the virus could easily have pushed Lopez to give up.

“We had no guidelines for us as mothers. We were left to raise this child that was born with this disease. Every day was traumatic for me,” Lopez recalled. “But,” she added, “I learned from [my] communities, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to save this child.”

One of those communities was ACT UP, the fiercely inventive AIDS activism organization that was formed in 1987. Lopez had been connected with the group by her caseworker, and the activists “really embraced me,” she said. They “mentored me, protected me”—and, she said, they “motivated” her, tapping into what would turn out to be a gale-force activist spirit.

In the months after her diagnosis, Lopez became a hurricane—advocating, agitating, and pushing to expand the terrain of rights and resources for people with HIV. “I kept going. I kept giving myself up to do a testimony, to be a claimant,” she said, describing how she spoke at conferences, testified for legislation, joined lawsuits. Her mission was to create the support structures that would allow her daughter and her, as well as the many parents and children in situations painfully similar to theirs, to survive: the affordable housing for people with AIDS, the medical care for pregnant mothers, and, above all, the treatments for children, who were largely being ignored by the pharmaceutical industry. It was this last quest that ultimately convinced her to sign Raven up for the clinical trial for the new protease inhibitor, which included a 24-hour dosing test to determine the proper amount of the drug to administer to Raven and other children.

“We were praying,” Lopez said of the day of the dosing test. “That’s all that I remember—prayers.”

The trial did what it was supposed to do, it was successful. Raven made it through the study, unscathed and unshaken, and then stayed on the drug through its approval by the FDA in 1997 and beyond. It was a landmark moment in the history of pediatric HIV and AIDS. Viracept, as it was called, was among the first successful treatments for children with the virus, and it transformed not only Raven’s life but the lives of other HIV-positive kids throughout the United States. Alongside another critical intervention—the discovery in 1994 of a therapy to interrupt the transmission of HIV from mother to child during pregnancy—it heralded the beginning of the miraculous, albeit slow and still unfinished, end of the pediatric HIV and AIDS crisis in this country.

Raven “really, really made a great impact for pediatric AIDS in reference to children having access,” Lopez said. “And,” she added, “it was a little Black girl from the Bronx.”

Lopez was sitting in Raven’s apartment when she told me this, perched next to her daughter on a black couch decorated with a single sparkling silver pillow. Lopez is 57 now, with electric energy and a full-bodied laugh. She is still protective of her daughter, still determined to tell the world what the two of them survived, and how.

Raven is more subdued: As her mother spoke, retelling this essential moment of family and medical lore, she seemed proud but also weary, perhaps because she’s heard the story so many times before, or perhaps because it feels oddly disconnected from her own memories of her life. She remembers the day when she was 6 that she learned she had HIV; remembers being afraid that she would die; and remembers her doctor’s reassurances. But the clinical trial that saved her life, as well as her many trips to the hospital—the poking, the prodding, the appointments—are lost to her. “I don’t remember all of that process,” she said.

Raven is now 33, which means that she has outlived the medical establishment’s dire early predictions for her by decades. Her life is, in many ways, a miracle. She now takes one pill once a day to suppress her HIV, and has a child of her own—a 6-year-old son who is HIV-negative and is the joy of her world as well as her mother’s. On the day we met, she was dressed in the saturated pink hues of a Barbie top, her hair accented pink as well. “I’m a pink girl,” she said. “If it was up to me, the world would be pink.”

Even so, Raven will be the first to say that the arc of her life has not been a smooth one. Much like her mother—and often right alongside her—she had to fight at each step and juncture of her journey, pushing back against the ignorance and stigma of her classmates, weathering moments of fear and despair. In elementary school, there was the teacher who refused to let her use the bathroom or go on school trips; in high school, there was the boy who told everyone she had “the Monster.” Throughout her life, there have been the friends who have died from the illness she has survived. “It was hard for me growing up,” Raven said.

Still, she prefers to focus these days on the fact of her survival, on life. “I got to show people: ‘Look, I’m that girl that’s still here!’” she said.

As we prepared to part ways, I decided to broach the subject of Special Case–Baby 1, to ask Lopez if she could imagine the child’s story, and if she thought it could tell us something even today. She didn’t pause. “These women and children back then did not have the kind of infrastructure we built… the community that I discovered and embraced me,” she said. “Those women and children did not have that in the early ’80s.”

It’s among the reasons she felt she needed to fight so hard. “They were not on the radar, or they were not a priority identified by our public health system,” Lopez said. “They fell through the cracks.”

On a bright but bitter day in November 2022, I stood in a clearing ringed by spiny trees at the southern tip of Hart Island, staring down at the grave of Special Case–Baby 1. It was my first trip to the island, and the grave looked more or less as I had seen it in pictures, an unobtrusive slab of concrete that could easily be mistaken for a mile marker if you didn’t know better. The island itself looked different than I’d expected—not a haunted place of decay and lurking ghosts, but a serene landscape of pale green and brown that seemed almost to hover above the water. It was handed over to the Parks Department in 2021 and cleaned up, the weeds pulled, the grass trimmed, the crumbling buildings torn down. The place was magical. From its shores, the city looked only half-real.

I had managed to score permission to visit Hart Island through my work with WNYC—reporting on HIV/AIDS for Blindspot—and I was joined by three colleagues and Eugene Ruppert, the retired DOC captain who oversaw burials on the site. We had asked Ruppert to come along as our guide, and he obliged by gamely pointing out every structure, still standing or not, on our way to SC-B1’s grave—the site of the old laundry building, the pumping station for sewage, the place where an old schoolhouse had once stood. When we finally arrived at the grave, I stood for a few moments, not quite sure what to do, then stretched out my hand to touch the marker, hoping to convey reverence—or maybe, if I’m honest, to intuit something. Mostly, though, I intuited cold.

This was still early in my quest to find SC-B1, and I hadn’t yet lost faith that I could solve the mystery of the child’s identity. So I peppered Ruppert with questions, searching for ways to dislodge any memories of the day of the burial, but those memories had either never embedded or had long since been washed away. “We got babies every day,” Ruppert said. “We got stillborns, we got body parts, we got adults.”

“It was routine,” he continued. “It’s just what we did. It’s like driving a bus.”

As I left the grave site, I felt the first lurch of disappointment, but now I think I am relieved. More than 15 months after I began trying to track down Special Case–Baby 1, and 15 years after I first became fascinated with their story, I’ve stopped dreaming of finding out who this child was, stopped wanting to peer into the depths of this one human’s tragedy. Although I may not have uncovered the specific contours of SC-B1’s death—or their life—I do have a sense of its shape, and it is as bleak and intimate as any I could have imagined. It is the little boy who first showed up at Arye Rubinstein’s immunology clinic, and the little girl who died on Stephen Nicholas’s early watch, and it is any number of other children whose stories I have not told but will inhabit the sadder quadrants of my heart for a long time to come. After so much pain, crammed into such a brief life, it seems to me that whoever SC-B1 was, they deserve to rest.

I didn’t fully recognize the importance of this rest when I began my search. When I set out to find SC-B1, I was voracious in my determination not only to understand how a child with AIDS could have ended up on Hart Island—alone, in a segregated spot—but also to give the child a proper burial of sorts, to do them justice through the retroactive magic of words and storytelling. What I didn’t realize at the time is that the child already had a proper burial—a grave site, however troubled its origins, that is as peaceful and hallowed as any final resting spot. Nor did I understand that the nothingness of anonymity, from which I had felt such a strong need to rescue the child, was not an injustice—although it clearly started as such—but a shield. AIDS activists had fought since the very earliest days of the epidemic for the rights to privacy and confidentiality, for the ability to protect themselves from the world’s stigmatizing gaze. I would not want to be the one to strip that protection from this child.

“The point of a cemetery,” said Melinda Hunt, the Hart Island advocate and activist who first brought attention to Special Case–Baby 1, “is that it’s a communal reconciliation of death.” It is “where we keep our history”—and the way we tend to that history matters. This makes sense to me but it also raises a question: How do we possibly begin to reconcile a death like that of SC-B1? How, in fact, do we reconcile so many of the deaths of the AIDS era?

When I asked Michelle Lopez this question, she had a ready response: “We honor [the child] by…continually advocating,” she said. She reminded me that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is far from over, that people continue to get infected and die to this day, both in the United States and abroad. And so, she said, we must continue to fight—for treatments and for access to treatments and for a real cure—so that no one has to go through what she and Raven endured. Or what Special Case–Baby 1 did.

Nearly 40 years ago, a child died in New York City. This child died of a virus that snuck into the city’s veins and arteries, then made its way, undetected, down its willfully neglected streets and into the bodies of whole communities. This child was not the first one to die of AIDS, nor would they be the last; they were not the only special child—although they were special.

When this child died, their body was taken by ferry to an island-cemetery off the coast of the city. Because of the virus that killed them, the men who buried the child were afraid, so they carted their coffin to a fenced-off area that was separated from the rest. They lowered the pine coffin into the ground using a system of ropes, then left those ropes in the grave, along with their gloves and protective gear, and closed up the hole. Then they walked away, leaving the child in the place where it lies to this day—in a quiet clearing, near a stand of slender trees, beneath a marker that is only half-deciphered.

In the mid-1980s, the people of Valerie Reyes-Jimenez’s Lower Manhattan neighborhood began to disappear. First one, then another, then tens—then 75 from one single block. “One day they were there,” she said, “and the next day they were gone.”

In the decades before these disappearances, Reyes-Jimenez’s neighborhood had been a tight-knit Puerto Rican community—a vibrant place where friends and family were always close at hand. But in the 1970s, as the local economy crumbled, a different one grew in its place—an economy centered around the city’s largest open-air heroin market—and, with that heroin, came this other thing, this illness, that began to steal people away.

“We said that people had The Monster, because they had that look,” Reyes-Jimenez said. “They had the sucked-in cheeks.… They were really thin.”

Outside Reyes-Jimenez’s neighborhood, doctors had a different name for what was going on: They called it HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. By this point, the illness that was destroying people’s immune systems was widely recognized as the biggest contagious threat facing the United States, but its effect on communities like Reyes-Jimenez’s—Black and Puerto Rican, poor, often in the grips of drug crises—remained largely invisible. It was a blind spot that would shape the course of the epidemic for years to come.

Why didn’t more people see this side of HIV and AIDS? And what might have been different if they had?

These are some of the questions at the heart of Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, a podcast I helped make alongside a dream team of journalists from WNYC, including Kai Wright, my former Nation colleague and the sublime host of Notes from America. Our collective hope was to understand how, decades before Covid-19, a virus had torn through some of this country’s most vulnerable communities while the wider world looked away.

What we found both devastated and inspired us. As we time-warped back to the 1980s, our reporting took us from a pediatric ward in Harlem to a maximum security women’s prison in upstate New York to a needle exchange in a South Bronx church to the city’s own potter’s field. And it revealed how, unseen but desperately feared, a single, tiny virus could take advantage of some of the worst bigotries, biases, and, yes, blindspots in our society. As Kai says in the first episode, “AIDS was not just a medical crisis; it was and it remains a social disease, one that exploits the inequities that already define so much of American life.”

And yet: Amid the grief and enduring pain, we also found something else—truly heroic human beings who had no intention of bowing to any of society’s bigotries and biases. These were activists and nurses, doctors and elected officials, daughters, sons, a nun, a priest, and a woman who literally helped change the definition of AIDS. They were people dying of HIV. When the world averted its eyes, they demanded the world look; they demanded to be seen.

It’s now been more than 40 years since HIV/AIDS burst into public consciousness, scorching lives, neighborhoods, and whole communities. Some 40 million people have died around the world, and it’s still killing people today. But in the US, much of the country has moved past the illness; we have forgotten it—or, in too many cases, never gotten to know—an illness that redefined everything from love and intimacy to health, sexuality, solidarity, and activism.

With Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, we revisit the early days of this pandemic, and we ask: What might have happened if more people had chosen to see the plague in the shadows—if they chose to see it even now? And what lessons can we learn from it today?

* * *

Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows is a coproduction of the History Channel and WNYC Studios, with The Nation. Its first two episodes are “Mourning in America” and “If I Didn’t Have HIV, I Wouldn’t Have Met You.” You can find them at wnycstudios.org/podcasts/blindspot or wherever you get your podcasts.

I met Ahmed Abu Artema only once, in March of 2019, but if I close my eyes for just a moment, I can still conjure him sitting in The Nation’s conference room, soft-spoken and bookish in a pair of black rectangular glasses, reluctantly commanding our attention.

Ahmed is a writer and peace activist who was born in the Rafa refugee camp to a family that had been expelled from what is now Israel. He had come to speak with us, a small band of editors and interns, about life under siege in the Gaza Strip and about the mass non­violent movement he’d helped galvanize to resist it.

Every Friday, for more than a year, he recounted, thousands of people in Gaza would make their way to the border fence with Israel as part of what they called the Great March of Return. They were, as he wrote in a 2018 piece for The Nation, “fighting back peacefully with our bodies and our love for life, appealing to the justice that remains in the world.” For this, Israeli soldiers shot and tear-gassed them, killing more than 200 protesters and wounding tens of thousands.

Before Ahmed left The Nation’s office, we agreed that he should continue to share his words with our readers—and he did. Over the next four years, he wrote articles, at once poetic and urgent, that bore witness to Israel’s strangling grip on Gaza. In 2019, during one of the Israeli military’s periodic bombing campaigns, he wrote of trying to calm his terrified young son Abdul Rahman with hugs and even humor, telling him, “Look, son, these bombs are far away and fall in the sea not near us, so whenever you hear them again, I want you to jump high in the air, laugh, and shout ‘Hey!’”

Not long after, in the spring of 2020, he described the tense quiet of the early days of Covid, as Gaza’s shattered health system prepared for the arrival of the deadly virus. And just last month, when Israel began its bloodiest war on Gaza yet, he did his best to make the “blur of cascading violence” real for readers.

“The stench of death is on the streets,” he wrote, “and the nights are endless, with no electricity and intensifying bombardments.”

On October 24, just 10 days after he published those words, Ahmed’s oldest son Abdullah was killed in one of those intensified bombardments. He was 13 years old and adored by his father for his “innocence, kindness, compassion, mercy, and…self overflowing with goodness.” Abdullah had just returned from a trip to the corner store to buy bread—though he had found no bread, only biscuits—when the bomb fell. The blast killed four other relatives—two of Ahmed’s aunts, one of those aunt’s daughters, and his step-mother—and seriously injured Ahmed. He is now recovering from second-degree burns but, thankfully, is expected to heal.

In the devastating weeks since the bombing, I have returned again and again to the articles Ahmed has written for us over the years, and I have been haunted by the message he wove with lyrical desperation through each one. Somehow, I didn’t fully understand what he was doing when I first read the pieces; I didn’t hear the plea threaded through every one of the hooks and pegs. But now, reading them collectively, it’s achingly obvious.

“It’s time for the world to finally say to Israel that enough is enough,” he wrote in 2019.

“Palestinians, like all people in the world, want to live free,” he begged that same year.

“We need all people of conscience around the world to understand the relentless oppression that created this horrific reality,” he urged only weeks ago. “Raise your voices in solidarity with us.”

The world did not listen to those words—not to the first of them, nor to the last. Now, Ahmed’s son is dead, as are over 4,000 other children in Gaza; 1,250 children remain missing.

Like so many other Palestinians, Ahmed tried to get the world to notice. He tried to get us to care. He marched, he wrote, he pleaded. This time, if we want to prevent more death, if we want to prevent parents from ever having to feel the abject grief that Ahmed does, we must listen.

As the people of Gaza endured perhaps the most harrowing day of Israel’s assault on the besieged Strip, reeling from a bombing that killed hundreds of civilians sheltering in a hospital, and as President Joe Biden, newly arrived in Israel, shared a warm embrace with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a group of American Jews gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand an immediate cease-fire. Today’s action—a thousands-strong protest, set to start at noon—is part of a week of actions by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, Jewish-led organizations that have chosen to channel their grief over Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians into calls to stop what many are calling a genocide attempt against Palestinians.

On Monday afternoon, I spoke to Jay Saper, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, to learn about why they had traveled from Brooklyn to D.C. to take part in today’s protest. Saper is an artist, educator, organizer, and Yiddishist who translates poetry from Eastern Europe’s ghettos and creates contemporary Yiddish theater. As we spoke, a contingent of Jewish activists were busy shutting down the entrances to the White House, calling on Biden to negotiate an end to the bombing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Compared with the decades that came directly before and after, the 1990s have often seemed a ho-hum era, the dull Jan caught between its more outrageous siblings. While the ’80s arrived with a burst of big hair and shoulder pads, a synthy MTV soundtrack blasting over the Gipper’s evisceration of the welfare state, and the 2000s appeared like a deranged comet, throwing whole worlds off course, the ’90s bounced and slouched their way forward, a little bit sunny, a little bit ironic, and more or less insignificant. This was the decade so boring it was supposed to be the end of history.

And yet.

Three decades later, the ’90s don’t seem so dull after all. Squint a little, peer through the telescope of time, and they look not only consequential but foundational—a sort of cosmic microwave background flickering with the precursors of the present moment. Our obsessions, our follies, our heartbreaks, our struggles, and even a few of our triumphs—they are all there, if in nascent form, radiating into the here and now.

Consider the new Cold War. You can glimpse its beginnings in the end of the old one, which spun out in spectacular fashion in December 1991, when the Soviet Union officially collapsed, leaving the United States the world’s sole superpower. Or how about neoliberalism? Sure, Ronald Reagan did his best to undo the New Deal, but it was Bill Clinton, that triangulating Lothario, who ushered in neoliberalism’s second wave, giving us NAFTA, welfare “reform,” and the enduring emptiness of “doing well by doing good.” And let’s not forget the tech revolution, which rewired our minds along with our machines. You can hear that revolution coming in the jagged stutter of your first modem, or the mechanical singsong of your old Nokia. You can feel it in the acceleration of culture itself.

The legacy of the last decade of the 20th century isn’t limited to the epic global stuff, either. In ways both big and small, the events of the ’90s continue to exert their influence, echoing across the decades and into the present. Long before the outbreak of the current culture war, for instance, there was the ’90s culture war, with its clashes over multiculturalism and political correctness. Long before 2020’s Black Lives Matter uprisings, Los Angeles lit up in despair and rage over the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King—an attack that was broadcast, again and again, by means of what has been described as the first viral video. Columbine paved the way for Uvalde; Iron John for incels; Fox News for Newsmax TV; fat-free for keto fads; and on and on, into the here-and-now. Instead of the End of History, the 1990s gave us the Revenge of History.

To help make sense of this overlooked epoch, we spent several weeks roaming the corridors of our own nostalgia, then reached out to a range of thinkers and writers. We asked them to tackle such heady questions as, was Trumpism actually born in the 1990s, and were Snackwells the ultimate neoliberal snack? While we didn’t get an answer to this last question, we did receive thirteen elegant articles probing everything from the rise of house music, courtesy of Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, to the origins of today’s fractured and fractious politics. This last topic is the subject of two fascinating essays—by Jeet Heer and Lily Geismer—which explore the legacy of Pat Buchanan’s grievance politics and the aftereffects of The Third Way, that love child of New Labor and the New Democrats. Meanwhile, Brent Cunningham has crafted “How Food Became a Weapon in the Right’s Culture War,” a tour de force of culinary and cultural analysis that traces how the ’90s gave rise to a high-stakes food fight that still rages today.

To be sure, not all of the era’s developments were negative. Alongside the abundant ugliness—and, yes, some genuine oddities that still confound (see: Pauly Shore, Haircutgate, Olestra)—the 1990s also seeded fresh dreams and possibilities. In the very first year of the decade, the philosopher Judith Butler gave us Gender Trouble, “introduc[ing] new ways of thinking about gender, not just to academic discourse but to popular culture,” Naomi Gordon-­Loebl explains in her intimately vivid essay for the issue. As for the activist left, it found ways, even in its diminished state, to resist—or, as Naomi Klein writes, to jam its foot “in the heavy door of history so that the full weight of neoliberal power would not succeed in slamming it shut completely.” While this isn’t exactly “the kind of feat that people sing songs of triumph about,” Klein notes, it was nonetheless its own kind of achievement.

As 2022 comes to an end, it’s enlightening and perhaps oddly comforting to be reminded that we have seen—and survived—some of the afflictions roiling our society before. While it would be nicer if we’d managed to vanquish them, the reality is, that doesn’t happen very often. Instead, we struggle, we shift tactics, we struggle some more—and maybe we learn, as Mary Annaïse Heglar writes in her essay about growing up as a child of the first climate-change generation. For Heglar, the great lesson of her childhood was that the fight to save the planet, like many fights, is not one generation’s “burden to bear all alone.” It is an act of collective dedication. As we reflect on the past and plunge into the future, that’s a worthy lesson indeed.

The Nation’s editor in chief D.D. Guttenplan and senior editor Lizzy Ratner sat with journalists Laura Flanders, Sara Lomax-Reese, and S. Mitra Kalita as part of the magazine’s Conversations series to speak about the critical importance, and challenges, of independent media. The cofounders of URL media, Lomax-Reese is the CEO of WURD Radio, one of the few remaining Black-owned talk radio stations in the nation, and Kalita is a veteran journalist and author, most recently senior vice president at CNN Digital.

The journalists discussed lifting up new voices and reporting underreported stories, but the focus was on URL Media, a decentralized, multi-platform network of Black and brown media organizations. Founded by Lomax-Reese and Mitra Kalita in 2001, URL Media helps members share content, distribution, resources, and revenue to extend reach and build long-term sustainability.

Lizzy Ratner: Can you talk about how “Meet the BIPOC Press’ started on your show? How does the collaboration fit into your show’s mission to be “the place where the people who say it can’t be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it”?

Laura Flanders: Meet the Press is the longest-running show on television, dating back to the 1940s. The model was one white guy interviewing a power broker. All of the presidents have appeared on Meet the Press. The “important interview of the week” was exactly the model that we wanted to blow up on this program—the idea that there is one version of truth, one epitome of power, one show that everybody should watch to get their talking points for the week.

The Laura Flanders Show secured a spot on public-television stations that just happened to be after Meet the Press, and I thought, “Here’s a great opportunity to paint a different picture of our media.” Specifically, after last year, it seemed critically important to me to paint a picture of the vibrancy of Black and brown media.

We’ve been bringing people programming about messages of possibility, and people making change where they live, and once a month, we look at how the BIPOC media has been covering that that same month. It’s been illuminating for me. It’s truly an honor to work with Sara and Mitra. I’m always learning things, and I think our audience is getting a message that there’s more than one kind of press.

D.D. Guttenplan: What interested me about the old Meet the Press is that it used to be wide-open ideologically. Then, after the Cold War, it shut down into a very narrow vision of possible discussion, which was also part of what forced out Martha Rountree. I’m curious about whether you feel that there are boundaries about what you can talk about. I was also talking to a friend who was at BuzzFeed in the early years when money was pouring in through the windows. I’m guessing that’s not an experience either of you have had.

Sara Lomax-Reese: There’s nothing really off limits in terms of what we cover. We are a network right now of 11 independent media organizations that are owned by Black and brown people. WURD, my radio station, and Epicenter are two of those 11. URL does not mandate any kind of ideological framework from any of our partners. They are in the network, because they represent authentic engagement and trusted interaction with their audiences. They represent quality content.

From an ideological standpoint, it’s all about our audience. How can we be of service to our audience? What does our audience need? We are about speaking truth to power. In a city like Philadelphia that is almost 45 percent Black, we have a responsibility to be a place where the Black community can speak and be heard. We can wrestle with the hard issues, and we can talk about the complicated ones, but there’s really nothing that’s off limits.

What does that mean from an economic standpoint? It’s hard. It’s hard as hell to make authentic community-based media profitable or sustainable, and that is where everything that you have—creativity, tenacity, relationships—comes into play. We really believe that Black and brown media, if we come together, have the potential to become leaders and not always be starved for resources and talent. If we can create this bigger platform, we can become the organizations of choice.

It’s very difficult to get to the top levels in mainstream media organizations for BIPOC folks. All of the momentum for BIPOC organizations and institutions that was articulated after the 2020 protests seems to be dwindling. But it doesn’t matter. We’re here to do the work no matter what, because the audiences need our voices and our work.

S. Mitra Kalita: Those 2020 commitments were questionable to begin with. Where have the advertisers, funders, and investors really put their money? We intentionally launched in January of 2021, days after President Biden was inaugurated. We didn’t want the next four years to look like the last four—or the last 400. As the country was hitting a reset, we felt like there should be a reset on the media.

But before that, we shopped the idea around to investors. I didn’t say it in the moment, but I vowed last night when I saw the news about Bitch Media that we really need to get a lot more honest about just how hard this is. When Sara and I went out there, we met with investors, and in the typical kind of Silicon Valley positioning, they started poking holes into our idea. We’re coming on the heels of a movement that is vowing to change everything, and yet you’re going to evaluate me by the same standards as how you’ve evaluated every business idea or media model? I think that’s really unfair. At the time, I didn’t shout about that, but now I’m angry enough.

LF: I think it’s important for people to realize that public television hasn’t really been investing since the 1960s. Its appropriations have been cut back and made more political. As a network of stations, it’s as dependent on corporate underwriting almost as the commercial networks. There are still pledge drives, but the money that you pledge to your local station does not support the majority of programming.

The majority of the material that you see is produced by independent producers like me. We raise the money from foundations and our audience, and that is really hard. In the independent media world, many of us have been to workshops that say, “You must invest in your back office as much as you invest in journalism,” and we just can’t do it. I can’t do it. I invest in the journalism, and I am constantly trying to catch up with not having enough infrastructure to get us to the next level financially.

That may be more than you will want to hear, and it is a constant struggle, but I believe that if we don’t provide the US public a message about how society can move forward collaboratively in a positive direction, then the only message they’re going to be getting is a message of “Fight for your own. Keep your piece of the pie. Keep anybody else from getting it.” That zero-sum game mentality is what you see on every other network, whether it’s Democratic-leaning or Republican.

SLR: The thing that’s so interesting to me is that we represent so many different platforms. We’ve got Documented that’s working on WhatsApp. We’ve got Sahan Journal that’s digital and newsletters. But all of them are rooted in their community with a trusted, ongoing, authentic relationship with their audiences. The reporting is done specifically for a localized audience, but there are also through lines that we’re able to create within the network.

LR: What are the differences and similarities between what The Nation would call “the progressive media” and “independent media” and “BIPOC media”?

SMK: I would feel way more comfortable having a conversation about the race of a suspect, or increased crime on the subway, or how Asian women in New York City are feeling right now in a setting where it’s community. When that conversation happens anywhere else, it starts to feel like we’re divided.

I don’t want that history among different communities to be defined by whiteness. There are a lot of intra-racial relationships that I feel are more honest in certain settings. When I think about things from a progressive lens, I still think about it from the traditional political spectrum. But when I try to cover politics from the URL perspective, I really try to ask, “What is it that we’re trying to help our community understand? How can we advocate for our community?” One thing we need to acknowledge is that the mainstream press does not capture the nuanced multitude of perspectives within our communities.

LF: I’m about as ensconced in the old-school progressive media world as you can imagine. I started writing for The Nation in my 20s, and I’ve never really had a spot in commercial media. And yet this collaboration with URL Media has been a real learning experience for me, and sometimes a quite difficult exercise. “How do we work this out in public? How do we think in public together?”

One of the things about having this space, without commercials, is that we can actually see a conversation develop. We are working it out. You can see it happen in real time. I think that’s the media at its best. This is not an article—it’s live interaction. We’re sort of modeling—not being perfect at it, but at least we’re agreeing to sit with each other and listen. We’re calling in the audience to believe that they, too, can engage in these kinds of conversations.

SLR: I really believe that context matters. There are things that we can say on WURD, which is a Black-owned, Black-focused, Black audience media outlet, that if it was said on CNN or even The Laura Flanders Show, it might be received very differently.

Our URL Media organizations have this very direct relationship with their audiences. They are reporting from being embedded. There’s not this kind of swoop in. A lot of times, I’m asked, “Is what you do advocacy or journalism?” That’s not a real question to me, because what we’re about is being of service and of value to our audiences. Part of that value comes from being in the community and not having this “objective lens” where you’re just reporting this out from above. We’re seeing a lot of partnerships in the journalism space right now. I’ve been in a lot of partnerships with “mainstream media” in Philadelphia, and a lot of times they are very lopsided. You are the garnish on the side, and the big media organization is the steak.

What I really value about our partnership with The Laura Flanders Show is that it’s not like that. We’re coming to this partnership as equals that are experimenting and exploring. We’re bringing something that’s new and valued.

SMK: I’m the daughter of immigrants, and I was raised in Puerto Rico. My perspectives are different from the African American history that is centuries old here. In mainstream media, we kind of gloss over how complicated it is. When I would interview people, and they’d say, “Oh, I’m a Jehovah’s Witness.” I’d be like,“Oh, gosh! I’m not gonna write that part.” But watch some of the shows. It’s an exercise in leaning into the complicated parts of people and identity.

LR: Are there any legislative possibilities for helping support and sustain independent media? Which elected politicians understand the issue? And also what are you most excited about going forward with the collaboration?

SMK: There’s a few government possibilities before us. Tax credits for hiring journalists and local news organizations, for example. There’s a $25,000 tax credit that’s been proposed for organizations like mine, and would actually be pretty revolutionary, but for some of our BIPOC members that rely on freelance and contract work, not so much. You really need to make sure you’re not excluding some media models in these efforts.

New York State has enacted legislation where, if you’re a government agency in New York, you have to advertise with community media. That’s been a game changer for many of our members. I just had dinner with the editor of The Haitian Times last night, and it’s a significant part of their revenue. One challenge, having done business with the city, is whether they pay you on time or not. It’s something we never talk about as local organizations, but is very much an issue.

The third possibility is that there hasn’t been significant investment in public media in quite some time. I don’t think the political climate for it has been right for the last few years, but that just feels like the elephant in the room, as we’re skirting around that issue.

SLR: There’s also the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association, MMCA, that’s doing a lot of work in Washington, D.C., around new ways to fund BIPOC media organizations through legislation and tax credits. I’m also a big fan of Media 2070, which is about the media reparations that need to happen in order for mainstream media to make good on all of the ways that they were complicit in promoting and extending slavery and Jim Crow.

I’m just excited about everything coming down the pike. We’re growing our network. We’re in year two with The Laura Flanders Show. We’re figuring out how to make our URL Model exceed our expectations. The proof will be in the elevation of all of our partners on multiple levels. That’s what I’m really looking forward to over the next year.

On the morning of September 13, shortly after the New York school system’s Covid-screening website crashed, Mayor Bill de Blasio stood outside PS 25 in the Bronx celebrating the reopening of the city’s public schools. It was a heady occasion: For the first time in 18 months, the largest public school system in the country—nearly 1.1 million students—would be back in swing, and de Blasio was intent on proving that it was not only the right but also a safe decision.

“It’s so good to see all our kids coming back to school in person where they can learn best,” de Blasio said as a collection of multicolored balloons bobbed in the background. Dressed in a trim blue suit, his face mask temporarily stowed, he touted the Department of Education’s Covid-19 precautions and vowed that students would be safe. “Kids coming to school today, all across the city, are going to experience a gold standard of health and safety measures,” he said.

De Blasio seems to like the phrase “gold standard,” as he repeats it frequently when talking up the DOE’s Covid-19 protocols. But two days later, my son offered a more tarnished assessment of the situation. “My school is a Covid petri dish,” he said, citing the 25 to 30 kids crammed into his classes; the clustered seating arrangements, with four kids to each worktable; the teeming hallways in which “everyone is bumping into everyone else”; and the haphazard masking by some friends and classmates. “It’s a bit scary,” he confessed.

Since my 11-year-old son is too young to be vaccinated, I wasn’t thrilled by this report, but I wasn’t all that surprised either. In the weeks leading up to de Blasio’s Bronx appearance, I had watched the DOE roll back safety measure after safety measure as the mayor repeated his “gold standard” mantra.

True, the city does have a mask mandate, and it’s just implemented a vaccine mandate for staff, both of which put it ahead of the many districts that have pushed back against basic science. But social distancing appears largely notional, thanks to the mass overcrowding of many public schools. Testing is spotty (less than a quarter of kids have consented to getting tested) and applies only to the unvaccinated in any case (never mind that vaccinated people can be carriers). Quarantine protocols have been weakened to the point of farce—or at least confusion. And the city’s priorities seem out of whack—as seen, for instance, in its decision to chisel the funding (and hours) of the Situation Room, the multiagency brain trust that’s supposed to track Covid-19 outbreaks in schools.

Taken together, all of these issues raise questions about how seriously the DOE and the mayor are taking the crisis—particularly for unvaccinated kids—even as we all understand the mayor’s argument about the importance of consistent, in-person education. So, as the number of positive Covid-19 cases ticks up each day—a total of more than 4,000 as of October 7—I can’t help but wonder: Are families getting the full safety story? And I can’t help but worry—not only about my own kid, but also about the many other kids who might get sick and bring the virus back to their family members who may be at risk of severe illness.

To help get some clarity, I reached out to Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Osterholm became something of a guru to Covid obsessives after his “hair-raising, accurate prediction” of the early course of the pandemic, followed by his prescient warnings about this summer’s surge. Our interview, which took place over two sessions, has been edited for length and clarity.

Lizzy Ratner: So how should I feel about sending my kid back to school?

Dr. Michael Osterholm: Right now, schools are probably our single biggest challenge in terms of trying to reduce transmission. It is a very different world with Covid and kids this year than it was last year. The arrival of Alpha and then subsequent Delta variants fundamentally changed how we look at the risk of transmission in and by kids.

LR: Can you say a little bit more about how it’s changed?

MO: As of September 30, there have been 5.9 million children in the US who have tested positive for Covid. A hundred and seventy-three thousand occurred just in the last week. This, however, was good news in that it was the first time in six weeks that we have seen fewer than 200,000 pediatric cases reported. If you look at what’s happened as of this last week, based on American Academy of Pediatrics data, which is 24 states and New York City, there were 615 new hospitalizations. Last week, there were 22 child deaths, the highest number of deaths in the previous six weeks.

Overall, between October 1 of 2020 and September 30 of 2021, for one year there were 408 deaths in kids. Seventy-six of those deaths, or 18.6 percent, have occurred in just the last month.

LR: In terms of what these high caseloads mean for reopening schools, I want to ask about social distancing. At my son’s school there’s none of it. The principal has said we are relying on masks [to keep the virus from spreading], that’s what we’ve got. So I’ve gotta ask: Is my son’s mask going to do it?

MO: No, no, it’s not—and cloth covers in particular are not. The data that even exists in supporting the three-feet rule actually came about from the pre-Delta era. We’re writing a piece right now, a commentary on masks and schools and day care, and we’re basically laying out how much leakage occurs and what the challenges are. So you cannot count on cloth coverings for students to stop transmission in a school. We surely think you should use higher quality masks, the N95s and KN95s.

LR: The city is now testing 10 percent of the kids once a week, but the caveat is that they’re only testing the kids whose parents have given their consent. Is that adequate?

MO: There is no scientific evidence at all that testing any group once a week makes any difference in reducing disease transmission. None. You need much more frequent testing. The data we do have says that if you’re not testing at least five times a week, you’re going to miss anybody who is positive and potentially capable of transmitting. So, you know, it makes one feel better to do that kind of testing, but there are no data that support that that reduces disease transmission at all. There’s zero data supporting it.

LR: So that leads to my next question: The mayor has relaxed the quarantine rules so that any student that is three feet or more from any student that tests positive does not have to quarantine. Does that make sense to you?

MO: That is the CDC recommendation. And again, the data came from a single study done prior to Delta, done last year, for which we believe that there are very serious methodological flaws. And it just defies logic. Imagine if somebody was three feet away from you and you both had a face covering and they were smoking. Could you smell the smoke? Of course, you could. Well, if you can smell the smoke, you also can transmit the virus. So that just makes no sense.

LR: That was my fear.

MO: Yeah, you’re right. To think that you’re going to stop transmission—an aerosol-related transmission—between two kids three feet apart with face cloth coverings, you need a dose of pixie dust.

LR: It’s incredibly frustrating because you have the mayor and the DOE telling parents that we’re safe.

MO: Everybody wants kids back in school, and I understand that. I want my five grandkids back in school. But I want it done safely. And right now, we are, for the purpose of getting kids back in school, totally missing the safety.

Our kids have basically become pawns in an effort to get kids back into in-class learning—which I fully support. I want that too. But we have to look at the safety—not only of the kids but of the teachers, the staff.

LR: So, what would a safe version of this look like?

MO: You’d have school rooms that would have at least five to six air exchanges an hour. You’d have additional filtration present, such as the HEPA filters that I’ve talked about [on my podcast]. You’d have a density of no more than kids at 3-6 feet apart. Every child should be vaccinated that can be, 12 and older, and all the faculty and staff should be vaccinated. You need to test, and the more you can test the better it is—antigen testing at least every day, or no later than every other day. And basically, quality masking—KN95s or N95s on the kids. Short of that, it’s going to be good luck. And, unfortunately, we shouldn’t be betting our kids’ health on good luck.

A few days after our initial conversation, I called back Dr. Osterholm to ask him about several new Covid-related developments. The first was that New York City had instituted a vaccine mandate for all school staff, which the mayor touted as a way to “keep kids safe and the whole school community safe.” The second was that, despite the return to schools and the cases popping up all across the system, New York’s overall Covid-19 rate hadn’t increased. I wanted to know what he made of both.

LR: So, in New York, the mayor has instituted a vaccine mandate for school staff. Should we expect that to help slow transmission? And does that make up for the other holes in the safety protocols?

MO: We’re seeing several things happen. Number one is that the number of people that need to be vaccinated in a given area needs to be exceedingly high to really reduce transmission. Second of all, we’re seeing an ever-increasing number of breakthrough cases that also may be infectious. We have schools where we’ve had a number of both staff and faculty who’ve actually been breakthrough cases just in the last week. Clearly, they could be infectious at the time during the school, even though they’re vaccinated. So this is why this whole concept of an additional dose of vaccines is going to be very important.

LR: While we’re seeing a lot of transmission in schools, the numbers in New York City are not going up. What’s going on?

MO: I talked about that in the podcast: Why is Southern California and the New York to Boston metroplex seeing so few cases? And there’s no answer to that. This is part of the mystery of this virus. Why did it miss those two areas? It has nothing to do with the populations’ being fully protected [meaning fully vaccinated], because they’re not. And this has happened before. I’ve talked about the sprint versus marathon virus: Why does it basically go for four to six weeks and then just boom, it drops? We don’t know that. And I can tell you that New York and Southern California are not done with this virus. They will see sizable increases in this virus at some point in the months ahead.

LR: I can’t say that makes me happy.

MO: I know, but I think we need to be prepared for it, both from a psychological standpoint and a practical standpoint. You always prepare for it.

LR: Would you send your kid to school? What does a parent like me do?

MO: Well, my grandkids are in school right now. They happen to be in a school district that is really doing a good job of trying to adhere to the best protection, but we’ve already had infections transmitted in the school. Kids have already been sent home. All I can say is they’re doing their best. My grandkids are in KN95 masks—and I can’t wait for the vaccine to be approved for the younger ages. I can’t wait.

America loves to see a Hollywood villain go down—and Harvey Weinstein is a true Hollywood villain. Creepy, leering, looming, odious. Even in Miramax’s heyday, the company would have had a hard time conjuring a monster as vicious and bullying as the man revealed in back-to-back New York Times and New Yorker exposés.

So it’s been gratifying, if not altogether surprising, to see the rush of outrage and condemnation that has accompanied Weinstein’s thud from grace. In stunning succession, he has lost his job, his wife, his kids, his membership in the Academy, his status, his power. His alma mater has decided to revoke the honorary degree it once bestowed on him; the USC School of Cinematic Arts has rejected the $5 million guilt pledge he made to support a program for women filmmakers. Meanwhile, speculation is growing about the cascade of potential legal actions that could be lobbed at both him and his former company. “I expect a flood of lawsuits to be headed his way if they are timely and he hasn’t already bought off the victims,” Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times.

All this is as it should be. When a man preys on scores of women with impunity—“like a hunter with a wild animal,” as the actress Emma de Caunes described her encounter with Weinstein for The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow—he should be cast from his power perch and forced to contend with the fallout of his crimes. But as the outrage has crescendoed, with everyone from Hillary Clinton to former Weinstein protégé (and known boob grabber) Ben Affleck beating a righteous drum, it’s been frustrating that one of Weinstein’s most prominent co-conspirators has gone largely unacknowledged: the film industry itself.

By this I don’t just mean the retinue of aiders and abettors, silent witnesses and sleazy sycophants who enabled Weinstein’s reported thuggery for more than two decades. These men—and, yes, even women—blithely served up Weinstein’s victims for him, delivering them to hotel rooms and casting couches, and then dutifully cleaned up his messes; they should be held accountable. But the circle of guilt spreads well beyond the once-hallowed doors of Weinstein’s Tribeca studio all the way to the to the vast, glittering man-swamp that is the world’s film capital.

Hollywood, for all its liberal grandstanding, is a deeply sexist place. This statement is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to have to write it. But it bears repeating and dissecting, as the industry begins to grapple with the fact that that one of its most powerful members seemingly got away with raping, assaulting, and harassing tens of women for years on end. Otherwise, there’s a danger that the scandal, while toppling Harvey Weinstein (no small feat, to be sure), will leave the infrastructure that enabled his abuse intact.

o what does this infrastructure look like?

Well, for one thing, it’s male—very, very male. And white. White male. From the C-Suite to the big screen to the back lots, men dominate the film business in numbers that mirror—or even eclipse—other harassment-heavy spaces like Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is evident in everything from the credits that scroll at the end of movies to the guy-centered plot lines of the movies themselves. But in recent years, researchers at institutes like the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film and elsewhere have begun cataloguing the imbalance, both onscreen and off, and the figures are as dispiriting as they are shocking.

Consider the most recent year of movie making. In 2016, women held just 17 percent of the “behind-the-scenes” positions in the year’s 250 top grossing movies, according to the center’s annual “Celluloid Ceiling” report. This means that of the 3,212 people employed as directors, writers, editors, producers, and cinematographers, only 546 were women, with men claiming the remaining 2,666 spots. And the picture looks even uglier when you break the numbers down by job category. While women claimed 24 percent of producer slots, they held just 7 percent of director spots, 13 percent of writers, 17 percent of editors, and 5 percent of cinematographers. When it came to making music for films, women represented a piddling 3 percent of composers.

These figures suggest an Uber-esque level of awfulness, but what makes them all the more galling is that 2016 wasn’t a particularly bad year for Hollywood; it was, more or less, standard for how the film industry has operated since at least 1998, the year the center began tracking these things kinds of employment figures. Then, as now, only 17 percent of the behind-screen positions went to women, with producers holding 24 percent of the spots and writers holding 13 percent, exactly same as last year. Still, there was at least one category where the numbers fluctuated: directing. Back in 1998, 9 percent of directors were women—2 percentage points higher than in 2016.

Over the years, the men who run the industry have reportedly tried to minimize the significance of this disparity by throwing the blame back on, well, women. In the case of directing, in particular, “[t]hey contend that the pool of female talent is too small and that women are not interested in directing action and comic book movies—and have even suggested women can’t handle big budgets,” journalist Jessica P. Ogilvie wrote in an extensive LA Weekly report on Hollywood’s serial exclusion of women. Or, as the writer-director Angela Robinson put it, “People think women can’t run a set, that they can’t handle it.”

These are ridiculous claims, made all the more so by statistics that dispel at least part of their inaccuracy. Between 2002 and 2014, women directed a quarter of the dramatic competition films at Sundance, the famed film-word incubator. Meanwhile, top film schools, like NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, say that women are graduating from their programs in roughly the same numbers as the men who then waltz off to coveted production jobs and studio gigs. This certainly wasn’t always the case; as recently as 10 years ago, women occupied closer to one-third the seats at places like Tisch. But even at those levels, we should be seeing women represented in higher numbers across the film landscape, and the fact that we’re not, media watchers argue, is because of rampant gender discrimination and old boys’–club bias.

What this means in practice is that the film industry remains a shamefully warped and backward place. Rather than catching up with the times, it operates more like a self-sustaining discrimination loop: women are kept out of the industry because of sexism, and, because they’re left out, sexism is able to flourish. And this sexism plays out across the system, in everything from the clichéd story lines that pass for plots to the numbers of women represented on screen to the way these women are treated on their way to the screen.

Here, once again, studies help confirm what we already intuitively know. In 2016, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women represented just 29 percent of the protagonists featured in the 100 top domestic films—an underwhelming number on its own terms, but all the more so considering that it also represents a “recent historical high.” In 2014, for instance, women had to settle for a humiliating 12 percent. Nor did women fare much better in some of the broader, more forgiving categories the study measured. When the Center analyzed the number of “speaking characters” in films—that is, people who simply opened their mouths—women accounted for just 32 percent. And the majority of these lucky, speaking ladies? They were white.

Still, if the presence of women in film is limited and depressing, their portrayal is even more so, with women routinely flattened into two-dimensional cutouts who are, on the whole, younger, more attractive, more naked, and more sexualized than their male counterparts. The center’s studies have also found that women are less likely to be portrayed as leaders and less likely to have an identifiable occupation—but more likely to have a known “marital status.”

A visit to websites like Lady Parts or Casting Call, the Project, which track some of the more egregious instances of casting-call sexism, offers a particularly vivid peek into the dungeon of female film-world representation. These calls read like a parody of the late-night ramblings of really awful frat boys—but, apparently, the requests for women who are “sexy, young, and feisty; could be perceived as a prostitute” or “cute, but very smart,” or “beautiful, blonde, tall, thin…every boy’s dream girl” are all too real. In one well-known incident, a casting company posted a call on Facebook that read, simply:

Casting Whores for Quentin Tarantino project. Caucasian, non-union females, ages 18–35.… No highlights, natural eyebrows, natural breasts, natural hair color to be true to the period. Dress sizes 2–8.

uch is the swamp in which Harvey Weinstein brewed and stewed, swam and frolicked, gathered strength and took cover for decades. While it may not explain the full, nasty measure of his deeds, it nonetheless gestures toward the toxic environment in which a predator like Weinstein could not only survive but thrive. And it begins to suggest a way forward.

In the days since the Weinstein story broke, women across the film industry have been speaking out, demanding an end to Hollywood’s culture of smarm. This is hardly the first time women have sounded the alarm; they’ve have been whispering and shouting, taking their tales of humiliation and harassment to bosses and HR departments and even newspapers for years. But with their new bullhorn, women have been putting the many other accused gropers and serial harassers in Hollywood on notice. “Listen up, creeps of Hollywood. We know who you are,” Samantha Bee warned in a fierce monologue. “Women talk to each other. And we talk to journalists. And we talk to lawyers. It’s 2017. We don’t have to put up with this shit.”

This is heartening, even thrilling, and one can only hope that, as the film industry does some serious soul searching, it will put rigorous mechanisms in place to ward off and weed out perpetrators, from the high-ranking studio mogul to the stalker holding the boom pole. But as an absolute, low-bar minimum? As institutions like the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences try to appear pro-active and evolved by revoking Weinstein’s membership, they also need to stop rewarding other known and accused harassers with Oscars, as they did just months ago with Casey Affleck.

Still, if the film industry is going to change, really change, the whole ecosystem needs to be transformed, quickly and dramatically. It’s not enough to pluck the most egregious offenders from the swamp when they behave in criminal or disgusting ways. Women—and I mean all women, not just the white ones who tend to occupy the few spaces that exist—need to be present and powerful and respected throughout the system, from the producer’s suite to the director’s chair to catering and janitorial services, where you know women are getting harassed—and underpaid and exploited—but no one is writing an exposé about it.

Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter that a major villain was just taken down. Hollywood, after all, is notorious for sequels.

In my aunt’s house, in the bedroom where 
I’ve often slept, there’s a framed photo of a ship’s manifest that I love to stare at. The ship was the RMS Aquitania, a Cunard ocean liner with an inky-black hull that was famous for its four smokestacks; its picture hangs in the bedroom, too. I can spend long minutes looking at these photos, first the ship, then the manifest, with its clutter of blocky print that draws my eyes up, down, and across the page until they finally settle on the name I’m always looking for: Ozcar Ratowzer. The print tells me that he was a worker from the town of Bialystok in Poland. If I trace down the column labeled “race or people,” I come to the word “Hebrew.”1

Ozcar Ratowzer, also known as Osher, was my grandfather. The manifest lists him as being 16, but my family believes he was closer to 19 or 20 when he boarded the Aquitania in Southampton, England, on October 23, 1920, and began his third-class voyage across the Atlantic. The journey took seven days, finally depositing him at Ellis Island, America’s “Golden Door,” the gateway to a world without pogroms or hunger or the horror of world war. There, he would almost certainly have been met by an assembly line of doctors and inspectors, who would have poked and peered at him, pried and questioned until, content with what they’d found, they would have sent him on his way with his handful of old-world possessions and the shards of a new identity. He would soon become known as Harry Ratner.2

My grandfather’s journey has always moved me, filled me with overwhelming gratitude and awe, not least because I’m aware how differently it might have turned out. Ozcar’s passage to this country was far from guaranteed. A Jewish kid of conscription age, he was barred from leaving Poland legally, meaning that he and one of his older brothers, Leiser, were forced to slip over the border with Germany dressed as cattle herders, then hide in a barn overnight, buried in haystacks. Their first attempt failed: My grandfather was caught by a bunch of pitchfork-wielding German guards and sent back across the border. His second attempt was more successful, but once in Germany, he and his brother ran into a second hurdle: They were carrying fake German passports, and, family accounts suggest, the American consul had no intention of honoring them. It was only after the intercession of their oldest brother, Kalman, a Bolshevik sympathizer turned American citizen and Freemason, that the consul agreed to grant them passage to the United States. (According to family lore, the consul was also a Freemason.)3

The brothers arrived safely on Ellis Island on October 30, 1920, and soon made their way to Cleveland. The rest of the family—their parents and six of their siblings—arrived on the RMS Caronia two months later, though their journey ended less happily. My grandfather’s 9-year-old brother, Joseph, had fallen ill on the boat to America, and he died just a few weeks after reaching this country.4

Still, the family was lucky. Although they didn’t know it at the time, the United States was about to begin slamming the door shut on immigrants just like them—and it would keep that door sealed for several decades.5

* * *6

My grandfather’s near-miss has haunted me 
for years—what if he hadn’t made it to this country when he did?—but the thought has been relentless these last few months. Ever since Donald Trump’s upset victory, I’ve had the sickening sense that history is reversing itself, whipping us back to a time when a noxious, state-sponsored xenophobia gravely imperiled millions of would-be Americans. It’s not that I have any illusions about the Obama administration, with its mass deportations and failure to welcome even a fractional number of Syrian refugees. But with Trump’s ascendancy—with his plans to ban Syrian refugees, suspend immigration from majority-Muslim countries, round up undocumented immigrants, and begin construction of a “physical wall”—we seem to be witnessing the rise of something at once utterly distinct and hauntingly familiar: a revived anti-immigrant regime, a nativist moment not unlike the one that seized this country a century ago.7

The parallels between that earlier period and today often get lost amid more provocative historical comparisons—to Germany in 1933, for example. Nonetheless, it’s worth considering this other quintessentially American moment, which began in the years before my grandfather made his way west and which, in the words of historian Alan Kraut, “rang down the curtain on the flexible migration we’d had before.”8

During that tumultuous time, the United States was in the throes of an intense anti-immigrant fervor, stoked by world war, the Russian Revolution, and a budding love affair with eugenics. Anti-Catholicism raged, anti-Semitism simmered, and Americans were gripped by xenophobia. They feared that the masses of Eastern and Southern Europeans streaming into the country would “mongrelize” the nation, undermining its Anglo-Saxon awesomeness with their crude customs and inferior intellects. They fretted that these “undesirables” would remain unassimilated “hyphenates”—part American, part something else—for years to come. They worried that they would “be a drain on the resources of America.” And, perhaps most intriguing, they feared that many of these immigrants—Jews and Italians, in particular—were, in fact, stealth Bolsheviks and radicals seeking to flip the country red from the inside.9

As the authors of a famous 1920 congressional report recommending a “temporary suspension of immigration” wrote of the Jews then living in Poland: “It is impossible to overestimate the peril of the class of emigrants coming from this part of the world, and every possible care and safeguard should be used to keep out the undesirables.”10

Sound familiar? Although the specific targets have changed, some of the language and much of the vitriol spewed at immigrants some 100 years ago wouldn’t be out of place at one of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rallies, or tumbling from the mouth of his chosen national-security adviser or attorney general. Then, as now, hypernationalistic figures raged against religious minorities they deemed suspicious, scheming, and potentially disloyal. Then, as now, war abroad stirred up refugee phobias at home. And while there are differences, to be sure—while the past is never simple prelude—then, as is happening again now, the ugly rhetoric quickly gave way to ugly policy.11

Three laws in particular stand out, an unholy trinity that, one by one, narrowed the range of immigrants who were allowed entry via Ellis Island. The first of these laws, the 1917 Immigration Act, attempted to do this by imposing a literacy test on immigrants, barring anyone who couldn’t read, as well as “feeble-minded persons,” “idiots,” “epileptics,” “persons likely to become a public charge,” “anarchists,” and, most stunningly, almost all immigrants from Asia. When this act failed to stanch the flow—when immigrants like my grandfather kept on coming—Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which restricted immigration to a mere 3 percent of the total number of immigrants from any given country already living in the United States in 1910. And when this act proved insufficient? Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, the most stringent of them all, which tightened the quotas to 2 percent of the total immigrants from a given country living here in 1890—a move that effectively slowed immigration to a thin trickle of Nordic and Western Europeans.12

Over the next decades, this new immigration regime would prove devastating for would-be immigrants from a wide swath of countries. For Jews, however, it would prove catastrophic. As the razor wire of fascism tightened around Europe, scores of Jewish men, women, and, yes, children were locked out of this country—and locked into what would soon become a vast killing field. This remained the case even after Kristallnacht shattered any illusions that the Nazis wouldn’t launch a program of organized violence against Jews. And it continued even after the Holocaust began, when the United States not only refused to bend the quotas for fleeing Jews but, under the fierce anti-Semitism of State Department officials like Breckinridge Long, actively found ways to keep them out. Among the more preposterous yet effective arguments: Jewish immigrants were a potential fifth column, possible plants or spies working for the Nazis.13

Even so, there were Jewish immigrants who managed to find their way into the country during these long years of exclusion. Some got lucky and slipped through the narrow bars of the quota system. Others made their way using the same means that desperate thousands use today when they find the borders of this country closed to them: They turned to “surreptitious or illegal entry,” according to the historian Libby Garland, whose book, After They Closed the Gates, tracks the long-overlooked phenomenon of Jewish illegal immigration to the United States. “There were people coming in through unguarded places on the long northern and southern border,” Garland explains, as well as via passenger ships from Cuba and Europe, on which they traveled using forged or illicitly procured documents. “There were networks of people who knew how this worked, and they would coach people.” Garland estimates that “on the order of tens of thousands” of Jewish immigrants might have slipped into the United States this way—namely, illegally—between 1924 and 1965, when the country finally replaced the 1920s restrictions.14

Still, these Jewish migrants represented the minority. The unfortunate majority remained stuck in Europe, waiting as history goose-stepped relentlessly toward them. “It’s very possible that if those laws hadn’t been in place, many of the Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, most of the Jews from Poland, would have been saved,” says Hasia Diner, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies and history at New York University.15

“I think,” Diner concludes, “that one of the most significant events in modern Jewish history was the stoppage of immigration.”16

* * *17

It’s likely that we’ll never know the number,
 or full roster of names, of those refugees who sought and failed to find haven in the United States before and during the Holocaust. Yet one survivor whose story still reverberates is a woman named Rae Kushner. Eloquent and soft-spoken, with a sense of sadness but not rancor, Kushner recorded her story for the Kean College of New Jersey Holocaust Resource Center in 1982. Delivered in a quiet Yiddish-inflected accent, hers is a tale of devastation and tragedy—of a young woman whose family lived in Eastern Europe before the war and, finding that “the door was closed” to the United States and elsewhere, ended up victims of the Nazis. But it’s also a tale of stunning perseverance, in which a teenage girl managed to survive the brutality of the ghetto, the death of half of her immediate family, the white-gloved sadism of her German tormentors, and a year of fear and exposure in the vast Naliboki forest. As she said in the interview: “It’s just miracles that we are alive.”18

I watched the full two-hour sweep of Kushner’s interview for the first time in December, and it has lingered with me ever since. But if it echoes a little more loudly these days, it’s because she also happened to be the grandmother of Jared Kushner, now a senior White House adviser once described as the Trump campaign’s “final decision-maker.” Jared, of course, is also married to Ivanka Trump, which makes him Trump’s son-in-law—and that makes Rae Kushner’s story, with its threads of persecution and exclusion, part of Trump’s own extended-family story, too.19

As Rae Kushner described it in the Kean College interview, her story begins in 1923, when she was born in the small town of Novogrudok, in what was then northern Poland and today is Belarus. The daughter of a furrier—her father owned two stores, which sold men’s hats—Kushner lived what she called “a comfortable life, a quiet life,” with her parents, two sisters, and younger brother. They were not rich, she said, but the children were all educated at private Jewish schools, and her oldest sister even attended college. Although the town’s Jews numbered just 6,000, their world was nonetheless a vital one, a community filled with synagogues, schools, hospitals, and “a nice cultural life.”20

By the mid-1930s, however, the family had begun to sense the first rumblings of trouble. “[W]e felt the anti-Semitism, we felt that it’s coming… something,” Kushner said in the interview. This sense that “something” was brewing was strong enough that a few of her father’s friends left for Palestine and urged her father to “sell everything” and get out, too. The problem, said Kushner, is that “we didn’t have where to run.”21

“You know how hard [it] was to get a visa to Israel…,” she explained, referring, obliquely, to the British policies that restricted Jewish migration to British-controlled Palestine (and to the United Kingdom itself). “To America, very hard. If you sent papers, you’d wait for two, three years till you get a visa at that time.”22

Despite these obstacles, it seems from a brief exchange during the interview that her family did make some sort of effort to get to the United States. “So your family, your father, actually was making attempts in 1935, ’36?” the interviewer, Dr. Sidney Langer, asks Kushner a few minutes into the interview. And she answers, “Yeah, he had a sister here in United States, my father. And we tried…but we couldn’t do nothing.” So they remained in Novogrudok, first as the Soviets invaded and then, in 1941, as the Germans descended on the town and “took us over.”23

Kushner’s description of her family’s years under Nazi occupation is harrowing, and the full scope of what she experienced deserves to be heard in her own words, not simply mediated through a journalist. What can be said, however, is that during several years of unremitting horror, she lost her mother, her older sister, and her younger brother, along with thousands upon thousands of neighbors, friends, and extended family, as the Novogrudok ghetto was whittled from roughly 30,000 Jews to 350. The only way she, her father, and her younger sister managed to survive was by escaping from the ghetto in 1943 through a hand-dug tunnel—one through which all the remaining Jews attempted to crawl to freedom. Many didn’t survive once they made it to the other side, but, miraculously, Kushner, her father, and her sister did—and were eventually rescued by the legendary Jewish partisan Tuvia Bielski. For a year, they lived in the forest with Bielski’s brigade of more than 1,000 Jews until, in the spring of 1944, “he brought us out from the woods.” Novogrudok had been liberated by the Soviets.24

In the Hollywood version of Kushner’s story, this is almost certainly where it would end: with liberation. But for Kushner and her family, like so many other survivors, the trauma lasted several more years, as the family sought a safe place to rebuild their lives. Novogrudok, once again under Soviet control, wasn’t an easy place for Jews—“we had different troubles,” Kushner said—and, moreover, “we were broken, broken down.” So she and her surviving family, along with her soon-to-be-husband Yossel (later, Joseph), decided to leave. But they again faced the problem that had thwarted them a decade earlier when, sensing the rising threat of anti-Semitism, they had contemplated leaving Novogrudok. “Nobody opened the door for us,” Kushner recalled. “Nobody wanted to take us in.”25

Without a country to accept them, the family landed in a displaced-persons camp in Italy, where they lived three or four families to a room for three and a half years. They hoped to get visas to go to the United States, where they had family, but visas were not forthcoming. “We got depressed in the DP camp…,” Kushner stated. “A year, six months—but three and a half years!” It was in this camp, she added, that she gave birth to her first child.26

For this lengthy wait, the Kushners could thank the enduring anti-Semitism of both Eastern and Western European countries, which had little desire to roll out the welcome mat for some of the Nazis’ most beleaguered survivors. But the United States also “shut its doors tight,” says David Nasaw, professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, whose current research examines the fate of displaced persons in Germany after the war. Anti-Semitism was certainly part of the equation, but so too were Cold War fantasies about infiltrating communists, among whom Jews—long associated with leftists and radicals—were all too easily lumped. “Congressmen say, over and over again, ‘They’re coming out of Poland, so these Jews are communists or spies,’” Nasaw observes.27

It wasn’t until 1948, when Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, that the country began cracking open the door to these desperate immigrants. Yet even that gesture was troubled. Larded with a series of cumbersome provisions—including the somewhat inexplicable requirement that 30 percent of the visas go to farmers—the measure was considered so deeply biased against Jewish as well as Catholic immigrants that, even as he signed the act, President Harry Truman denounced it as “flagrantly discriminatory.”28

“For all practical purposes,” Truman wrote in his signing statement, “it must be frankly recognized…that this bill excludes Jewish displaced persons, rather than accepting a fair proportion of them along with other faiths.”29

Despite such hurdles, the Kushners finally did make it to the United States, in 1949. They settled in New York City, worked hard, had a family, made a life for themselves. They pushed on. Still, their difficult and tortuous journey to this country seems to have stayed with Rae Kushner years after she’d put down roots, first in Brooklyn and later in New Jersey. As she lamented toward the end of the Kean College interview, during one of the rare moments her voice rises with a sense of betrayal: “For everybody [there] was a place…but for the Jews, the doors were closed. We never can understand this. Even our good President Roosevelt, how come he kept the doors so closed for us, for such a long time? How come a boat [the SS St. Louis] went for exodus on the water and returned back to be killed? This question I’ll never know, and nobody will give me the answer.”30

* * *31

We don’t need the horrors of the past to 
validate the outrages of the present, to tell us that today’s swirl of xenophobia, locked borders, and scapegoating is wrong. Their injustice is self-evident. Still, as a pathologically cynical president resurrects some of the worst demons of this country’s past (and injects new energy into others that never died), history remains a powerful prod for thinking and acting in the present. It’s among the reasons a group of more than 240 Jewish historians, drawing on knowledge both scholarly and personal, vowed in a public letter issued shortly after the election “to resist any attempts to place a vulnerable group in the crosshairs of nativist racism.” And it’s why a dozen Jewish organizations declared in their recent open letter to Donald Trump that they are “committed to defending our country’s identity as a land of refuge.” To their ears, as to so many others, Trump’s attacks on refugees and immigrants smack all too painfully of the past, appealing to an old form of prejudice, resurrected and displaced onto a new era of migrants.32

“The blatant discrimination that we’re hearing right now, that’s very much like what we were seeing in 1921,” says Mark Hetfield, the president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee advocacy and resettlement agency that was founded in 1881 to help Jews escaping the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. “I really thought that part of [this country’s] history was behind us and that we would no longer discriminate—certainly not so openly—on the basis of religion, and we wouldn’t turn prejudice into policy like we did in the 1920s. But here we are talking about doing that. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.”33

Hetfield has been in the refugee trenches for more than a quarter-century, most of the time at HIAS, and his work for the organization has given him a broad lens through which to view today’s Trump-enhanced nativism. Founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS is well known among American Jews as the primary agency that aided Jewish refugees throughout the 20th century—including the Kushners and my own family. In recent years, however, the organization has shifted its focus to aiding refugees from all religions and backgrounds. As Hetfield explains: “The way we describe ourselves is that we used to resettle refugees because they were Jewish; now we resettle refugees because we are Jewish.”34

It’s in the service of this new mission, Hetfield says, that he’s been startled to hear the kind of dehumanizing charges once hurled at Jews now being flung at Muslims, Mexicans, and other refugees and immigrants. “It’s heartbreaking to hear the rhetoric today,” he admits, lamenting the demonization that has cast these groups as a kind of “faceless threat” invading from the south and east.35

When I asked Hetfield how we can properly respond to this moment—and how Jewish experience should inform that response—he was quick to answer, citing both text and history. He spoke of the ancient commandment to “love the stranger as yourself, because you were strangers once in the land of Egypt”—a notion so “integral” that it gets repeated, in one form or another, 36 times in the Torah. And he spoke of the long Jewish experience of seeking refuge in foreign lands. “We have such a long history of having to flee places, such a long history of persecution.… So for us to say, ‘OK, we’re safe, now they can close the doors’—it’s just morally reprehensible to think that way.” His conclusion: “We have to speak out and say it’s unacceptable.”36

Ninety-six years after my grandfather arrived from Bialystok, the story of his journey—of his illegal but impeccably timed emigration from Poland—remains defining yet largely invisible to the world around me. As do so many stories from that era. Once maligned, we descendants of last century’s “undesirable” immigrants are now unquestioned Americans, waltzing through this country as journalists, lawyers, social workers, real-estate developers, and, yes, White House senior advisers. That my grandfather was once part of that class of foreigners dismissed as “filthy,” “un-American,” “abnormally twisted,” “physically deficient,” and “potentially dangerous in their habits”—to quote that infamous 1920 congressional report—has largely been forgotten. The old slurs no longer follow us.37

But they do follow others, slapped on by the president and his supporters, who have smeared today’s immigrants and refugees as “rapists,” “murderers,” carriers of “tremendous infectious disease,” and a “Trojan horse.” And now they’re turning those smears into policy, using them to justify orders that break up families and exclude vast, diverse, and often desperate groups of people. For those keen on exclusion, such justifications will seem convincing. But as surely as the anti-immigrant policies of the early 20th century would prove both baseless and destructive, today’s acts will unleash cruelties and consequences against the would-be immigrants of our own era that we will long regret.38

On October 17, in the small town of Mandan, North Dakota, District Judge John Grinsteiner came to the logical, if thrillingly refreshing, conclusion that journalism is not a crime. The inspiration for his decision was a case involving Amy Goodman, the award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now!, who captured one of the defining moments of the Dakota Access pipeline protests in early September—an attack by private security contractors on Native American protesters—only to find herself slammed with an arrest warrant. In a notably warped reading of the law, North Dakota authorities sought to have Goodman charged with criminal trespass—then, when it appeared that charge wouldn’t stick, with riot. If Judge Grinsteiner hadn’t rejected the latter charge, Goodman faced the possibility of jail time or a sizable fine.

“The judge’s decision to reject State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson’s attempt to prosecute a journalist—in this case, me—is a great vindication of the First Amendment and of our right to report,” said Goodman, who had traveled to North Dakota to turn herself in, speaking to a crowd of supporters gathered outside the courthouse. To cheers and ululations, she added: “The state cannot stop this journalism.”

The news of Judge Grinsteiner’s decision rocketed throughout Goodman’s extensive, and passionate, audience. (Full disclosure: Goodman is a family friend, and I once worked for her.) But as much as her near-miss seemed to vindicate journalism’s protected status under the First Amendment, it also underscored what has become an alarming pattern across the prairies of North Dakota: a pattern of criminalizing the coverage of dissent—all the better, no doubt, to criminalize and quash dissent itself. During the week of October 10 alone, documentary filmmaker Deia Schlosberg was arrested in Walhalla while covering an anti-pipeline protest and charged with three felonies carrying a potential 45-year prison term, and actress Shailene Woodley was slapped in cuffs as she left a protest at a construction site; the police told her they had singled her out, she said, because she is “well-known.”

Meanwhile, the arrest of protesters—or “land protectors,” as they call themselves—has continued, accompanied by increasing reports of strip searches. And in case Goodman or her supporters were tempted to forget the power of the state as they waited for news of her fate on October 17, police officers in riot gear, looking like extras from the latest apocalyptic blockbuster, loomed nearby, hurling warnings through a bullhorn: “If you are on the roadway, you will be arrested.”

The story of how Goodman found herself facing criminal charges began on September 3, when she was covering what she calls “the stand-off at Standing Rock.” At the time, not one of the major American broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) had sent a reporter to cover the protests, despite the fact that they had already grown into the largest Native American mobilization in more than 40 years; none of the networks had even mentioned them, according to Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. But there was Goodman, standing at the edge of a sacred burial ground in the process of being churned into dirt. Clutching a microphone, she captured the scene as hundreds of protesters were confronted by security contractors armed with pepper spray and attack dogs—dogs straining against their leashes, dogs lunging at protesters, dogs biting them.

Within hours, Democracy Now! turned that footage into a potent video that quickly went viral and was featured, ultimately, on the same mainstream news stations that had ignored the protests. It was a rare crack in the consensus of silence—and, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote, may well have influenced the Obama administration’s decision to halt work on the pipeline, if only temporarily.

Then, on September 8, like a well-timed backhand, a warrant was issued for Goodman’s arrest. The reason, according to prosecutor Erickson: Goodman wasn’t a journalist. “She’s a protester, basically,” he told the Grand Forks Herald. “Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.”

It’s worth pausing for a moment to parse the chilling absurdity of this statement: According to Erickson, a woman who appeared at a protest carrying a microphone emblazoned with the Democracy Now! logo and accompanied by a video crew; who could be heard in the resulting footage identifying herself as a reporter; and who then broadcast the report on the news program she’s hosted for 20 years, isn’t a journalist—and she’s not a journalist because she harbors a strong perspective that, apparently, clashes with his own. By this distorted logic, every muckraking news gatherer from Ida Tarbell to, yes, Matt Taibbi isn’t a journalist, but rather an activist flirting with arrest.

Hopefully, Judge Grinsteiner’s clear rejection of this logic has chastened Erickson—or at least served as a much-needed lesson on the First Amendment. And hopefully, it has reassured journalists that they are safe reporting a story that is not merely newsy but necessary. The Standing Rock struggle—a struggle against broken treaties, environmental injustice, and government-sanctioned theft—is older than this country, and as essential to its future as to its past. Yet without someone to hold a microphone to the protesters’ lips—or to record their arrests—the story risks getting lost. And we risk missing the message, radical and resonant, that was uttered by an activist toward the end of Democracy Now!’s viral video: “No one owns this land. This land belongs to the earth.

Update: Case dismissed! On Monday, October 17, District Judge John Grinsteiner rejected the “riot” charge that had been leveled against Amy Goodman for her coverage of a September 3 Dakota Access Pipeline protest. Standing before the Morton County courthouse, surrounded by supporters, Goodman said: “It is a great honor to be here today. The judge’s decision to reject the State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson’s attempt to prosecute a journalist—in this case, me—is a great vindication of the First Amendment.” And she added: “[W]e encourage all of the media to come here. We certainly will continue to cover this struggle.”

This Monday morning, shortly after the sun rises over the small city of Mandan, North Dakota, the award-winning journalist, and host of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman will walk into the Morton County–Mandan Combined Law Enforcement and Corrections Center and turn herself in to the local authorities. Her crime: good, unflinching journalism.

Goodman had the audacity to commit this journalism on September 3, when she was in North Dakota covering what she calls “the standoff at Standing Rock”: the months-long protests by thousands of Native Americans against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The $3.8 billion oil pipeline is slated to carry barrel after barrel of Bakken crude through sacred sites and burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and tribe members fear it could pollute the Missouri River, the source not only of their water but of millions of others’, should the pipe ever rupture. Their protests, which began in April and ballooned through the summer months, represent the largest mobilization of Native American activists in more than 40 years—and one of the most vital campaigns for environmental justice in perhaps as long.

Goodman’s arrival at the main protest site was significant. At the time, not a single one of the major American broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) had sent a reporter to cover the Standing Rock mobilization; none had even bothered to mention it on the air. But there was Goodman, standing at the edge of a grassy plain that was in the process of being churned into gullies of dirt, reporting on one of the most significant stories of the day. Clutching a large microphone, she captured the scene as hundreds of protesters tried desperately to stop a crew of bulldozers from tearing up the earth—the earth, they said, that belongs to nobody—only to be confronted by a force of private security contractors wielding attack dogs and pepper spray.

“People have gone through the fence, men, women, and children,” Goodman reported, her voice taut, then rising, louder and more intense. “The bulldozers are still going, and they’re yelling at the men in hard hats. One man in a hard hat threw one of the protesters down…!”

As Goodman narrated, a security contractor, burly in a deep blue shirt, could be seen belly-flopping a man onto the ground. Protesters streamed in to help him, stumbled over mounds of newly churned dirt, faced off with contractors whose faces were hidden behind oversized sunglasses. The scene was full of movement. Overhead, a helicopter hovered, circled, while back on the ground, protesters began to report burning eyes, and dogs—dogs lurching at protesters, dogs straining against their leashes, dogs with mouths open, mouths biting.

“Why are you letting the dog go after the protesters?” Goodman could be heard shouting at a security contractor as a woman screamed in the background. “It’s covered in blood!”

Within hours of the attack, Democracy Now! had turned its footage into a seven-minute video that it released as a web exclusive. Three days later, Goodman followed up with an extensive report—“Dakota Access Pipeline Co. Attacks Native Americans with Dogs and Pepper Spray”—that she broadcast live on her show. The video quickly went viral, pinging across Twitter and Facebook (where it was viewed more than 14 million times) and landing, ultimately, on the same big news stations that, until that moment, hadn’t bothered to cover the protests: CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR.

Goodman’s report created a rare crack in the consensus of silence. And, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi writes, the outrage it generated may well have influenced the Obama administration’s decision to halt work on the pipeline several days later. This was journalism that mattered.

Yet, on September 8, Goodman received the news that Morton County, North Dakota, had issued a warrant for her arrest. The charge: riot, a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine.

It should be noted that this was not the original charge leveled against Goodman; initially, she was tagged with criminal trespassing, also a misdemeanor. But in what would seem to be a clear sign of charge-shopping, the prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, switched up the crimes she had allegedly committed just days before she was set to appear in court, because, he admitted in an e-mail to Goodman’s lawyer, there were “legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute.”

When asked to explain the grounds for arresting a working journalist, Erickson told the Grand Forks Herald that he did not, in fact, consider Goodman a journalist. “She’s a protester, basically,” Erickson told the newspaper. “Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” And in The Bismarck Tribune he later added, “I think she put together a piece to influence the world on her agenda, basically. That’s fine, but it doesn’t immunize her from the laws of her state.”

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to contemplate the full and chilling absurdity of this statement: According to Erickson, a woman who appeared at a protest carrying a microphone emblazoned with the name Democracy Now! and trailing a video crew; who can be heard in the resulting video report identifying herself to a security guard as a reporter; and who then broadcast the video on the daily news program she has hosted for 20 years is not actually a journalist. She is not a journalist, because she harbors a strong perspective, and that perspective clashes with his own. By the same distorted logic, every muckraking news gatherer from Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair on through I.F. Stone, and, yes, today’s Matt Taibbi (whose work Erickson apparently admires) was not a journalist but an activist flirting with arrest.

This notion should disturb anyone who labors in the journalism trenches, particularly those who dedicate their days, and often nights, to covering stories that challenge the mighty and prick at the powerful. Engaging in serious journalism—journalism that captures a society’s forbidden, or simply hidden, stories—is hard and scary, and it requires bravery, conviction, and determination, along with an abiding faith in the protective power of the First Amendment. When that faith is compromised, the possibility of serious journalism collapses—a reason, no doubt, the Committee to Protect Journalists came out forcefully on Goodman’s behalf.

“This arrest warrant is a transparent attempt to intimidate reporters from covering protests of significant public interest,” Carlos Lauría, senior program coordinator for the Americas at CPJ, said in a statement. “Authorities in North Dakota should stop embarrassing themselves, drop the charges against Amy Goodman, and ensure that all reporters are free to do their jobs.”

Thus far, the North Dakota authorities remain committed to their own embarrassment; the charges have not been dropped, which is why Goodman is going back to North Dakota to turn herself in—and then fight the charges.

A few weeks back, as I drove with Goodman to and from a memorial service (full disclosure: Goodman is a family friend whom I have known for a long time and once worked for), I overheard an admirer of hers ask what the public could do to support her as she faced arrest. Goodman was quick to respond: keep paying attention to the protesters in North Dakota, keep caring about their fight. She, in other words, was not the story.

Goodman was right, of course. The long struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux, which is a struggle against broken treaties, environmental injustice, and government-sanctioned kleptomania, is older than this country and as essential to its future as it is to its past. Yet, without someone to hold a microphone to the activists’ lips or train a camera on their protests, the story often gets lost. We risk missing the message, uttered by a man with a raw voice and pained face, toward the end of Democracy Now!’s viral video: “No one owns this land. This land belongs to the earth. We are only caretakers. We’re caretakers of the earth.”

Note: This article has been updated to reflect the news that the charges against Goodman were switched from criminal trespassing to riot.

Uncles don’t fare terribly well in history or literature. From Creon to Claudius, Uncle Sam to Uncle Scar, the role of Father’s younger or Mother’s older brother tends to be a dubious one, shaded by jealousy, vengefulness, and a penchant for fratricide. There are exceptions, to be sure: Pip’s sweet but simple uncle, Joe Gargery. Peter Parker’s ill-fated Uncle Ben. But even at their best, they rarely take the shape of crusading activists against US imperialism. Or legal warriors against war criminals. Or the implacable scourges of torturers. They do not, as a rule, serve legal papers to blood-stained generals at their Harvard graduations. But my Uncle Michael did. And in this way, as in so many others, he defied imagination—and redefined reality.

Last week, on Wednesday, I lost this beloved uncle of mine. He slipped away after a brief but torrential illness, a vigorous 72-year-old with years of fight—and decades of outrage—still inside him. In the days before his death, close friends and family streamed into his hospital room, one last love-in. Michael’s son brought a banjo, his friend a guitar. We sang songs, watched old videos, rehashed favorite memories, and cried a lot. All of us. Dear cousins who’d grown up with Michael in Cleveland. Dear friends who’d gotten beaten up with him at Columbia. Friends from the legal trenches, friends from struggles that spanned the globe. Even nurses and doctors who had grown attached to him in their too-short time together. “I know this is unprofessional,” one broken-up physical therapist confessed as she rushed into his hospital room, “but I had to come by when I heard.”

In the days since Michael’s death, the outpouring of love and grief across the continents, from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, has comforted and stunned us. The pain—and beauty—of the moment is that it would have stunned Michael, too. For all the people he touched and inspired, for all the audacity of his political work, I believe he had no idea of his far-reaching influence. As each new tribute rolls in, I imagine him clapping his right hand over his mouth—a favorite gesture when he was shocked or moved—and shaking his head back and forth while letting out an emphatic “Whoaaaaaa!”

In some ways, I understand this. We in his family always knew that Michael was extraordinary, brilliant, and passionate—the best and boldest there was. But I don’t think we fully realized how extraordinary he was to so many other people. This was in part, I suspect, because Michael didn’t talk all that much about his work—which is to say, his particular role in any of the many struggles he had dedicated himself to. He would talk about the struggles themselves—about the abuses that moved him to action—but, as his wise friend Rashid Khalidi observed, Michael was always far more interested in finding out about other people than in talking about himself. He had an amazing enthusiasm for people, and when he was with you, he wanted to hear about your work, your children, your parents, your fears, your hopes and accomplishments.

But for me, at least, I think there’s another reason for the surprise: My relationship with Michael was so deeply personal, so entwined not only with the big questions of war, peace, justice, and injustice, but also with the more intimate questions of family, parenting, birth, death, holidays, vacations, aspirations, disappointments, anxiety, depression, and joy—all the strands that weave together to form the fabric of our daily lives. Michael was, quite simply, a defining force for me. He was my mentor and guardian, my jester and wise counsel, and so much of what I have done, small and fragmentary as it is, is because of him. I guess I couldn’t imagine that he could mean so much to so many others, too. 

This connection to Michael—powerful and encompassing—goes all the way back to my beginning. I had no consciousness in my earliest days of the work that sent him careening through Central America—Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador—but I knew I adored him. Back then, Michael wore a full black beard, part Che Guevara, part Vilna Gaon, and whenever that beard came around, I knew the fun would begin. He would throw my sister and me over his shoulders like sacks of potatoes, hurl us squealing into the air, shake our hands until they almost dropped off. 

Michael loved kids. He had a fantastically goofy side, and he could keep us entertained for hours. But I also think that he connected so well with us, and with the scads of kids who followed—his own children above all, but also his friends’ children—because, for all his jokes and silliness, he took young people seriously, respected their still-forming minds. Plus, kids were some of the only people who could go toe-to-toe with him in curiosity and enthusiasm. In the brutal days before his death, just before he went into the hospital for the last time, Michael’s daughter discovered that he’d been searching for videos of how to draw cardinals. He had wanted to send them to my son.

In my own life, Michael’s respect for the minds of the under-10 set meant that he never talked down to me, always assumed that I could and should understand. He spoke of the world as it was, and as I got older, that meant he became not only fun but interesting. It was the early 1980s, a moment of revolution in Latin America and Reagan’s counterrevolution at home, and when Michael was around, conversation inevitably turned to issues both mysterious and grown-up. He used words like “Managua” and “Nicaragua,” “Sandinista” and “contra,” and in 1982, he took my whole family to Cuba, not long before he and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the Reagan administration over its draconian restrictions on Cuban travel. I’m ashamed to admit that I was more interested in guzzling as much Tropi-Cola as I could than in absorbing the lessons of the Cuban Revolution. Nonetheless, a halo of nascent comprehension was beginning to form at the fringes of my consciousness. Though I didn’t realize it then, Michael was laying stones in the forest for me to follow when the time came. 

Michael kept laying these stones, bigger, more deliberate, as I got older—suggesting that I write about the bombing of Cambodia for a 10th-grade term paper, subscribing me to The Nation, giving me a copy of Living My Life, Emma Goldman’s autobiography. I’d like to think that Michael saw in me a receptive spirit, that he recognized the way the privilege of my childhood was raising more questions for me than I could answer on my own. But maybe he just realized that I was 16 and struggling with a splintering nuclear family, and he wanted to be present for me. He called to check in on me often. The phone would ring, and we would talk about whatever homework I was doing; his kids, who were just small, pixieish toddlers back then; and, eventually, the big case that had come to consume him—the illegal detention of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay.

Guantánamo. For 14 years, it’s been synonymous with the barbarism and abuse of the “war on terror.” But before it became a modern-day penal colony, it was an open-air holding cell for more than 300 Haitian refugees: men, women, and children who had fled Haiti after the US-backed coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide. For more than a year, Michael, along with Harold Koh and a group of Yale law students, worked every angle—legal, political, and grassroots—in a multi-pronged campaign to free the refugees. And, miraculously, they won. 

It was a signal victory for Michael, a rare moment when the promise of legal rights trumped the power of government impunity, when organized compassion won out over naked cruelty. This cruelty, which Michael witnessed firsthand during visits to Guantánamo, shook him powerfully—so much so that, from the moment I read the news in January 2002 that the Bush administration planned to resurrect Gitmo for so-called enemy combatants, I knew that Michael would fight it. Damn the death threats, damn the opprobrium of the rah-rah jingoists and play-it-safe crowd. 

Today, as I look back over the sweep of Michael’s life, his audacity stuns me. Back then and in the moment, however, it didn’t surprise me all that much. Like a kid who conjures magical powers for her parents, who is convinced they can take on dragons and vanquish bullies, I believed that Michael could fight and win the big, impossible battles that few others would: sue presidents, challenge dictators, pursue torturers. He made it seem so routine, almost easy, like just another day at the office.

Nor was it just the big battles that I relied on him to tackle. I also turned to him to work smaller, more personal miracles. When a woman I knew got slammed with serious health and legal troubles at the same time, I turned to Michael for legal guidance. When lawyer friends needed career advice, I sent them to him. And in my own life, I leaned on him constantly. I relied on him for political guidance, to give me the right read on an issue when I couldn’t parse it myself. I relied on him for professional counsel—to say nothing of internships and actual jobs—on the many occasions I was lost. I relied on him for lightning humor, brilliant ideas, off-kilter quirkiness, and reassurance. I relied on him—exactly 10 years ago this May—to perform my wedding.

And now? Now that Michael is no longer here, I feel bereft: hollowed out, diminished, and a little scared. I keep wondering who will nudge me to take the bolder path when the safer one seems so much easier; who will help me slice through ethical snarls when I can’t unravel them myself; and who will crack me up with a steady supply of bad Borsht Belt jokes and, just as often, whip-clever quips. On the day after Michael’s death, his son, Jake, wondered who will be our moral compass now that Michael can’t be. It’s a question I’ve been asking, too. 

Michael, I suspect, would be somewhat mortified by all this gushing. He was too much of a rebel for pedestals, and he had little time for the Great Man theory of justice. He didn’t believe in men (or women), he advised me on a number of occasions; he believed in movements. In Black Lives Matter. Occupy Wall Street. The fight for Palestinian freedom. The struggle of the Sandinistas. The promise of South African trade unionists. The pursuit of Puerto Rican independence. And on and on.

“When change comes, it is unpredictable, but it does not happen by chance,” Michael told his close friend Anthony Arnove in an interview several years ago. “At some point,” he continued, “all of these small efforts coalesce, and we see the changes we want…. All of us need to light sparks all of the time, and then the time comes when justice is inevitable.”

Michael was right about the power of movements, about the quantum effect of lots and lots and lots of people working together. He wouldn’t have minded a few tears, but then he’d want us to get busy with the critical work of waging peace, forging racial justice, ending torture, stopping violence, and thwarting US imperialism. He’d want us to ignite change. But dear god, I will miss him as I stumble, arms outstretched toward the millions of tiny sparks, along the path he laid for me.

John Cameron Mitchell’s Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch closed in September, after winning a Tony Award as well as renewed fervor for the show’s queer antihero. Hedwig will soon be going on tour, while Mitchell’s hard at work on a film that he describes as “Romeo and Juliet between a punk and an alien.” Nation editors Lizzy Ratner and Kai Wright spoke with him about the show’s origins—and the striking bust of Hedwig that he keeps in his apartment.

LR: Who created that?


JCM: Miguel Villalobos, who I met on the street. He had come from Venezuela with nothing. He was washing dishes and photographing rock stars and doing his art, and we just met on the street. He was shooting Lady Bunny, who I knew, and he came up here and we had sex and became friends. He worked on the film [version of Hedwig].

KW: This is something you’re known for…


JCM: Sleeping with my collaborators? Better than sleeping with the enemy.

KW: I was going to say “community building around making your art.” 


JCM: I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.

There was this strange thing happening in 1980–’81. There was a huge shift culturally—a massive shift. Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan’s parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy… individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.

But I grew up in the military, which is the closest thing to a socialist structure that we have in the US. Very conservative-minded people were attracted to the military, but ultimately lived in socialism. So I had these things that I came out of that formed me philosophically, but also as a project manager. I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.

LR: I am curious about Hedwig, if she could be created in today’s New York.


JCM: Hedwig was born in ’94. I was thinking of a theater piece; Hedwig was one of the characters. SqueezeBox!, the club that [composer Stephen Trask and I] were hanging out in, was the first real queer-rock-and-drag club that I ever heard of. [Trask] was the leader of the house band, and my boyfriend was the bass player. So it was like, “If you’re gonna do a gig here, you have to do the female character, because this is a drag club.”

It was just a wonderful scene—scary but thrilling. It was also Giuliani time, so [the New York City mayor] was trying to shut down anything fun, really, in nightlife. I remember the moment when I was thrown out of a club for smoking pot, which was shocking to me.

LR: Yeah, that is shocking.


JCM: I was like, “This is really happening? I just got thrown out for smoking pot?” Now I’m like, “We smoked pot? In bars?” It changed things. It was also right at the apex of the AIDS crisis, where nothing worked and there was a horrible resignation. So people were at the end of their rope, dying or resigned to an endless attrition. And I was optimistic in the midst of it: “Something can be done!” So Hedwig came out of this strange ferment.

LR: Back when people could afford to live in New York…


JCM: You know, I’m in a rent-stabilized apartment; this is why I’m still here. Who said it? “Real estate is destiny.” It allowed me to do all the things I’ve really wanted to do. New York today is not welcoming to young people who are not career-track, in terms of structured careers. For artists, it’s scary.

LR: I’m curious about the good, the bad, and the ugly of having Hedwig on Broadway.


JCM: There’s no ugly, there’s no bad—it’s a classic Broadway story. It’s just the content was a little scary for Broadway. Which is weird to think of: Broadway was built for drag!

That is a great pulpit to have, because you’re getting to people who are uninitiated to a certain way of commenting on culture that is skeptical yet accessible and loving at the same time. My favorite compliment is when someone says, “Hedwig made me do something—make something of my own, get off drugs, find out that I was okay as a trans man who’s into gay men.” It’s freeing.

If you happen to have wandered into the children’s section of a bookstore recently—for your own kid or a friend’s kid, or simply to revisit the cozy, Technicolor sensation of being four again—you may have noticed something startling amid the potty books and engineering primers: the landscape of contemporary children’s literature is strangely bereft of books of conscience. The cheeky-poignant warnings that Dr. Seuss once sounded against the oily beasts of greed, discrimination and climate disaster have long since given way to princess romps and battery-powered truck books, while books with alphabet memes and number schemes have come to dominate the shelves. If you want to teach your child to brush her teeth, make a friend or brave the dark—all worthy enough endeavors—take your pick; if you want to shape her into a sensitive global citizen, good luck.

Earlier this year, however, a slim book arrived on American bookshelves featuring a cover portrait of a donkey shadowed by warplanes. The book is called The Story of Hurry, and, unlike its sugarcoated peers, it eschews princess fantasies, Elmo tie-ins and beeping garbage trucks in favor of a sweet-and-searing tale of life inside one of the most tattered lands on earth. That this land happens to be the Gaza Strip, a place that barely registers even among grown-up publishers, is all the more astonishing.

The Story of Hurry was written by Emma Williams and edited by Jean Stein, with illustrations by Ibrahim Quraishi. Lyrical and tender, with pictures that mix tone and media, it is an attempt, in Williams’s words, to tap into children’s “innate sense of justice” and “amazing sense of inquiry” in the hope they will provoke conversations that “confound” us.

“I hope my book would give [children] the potential to ask questions,” said Williams, a doctor-turned-writer who spent three years living in Jerusalem with her husband, a United Nations diplomat, and four children. “Why is this allowed to happen? What about the children on the other side, what do they think? Why do the soldiers do that? These questions need asking and need answering.”

The book goes about provoking these questions by following the adventures of a “little donkey,” named Hurry, who just wants to make children happy. Hurry lives “in a dry and lonely land by the sea” where the children often go hungry, the electricity frequently falters and, some nights, bombs fall from the sky. Grownups will recognize this land as Gaza, though its name is never mentioned in the book, nor is Israel’s. The book also sidesteps words like “war” and “siege,” but it is clear, from both text and pictures, that the children of this land lead fearful, walled-in lives. They wander to the beach to play but are “chased out of the sea by angry men.” They go to the zoo in search of fun and escape, but the animals are “thin, and sad, and few.”

Hurry bounds through this harsh, strafed landscape trying to cheer the children—giving them rides on his back, nuzzling them in their sadness—until, one day, he encounters a little girl who cannot be cheered. Sitting by a well where the water comes out salty, not sweet, she cries for the ordinariness of a childhood she cannot have—one where the food is good, electricity is constant, the skies are safe and little girls have the freedom to run, play, visit the mountains and explore other cities. Above all, she longs to see the “strange animals” she reads about in her books.

As he listens to the little girl’s lament, Hurry gets an idea. He trots off to the zoo, where so many of the animals have died for lack of water, and gets a makeover. By the end of the book, he has been painted with a zebra’s black-and-white stripes, and the kids, though still not free, have an escape from the gloom of life under siege.

In explaining how they came to write The Story of Hurry, both Williams and Stein have cited the classic children’s book, The Story of Ferdinand, as inspiration. The Story of Ferdinand tells the tale of a gentle young bull who refuses to fight like all the other young bulls, preferring instead to spend his days curled under a cork tree, smelling the flowers. Written by Munro Leaf in 1936, on the eve of the Spanish civil war, the book has widely been interpreted as a pacifist statement—an attempt to speak truth to the least powerful but most sensitive—and it was promptly banned in Spain and burned by the Nazis. Yet, where The Story of Ferdinand is pure allegory—and rooted safely in the past—The Story of Hurry is rooted in the firmness of actual events; it is journalism transposed into the lilt and rhythm of children’s literature.

Stein stumbled on the real-life story in a newspaper clipping not long after Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza that spanned more than three bloody weeks in late 2008 and early 2009. Nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including as many as 350 Palestinian children, and thirteen Israelis lost their lives during the offensive, which also destroyed thousands of homes, pummeled factories, ruined farms, damaged water wells and killed scores of animals. Some of those were the exotic creatures that had once lived at the Happy Land Zoo. In the grim aftermath, the zookeeper painted two white donkeys with black hair dye and transformed them into what he called “zebras made in Gaza” to cheer the children traumatized by the war.

“I just saw that little story and thought that it would be a fable, and sometimes fables can reach people more than hard news,” said Stein, an oral historian and editor who helmed Grand Street for fourteen years and worked as an editor at The Paris Review. (Full disclosure: Stein is also a personal friend of mine and the mother of Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel).

Williams, too, was attracted to the notion that a children’s book could slash through the thicket of ideology and indifference that buries so many well-meaning books about life under Israeli occupation. Having written a memoir about her experience living in Jerusalem, It’s Easier to Reach Heaven Than the End of the Street, she was eager to try another approach. And she was anxious to tell the particular and bleak story of Gaza’s children—a story that flares into view every few years when war erupts and young kids begin dying in Israeli airstrikes, but then recedes while a more quotidian awfulness engulfs them.

“No child in Gaza is untouched,” said Williams. “Three wars in seven years, knowing nothing but war and dust and concrete, and somehow the international community is letting this happen.”

Indeed, in the time since Williams, Stein and Quraishi began drafting their fable, life has gotten unspeakably worse for the children of Gaza and their families. More than 500 Palestinian children were killed and more than 3400 were wounded this summer during the fifty-day bludgeoning that Israel dubbed “Operation Protective Edge” (one Israeli child was also killed). Whole neighborhoods were flattened, with the Israeli military destroying homes, hospitals, schools, power stations and government buildings—the basic scaffolding of daily life. With much of Gaza still in ruins, and nearly 20,000 people still living in UN shelters, Gaza remains in the grip of a crippling humanitarian crisis.

The world, however, has largely moved on from Gaza, which is among the reasons The Story is Hurry is so valuable. In its quiet, insistent way, it pulls readers back to this caged-in land of sonic booms, salty wells, high walls and painted donkeys.

“I think it’s a little something different for me to read,” said Emily Walker, a sixth grader from California who read the book and also presented a report on the Happy Land Zoo and its hand-painted zebras to classmates. “I thought that that must be really scary living there and everybody bombing, that would be really scary to me.”

Walker’s classmates also thought it was scary, which is why, after hearing her report, they all “wanted to help,” with a few suggesting they send water and supplies or even start a children’s center, she said. These were naïve hopes, to be sure, at once over-simple and over-ambitious the way kids’ hopes (and maybe all our hopes) can be, but they also tapped right into the deep vein of empathy that runs throughout The Story of Hurry. And at a moment when the grown-up world is doing a monumentally poor job of modeling empathy, a book that inspires altruism and a creeping knowledge of injustice in its young readers feels a lot like a revelation.

As this wounded year ends and a new one begins, we need many, many more of these revelations.

It’s been a rough few days for one of New York’s most powerful women—and no, we’re not talking about Jill Abramson.

This past Monday morning, the New York Daily News and New York Post—the frat brothers of the New York journalism scene—published simultaneous front-page attacks on Chirlane McCray. McCray is the wife of New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and a staunchly progressive African-American feminist, poet and former speechwriter with a defining presence in her husband’s administration. She is also the subject of a fascinating profile in this week’s New York magazine in which the author, Lisa Milller, hails her as an “unambiguous asset” to her husband’s administration. So naturally the tabloids took out their hatchets.

“I was a bad mom!” shouted the cover of Rupert Murdoch’s Post next to a full-page photo of McCray. The headline was allegedly inspired by comments McCray made in the New York profile and was accompanied by an article which began: “In an astonishing confession, New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray has revealed that she was a neglectful mother after her daughter, Chiara, was born.” Next to that, there was a picture of the victim, Chiara, herself, whom the paper helpfully reminded readers “dropped her own bombshell last year about abusing alcohol and marijuana.” Were the mother’s early neglect and daughter’s drug use connected? the reader was clearly meant to ask.

The Daily News, ever the wingman to the wilder Post, opted for a more sober approach. In a framed teaser at the top of its front page, it served up a pained-looking picture of McCray, accompanied by the headline, “Didn’t want to be a mom.” And then, beneath that, playing at empathy: “Chirlane’s sorrow.”

Poor Chirlane McCray. What on earth could she have done that was so outrageous the Post surmised it would “horrify most moms”? Abandon her babies for a life of repetitive chanting and saffron robes in a desert cult? Soak away her days in a Calgon haze while her kids, left to fend for themselves, trapped possums in their Park Slope yard? Clearly it must have been pretty bad to warrant such hyperventilating.

And yet: as even a quick glance at the relevant section of the New York profile reveals, McCray’s offense wasn’t quite so dramatic. The big bad thing she confessed to was… ambivalence. Ambivalence about the early days of motherhood. Sideswiped by the consuming reality of parenting, she admitted that she often wanted to escape; she didn’t want to spend every round-the-clock moment with her new child; she wanted to work! As she explained in the quote that sent the tabloids into a tizzy:

“I was 40 years old. I had a life. Especially with Chiara—will we feel guilt forever more? Of course, yes. But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reasons not to do it. I love her. I have thousands of photos of her—every 1-month birthday, 2-month birthday. But I’ve been working since I was 14, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.”

If this doesn’t sound exactly like monster-mother material, it’s because it’s not. As Jennifer Senior wisely observed in a piece dissecting the two tabloid takedowns, women have been rubbing up against the stress and ambivalence of motherhood for decades, perhaps forever. For one thing, being a mother doesn’t always come naturally, in a great gush of wisdom and selfless love the moment the baby is pulled from the birth canal or brought home from the adoption agency. Being a mother—like being any parent—is a process of becoming, and as much as the parenting gurus and attachment warriors try to sell you on the uncomplicated oneness of it all, more and more women are embracing the mangled, tangled messiness of the reality. Just ask my good friend (and sometime co-conspirator) the Beta Parent.

And yet, by the transitive property of tabloid sexism, ambivalence equals bad mother equals equals daughter who drops “bombshells” about abusing pot and alcohol. The Post even took an obligatory swipe at McCray for having been “an outspoken lesbian activist,” and revealed that—gasp—she was pregnant two months before she wed. Maybe we should all just wear our poodle skirts to the sock hop and be done with this.

The added insult of the whole thing is that the McCray seems to be, and have been, a decidedly dedicated mother. More to the point, the profile isn’t actually about her mothering—or her philosophy of mothering. The paragraph the tabloids cite consumes just 101 words of a nearly 6,000-word profile. It’s a fragment of a sprawling whole which covers everything from her solitary childhood in puritan Massachusetts to her self-discovery as a black queer feminist in the 1970s to her marriage to de Blasio in the mid-1990s to her newfound role as the “conscience” of his administration. Thanks to her insistence, we learn, the new administration has gathered together “the most diverse leadership team New York City [has] ever seen,” including six women out of a total twelve positions and only three white men.

Yet there McCray is, on newsstands across the city, reduced to a character from the mommy wars.

This is all the more irritating given that McCray’s particular brand of feminism—which does get a lot of ink in the profile—doesn’t seem to be all that interested in mommy politics. The ongoing, decades-old debates over going to work or staying home, leaning in or leaning out, having it all or having it some, don’t seem to move her all that deeply. “For McCray, feminism is not so much about the fulfillment of personal ambition as it is about helping women to get the basic things they need,” writes Miller.

Perhaps it’s too much to ask the tabloids to parse such intricacies. Perhaps it’s too ambitious to expect them to time-warp themselves close enough to the twenty-first century to recognize that you don’t score political points by shaming a working mother—or any mother. Either way, turning an honest confession of ambivalence into an admission of “bad” parenting isn’t actually a “gotcha” moment. It’s just bad journalism.

In November 2006, the people of the purple-hued state of Virginia succumbed to their ruddier tendencies and voted to pass the Virginia Marriage Amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. At the time, states were busy popping off same-sex marriage bans—six other states rushed to enshrine discrimination in their constitutions that election cycle—and Virginia’s passed with a hefty 57 percent of the vote. In a fit of complacency, Victoria Cobb, executive director (now president) of the Family Foundation, which helped whip up support for the ban, crowed: “We can say once and for all that Virginians have rejected redefining marriage.”

Well, not so fast. On January 31, US District Court Judge Michael Urbanski ruled that a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal on behalf of two lesbian couples challenging Virginia’s gay-marriage ban should be expanded into a class action covering as many as 15,000 couples. That’s the estimated number of same-sex couples in the state who are currently barred from marrying or whose legal marriages, solemnized in other states, are not recognized.

Then, on February 4, as The Nation went to press, District Court Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen heard arguments in Bostic v. Rainey, another closely watched Virginia case brought on behalf of two same-sex couples. This suit similarly argues that the Old Dominion’s marriage ban is unconstitutional and should be overturned.

In a sign of the momentum building behind the case, attorneys David Boies and Theodore Olsen, the odd-couple power duo who helped knock out California’s Proposition 8, adopted Bostic v. Rainey in September 2013. And in January, the state’s newly elected attorney general, Mark Herring, boldly announced that his office would not defend Virginia’s marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman dictum and would instead back the plaintiffs. “I cannot and will not defend a law that violates Virginians’ fundamental constitutional rights,” Herring said. It’s worth noting that just seven years earlier, as a Democratic state senator, Herring sided with the forces of discrimination and voted for the offending amendment.

Should either of these cases succeed in striking it down, Virginia could become the first Southern state to allow gay marriage. Some equality watchers have further pegged the suits as potential candidates for the test case that will almost certainly challenge same-sex marriage bans in the Supreme Court one of these days. If that happens, Virginia will find itself in an uncannily familiar role.

Fifty years ago, a similar lawsuit, Loving v. Virginia, burbled up from the muck of intolerance. That suit challenged Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage and, after winding its way to the Supreme Court, smashed the color line that had long circumscribed the acceptable bounds of love and family. It’s a parallel that is not lost on today’s marriage-equality supporters.

“Virginia has argued on the wrong side of some of our nation’s landmark cases—in school desegregation in 1954, on interracial marriage with the 1967 Loving decision, and in 1996 on state-supported single-gender education at VMI,” Herring said in the statement announcing his decision not to defend Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban. “It’s time for the Commonwealth to be on the right side of history and the right side of the law.”

The forces of science and sanity scored a partial victory on November 22, when the Texas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to fourteen new science textbooks that provide unqualified, unadulterated descriptions of both evolution and climate change. Texas’s SBOE has long been a warren of creationists and climate-change deniers eager to use their position to muddy the teaching of basic science in public schools—a serious problem, since the choices that get made in Texas, the second-largest textbook market in the country, end up influencing the larger textbook landscape.

Four years ago, the board passed new curriculum “standards” meant to force textbook companies to present weaker treatments of evolution and global warming. It followed up by trying to pack the textbook review teams with junk-science zealots. But thanks to organizing by groups like the Texas Freedom Network and the National Center for Science Education, its scheme was foiled—mostly. 
After a last-ditch stand by creationists, the board agreed to send one biology textbook to a review board for further scrutiny.

Earlier this year, Rick Perstein wrote about the history of the “textbook wars.”

For twenty years, the voices of New York’s normally raucous public haven’t been heard much in the halls of power. Giuliani shouted people down; Bloomberg wasn’t interested. But in the weeks since the election that swept Bill de Blasio and a swarm of progressives into office, something unusual has happened. The rumble of civic chatter that built during the election has continued—most notably in a vast tent in lower Manhattan.

This tent is the centerpiece of Talking Transition, a fifteen-day experiment in participatory policy-making organized by ten foundations. (Think Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, North Star Fund, etc.) The purpose, said OSF’s Andrea Batista Schlesinger, is to demonstrate the power of public engagement and influence the incoming administration. The foundations have no formal connection to Team de Blasio, but they say they are talking to them. “We think the ideas that are being discussed here…will prove very helpful to an incoming administration,” Schlesinger says.

To help stimulate the conversation, Talking Transition created an environment that hovers between teach-in and tech start-up. The organization drafted an online survey to map New Yorkers’ wishes (filled out by more than 30,000 people in the first week); it sent street teams across boroughs; and, of course, it set up the tent. Here visitors are encouraged to record video messages for de Blasio at a “soap box” and scribble policy wishes on stickers. There is live music and mural painting. And in the center, there is a “Town Hall” where community groups can host forums to hash out policy dreams for the new mayor.

On a recent Saturday, this space was filled with 100 to 200 people who had gathered under the auspices of VOCAL and the Drug Policy Alliance to discuss ending the drug war in New York City. For ninety minutes, they brainstormed an alternate reality where the incarcerate-first agenda is replaced by decriminalization, legalization, more treatment, more affordable treatment and economic development. After years of being ignored, it was clear they were eager to be heard. As the ideas flew, a woman shouted: “De Blasio, are you listening?”

After Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory, the editors of The Nation indicated five areas in which the mayor-elect can make a progressive change.

Bill de Blasio, Democratic nominee for New York mayor, leans over to listen to a woman at a rally on Oct. 5, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
 
Shortly after 11:30 on Wednesday morning, Bill de Blasio, New York City’s likely next mayor, stood just a few blocks from City Hall and did what none of his recent predecessors would have done without the help of drugs or tickle torture: he pledged his support for the city’s vast fast-food workforce and the scores of low-wage workers laboring beside them. Standing in front of a lower Manhattan Burger King, de Blasio offered praise for the campaign to organize fast-food workers and laments for the industry whose grabby, employer-take-all economics has consigned so many New Yorkers to a subsistence existence. As one initial remedy, he called for New York City to have the authority to set—and presumably raise—its own minimum wage.
 
“The bottom line is, this is an unsupportable situation where every day hard-working people can’t make ends meet, and the companies involved certainly can do more,” de Blasio said as a squad of fast-food workers cheered behind him, and reporters scribbled notes on steno-pads. “And it is right, it is right, for leaders in government to step up on behalf of these workers and help them organize to win their rights.”

This was not the first time de Blasio had volunteered his voice for low-wage worker rights. As public advocate, he has been a reliable supporter of the fast-food workers’ movement, appearing at labor conferences long before the media cared to follow him and pressing worker-friendly legislation like the recently passed paid sick days bill. During the dog days of the Democratic primary, he spent a week trying to live on a minimum-wage worker’s budget.

But de Blasio’s appearance Wednesday outside a downtown Burger King signaled a potentially new moment for both city politics and Fast Food Forward, the coalition behind New Yorkers fast-food worker campaign. As the mayor-apparent of New York City, de Blasio is not just some scrappy local pol offering a thumbs-up to a worthy cause; he is a rising political power with a broad mandate and potentially national platform (indeed, de Blasio is now one of the highest-ranking elected officials to embrace the fast-food workers’ movement). And, as suggested by the scrum of elected officials clamoring for turns at the mic before him, he might actually have a significant base of elected support behind him.

As Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president who is expected to become the city’s comptroller, observed when it was his turn at the podium, “We have a growing coalition.” Among those who put in an appearance on Wednesday were state senators, state assembly members, several city council members and Letitia James, a city council member who is almost certain to get the city’s second-highest post, public advocate.

The particular reason for their presence this Wednesday morning was the release of a startling new report titled “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast Food Industry.” The report was published by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, and its findings have provided some of the first hard data on the economic costs of the fast-food industry’s appalling pay practices. Needless to say the details are bracing. Between 2007 and 2011, 52 percent of all frontline fast-food workers were forced to rely on some form of public benefits, such as Medicaid, food stamps or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, because they do not earn enough money to survive on their own. The cost to taxpayers was $7 billion a year. And all the while, the fast-food business boomed, with the country’s ten largest companies raking in an eye-goggling $7.44 billion last year.

“It’s very disturbing that companies that collectively make billions upon billions of dollars refuse to pay their workers a living wage,” said Karim Camara, a New York State Assembly member from Brooklyn. Like several other speakers, Camara used his turn at the podium to call for an investigation by the state government into the $708 million New York spends each year to pick up the tab for the public benefits fast-food workers rely on since their employers won’t pay a livable wage. As many as 104,000 frontline fast-food workers rely on these benefits every year in New York State.

Tionnie Cross is one of these workers. At 29, she is at once shy, gregarious and, in her words, “poverty-stricken.” As she told her story, she began working at a Brooklyn McDonald’s six months ago, though she has spent as many as five years in the fast-food trenches over all. She had hoped to find some measure of stability in her job (she had just come out of the shelter system), but with a salary of just $7.35 an hour, or between $120 and $160 a week, she hasn’t been able to make nearly enough money to pay her $1,000 rent, buy food, pay her phone bill and cover the sundry other costs of being alive. So she relies on food stamps and welfare and tries to budget her income, though she has fallen behind on her rent and fears an eviction notice will be arriving.

“It’s not enough,” she said simply, as Burger King signs for “Satisfries” and one-dollar French-fry burgers glowed behind her. “It’s not fair when you’re in poverty, working, trying to get more money, and you not really getting enough money to do what you have to do.”

Will the dawn of a new political era make a difference for her? Will it help other workers so that they can buy MetroCards, pay their rent and still afford to put food in their refrigerators? The question is a critical one, not the least because the number of fast-food workers continues to grow rapidly in New York, jumping nearly 30 percent in the past four years alone. The city is now home to 6,600 fast-food restaurants employing 57,000 workers.

New York’s rising political leadership has pledged to support these workers as they attempt to organize and unionize, and de Blasio’s call for Albany to give the city the authority to set its own minimum wage could, if achieved, have far-reaching consequences. But the hurdles are high. After all, corporations evade, Albany thwarts and leaders backtrack on promises.

And yet it was hard to ignore the buzz among the workers and politicians, organizers and advocates as they milled outside Burger King, surrounded by a squall of press.

Jonathan Westin, the executive director of New York Communities for Change, which has been leading the Fast Food Forward campaign, acknowledged the mood shift. “I feel like for two decades now we’ve been toiling away in the fields while not having much to show for it because whether it was Bloomberg or Giuliani or whoever, nothing was getting passed for people on the ground.”

But now, he said, the years of toil might finally bear fruit. “It generally feels like we may actually have people in office who have similar progressive values to what we’ve seen all over New York City.”

“I think we’re all excited to see it,” he said.

A still from the film Inequality for All (Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)
 
Throughout his forty-six-year career, Robert Reich has been an academic, an author, a candidate for governor, an adviser to presidents, the secretary of labor and a merry-eyed agitator. With the September 27 release of his documentary Inequality for All, he adds “film star” to his résumé. On a recent morning, we sat down to talk about the movie and the subject that seems to have become something of a mission for him. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.     —Lizzy Ratner
 
Lizzy Ratner: Why make a film about inequality?
 
Robert Reich: I don’t know a great deal about film as a medium, but I’ve tried everything else. I figured, this is sort of the last frontier for me. If I can’t reach people through film, I don’t know how I can do it. This whole area of widening inequality in income, wealth and opportunity is rapidly getting out of control. It’s very important that people understand it. And it’s too easy to caricature—by the right, as essentially a problem of poor people not taking responsibility, and by the left, as essentially a matter of greedy CEOs and Wall Streeters. Those caricatures are both wrong. It’s systemic; it has to do with how we’ve organized society.

LR: An updated study by economists Piketty and Saez came out recently that says that as of 2012, post-recession, the rich are getting richer and everybody else is staying where they are. Weren’t we supposed to have fixed this?

RR: We didn’t fix it, and this is really the point of the film. We fixed it in the 1930s; we made great headway in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s; but beginning in 1978, we turned our backs on the problem. Mothers flooded into paid work, and we all worked more hours—and then, beginning in the late 1990s, we borrowed against the rising value of our homes. All of those coping mechanisms for maintaining living standards in the face of stagnant or declining wages are now exhausted. So we have no choice but to face reality.

LR: What happens if we don’t confront this as a society?

RR: We can’t go on in the direction we’re going. For one thing, as we learned after 2007 and, before that, after 1928—both peaks of inequality—the economy can’t function when the vast middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. This is not simply a matter of unfairness and social morality; it’s also a very practical economic problem.

LR: I’d love your judgment on the Obama administration and what it’s done so far to get us into, or out of, this inequality mess.

RR: Well, the Affordable Care Act is important, and I think that we will look back on the Obama administration and see that as the signal contribution. In other respects, the Obama administration has not done very much. To be fair, [it] has faced a more disciplined, recalcitrant and right-wing Republican Party than any recent Democratic administration.

LR: You were an adviser to Obama in 2008 on the transition, and then in came Rubin, Geithner, Summers, the whole crew. What happened?

RR: It’s a good question. I felt that in the transition, a lot of important arguments were being made, and the president-elect seemed quite eager to hear them. But very rapidly a cohort of economic advisers emerged who were, let us say gently, not particularly progressive.

LR: In some ways, it mirrors what happened in the Clinton administration.

RR: It’s hard to overstate the power of Wall Street in setting an agenda. I think it’s very easy for progressive voices to be drowned out.

LR: If Bill de Blasio becomes New York City’s mayor, how can he make good on his promise to right the inequality that’s at the heart of our city right now?

RR: Well, he can make good on his promise only if people continue to put pressure on him and continue to be mobilized in ways that make it possible for him to take on the established structure of power. Too often, I think, we elect people who we assume are going to make fundamental changes, and then we go home and do whatever we were doing before without realizing that an election is just the beginning of the challenge. They need all our help and support if they are going to succeed.

In August, The Nation’s John Nichols argued that President Obama should appoint Robert Reich as head of the Federal Reserve.

(AP Photo)
 
Several years ago, not long after my son was born, I developed an insistent, almost religious habit of reading Goodnight Moon to him every night before bed. I hadn’t actually loved the book as a child—something about the darkening room spooked me—but as an adult, I found it soothing, a cozy throwback to the days before educational apps, brain games, flash cards, attachment gurus and the whole vast library of kid-genius books had all but destroyed the promise of the great green room. Childhood had been enriched to a state of radioactive intensity, turned into a nuclear achievement race that not only struck me as a bummer for kids but bad for society. As at least one study I read suggested, the cult of constant enrichment has seriously exacerbated the education gap; in the age of rising inequality, this is one way elites reproduce themselves. As I flipped through stacks of ABC books we’d been given (and, yes, bought), I mourned the loss of the pure, egalitarian times when a book like Goodnight Moon could be written.

Of course, if I had paused to think about it, I would have realized that Goodnight Moon was also a fabrication, as much a projection of its time and place as today’s brain-stimulating baby books. Published in 1947, Goodnight Moon was at once a groundbreaking work of progressive educational philosophy and a rather conventional ode to postwar middle-class stability, with a distinct vision of what children want and need. After all, this is what children’s books do. They distill the dreams and distortions of older generations, boil them down into bold-colored allegories that entertain, yes, but also edify, indoctrinate, guide, mold and nurture. The ultimate in loco parentis.

“What you’re seeing is, in a way, how culture is made,” said Leonard Marcus, a well-known children’s historian, during a recent phone conversation about the long-running role of children’s books. “It’s each generation setting down its hopes and dreams for the next generation. That’s what children’s books do.”

Such generational hopes and dreams—as well as a few nightmares—are at the heart of a fascinating exhibit that runs through March 2014 at the New York Public Library called “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” Curated by Marcus, the exhibit was commissioned by the library as a kind of declaration of children’s books’ artistic and historical merit, both of which have tended to be overlooked. The fact that children’s programming has become such a solid bet in today’s kid-obsessed culture—more enrichment!—couldn’t have hurt either.

The exhibit unfolds much like a children’s tale. Visitors begin by walking through an enchanting door—this one draped in stripy, white-and-yellow bunting—on the other side of which there is a winding path full of twists, turns and lots of discoveries. There are titillating artifacts, like the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee figurines that a still-enthralled Lewis Carroll gave to an adult (and married) Alice years after he penned his tales for her. There are delightful relics, like the pine-green umbrella, its handle shaped like a parrot’s head, which served as P.L. Travers’s inspiration for the one Mary Poppins carried. Mostly though, there are the hopes and perversions of centuries of elders, each doing their part to shape the next generation.

Consider The New-England Primer, the first book featured in The ABC of It. Originally published in 1690, the primer was the most prominent young-person’s book in America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though it’s hard to see the appeal today. A downer if there ever was one, the book is filled with the sour warnings and moral reprimands of a culture that viewed children as wayward souls in need of salvation—and salvation’s favorite sidekick, discipline. “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned all” reads a typically cheerless line from the primer. “The Idle Fool, Is whipt at School” reads another, while on the verso page, vocabulary words like “fornication” and “fidelity” serve as their own kinds of warnings.

Happily, the Puritan ethos didn’t last forever (though Marcus reports that the New England Primer is still available online for purchase by homeschoolers). As The ABC of It explores, changing currents in philosophy, psychology, nationalism, communism, capitalism—all have tracked their inky prints across the pages of children’s books, giving rise to new themes and characters, to say nothing of wildly different visions of children: the “rational child” of the Enlightenment, the “natural child” of the Romantics, and, in the twentieth century, the “progressive child,” who was cooked up by educators like Lucy Sprague Mitchell and strutted confidently through the pages of books like Goodnight Moon and Harold and the Purple Crayon. More recently, the big business of publishing has set its sights on the “consumer child” with all her profitable potential.

“Children always get the books their parents deserve,” Marcus has written, and The ABC of It certainly bears out the theory.

And yet, what about the books children deserve? While The ABC of It is not an expressly political exhibit, one of the more intriguing questions it prods its visitors to consider is what kind of heavy cultural lifting all these parent-penned books are doing. What purposes do they serve? And whose?

The exhibit offers one answer to this question in an early display case filled with two books dredged up from the Dickens era. The first of these books, The Royal Alphabet of Kings and Queens, was published in 1840s England and is thick with the rhymed stories of great royal personages; it most likely served as a kind of aspirational primer for “upwardly mobile, middle-class English children,” according to a curator’s note. The second book, Instructions on Needle-work and Knitting, is an altogether different beast. Despite a playful, pop-up style shirt stitched onto one of its pages gives, it was actually intended as a training guide for children who had almost no time to play: young working-class Brits whose nimble hands would soon be employed in dress shops, haberdasheries and other dreary mills.

“That was put early in the show in order to make a statement,” said Marcus. “Children rarely have equal access to books in the same time and place.” Or to put it more bluntly, children’s books have long trafficked in the politics of class, reflecting the inequities of their age if not reproducing them.

You can see this clearly in early books like The Cries of New York, the first children’s book ever written about New York City, which was published in the early nineteenth century and served as a guide for kids of a certain class to the jingles of the peddlers in their midst. Through the book, children learned not only the songs of the streets and the price of milk and onions but an important social lesson. Explains an editor’s note: “Children who failed to study hard and obey their parents might one day find themselves selling sand or matches on Broadway.”

Decades later, the message is less ham-handed, and more nuanced, but it hasn’t exactly disappeared. It persists in the way some children’s books are marketed, if not conceived, as gateways to the world of intellect and letters—which, in turn, is marketed as the gateway to the world of achievement and success.

And yet: it would be a mistake to dismiss children’s books as mere vessels for grown-up biases, decanting privilege into young kids’ brains. As a walk through the The ABC of It makes clear, the exuberant, centuries-old history of children’s literature is also one of subversion, rebellion, experimentation and inclusion. It’s the story of public libraries creating reading rooms and free programs for children and, in the process, blasting open the gates of literature to young people from all backgrounds. And it’s the story of women like Pura Belpré, the New York Public Library’s first Puerto Rican librarian, who began writing her own Spanish-language picture books in the 1930s to fill the void in culturally resonant literature available to her students. It is even the story of books like The Poky Little Puppy, which was one of the first titles churned out by the mass market children’s imprint Little Golden Books in the 1940s; though the guardians of high culture clucked, the book, which cost just twenty-five cents, was one of the first to be both affordable and available to kids across the country.

Most important, however, the story of children’s books is also the story of children. Kids books may be stuffed with the dreams of older generations, but children have never been mere passive recipients of the tales their elders tell. Once a book is in their hands, there’s no telling what they will do with it: absorb it, twist it, reject it, eat it or, heck, turn it into a four-cornered projectile, which is more or less what one small girl tried to do the first day I visited The ABC of It.

She looked to be about eighteen months old, and she was wandering near the section on comic books (sources of rebellion in their own right). As she stumbled about—dressed in pink and trailed by her mother—she took an interest in a display of oversized library cards featuring quotes by celebrated kids’ book figures like Maira Kalman and Belpré. Excited by the opportunity to further enrich her daughter’s mind, her mother grabbed the card and began reading the sophisticated, grown-up text. “Do you like what that one says?” the mother asked.

But the little girl did not like what the card said: she liked what it looked like or felt like, perhaps what it smelled like. She did not want to listen, she wanted to play, and as her mother read and shushed, she kept grabbing for the card, turning it into a toy, making it her own.

Peter Rothberg discusses Maurice Sendak’s cultural legacy.

“Fast Food Forward” workers and supporters picket outside Wendy’s in New York, April 4, 2013. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
 
The McDonald’s at the corner of 51st Street and Broadway is a monument to the dedication of corporate rebranding experts. Crouched near the northern edge of Times Square, it has been spiffed to a state of clean-lined cheeriness, the chain’s signature ketchup-and-mustard decor replaced by trendy hues and fake blond wood. The walls are bedazzled with plucky pictures of kids and tomatoes, and on the outside, peppy word-art telegraphs positive vibes to incoming customers: “Friendly… wholesome… dreams…”

Behind this chipper façade, however, the 51st Street McDonald’s is neither friendly nor wholesome, and dreams rarely come true, at least for the phalanx of underpaid workers—by and large Latino and African-American—who struggle to break the golden $7.25 an hour wage ceiling. While McDonald’s profits jumped 135 percent between 2007 and 2011, enough to earn its last CEO $8.75 million a year and its new CEO $13.8 million a year, these workers are forced to survive without benefits, sick leave or a living wage.

“You can’t be expected to survive on that little bit,” said Alterique Hall, 24, who has been working as a supervisor at McDonald’s for roughly three years. Hall earns $8 an hour, but his hours have been sliced over the years, and he frequently takes home as little as $60 to $100 a week. And so he often walks several hours to work from his home in Harlem because he can’t afford subway fare. At times, he’s relied on food stamps. As for his phone, it often gets cut off, because, he said, “Do you fall behind on the rent or do you pay the phone bill?”

If this were a typical narrative of low-wage labor—one of the many that unspools daily across New York’s five boroughs—this is where Hall’s story would begin and end: in the blunt grammar of need and struggle. But on November 29, 2012, after months of quiet organizing, Hall and his co-workers decided to rewrite this predictable tale. As part of Fast Food Forward, a new organizing initiative, they joined some 200 workers from across the fast-food spectrum—Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s—in a one-day mass strike. Their demands: $15 an hour and the right to join a union.

“We’re fighting because we refuse to tolerate the disrespect of being underpaid,” said Hall. “I’m worth more than a minimum wage; I’m worth a living wage.”

In the annals of low-wage labor, the story of Fast Food Forward is a startling tale, not the least because the November strike was widely believed to be the largest mobilization of fast-food workers in United States history—until that record was broken in April when some 400 workers struck again. But the fast food campaign is also an important part of an emerging New York tale.

Despite the profusion of low-wage jobs, grassroots labor campaigns have been few and far between in these parts. Here, as elsewhere, the labor movement has been under attack—from big business, small business and, not the least, the mayor, whose distaste for unions is so strong that he frequently refers to them simply as “special interests.” And here, as elsewhere, unions have struggled to adapt to the changing shape, and face, of the economy. Many simply haven’t bothered.

“We don’t have a clear set of practices around how you organize in scattered sites and subcontracted, private sector situations like we’re in,” explained Janice Fine, a political scientist and professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University.

And yet, throughout the last few years, the ground has been shifting. Taxi workers and domestic workers were among the first to begin agitating, blending inventive union drives with legislative campaigns. And now, others have joined the fray. At carwashes and groceries, airports and fast-food joints—at some of the most feudal work sites in the city—workers have begun banding together, demanding safeguards against the freefall of the low-wage service economy.

To be sure, the proportion of workers involved in these campaigns is modest. But the efforts come at a dire moment. As the steady thrum of organized manufacturing has given way to the feeble throb of service work, more and more New Yorkers have been tossed into the grind of low-pay, low-security employment. In 2011, some 600,000 New Yorkers earned less than $10 an hour, a wage that would hardly pays the bills in a less bank-breaking city. Within this underpaid demographic, roughly 42 percent work in retail and food services, while a mix of home health aides, waiters, stock clerks, domestic workers, groundskeepers and others fills in the rest. And the Great Recession merely intensified this trend. Between July 2008 and January 2013, as the city hemorrhaged decent-paying jobs—41,000 middle-wage jobs and 19,000 high-paying ones—the number of low-wage jobs soared by 130,000.

This is the unforgiving environment in which the various new organizing efforts have emerged, a bit like water crystals on Mars: not exactly guarantees of future multi-cellular life, but certainly a sign of its possibility. Because the organizing terrain is so tough, many of these efforts have tended to be fairly non-traditional, with community groups joining together with unions to push, pressure and prod by as many means as possible: through union drives, advocacy efforts, policy pushes and law suits. In some instances, sprawling coalitions have joined forces to push significant legislative changes, like the paid sick-leave act, which will guarantee sick leave to more than a million New Yorkers—once, that is, the City Council overrides a likely mayoral veto.

“I don’t think we know yet if any one of these projects, every one of these models, will bear fruit in terms of unionization,” said Fine. But, she added, “I think that the future of labor organizing…is here, in that it’s going to be a combination of creative new models pushing the limits of what’s allowed by existing labor law and supplementing that with smart public policy at the local and state levels.”

* * *

The last year has been particularly flush with these kinds of experiments, with as many as five campaigns unfolding across the boroughs. There were successful, if challenging, union drives at five carwashes and a major cable company. The Retail Action Project launched its Just Hours campaign, which attempts to tackle the widespread retailer practice of whittling workers’ hours down to paltry part-time gigs. Airport services workers banded together and, with the support of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), began advocating for basic labor standards in an industry gutted by low-bid subcontracting. And, of course, fast-food workers went on strike.

The carwash campaign, which is being organized under the aegis of Workers Aligned for a Sustainable and Healthy New York (acronym: WASH New York), is among the more instructive of these efforts. WASH New York follows in the path of carwash campaigns in Chicago and Los Angeles, but represents something of a novelty in New York: a multi-pronged partnership between two community groups and a union—Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). The three had worked alongside each other before as members of New York’s loose-knit grassroots community, but with WASH NY they made the partnership official—and different. For the community groups, the campaign was a chance to tackle members’ pressing labor concerns, while for the union it was a chance to make serious community connections—with the idea being that, in the process, they would all create something new.

“I think that what we decided is rather than seeing ourselves just as a labor movement, we have to see ourselves as the labor component of a broad progressive alliance,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU, explaining the union part of the equation.

The decision to focus on carwashes was inspired in part by the groups’ carwash-worker members. “We hear from so many car wash workers, ‘they treat me like an animal,’ ” explained Deborah Axt, co-executive director of Make the Road New York. And, indeed, the carwash industry is a notoriously abusive business, as the New York State Department of Labor documented in a 2008 report. Among the report’s more troubling findings? The revelation that 78 percent of the city’s car wash operators were guilty of violating wage and hour regulations, and that they had shortchanged workers $6.5 million in wages.

The Lage Car Wash in SoHo is a textbook example of these kinds of conditions. Sprawled across an open stretch of lower Sixth Avenue, it served for as a kind of landing spot for immigrants, the place they parked their hopes after migrating from El Salvador and other points south. These workers had come, in the words of one, “to live a better life, to have a better salary.” But what they found in the spray of water and slurry of chemicals was brutal bosses, stinging conditions, grueling hours and starvation pay. Salaries started as low as $3.50 an hour and never stretched much past $6. Work weeks yawned past seventy hours. Tips vanished. The cleaning chemicals caused nose bleeds. And when the workers complained, they were told there was no money for raises or protective gear.

“They used to tell us, ‘There’s an exit and there’s an entrance, and you know very well where each is located,’ ” said Omar Pineda, 35, a soft-spoken worker from El Salvador who has been spiffing cars for various Lage operations since 2000. Since exiting wasn’t an option, he always stayed. “You need to support your family in whatever way you can,” he said through a translator.

This was the world that organizers from WASH New York found when they began showing up at carwashes in 2011, talking to workers one by one. It was not always easy. “People were afraid,” explained Juan Carlos Rivera, 26, who is among the leaders of the SoHo shop. But by March 2012, they had enough momentum to go public. As organizers organized, lawyers sued carwash owners for unpaid wages, and supportive legislators introduced a bill in the City Council to create some measure of accountability in the woefully unregulated carwash world. It was the organizing equivalent of a mixed-media approach. And by September 2012, the campaign scored its first big victory, when carwash workers in Queens voted to join RWDSU. The SoHo workers—or carwasheros, as they’ve become known—followed suit two months later.

* * *

If the carwash campaign seems like a savvy but uphill attempt at reforming a harsh but relatively small industry, the Fast Food Forward campaign is something else entirely. With as many as 70,000 people working as prep cooks and servers in the New York area, many at fast-food restaurants, fast food is one of the gorillas of low-wage labor. It is vast, poorly paid and splintered—and it’s growing.

“We realized that the only way we’re going to make big changes in our neighborhoods and also the New York economy was to really take on some of the bigger players within the low-wage industry, the biggest being the fast-food industry,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change. New York Communities for Change has been one of the leaders of Fast Food Forward, along with SEIU and other groups.

To begin tackling this fast-food hydra, Fast Food Forward started sending organizers into the field in early 2011. Along the way, they met workers like Chad Tall, 20, a baritone-voiced Taco Bell employee who is, indeed, very tall. Tall has been working at Taco Bell for the last year, earning $7.75 an hour, and he is treated well, he says. But as so often happens in the fickle fast-food world, his hours were slashed several months back, around the time his mother lost her job, making for very tight times. With no real money left over after helping his family pay for food and rent, he can’t afford to pay for this semester of college and is taking an unwanted break.

Tall was skeptical the first time an organizer approached him—“how far is this really going to go?” he wondered—but he’s since become an evangelist, talking to everyone he can about the campaign. Support for the campaign from politicians and other outsiders was one factor, but so were the stories he saw and heard every day—from his mother, who once worked at Duane Reade, alongside a woman they called “Seven Years Seven Dollars”; his brother, who has also spent time in restaurants; his friends; and his colleagues, many of whom are supporting families on fast-food worker salaries.

“I know what’s going on here,” he said. “And I also know what the car wash people are going through and the airport people are going through, but particularly the fast-food people, there is a lot of tyranny in this field.”

* * *

In mid-February, several hundred workers, organizers and labor-boosters came together for a conference called “Workers Rising” about the state of low-wage worker organizing in New York City. The conference was hosted by the Center for Popular Democracy and United New York, which have been providing back-up support for several of the campaigns. At times, it had an almost giddy feel. As workers described their efforts to bring basic standards to their workplaces, academics and labor observers weighed in the meaning of the moment. The New York Times’s Steven Greenhouse, who was moderating a panel, declared it “an unusual time for activism among low-wage workers.” Others offered comparisons to earlier periods in US labor history.

“One hundred years ago, people thought you couldn’t possibly organize manufacturing/mass industry,” said Dorian Warren, a professor of political science and public affairs at Columbia University. “All these new centers are figuring out in real time how to organize low-wage work.”

Yet even as the crowd cheered such moments, many agreed that big questions and even bigger battles remain. How, for instance, can one-day strikes, hand-delivered petitions and store-by-store union drivers translate into real, industry-wide change? Can these many nascent efforts scale up? And what about retaliation? Bosses are powerful, and a number of workers have already experienced blow-back for their pains.

Shortly before the conference, the nineteen carwasheros from the SoHo carwash were informed that they were losing their jobs. The reason, they were told, was that the owner, John Lage, had sold the carwash. Lage claimed he had negotiated the sale the previous June, but the timing of the closing, just a few months after the workers’ vote to unionize and before contract negotiations could begin, seemed suspicious. The fact that he didn’t bother to notify the workers until three weeks before the closing simply seemed cruel.

In the immediate aftermath, the closing of the SoHo carwash seemed like a bitter rebuke. But then something unusual happened. As the workers protested their firing, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who was already investigating Lage for other possible labor law violations, stepped in and negotiated an agreement with Lage on behalf of the workers. The company had to transfer the carwasheros to new positions at other Lage sites within thirty days or else face significant monetary penalties.

When asked whether the drama had altered his feelings about joining the union, Omar Pineda answered that it was still worth it. “If we were not organizing, not trying to get a union contract, we would have gotten fired with no hope of getting another job. But now that we organized,” he said, “we managed to get relocated to other carwashes, which is a big victory.”

And there was another upside, said his co-worker, Juan Carlos Rivera: the chance to take the fight to other carwashes throughout the city. “We’re still going to hold our heads high,” he said, “organizing wherever we go.”

The world’s largest employer is under fire for subcontractor abuses in Nicaragua and Bangladesh. Read Josh Eidelson’s report. Read all of the articles in The Nation’s special issue on New York City.

Photo: Lizzy Ratner
 
Sometime during the mid-afternoon hours of October 29, as Superstorm Sandy was heaving up the East Coast, Anthony Narh, a Ghanaian immigrant, limped toward his job at Empire Parking, an underground garage serving one of the toniest strips of one of Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods. Nestled near the watery edge of TriBeCa, Empire Parking was smack in the center of an evacuation zone—and Sandy was heading straight for it.

As the winds picked up and debris was flying up and down TriBeCa’s narrow streets, Anastasia Ratia, an architect and designer who lives with her aunt at 92 Laight Street, a high-end building adjoining the garage, ran into Narh and a co-worker. Ratia and her aunt had already evacuated but were making a last-minute run to the building; Narh, who was in his late fifties and walked with a severe limp, was just arriving for work. (At the garage, he was known as Jackson.)

“I said, what on earth are you doing here?” recalled Ratia, 34, who grew emotional as she recalled the story. “And he said, I was called in to come.” When Ratia asked whether the garage’s manager had asked Narh to come in, Narh placed the responsibility higher up. “He said, ‘No, the big boss.’ And I just said, that’s craziness. They’re just cars!”

When the Hudson River burst its banks several hours later, the water raced toward the garage and trapped Narh inside. He never made it out.

When Hurricane Sandy smacked into New York City, it struck one of the most economically divided cities in the country, and the story of the storm is as much a story of inequality as it is of weather. But few stories are shaping up to be as stomach-churning as Narh’s. Meryl Streep lives in the apartment building adjoining the garage. So does Gwyneth Paltrow and the model Karolina Kurkova.

“What appalls me about this story is here is a building with one of the world greatest actresses and a poor Ghanaian man dead in our garage, and no one is reporting on it,” said Ratia’s aunt, Anne Templeton.

Though many of the details of Narh’s death remain vague, serious questions are beginning to emerge around why a man was required to work (or believed he was required to work) in the middle of an evacuation zone as a deadly hurricane bore down on his city. Here is what is known.

On October 28, more than a day before Sandy struck, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation of all low-lying areas, including the western fringe of TriBeCa. By noon the day of the storm, the superintendent of the adjoining apartment building, 92 Laight Street, had issued an evacuation warning to all parties. But the garage remained open. A source, who declined to be identified, spoke with the person who was managing the garage on site that day. The manager explained to this source that Empire Parking wanted attendants to remain behind to watch over the cars.

“I told him, look, you should really send everybody home,” said the source. “He said, look at the garage, there are still cars here.” The source estimated that there were still twenty to thirty cars in the garage.

When reached for a response, the manager of Empire Parking, who gave his name only as Wilfred and declined to provide a last name, said the company did not have a comment on “this subject.”

But for many people, including Ratia and Templeton, who were among the last to speak with Narh before he died, the story won’t go away. “I was one of the last people to tell him to get the hell out of here,” Templeton said. She can’t understand why he and a second attendant, who ultimately managed to escape the rising waters, were working that day.

“I didn’t know if he understood not to stay,” she said. “I kind of got the feeling that they thought they had to stay.”

Two weeks after the hurricane, on a strangely spring-like Monday morning, the garage where Narh drowned remained dark, its electricity snuffed out by Sandy’s wet kiss. A lone picture of Narh had been taped near the entrance, revealing a middle-aged man with a round face and hesitant smile. A thin necklace ringed his neck, and one of his shoulders was draped in traditional, wine-colored robes.

Beyond the picture, there was little to see in the garage: a few scuffed cars were visible near the entrance, but mostly, as the ramp curled right, there was blackness. The garage was closed for business.

Read Naomi Klein on whether Super Storm Sandy will push us to change our relationship to the natural world: A People's Shock?

Here’s a bit of consolation: in the face of Pamela Geller’s latest hate-stunt, the forces of decency and justice have performed with vigor, condemning racism and denouncing incitement with speed and fervor. If societies were judged primarily by their response to extremists, our own might be deemed relatively OK.

The story began in August, when Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative splashed a series of crude, anti-Muslim advertisements across San Francisco buses. It has continued into September and October with Geller and AFDI splattering the ads across ten of New York City’s busiest subway stations as well as Metro stations in Washington, DC, and light-rail trains and busses in Portland, Oregon. In all four cities, the transit authorities expressed dismay at the ads, which feature Geller’s signature mix of Islamophobia and ultra-Zionism. And both the New York and DC transit authorities initially rejected them. But after Geller sued (with the help of anti-Muslim agitator and attorney, David Yerushalmi), federal judges gave Geller the go-ahead to offend. The ads went up. Their message: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” And then, in smaller letters sandwiched between two Stars of David: “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Like any good arsonist, Geller has been intent on making the most of this moment, building it into the biggest bonfire she possibly can. She has mouthed-off, posed, agitated, offended and threatened more and worse in the future. (If she were a comic book super-villain, her name might be Fire Bug.) To her critics, she has been merciless, casting detractors such as Mona Eltahawy, who was arrested for trying to overhaul one of the New York ads with hot-pink spray-paint, as a “fascist savage Islamic supremacist writer.” To her supporters, by contrast, she has played the embattled warrior, fearlessly defending humanity against the hordes. In one recent photograph, taken next to the offending ad, she has rarely looked so happy.

“How often have I said that the individual can change the course of human events?” she crowed on her blog, Atlas Shrugs. “Always remember that. That is you and me. And we will, and we are.”

But human events (to say nothing of many humans) have so far refused to play along with Geller’s vision. In each city where the ads have appeared, individuals and organizations have denounced the placards, calling them out as the verbal cluster bombs they really are. In both San Francisco and New York, groups of bus and subway scribes garnished the ads with signs saying “racist” and “hate speech.” Interfaith groups have issued moving statements against them, and Sojourners, the Christian social justice organization, took out its own subway billboards, these ones saying, “Love Your Muslim Neighbor.” Even Fox News, which has been only too eager to shill for Geller in the past, deemed the ads “so inflammatory” that Happening Now, the network’s weekday news(ish) program, blocked out the word “savage” when showing viewers the ad.

Outrage has also erupted within the Jewish community, both within Zionist circles, for whom Geller often claims to speak, and without. As in the past, Jews Against Islamophobia, a coalition of three progressive Jewish groups, came out loud and bold against the bigotry, condemning the New York ads as “anti-Muslim” and “hate-mongering.” Rabbis for Human Rights stepped up with its own subway ads, moving declarations of human decency that say, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.” The group has joined a coalition of Muslim, Christian and Jewish organizations calling on the Washington Metro system to donate the profits from the ad to charity.

Far more surprising, however, has been the response from mainstream Jewish outfits like the American Jewish Committee, the Union of Reform Judaism, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the aforementioned ADL, some of which have remained woefully silent in the face of past Islamophobic outrages. “We believe the ads are highly offensive and inflammatory,” said Ron Meier, New York regional director of the ADL.

In the war between the civilized man and Pamela Geller, the civilized man (and woman) has come out swinging.

And yet, jubilation is sadly premature. For all the outrage aroused by the ads, there has also been screeching silence, particularly from the far-right precincts of the Jewish community, where Geller-style Islamophobia often gets a warmer reception than many would care to admit. The lobbying behemoth, AIPAC, has remained notably mute about the subway campaign, as have the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America, according to Open Zion’s Sigal Samuel. “We have no comment at this time,” an anonymous Orthodox Union spokesperson told Samuel. As for the Zionist Organization of America, it has also kept mum, though the president of its Los Angeles chapter, Paul Schnee, made his position pungently clear in August when he penned a piece praising Geller’s San Francisco bus ads.

“I’m sure I speak for many members of the public when I thank Ms. Geller for her efforts in courageously defying political correctness and speaking the truth about the nature of both Israel and America’s religiously inspired enemies,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, conservative pundits have gone full mic in support of the ad, spraying editorial pages with pro-Geller vitriol and bluster. At the English-language Jerusalem Post, Israel Kasnett published a hyperventilating piece titled “Support the civilized man,” in which he declared that Geller “has it right” and urged the West to “stop apologizing to the Muslim world, get behind Israel and defeat Jihad.” More recently, William McGurn published a piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he opined, “Whatever the agenda of those behind this ad might be, the question remains: What part of that statement is not true?”

If all of this neocon blather is predictable, it is also unforgivable. Out of the whole, overstuffed universe of bigots and haters, Geller should be an obvious pariah, a fringe figure whose role as the muse of Anders Breivik, if nothing else, should have made her an extremist non grata. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled her organizations, Stop Islamization of America and AFDI, hate-groups. So has the ADL. To denounce Geller’s bigotry poses almost as little political risk as denouncing David Duke’s. To applaud it is as inexcusable as complimenting his sheet.

Fortunately, many rational and decent people have risen to the moment, helping society pass (or, at least, not fail) one of its most basic tests: the test of how we respond to the extremists among us. But the same can’t be said for many of the other tests that recent history has thrown our way.

Though Geller and her crew are fringe elements, they are not random or spontaneous, idiopathic lesions on the healthier whole. They are, quite sadly, part of this country, outcroppings of something big and ugly that has been seeping and creeping through the body politic for years. In the decade since September 11, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry has become an entrenched feature of our political and social landscape. It lurks in the hidden corners of everyday life—in classrooms and offices and housing complexes—as well as in the ugly scenes that occasionally explode into public consciousness. In the special registration of Middle Eastern men after 9/11. In the vicious campaign against Debbie Almontaser, the American Muslim school teacher who tried to open the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) and was tarred as an extremist. In the attack on the Park51 Islamic center, more commonly (if less accurately) known as the Ground Zero mosque. In the New York Police Department’s selective surveillance of Muslim communities. And that’s just New York City. All of these instances should have called on our horror and outrage, and in all too many of them, society hasn’t lived up.

Consider the case of the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL has taken the right and just step of denouncing Geller’s “savage” subway ads, but when news broke of the NYPD’s secret anti-Muslim spying program, the ADL remained shamefully silent, and when Geller helped launch the crusade against Park51, it did worse: its leader, Abraham Foxman, came out against the Islamic center, offering the gutless suggestion that the center find a site “a mile away.”

The Jewish Community Relations Council is another example. While it has issued a firm statement against the Geller ads, its leadership went out of its way last winter to publish an elegiac letter supporting New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and his Muslim surveillance program, and it ultimately joined the wrong side in the Debbie Almontaser witch hunt.

And how about our local politicians—our mayor and city council speaker, for instance, who have spoken eloquently against Geller-style intolerance while supporting police intolerance toward a whole community? Or our national politicians, like Mitt Romney, who can spew Islamophobia—try putting Romney’s infamous comment about Palestinian “culture” on a subway ad and see how that goes over—and still be allowed to run for president? Or our TV shows? Or Fox news?

As Donna Nevel, a founding member of Jews Against Islamophobia, told me in an e-mail, “The Geller ads do not operate alone but take place in the context of the NYPD surveillance program and the ongoing targeting of the Muslim community and communities of color in this city.” The same goes for the country.

Pamela Geller has no intention of going away, and in the coming weeks, and perhaps years, she will continue to incite and ignite. In the wake of the New York MTA’s decision to require disclaimers on all political advertisements (a decision inspired by Geller’s ads), she has announced that she is buying eight more ads, which will soon greet New Yorkers from the back of city buses. And, after the Council on American-Islamic Relations decided to take out its own counter-ad in the DC Metro showing a smiling Muslim girl beside a quote from the Koran saying, “Show forgiveness, speak for justice and avoid the ignorant,” Geller decided to double-down on the hate: she is now cooking up a new ad campaign that will feature an image of the Twin Towers erupting in flames alongside various hand-picked quotes from the Koran. (Her current quote-of-choice: “Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of believers.”)

“This will go on for years,” she gloated to her Atlas Shrugs readers.

As Geller continues to set fires, it’s incumbent on people of conscience to keep condemning, keep standing up to her particularly flagrant brand of racism and bias. But a society is not judged only by how it reacts to its bonfires. It’s judged by how it responds to the less spectacular offenses, the daily outrages where bigotry grows and festers. If we want to pass this test, we still have a long way to go.

In this Sunday, April 22, 2012, photo, Israeli flags fly over the Ulpana neighborhood in the West Bank settlement of Beit El near Ramallah. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Round Two

BDS: A Call for Solidarity and a Challenge to the Status Quo

Critics of BDS who call for a settlement-only boycott ignore the vast range of political and economic forces inside Israel that sustain and profit from the occupation.

by Lizzy Ratner, on May 25, 2012

Before tackling all the bluster and hysteria around Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—before diving into critics’ knee-jerk manipulations and angry accusations—let’s start with the facts: the ugly ones, the undeniable ones, the ones that have been created on the ground over six brutally deliberate decades.

Let’s start, for instance, with Gaza, that locked-down, bombed-out latter-day ghetto where “refugee” has become a permanent category of existence and an endless, five-year siege has turned collective punishment into the daily norm. Let’s talk about East Jerusalem, where the native Palestinian residents are being forced from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. In the West Bank, illegal Jewish-only settlements hulk over a landscape denuded of olive groves. Settlers guilty of violence against Palestinians go free, while Palestinians are hauled to jail for “stealing” their own water. More than 230 kilometers of segregated roadway, and 760 kilometers of the “Separation Wall,” have convinced even the most unlikely sources that something is desperately wrong. “While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids,” wrote Stephen Robert, former CEO of Oppenheimer & Company and an “ardent Israel supporter,” in The Nation last year.

Finally, let’s talk about refugees, the ones who have been living in exile for decades, often in appalling conditions and have the right to return home under international law. And let’s talk about Israel itself—“democratic,” post-1948 Israel, where, despite their having the right to vote, Palestinian Israelis are subject to a dizzying concoction of discriminatory laws.

Let’s talk about all of this, because this is the reality for 11.2 million people—and this is the reality from which BDS has sprung.

“We have lived the past six decades going from one trauma to another, one tragedy, one slaughter, one theft to another…,” said author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa in her address to the 2012 National Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Conference. “The boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is our nonviolent response to this violence.”

In the frenzy to discredit BDS, it’s perversely easy for critics to forget these facts, to get lost in the abstraction (and sometimes distraction) of arguments about the uplifting effects of transnational corporations, the benevolence of 1948 Israel and the lurking anti-Semitism of the BDS agenda. These arguments are not just misleading but often downright dangerous and offensive; the anti-Semitism charge in particular is probably the most often cited and potent. So let’s be clear: vile and frightening anti-Semitism certainly exists, but BDS is not an example of it. As a nonviolent movement dedicated to human rights and nondiscrimination it is, in many ways, its opposite: the lesson of “Never Again” interpreted universally, a reminder that in the face of extreme horror, it is incumbent upon people of conscience to rally around the inalienable rights of the abused.

And there is more: while BDS remains a fundamentally Palestinian call, it nonetheless speaks to some of the best strains within Jewish tradition, from Rabbi Levi Yitzhak’s famed eighteenth-century matzo factory protest to the great, women-led kosher meat boycott of 1902 to some of the most potent phrases in Jewish religious texts. “Do not profit from the blood of your neighbor,” the words of the Leviticus 19:16 command. And another oldie but goodie, from the Talmud Bavli: “Whoever is able to protest the wrong doings of their community and doesn’t, it is as if they themselves did it and are punished for it.” And what about “Justice, Justice, shall you pursue?”

Sadly, these arguments haven’t stopped people from hurling accusations at BDS supporters, just as the Gordian knot of the Palestinian situation hasn’t stopped people from arguing that BDS should be weakened, diluted. Such is the case with Bernard Avishai’s essay, “BDS Abandons Progressive Israelis,” in which he argues that BDS should be toned down to avoid alienating enlightened Israelis living inside the Green Line. BDS, he says, is “too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater.” So while he supports the idea of a narrow, settlement-only boycott, he condemns the full-throttle BDS effort as “confus[ing] anger with serious politics.”

And yet, it is precisely Avishai’s desire to force a distinction—to cordon off the outrages of the occupation, to separate reality from serious politics—that is the problem with his position.

Let’s start with Avishai’s own example, the narrow example of the settlements, since it demonstrates how quickly distinctions crumble. Though it would be convenient if settlements were simple, sui generis eruptions, the truth is that they don’t just pop up across the landscape like a new species of flower. They are seeded and sustained by an intricate system of political laws, government incentives, financial investments and military might—and this root system sprawls deep inside Israel’s pre-’67 borders. As Dalit Baum and Merav Amir of the Coalition of Women for Peace wrote in a 2010 essay, “Any clear-cut distinction between the Israeli economy as a whole and the economy of the occupation can no longer be justified. The Green Line border has all but disappeared from the corporate activity map. Even if we only look at the Israeli settlements, and then again only focus on settlement construction, we will discover that the major players in the Israeli economy are deeply complicit. For instance, our findings show that all major Israeli banks have funded and supervised construction projects in the settlements.”

As Baum and Merav’s work makes clear, the settlements will not be dislodged through boycotts of settlement goods alone (essential, righteous and important though such boycotts are). There is a vast economy at work in keeping the settlement enterprise alive—and not just the settlements but the whole infrastructure of inequality and control that stretches in varying degrees from the southern tip of Gaza to the northern tip of the Golan.

So the question must be asked, What is to be done? How do you bring justice to a system that in the last few years alone has given rise to Operation Cast Lead, the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the ongoing colonization of East Jerusalem and countless other outrages?

For those of us who support the call for BDS, the answer, or an answer, lies in the collective action of civil society. It lies in action that is nonviolent, rights-based, grassroots, galvanizing, targeted, tactical and capable of shaking Israelis from their torpor—because Israel won’t do it on its own, and our leaders won’t pressure them to do it either. The status quo is too cozy, too “desirable” from a “cost-benefit perspective,” as Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf recently noted in an important column titled “Ending the Occupation: No Way Around Direct Pressure on Israel.”

And so, here is pressure—pressure that does not necessarily fill me glee, but that does give me hope. “It opens up a whole world for us of effective local action that adds up to movement building,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has initiated boycotts of companies like TIAA-CREF that profit from the occupation. “I believe that BDS as a tactic overall—not as the only one—is going to pressure Israel to change the status quo in a way that peace talks have not.”

This is where critics like Avishai once again chime in. Though it’s certainly fair to question the efficacy of BDS, Avishai makes the perplexing claim that in cutting off the salutary spigot of corporate capital, BDS risks alienating the very Jewish Israelis who are most primed to be sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight—namely, its “most educated and cosmopolitan people.” This is an odd formulation for several reasons, the most notable being the most obvious: Since when was morality the privilege of elites? And at what point did corporations become the avant-garde of enlightened behavior?

But there is another problem, which is that the available evidence doesn’t seem to support the theory. During the years that capital has poured into Tel Aviv, nightlife may have boomed but anti-occupation protest has not. More to the point, one of the prime, historic examples of boycott and divestment—the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which inspired BDS—was enormously effective, as both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu have argued. (And they should know, to quote Omar Barghouti.)

Will BDS work this time around, in Israel? Israel’s leadership has certainly poured enough resources into stopping it to suggest they’re concerned. Still, we can only hope and try. Because amid all the uncertainty, the one thing we do know is that the time for dithering is long past, and the moment of peaceful, persuasive solidarity has arrived.

BDS’s Conditions Spell the End of Israel

By insisting on the right of return, proponents of BDS only undermine the progressive Israelis and Jews who would champion the Palestinian cause.

by Eric Alterman on May 25, 2012

As both a liberal and a pro-Zionist Jew, I’ll admit to feeling considerable trepidation whenever I check the news coming out of Israel and the occupied territories these days. There is no question that the most regressive, racist and anti-democratic elements of Israeli society have been on the upswing. Illegal settlements—judged by Israel’s own generous standards—are being justified in a hasty, ex-post-facto fashion. Laws are being introduced to reduce the freedom of debate and democratic discourse and to outlaw the work of peaceful NGOs and civil liberties organizations—who find themselves under attack by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as alleged “collaborators in terror.” Journalists’ ability to report on these matters is being hampered by draconian new slander penalties. The Supreme Court is at risk of seeing its power curtailed, and respected religious figures are calling for explicitly racist actions to be taken against Israel’s Arab minority. For instance, not long ago, dozens of municipal rabbis issued an edict against renting or selling real estate to non-Jews, and a group of rabbis’ wives joined together to instruct Jewish women avoid all contact with Arab men.

What explains this destructive dynamic? Clearly a significant portion of it is driven by genuine threats combined with psychological and political factors that together produce an irrational reaction. For instance, Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with the hateful rhetoric of its leaders, has helped to empower the Holocaust-related psychosis among Jews, both inside and outside Israel, that lay barely beneath the surface of most Jewish discussions of Israel’s safety and security. According to a recent poll reported on in Haaretz, “about 40 percent of all Israelis believe the Holocaust could happen again, and 43 percent are reportedly concerned the State of Israel is in danger of being destroyed.” Another significant segment of the population are not interested in democracy or human rights but only in their extremely literalistic and restrictive interpretation of religious law. Yet another sector is comprised of right-wing nationalists who could care less about democracy and prefer to see Israel turned into a modern day Sparta.

Yet even allowing for the increasing influence of these segments of society, a majority of Israelis consistently tell pollsters that they would prefer a two-state solution to the current occupation and would welcome the opportunity to work out a compromise that would end the occupation and allow Palestinians to fulfill their national aspirations in the context of security guarantees for Israel and a genuine willingness to end hostilities. But they feel themselves to be without a credible partner in the peace process and hence don’t have sufficient confidence in the concept of political and territorial compromise to challenge the scare tactics of their internal political adversaries.

For this pro-peace majority to become politically empowered, Israel’s citizens must be able to trust that the Palestinians with whom they negotiate are able to enforce the agreements they reach. This is, literally, the only path to genuine Palestinian self-determination. No American president, much less Congress, will ever attempt to force Israel into a peace agreement against its will. Neither would the Europeans, who are actually irrelevant since they lack both the power and the means to do so. Terrorism aside, Palestinians have no credible military option vis-à-vis Israel. Their only hope can come by convincing Jewish Israelis that the risks and benefits of peace outweigh the risks and benefits of continued conflict.

It is true, of course, that Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people breeds hatred rather than a desire for cooperation with their oppressors. Even so, it cannot possibly serve the cause of peace and self-determination for the Palestinians for their spokespeople and supporters to demand that Israel, as currently constituted, commit suicide. They may think it just. They may think it right. They may think it fair or even ordained by God. But so long as they insist, as Omar Barghouti does, on the achievement of a set of goals that would mean the end of the Zionist project, then they will only strengthen those who seek to keep them in a permanent state of oppression and immiseration as they simultaneously undermine those who would champion their cause.

Barghouti claims that equal rights for Palestinians must include “at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba.” If so, there is really nothing to talk about. Six or seven million Palestinians cannot be reintegrated into Israeli society based merely on arithmetic, much less all of the obvious problems that would arise from the fact that the two populations happen to hate one another. Barghouti’s conditions demand that Israelis voluntarily forfeit their commitment to their history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history. He might as well insist that they convert to Scientology in the bargain.

Barghouti apparently thinks that the support of a food coop or an obscure pop singer somehow constitutes the beginning of Israel’s ultimate destruction. By talking in these terms and by employing the analogy of Israel not only to South Africa but also to Nazi Germany, as he has done in the past, he strengthens the case of Israel’s hardliners and actually helps to ensure the permanent oppression of the Palestinian nation. No less foolish is his mockery of those Jews who are committed to compromise, including those who support the notion of a “Zionist BDS.” By spitting in the face of the very people who are in the best position to help Palestinians progress toward the goal of statehood and self-determination, including those willing to put themselves on the line for the cause, he furthers demonstrates the disjunction between his hollow rhetoric and the political reality he allegedly seeks to influence.

Finally, while I genuinely despair for Israel’s future under this unhopeful scenario, as I also grieve for the victims of its occupation, I was, however, deeply impressed to learn that Barghouti, who in effect calls for Israel’s destruction, has earned a masters degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Alas, it is impossible to imagine the situation in reverse: an outspoken, foreign-born Jew who called for the boycott and destruction of the Arab or Islamic nation in which he resided living long enough to see himself denounced in the next day’s newspaper. The near-complete lack of democratic practices within Israel’s neighbors in the Arab and Islamic world, coupled with their lack of respect for the rights of women, of gays, indeed, of dissidents of any kind—make their protestations of Israel’s own democratic shortcomings difficult to credit. This is not merely a debating point. This democratic deficit also calls into question the ability of a future Palestinian leadership’s to enforce a peace agreement that is opposed—as appears inevitable—by significant segments of its population. Unfortunately, the signs from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in this regard are hardly encouraging.

Were Barghouti to ask American Jews to join him in pressuring Israel to come to its senses and negotiate a secure settlement based on the 1967 lines, with necessary adjustments on both sides and some sort symbolic (and perhaps financial) redress for Palestinians without the “right of return,” he might stand a chance of attracting significant support even among American Jews and within the Israeli peace camp. As his plan now stands, it is of a piece with the programs of Hamas and Hezbollah and with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent call for “the destruction of the Zionist regime” by peaceful means.

Good luck with that.

Round One

BDS for Palestinian Rights: ‘Equality or Nothing!’

The BDS movement is not asking for anything heroic from people of conscience. It is merely asking them to desist from complicity in oppression.

by Omar Barghouti on May 3, 2012

The Palestinian right to equality is neither negotiable nor relative; it is the sine qua non of a just peace in Palestine and the region. As Edward Said once said, “Equality or nothing!”

Anyone who supports Palestinian self-determination while calling only for ending the forty-five-year-old Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is only upholding most of the rights of just 38 percent of Palestinians while expecting the rest to accept injustice as fate. According to 2011 statistics, of 11.2 million Palestinians, 50 percent live in exile, many denied their UN-stipulated right to return to their homes of origin, and 12 percent are Palestinian citizens of Israel who live under a system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination,” according to the US State Department. More than two thirds of Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons.

Equal rights for Palestinians means, at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba. The 2005 Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) call was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians because it upholds all three. By appealing to people of conscience around the world to help end Israel’s three-tiered system of oppression, the BDS movement is not asking for anything heroic. It is merely asking people to desist from complicity in oppression.

Moreover, given the billions of dollars lavished by the United States on Israel annually, American taxpayers are subsidizing Israel’s violations of international law at a time when American social programs are undergoing severe cuts. Striving to end US complicity in the occupation is good for the Palestinians and for the 99 percent struggling for social justice and against perpetual war.

Building on its global ascendance, the BDS movement—led by the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society, the BDS National Committee (BNC)—is spreading across the United States, especially on campuses and among churches, scoring significant victories such as at the Olympia Food Co-op. Globally, trade union federations with millions of members have endorsed BDS. Veolia and Alstom, two corporations complicit in Israel’s occupation, have lost contracts worth billions of dollars. Deutsche Bahn, a German government-controlled rail company, pulled out of an Israeli project encroaching on occupied Palestinian land. The University of Johannesburg severed links with Ben Gurion University over human rights violations. World renowned artists—including, most recently, Cat Power and Cassandra Wilson—have canceled performances in Israel, heeding the cultural boycott and transforming Tel Aviv into the new Sun City.

BDS advocates equal rights for all and opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This universalist commitment has won hearts and minds globally, triggering panic and over-the-top bullying attempts to crush BDS in the United States, as witnessed with the national BDS conference at the University of Pennsylvania and the Park Slope Co-op ballot on boycotting Israeli goods, where almost 40 percent voted for BDS. Perhaps provoked by the mainstreaming of BDS, President Obama attacked it for the first time in his recent AIPAC address, joining numerous US politicians whose vehement vilification of BDS puts them on a moral plane with those white Americans who opposed the Montgomery bus boycott and/or the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

With impressive successes in the economic and cultural fields, and with the increasing impact of its Israeli supporters, BDS is viewed by Israel’s establishment as a “strategic threat” to its system of oppression—namely occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This explains the Knesset’s passage of a draconian anti-boycott law last year that drops the last mask of Israel’s supposed democracy. But multimillion-dollar campaigns by Israel’s foreign ministry to counter BDS by “re-branding” through art, science and cynically using LGBT rights to “pinkwash” Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights have largely failed.

Among international supporters of BDS, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is among the most eloquent in arguing that Israel practices apartheid. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine in its recent Cape Town session determined that Israel is practicing apartheid against the entire Palestinian people. Similarly, South African Christian leaders have condemned Israel’s apartheid as “even worse than South African apartheid.” And the publisher of Haaretz, an influential Israeli daily, recently described a fanatic Israeli ideology of “territorial seizure and apartheid.”

With its continued siege of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal colonies and the wall in the occupied West Bank; its “strategy of Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of refugees’ rights, Israel has embarked on a more belligerent phase in its attempt to extinguish the question of Palestine through literally “disappearing” the Palestinians, as Said would say.

Israel and its well-oiled lobby groups, who Thomas Friedman charges with buying allegiance in Congress, have been trying to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equal rights by portraying the nonviolent BDS call’s emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” If equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Did they destroy Alabama? Justice and equality only destroy their negation, injustice and inequality. The BDS movement’s effective challenge to Israeli apartheid and colonial rule petrifies Israel and its lobbies.

Desperate to “save Israel,” essentially as an apartheid state, and motivated by genuine fear of the demise of Zionism, “liberal” Zionists are under exceptional duress given the fast spread of BDS. Cognizant of its appeal to an increasing number of younger Jewish activists, some are muddying the waters by suggesting a Zionist-friendly boycott to undermine the movement. But BDS is an ethically consistent, rights-based movement that cannot coexist with racism of any type, including Zionism. A “Zionist BDS” is as logical as a “racist equality”!

BDS addresses comprehensive Palestinian rights, not simply ending the Israeli occupation of some densely populated Palestinian territory in order to save Israel as a “purer” apartheid. Even those who seek ending the occupation only, disregarding the basic rights of most Palestinians, struggle to explain their opposition to a full boycott of Israel, the occupying power, which under international law bears full responsibility for the occupation and its manifestations. The BDS movement calls for boycotting Israel just as South Africa was the target of boycotts due to its apartheid regime, China due to its occupation of Tibet and Sudan due to its crimes in Darfur.

Still, BDS is not a dogmatic or centralized movement—it is all about context sensitivity and creativity. BDS supporters in any particular context decide what to target and how to mobilize and organize their local campaigns. So long as they uphold the basic rights of all Palestinians, international partners may decide to selectively target companies implicated in Israel’s occupation or colonies only out of pragmatic considerations rather than approval of Israel’s other injustices.

A movement that dwells in citizens’ consciences, that is rooted in an oppressed people’s heritage of struggle for justice, and that is inspired by the rich and diverse legacies of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. cannot be defeated or co-opted.

Our South Africa moment has arrived.

BDS Abandons Israeli Progressives

A boycott of Israel’s settlements makes sense, but a broader boycott will most hurt those forces inside Israel that are best poised to change Israeli state policy.

by Bernard Avishai on May 3, 2012

The American response to Peter Beinart’s New York Times op-ed calling for an economic boycott of Israel’s West Bank settlements—what he calls, usefully, “non-democratic Israel”—will strike Israeli liberals as just a little melodramatic. Not very much is produced in the settlements, which are largely bedroom communities. Most liberal Israelis have been boycotting products from the settlements for years: Dead Sea creams, organic eggs, boutique wines and spices.

Recently, various scholars, artists and scientists signed statements announcing our refusal to cooperate with, or even visit, the college established in the settlement of Ariel, between Ramallah and Nablus; a college originally established by Bar-Ilan University, but now applying—with the support of Netanyahu’s government, and in the face of considerable opposition from the Council of Higher Education—to be upgraded to an independent university. A couple of years ago, writing against the BDS movement against Israel as a whole in these pages, I called for just such a boycott myself.

The settlers have, let us say, a problem with boundaries. Boycotting their products is simple, direct and clearly targeted: if a settler business loses customers, its settlement may prove less viable. This is a way of using obvious market freedoms to manifest our dissent or opposition to the settlement project as a whole. (For their part, and by the same token, most settlers don’t subscribe to the liberal daily Haaretz—in effect, they boycott the newspaper, and want it to go away.)

And Beinart is right to want the boycott of settlements to be international. Presumably, this will pressure Israeli companies, too, into dissociating themselves from the settlements and, in some cases, proving that they are not using settlement components or raw materials. The Israeli right wants to establish facts to erase the boundary between Israel and the occupied territories. A boycott of settlements establishes counter-facts that reinforce an eventual boundary: about a fifth of Israel’s GDP is from exports, and any serious Israeli company is global.

But the settlement boycott has another virtue, which is to bring into relief the kind of boycott that should not be entertained, namely, a general boycott of all Israeli products and institutions. That boycott would erase another boundary, between the Israeli state per se—the country and its civil society—and the state apparatus under particular elected leaders.

Erase that boundary, and you erase the discrete facts of Israeli politics; you repudiate the idea that a more moderate government could ever be elected again, though polls show that a split in the Shas party, or the emergence of a charismatic centrist, or a shift in Israeli Arab electoral strategies (all of which, or none of which, may happen this year), would tip the Knesset and government back to what it was under Ehud Olmert, who just attended the J Street conference, by the way.

Israel, in other words, is a complicated place. Its democracy is certainly more than what produced the occupation of Palestine. Imagine European officials, intellectuals etc., reading grim headlines about America’s invasion of Iraq, and concluding that the war was the product (as it was to some degree) of America’s imperial political structure and peculiar concepts of liberty. Imagine their advocating a boycott of everything American, from Google, to The Nation, to Berkeley—in effect, an end to the United States as we know it, including Bush’s internal opposition. Would this have been thought sane?

To be sure, Israeli democracy is not what it could be. I defer to no one in having risked what writers risk to tell hard truths about it. I wrote in The Tragedy of Zionism, nearly thirty years ago, that settlements were only the most vivid proof of Israel’s democratic deficiencies; that some of its legal structures amounted to discrimination against Israeli Arabs and valorization of religious orthodoxy—more precisely, reflected the absence of a liberal social contract needed to allow all citizens to meet as equals. And, yes, Israeli state agencies and the IDF have been instrumental in making the occupation what it is.

Still, Israel is also a place of progressive and creative forces, concentrated in Israeli elites: again, artists and scholars, but also entrepreneurs and professionals. BDS aims to hit global companies doing business with Israeli ones. But, as a group, international companies are the most important allies Israeli liberals have. These companies are learning and teaching organizations: Intel’s impact on Israel is like MIT’s on Cambridge. Opposing the bloc of parties favoring Greater Israel is a (somewhat weaker) bloc working toward Global Israel. What would BDS do to the latter, the very people in Israel whom the liberal world needs to strengthen?

You see, the implicit premise of BDS is that the occupation flows from the fact of Israel itself: that Israel is inherently a kind of occupation machine, beginning with 1948 and followed by 1967. In effect, BDS advocates accept the grotesque view of settlers and Hamas both, that the claim of Jews to Hebron in 2012 is exactly like the claim to Degania in 1912. It is not: the actions of a desperate movement are not to be copied by a triumphant state; after he became mayor, Jean Valjean did not keep stealing candlesticks. On the other hand, BDS advocates argue that the stock of global companies making things used by occupation forces—United Technologies makes IDF helicopters, for example—should be divested, as if companies are big collaboration machines. But the same company’s air-conditioners may be cooling a school in Afula—or Gaza. In both cases, looking at Israel, or at companies, we need to up the magnification.

Some will say, fine, force the implosion of Israel’s private sector and this will finally force Israeli elites to seek political change more urgently. This is mechanistic and shortsighted thinking. Economic implosion, which a fully implemented BDS would bring about rather quickly, will cut the ground out from under Israel’s most educated and cosmopolitan people. It will not just pressure them, it will destroy them—ruin their lives, force the emigration of their children. Settlers and their ultra allies, in contrast, have no problem with Israel turning into a poorer, purer, Jewish Pakistan. Do we really want to cause Israel’s private sector to collapse or its universities to be isolated?

I suppose what offends me most about BDS is that it confuses anger with serious politics. It is something like the Tea Party, mad at “government,” too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater.

What we need, rather, is a vibrant, globalizing Israel, businesses, universities, etc. that expect to be part of the world and show the way to it; people who find Greater Israel an embarrassment and, indeed, will see an international boycott of settlements as a way of selling their case for compromise. Such people will be strengthened not by BDS but by a general, persistent anxiety about the conflict’s “opportunity cost”: the conviction that Israel’s manifestly improving quality of life will be a far cry from what it could be with peace.

That is the vision a re-elected President Obama should be preparing to bring: for Israel’s security everything, for Israel’s occupation nothing. That is the vision he tried to bring before 2010’s electoral reversals spooked all Democrats into the arms of AIPAC. With the Palestinian Authority on the brink of collapse, and successive Centcom commanders warning of a mean turn in the Arab street if the settlements are not stopped, is it too much to hope that the embrace is not permanent?

Just past Fifth Avenue, where the gourmet food shops shift into dollar stores and Fourteenth Street turns suddenly seedy, there is a squat, metal-sided building that looks like a relic from a half-familiar past. Coated in grime so thick it’s hard to tell whether the striped siding is green or blue, it still bears boxy traces of postwar optimism (it was built in 1946), but mostly it looks haggard, a smile snaggled with broken teeth.

This is the home of the Waverly Food Stamp Center, one of eighteen such centers in New York City. On a recent Monday morning, it was choked with visitors—men, women and kids in strollers—heading to appointments, picking up applications and pressing to get cases reopened. They came in waves, big and constant, which got sucked upward in two tin-can elevators and then spit out into a room that one applicant, Erica, described as “really hot,” “crowded” and “loud.” It was the kind of place where no one seemed to be in control, and where anyone who might be in control didn’t seem to care. And yet somehow, Erica said, the place functioned. Despite hoops and hurdles, visitors frequently walked out with the help they so desperately needed when they came in.

“They do assist you, they do,” said a middle-aged man who asked to be identified by his nickname, Mr. Monk, as he breezed out of the Waverly Center. Mr. Monk had lost his job, then his home, to the recession and had decided to apply for benefits because “I have to eat.” Still waiting to see if his welfare application would be accepted, he’d already received an emergency food stamp disbursement. “Every red penny goes to food.”

Welcome to the food stamp system: decaying, inundated and one of the most unexpectedly effective safety net programs still standing. Indeed, like the crumbling Waverly Center, the food stamp program, more formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, still stands, still works—remarkably well, all things considered. It may not look pretty, but while other social safety net programs, like public assistance (more commonly called welfare), public housing, Section 8 and even unemployment insurance, have been so thoroughly hobbled that they can no longer respond to the struggles of millions of Americans, the food stamp program has remained surprisingly sensitive to people’s needs. It is one of the defining reasons more Americans were not as immiserated by this recession as they were in eras past.

The statistics tell the story. On any given day, nearly 1.8 million New Yorkers participate in the program, using electronic benefit cards to buy bread, milk, cheese and other staples. Across the country, the number is 46.3 million, or one out of every seven people. And thanks to an infusion of $45.2 billion in stimulus money, SNAP has helped millions of unemployed and underemployed recession victims. In 2010 alone, food stamps lifted 3.9 million people above the poverty line, the Census Bureau reports. And it did this, continues to do it, despite decades of on-again, off-again neglect, budget cuts and Republican attacks.

“Food stamps are really the only functioning part of the safety net,” says Joel Berg, executive director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger. “It’s the only thing left.”

The question now is, how much longer can the food stamp program withstand the conservative assault on the nation’s safety net? And why haven’t Obama and the Democrats done more to defend such a vital program?

* * *

The modern-day food stamp system is, in many ways, a model entitlement program—far from perfect, but as good as it gets in social welfare–wary America. Born of the Food Stamp Act of 1977, which in turn was born of the anti-hunger movement of the 1970s, it is accessible, far-reaching, resilient and lean, with an overhead that consumes less than 10 percent of its budget. True, its benefit levels are so stingy that many recipients are forced to survive on little more than $1 a meal. True as well that it fails to reach three of every ten people who are eligible, helping explain how some 14.5 percent of this country’s households experienced food insecurity in 2010. Among those denied: a desperate mother of two who walked into a Texas food stamp center earlier this month and took a supervisor hostage, ultimately killing herself and two kids.

And yet, for all these stunning and starved beast failings, SNAP remains the best of the bunch, a program whose essential effectiveness has enabled it not only to stave off food insecurity for millions but to catch the overflow of need caused by the attack on other entitlement programs. Call it the safety net’s safety net.

“In terms of food security in this country, food stamps really are the foundational component of the safety net,” says Triada Stampas, director of government relations and public education for the Food Bank for New York City. “It is a program that by and large works.”

The fact that the program remains as successful as it does is remarkable given the beatings it has taken since Ronald Reagan began sweeping away the buttresses of the welfare state. Since the Reagan revolution, funding has regularly been slashed, eligibility tightened and, during the Gingrich years, most immigrants banned from the program. And yet, even amid these attacks, food stamps have enjoyed enough bipartisan support to avoid the radical disemboweling experienced by, say, the welfare system. The reason, at least in part, is the way the program has historically been framed: as a voucher (always Republican-friendly) supporting the working (and hence “deserving”) poor. As a result, funding has often been restored, some categories of documented immigrants have been readmitted to the rolls, and the program has retained sufficient flexibility to respond quickly when the need is greatest.

The past few years provide a textbook illustration of how the food stamp program works when it functions best. In 2007, before this country’s economic engine gave out, the number of people receiving food stamps hovered at 26.3 million, a number that had crept up steadily since the start of the decade, thanks to the 2001 recession and stagnating wages. In the almost four years since, the number of people participating in SNAP exploded, nearly doubling as unemployment and underemployment rocketed ever higher. Obviously it would have been far better if the economy had improved and the need evaporated. But given today’s unhappy economic reality, the spiking SNAP rolls are one of the clearest signs of a functioning food safety net.

“The program’s almost a model countercyclical program, in the sense that as more people are unemployed, as more people’s wages fall, food stamps can step in quickly and effectively to pick up some of the slack and ameliorate some of the pain,” says James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), one of the country’s most prominent national anti-hunger organizations.

Today’s food stamp legions are a diverse group, a cross-section of ages, ethnicities and biographies. They include recession casualties like Rosalinde Block, 59, a middle-class single mother in Manhattan, who lost nearly half her piano students as well as her freelance gigs and medical coverage at almost the same moment in 2008 when her son became seriously ill. They are double-barreled hardship victims like Carmen Perez-Lopez, who suffered a stroke followed almost immediately by a breast cancer diagnosis in the fall of 2009 and quickly ran through her savings as she slogged through treatment. They are disproportionately women; roughly half of them are children. And for many of them, food stamps have made all the difference.

“They actually rescued me—they gave me food when I had none,” says Perez-Lopez, a former office manager who was reduced earlier this year to subsisting on the free nutrition bars handed out by her cancer clinic. Unable even to afford bananas, she was weak and losing weight—until an advocate at the Food Bank for New York City helped her navigate the food stamp application process. “Oh, I went to buy milk, I went to buy broccoli and cabbage and eggs… it feels so good,” she says of her first food stamp shopping excursion.

“I guess food is essential, huh?” she half-jokes.

Yes, food is essential. But it is also something else: a source of economic growth, a stimulus. As a 2008 study by Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, found, every government dollar spent on food stamps lifts GDP by $1.73, making it the most effective way to inject money into the economy. The reason is simple: “People who receive these benefits are hard-pressed, and will spend any financial aid they receive very quickly,” writes Zandi, one of John McCain’s economic advisers during his presidential campaign, hardly a bleeding heart. This money, in turn, disperses outward to the store clerks, store owners, truckers and farmers, who then feed it back into the economic loop.

Small wonder, then, that the program is widely popular. In a 2010 poll of registered voters by FRAC, 74 percent said food stamps are “very or fairly important for the country” and 71 percent said that cutting food stamps would be the “wrong way for Congress to reduce spending.”

* * *

Given the program’s popularity, to say nothing of its strengths as an anti-poverty program and recession-buster, one could be forgiven for assuming that food stamps are enjoying widespread government support right now: that Congress would be debating funding increases, not cuts, and that the administration would be working hard to bolster and even boost one of its more effective stimulus initiatives.

And yet.

In recent months, the nation’s food stamp program has come under increasing pressure—from the reverse Robin Hoods who have taken aim at the government and the Democratic leaders who quake before them.

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was the first to empty his quiver with his Path to Prosperity plan in April, in which he recommended garlanding the rich with yet more tax cuts while carving $127 billion (or almost 20 percent) from the food stamp program over the next ten years, imposing time limits on benefits and converting the system into block grants. Echoing the arguments used to attack welfare fifteen years earlier, Ryan warned against transforming the safety net into a “hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” If passed, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities cautioned, the Ryan plan would have thrown “millions of low-income families off the rolls, cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination of the two.”

Ryan’s proposal, and the House budget that grew out of it, were defeated, but not without winning the support of almost every Republican in the House. And now there’s the sudden surge of Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich, which can only portend ill for food stamps. Gingrich has been lobbing anti-SNAP bombs for months, but his most infamous, issued in May and repeated in December, was his slam calling Obama the “food stamp president”—a declaration of barely coded racism that harked back to decades of racially inspired attacks on food stamps, most notably Reagan’s slur about “strapping young bucks” dining out on T-bone steaks. Equally troubling, Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican with a record of racebaiting, led a charge in the Senate this past fall to “reform” food stamps by restricting eligibility and undoing a planned $9 billion budget increase, supposedly to crack down on fraud and government excess. (Notably, food stamp errors have reached record lows in recent years: only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported.)

The deep racism at the heart of conservative food stamp critiques offers at least one clue as to why the Obama administration has been unable or unwilling to champion SNAP as a valuable recession antidote: as the nation’s first African-American president, Obama is vulnerable to racist innuendo, which his opponents are only too happy to exploit. Just two months after Gingrich made his “food stamp president” comment, another would-be president, Rick Santorum, picked up the theme, accusing Obama, absurdly, of “pushing more people on food stamps.”

Moreover, and in fairness, it’s not easy to sell the positive side of skyrocketing food stamp enrollment. That food stamps have performed admirably during the recession, catching those in need and stimulating the economy, is small consolation when the economy continues to stagnate and unemployment hovers at just under 9 percent. Certainly we can agree that living-wage jobs would be far preferable to an economy so broken that 46 million people need food stamps.

And yet, none of this exactly explains the Obama administration’s failure to defend a clear policy success. And it certainly doesn’t explain why the administration along with Congressional Democrats bargained away some $14 billion in food stamp funding in 2010, hacking more from the program than George W. Bush ever did. Or why the Democrats on the Agriculture Committee agreed to recommend $4 billion worth of SNAP cuts to the mercifully failed “supercommittee.” Or why Democratic leaders like Dick Durbin, Charles Schumer and Patrick Leahy failed to sign on to a passionate letter by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand imploring the supercommittee to protect SNAP.

“Who are the liberal lions anymore?” one advocate laments.

Liberal lions do seem woefully scarce these days. More precisely, full-throated defenders of a common, socially contracted good seem woefully scarce. Obama does seem to have some kind of social contract vision, but it is based largely on compromise, on the social contract as process, not values. This is all well and good until you’re forced to go up against a pack of social Darwinists who have no values or belief in process. No wonder he’s had a hard time defending even the most basic, necessary and successful programs.

Then again, maybe the fight was never completely up to him. Maybe it’s been up to us all along.

When the Food Stamp Act was passed in 1977, making food stamps free and nationwide for the first time, it bore the distinct traces of the blood and sweat of the newborn anti-hunger movement. “Most of the nation’s leading antihunger groups were founded during a fourteen-year period starting in 1970,” writes Joel Berg in his book All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? “Not coincidentally, the nation’s greatest advances in reducing hunger came in the same decade.”

Many of the groups that helped fight for the Food Stamp Act still exist and are still fighting valiantly, but there hasn’t been much of a movement surrounding them in years. In fact, as progressives dived into the culture and terror wars and all but forgot the anti-poverty wars, there’s barely been the glimmer of a movement—until now. Until a ragged group of young, old, utopian, hard-luck, some-luck visionaries began occupying the country’s squares and minds with their calls for a society based on shared, mutual good rather than rogue individualism.

As the Occupiers plot their next moves, here’s one suggestion: occupy the safety net!

Also in This Forum

Betsy Reed: “Occupy the Safety Net” (Introduction)
Kate Kahan and George Wentworth: “Unemployment Insurance Under the Knife”
Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich: “The Making of the American 99 Percent”
Diana Spatz: “The End of Welfare as I Knew It”
Pedro Noguera: “Tearing the School Safety Net”
Patrick Markee: “The Unfathomable Cuts in Housing Aid”
Sasha Abramsky: “Medicaid in Crisis”
Kai Wright: “Hard Knocks in the Bronx”
Frances Fox Piven: “A Proud, Angry Poor”

The first time I met the writer, feminist and modern-day matriarch E.M. Broner—better known to her friends as Esther—she was wielding a wand. It had been a sad occasion, the first anniversary of the death of the late, great book critic and, for a time, Nation literary editor John Leonard, and a few of us were gathered at the house John had shared with his wife Sue, a brilliant teacher, radical spirit, and one of the first women to teach me about feminism.

We were just digging into a mound of oversized, drown-your-sorrows desserts when Broner walked in—or floated, more accurately—an 81-year-old fairy with leaping eyes, a delighted cackle, and unapologetically frizzy brown hair. She seemed ancient and ageless all at once, and she was waving one of those glittery star-shaped wands that are so popular with the under-eight set. There aren’t many people who can pull off a wand, with or without glitter, but Broner wore it like a particularly graceful limb. When she waved it over us, the lights—I am certain of this—buzzed 50 watts brighter.

On June 21st, this exquisite woman died, just a few weeks shy of her 83rd birthday and long, long before she or the world she inhabited was ready. While I didn’t have the privilege of knowing Broner well, she was the kind of person I adored instantly, enjoyed tremendously, and admired endlessly. She wrote books—lilting, sensuous, form-bending books like A Weave of Women and The Red Squad; she taught writing, literature, and life; she invented rituals; she organized and protested; she helped midwife the movement for Jewish feminism—once, perhaps, thought to be an oxymoron—and helped refashion a religion in the process.

Mostly, though, she cast spells.

You see, Broner was one of the women who came before, part of that group and generation of lady warriors who made my world possible. She slew the dragons so my friends and I didn’t have to, but she slew them with such charm and wit and eloquent determination that it might be more accurate to say that she didn’t kill them so much as de-fang them, ensorcell them with her incantations and imagination.

“She gives such a twinkle to the phrase earth mother, because that’s what she was. Every single cell of her being was feminist, and that radiated outward in any circumstance, in any situation,” our shared friend Sue Leonard said. “And other people might have a different interpretation, but I think it was her feminism that made her such a humanist about anybody anywhere who was being in any way downtrodden.”

It was this feminist humanism, or humanist feminism, that inspired Broner to hold high the banner of so many righteous struggles: antiwar, labor, civil rights, Palestinian rights, and, of course, women’s struggles both near and far. She held vigil with Women in Black, she protested police brutality—indeed, she got arrested when she was past 70 for protesting the brutal 41-bullet execution of Amadou Diallo.

“She was just tuned in, passionate, and willing to put her body on the line,” her close friend, the writer and feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, said.

Still her most lasting legacy will almost certainly be the way she helped remake Judaism for so many women, remake it in their image. This is hardly a small feat given that the religion in question—like so many of the really big ones, frankly—has excelled for some three millennia at writing women into subservience when it wasn’t simply writing them off. But Broner helped reclaim a place and a history for the second sex by both forcing her way into male-dominated rituals— witness her year-long struggle to say kaddish for her dad at an orthodox synagogue, which she chronicled in Mornings and Mourning: a Kaddish Journal—and by inventing new ones. Hence the wands. And feathers. And sacred shmatte. Hence also the coven that include Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French, and Carol Jenkins. And hence The Women’s Haggadah she co-authored in 1977 and the legendary women’s seder she conjured a year earlier, an act of religious reinvention that became a New York tradition celebrated each year alongside such sisterly powerhouses as Grace Paley, Bella Abzug, Steinem, Pogrebin and others.

“There is no way to calculate the enormous impact she’s had,” said Pogrebin, who credits Broner with drawing her back toward Judaism—an enlightened feminist Judaism—after years of disenchantment. “She was able to rename what mattered in women’s lives, and to sacralize it, to make sacred, the way men throughout time were able to name the sacred, and she did it with this whispery voice and rosy cheeks and glittering eyes.”

What does all of this renaming and sacralizing, reinventing and reshaping have to do with everyone else? Quite a bit actually since what Broner offers, among so many other things, is a beautiful example of exploding a tradition to save it, transforming something that had oppressed her into something that might liberate her.

As I write this, I can’t help but think back to a tribute paid recently to another righteous soul who was yanked away far too soon. Several weeks ago, during an impromptu eulogy for the Jenin Freedom Theater fighter Juliano Mer-Khamis, the filmmaker Udi Aloni compared his friend to the great trickster figure in literature. The trickster is the great subverter, the irreverent, irrepressible boundary breaker. He is Puck and Huck, Eshu and Anansi, The Little Tramp, Hermes—any number of protean beings who are at once inside and outside, here and there, bending norms, meaning, and the laws of reality.

Broner wasn’t exactly a trickster—tricksters historically haven’t been women, and it wasn’t really her style either. But she was both inside and outside, bending norms, hovering at the door between tradition and equality, turning stasis into possibility. All of which makes her something rare indeed: the woman with the wand.

Image courtesy of Tulane University.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of the article below appeared in our May 2 print issue. Subscribers can download the PDF.
 
From the moment the Goldstone Report was published in September 2009, its opponents have worked tirelessly to undermine it. The 452-page investigation of the 2008–09 Gaza conflict by a United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes for attacks on civilians, but its overall thrust was harshly critical of the Israeli onslaught, which took as many as 1,400 Palestinian lives, including those of more than 300 children. The US Congress denounced the report for allegedly denying Israel’s right of self-defense (it didn’t); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortlisted the report, along with Hamas rockets and a nuclear-armed Iran, as one of the three main threats to the Jewish state; and Alan Dershowitz accused the report’s chief author, Richard Goldstone, of being a traitor to the Jewish people. As recently as March, Eli Yishai, Israel’s bellicose interior minister, wrote to Goldstone charging his report with giving “legitimacy” to terrorist organizations and “calm[ing] murderers without a conscience” when they murder children.

Then came the “reconsideration.” On April 1 Goldstone, a 72-year-old South African judge, published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that Israeli army investigations of some 400 incidents during Operation Cast Lead had caused him to disavow a key assertion in the report: that Israel had a policy of deliberate attacks on civilians during the twenty-two-day conflict. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” he wrote.

Within hours of Goldstone’s op-ed, those who had been gunning for the report all along gleefully pronounced its demise. They characterized the judge’s essay as a recantation, and they declared the report mortally flawed. Netanyahu demanded that the UN cancel the document. The State Department followed suit, with UN ambassador Susan Rice stating that she wanted the report simply to “disappear.” The Israel Action Network, a multi-million-dollar effort led by the Jewish Federations of North America to massage Israel’s image and rebut “delegitimization” efforts, promptly launched a campaign to circulate the op-ed to as many “opinion molders” as possible.

And yet, the Goldstone Report lives on. Not only have all efforts to derail it failed thus far but the report is arguably more relevant than ever. Just a few days before the judge’s “reconsideration,” the UN Human Rights Council gave the report new life by passing a resolution recommending that it be sent to the General Assembly and from there to the Security Council for possible referral to the International Criminal Court. And Goldstone’s op-ed itself has thrust the report, and its recommendations, back into the spotlight. “In my view, the Goldstone retreat, unfortunate for his overall reputation and legacy, has actually given the report, and its recommendation, a second public life, with renewed interest, and civil society engagement with a call for its implementation,” Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, wrote in an e-mail. He later added, “It has made people more aware about the need for accountability.”

Eminent figures have stepped up to affirm the validity of the original document, including, most notably, the three commissioners who co-authored the report with Goldstone: retired Irish colonel Desmond Travers, Pakistani lawyer Hina Jilani, and legal scholar Christine Chinkin. In a devastating rebuke published in the Guardian on April 14, the three commissioners defended the validity of the report and dismissed critics who have sought to capitalize on Goldstone’s essay as cynically misrepresenting the facts.

“We concur in our view that there is no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report with respect to any of the parties to the Gaza conflict,” they wrote in their statement. Further down they added, “Had we given in to pressures from any quarter to sanitize our conclusions, we would be doing a serious injustice to the hundreds of innocent civilians killed during the Gaza conflict, the thousands injured, and the hundreds of thousands whose lives continue to be deeply affected by the conflict and the blockade.”

Indeed, the largest lesson of the controversy has been that the world is not prepared to forget these hundreds of thousands of killed, injured and “deeply affected” civilians – or the report that documented their suffering. If Gaza was a contemporary Guernica, the report fit the battle by describing riveting horrors: the children forced to sleep next to their parents’ bodies for days on end as ambulances were denied access to neighborhoods; the 15-year-old boy whose mother sought to save him by sewing up the bullet hole in his chest with a needle sterilized in cologne; the mother and daughter, 65 and 37, shot and killed amid a crowd of civilians carrying white flags as they walked from a village in search of safe harbor; the student who calmly told Human Rights Council interviewers, “My legs were exploded away” by a shell that killed several members of his family. These images will haunt anyone who has read the report.

No less powerful is the moral vocabulary the report provided to describe the outrage of these events. This language was drawn from the realm of international law and carried the promise of legal repercussions for the wrongs committed—by Israel and Hamas—during Cast Lead. Thanks to the report there were names, and consequences, for the suffering inflicted on the people of Gaza, as well as the people of southern Israel. The attack on Gaza’s only functioning flour mill became an example of Israel’s intentional destruction of the area’s civilian infrastructure, while the siege of Gaza, which deprived civilians of the means of sustenance, was correctly classified as a form of collective punishment. Both are war crimes, and both require criminal prosecution of those who planned and orchestrated them.

This moral vocabulary has now permeated the global discourse about Israel-Palestine. Israel’s apparent impunity has galvanized the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and inspired grassroots efforts to use universal jurisdiction to hold Israeli leaders accountable where the international community has failed to do so. This too is the achievement of the report: it has retold the story of the Israel-Palestine conflict and reshaped the contours of the debate.

There has been wide speculation on why Goldstone issued his “reconsideration.” Many have pointed to the unrelenting pressure on him—the ad hominem attacks, the accusations that he abetted terrorists, the meeting with members of the South African Jewish community that was designed to “puncture” his heart, according to the Forward. But the judge has offered no window on his motivation. Indeed, his reconsideration becomes all the more perplexing in light of his assertion that he still stands by the original report. “As presently advised I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time,” he told an AP reporter several days after his essay exploded across the Internet.

Equally confounding is the matter of the new “evidence” Goldstone adduces in his op-ed to suggest that Israel did not intentionally target civilians, evidence which his co-commissioners as well as legal experts say does not hold up under even the mildest examination.

Goldstone’s reconsideration hinges on his claim that Israel’s investigations into some of the most serious alleged crimes of Cast Lead have yielded new information that exonerates it of the charge that it targeted civilians as a matter of policy. To bolster this argument, he cites a March report by a UN Committee of Independent Experts, chaired by former New York Supreme Court justice Mary McGowan Davis which he says “recognized” the validity of Israel’s investigations. And yet, the committee makes no such claim. While commending Israel for initiating investigations, it offers a damning assessment of the quality of those inquiries. It points to Israel’s unwillingness, and structural inability, to investigate those who “designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead” as the greatest fault of the Israeli investigations to date.

As John Dugard, a former UN special rapporteur for the occupied territories and chair of a 2009 Arab League Independ-ent Fact Finding Committee on Gaza, wrote, “There are no new facts that exonerate Israel and that could possibly have led Goldstone to change his mind.” Dugard added that Goldstone’s op-ed misrepresented a key finding of the report when he said he no longer believed there was an intentional policy to target civilians. Such a policy was never the issue, Dugard points out; rather, it was Israel’s indiscriminate use of force that broke international law. “The principal accusation leveled at Israel,” he explains, “was that during its assault on Gaza, it used force indiscriminately in densely populated areas and was reckless about the foreseeable consequences of its actions, which resulted in at least 900 civilian deaths and 5,000 wounded.”

There can be no question that Goldstone’s op-ed has thrown up a considerable roadblock to those who hoped to see the report go to the International Criminal Court. “I was shocked and shattered,” said Norman Finkelstein, a longtime student of the conflict. “I immediately understood it was going to do terrible damage, and damage on many fronts. It’s the damage to truth and justice, it’s the damage to Jewish-Palestinian relations, it’s the damage to Israeli dissidents.”

Unfortunately, the willful misrepresentation continues. A bipartisan group of US senators has called for legislation urging the UN to rescind the report as a “libel” against Israel, while the State Department’s chief legal adviser has described the blocking of the Goldstone Report as an achievement right up there with setting up a UN commission to investigate Muammar el-Qaddafi’s human rights violations.

The report has survived more than eighteen months of assassination attempts, and it may weather the latest ones too. But if the attacks succeed, it will be a disaster for the principle of accountability in Israel and Palestine. As we write these words, tension is mounting once again between Israel and Hamas, and Israeli leaders like Tzipi Livni are threatening Gaza with a second Operation Cast Lead. Between April 7 and 11, nineteen Palestinians were killed and more than sixty injured. This fragile moment not only underscores the importance of the report and its central call—the need for accountability—but also the danger of ignoring its chief recommendations. As long as the crimes of Cast Lead go unpunished, we run the risk of seeing them repeated. Or as the Goldstone Report’s authors warn, “To deny modes of accountability reinforces impunity.”

In December, as 2010 glittered to a close, life among New York City’s affluent caste looked remarkably like the go-go good old days before the recession. At the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on December 1, Citigroup executives, apparently unfazed by their role in the financial crisis, clapped heartily as they celebrated the initial public offering of CVOL, a complex new financial product they had cooked up. At Sotheby’s, collectors at the Magnificent Jewels auction snapped up more than $49 million worth of gilded baubles (including a 27.2 carat Tiffany diamond necklace that sold for more than $3.6 million), making it Sotheby’s highest grossing jewelry sale ever. And at Harry Cipriani, natty-looking power-lunchers waited two deep at the bar for a table, boosting a business that only two years earlier had been troubled enough that management had considered closing off nearly half the restaurant.

“Now it’s busy, as you can see,” says Maggio Cipriani, the Cipriani dynasty’s 21-year-old magnate in training. “We’re picking up a lot.”

Nearly 100 blocks north, in the heart of central Harlem, the picture is noticeably different. Things are not picking up, at least not for Pamela Brown, 51, a poised mother of three who has recently moved into the neighborhood after losing her apartment in the Bronx. Sitting at a local Starbucks, her hair pulled into an elegant twist as if she was about to head to the office, she describes how she was downsized from her administrative job at Bank of America during the great meltdown of 2008 and has struggled unsuccessfully to find work ever since. Is her age to blame, she wonders? Race? The fact that she is still a few credits shy of a college degree?

Whatever the reason, she is getting by on food stamps and welfare, her monthly income reduced to $818 for her family of three. Soap and dry cleaning are luxuries; her youngest son has left his private school. As part of the 1996 welfare “reform” requirements, she spends her days sweeping streets for the city’s mandatory Work Experience Program. “[My friends] have this false sense that I must have done something wrong for this to happen to me,” says Brown. “But I did everything that I thought I was supposed to do.”

Such are the stories of recession and recovery wafting up from New York’s sidewalks these days. On the one side are tales of prosperity and excess, of New York as the poster child for an economic comeback so robust that Manhattan is now the fastest growing local economy in the country. On the other side are privation and struggle.

These disparate realities rarely elbow their way into the same conversation, but they are very much part of the same story, perhaps the story of recession New York. In this story, African-American men lost jobs at four times the clip of their white counterparts; their unemployment rate jumped 9 points, to 17.9 percent, the largest increase of any group during the recession. At the same time, the median salary of managers and professionals leaped 9.5 percent, while nonmanagers and nonprofessionals saw their wages tumble some 4.3 percent. And according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, the city’s fifty-seven billionaires (including its billionaire in chief, Mayor Michael Bloomberg) increased their collective net worth by $19 billion between 2009 and 2010, while the number of New Yorkers visiting food pantries ballooned by 200,000 during roughly the same period. Call it the trickle-down recovery that has yet to trickle down.

New York City is not an aberration; it’s just one of the more dramatic examples of the recession’s unequal grip. As labor economists Andrew Sum and Ishwar Khatiwada argued in a February 2010 paper, “A true labor market depression faced those in the bottom two deciles of the income distribution, a deep labor market recession prevailed among those in the middle of the distribution, and close to a full employment environment prevailed at the top. There was no labor market recession for America’s affluent.” No wonder 2009 set records for income inequality. In that year, the chasm between rich and poor measured even wider than it did in 1928, the last time so much wealth was concentrated in so few hands.

* * *

Even before the Great Recession, all was not as sunny as it seemed in New York City. For the lucky minority, the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s were glorious times. As the twin forces of financial deregulation and corporate-friendly tax policies loosened the economic floodgates, Wall Street surged, lifting all yachts if not all boats. Between 1990 and 2007, average Wall Street salaries (including bonuses) ballooned nearly 112 percent, from just over $190,000 in 1990 to more than $403,000 in 2007, according to a startling new study by the Fiscal Policy Institute. During the same period, the top 5 percent of income earners—those making more than $167,400 a year in 2007—nearly doubled their share of the city’s total income, from 30 percent to 58 percent.

But for the remaining 95 percent, life was not so charmed. As unions came under assault, the minimum wage stagnated, manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas, New York’s poor and working class struggled, and its middle class wasted away. As the Fiscal Policy Institute study shows, the median hourly wage shriveled 8.6 percent between 1990 and 2007. The gap between rich and poor yawned wider—while the rich claimed ever larger chunks of the pie, the poorest 50 percent claimed less than 8 percent of the city’s annual income and the once robust middle claimed just above 34 percent, earning New York the honor of being the most unequal large city in America.

“If New York City were a nation, it would rank fifteenth worst among 134 countries with respect to income concentration, in between Chile and Honduras,” writes James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, in his report “Grow Together or Pull Further Apart? Income Concentration Trends in New York.”

Such was the world that existed before the recession even struck, and it bore an uncanny resemblance to the Big Apple on the eve of the Great Depression, when the gap between rich and poor was epicly wide. New Deal policies helped usher in an age of unprecedented (if still relative) equality after the Depression, but it seems unlikely that the same result will come from this meltdown. In fact, it seems to be exacerbating inequality.

The reasons for this are many and tangled. They lie in the foreclosure crisis, which fell disproportionately on minorities. They lie in the fact that the hardest-hit industries—construction, manufacturing, retail trade and administrative support services—were those that employed the poor, the working classes and struggling middle. They lie in the apparent willingness of professionals and managers to slash everyone’s job but their own (Andrew Sum found no net loss in the combined number of managers and professionals employed in the country during the recession). But fundamentally, the reasons lie in policy: in a bailout that went too far and a stimulus that didn’t go far enough.

“There was an over-focus on Wall Street and business, and not enough attention paid to the people that are actually integral to getting the economy going again,” says C. Nicole Mason, a political scientist and executive director of New York University’s Women of Color Policy Network. Sum is more blunt. “Low-income people needed the most help, and they got the least help,” he said. “Nobody’s bailed out the American worker.”

By now, the Wall Street component of this story is well-known. Determined to prop up the imploding banking sector, the government mainlined money into Wall Street’s ready veins, $193 billion through TARP alone. With scarcely a qualm, it gobbled up bad assets, restored the commercial paper market and saved the money market/mutual funds industry—to stunning effect. Banks did not merely survive; they earned record profits. The stock market swooped upward. And for a select sliver of New York’s population, the most obvious signs of the recession seemed to melt away.

Once again, the statistics tell the story. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, during the third quarter of 2009, denizens of Manhattan’s tony Upper East and West Sides enjoyed a barely recessionary unemployment rate of 5.1 percent while residents of Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood suffered near-depression levels of unemployment (the official rate was 19.2 percent). More shocking: the unemployment rate for white men in the west Brooklyn neighborhoods stretching from Brooklyn Heights to Red Hook floated at 3 percent while black men in the same neighborhood suffered an unemployment rate of 46 percent.

“If you’re sitting in financial services, you feel like it’s stabilized, you feel like we’re out of crisis mode,” says Adam Zoia, founder and CEO of Glocap Search, a financial services headhunting firm. Hiring is up about 30 percent from 2009, he reports, and the amount of assets under hedge-fund management is back to its prerecession high of $1.7 trillion. “The compensation levels have largely recovered,” he adds.

Unfortunately for those outside the finance sector and its satellite industries, the benefits of this comeback have largely been elusive. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus, certainly helped the working and middle class. The stimulus social spending—like the childcare money and the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund, which created a job subsidy program for parents receiving welfare—made palpable differences in people’s lives. The stimulus both created and saved jobs in New York City—some 22,000 in the third quarter of 2010 alone—and unemployment would have risen without it.

Yet the stimulus didn’t do nearly enough: it wasn’t big enough, direct enough or targeted enough to help the people who needed it most. In New York, as in much of the country, those who needed it most have tended to be the young, people of color, and low-income and blue-collar workers. They are women like Luz Villanueva and Belgica Malu, who stood shivering in yet another job fair line in November, hoping to end their yearlong job search. And they are women like Nancy, a 56-year-old domestic worker from Colombia whose age and limited English and education have conspired to keep her jobless for more than two years. Nearly one in four low-income Latinos reports losing a job or having hours or income reduced, according to the Community Service Society’s 2010 “Unheard Third” study, and these women certainly proved the point. Luz and Nancy can barely afford the subway.

They are also men like Chang Ahn, 62, a Korean immigrant with legs made spindly by polio, who lost his job in the classified department of the Korea Times in December 2008—a job he’d held for twenty years—and has been unable to find work since. He tried to find another media job and even asked fellow church members about washing feet at nail salons, to no avail. He blames his disability and age—and he’s probably right; in 2009 men between 55 and 64 held the record for long-term unemployment in New York City, with an average of thirty-nine weeks.

And then there is David Ward, a 24-year-old father of two, who stood outside the city’s intake center for homeless families on a chilly November day, preparing to enter the homeless system for the first time. “I never expected to come here—never wanted to—I always expected to do things on my own, with a job,” he says. But after failing to find work more than two years after losing his job at Rite Aid, he finds himself shoved toward an unexpected bitter reality. In this reality, young men with limited education and even more limited means can spend years trying to find a job, with no luck. In this reality, only one in four black men in New York City between 16 and 24 is employed, as a recent study by the Community Service Society reveals. And in this reality, the jobs that were created by the stimulus, many through infrastructure projects, went largely to people with more skills, education, work experience and access.

A targeted approach to job creation—in the form of affirmative action hiring, direct job creation or wage subsidies for companies that hire particular groups of workers—would have helped moderate this trend. But for the most part that didn’t happen. The stimulus money was simply released, with little direction and even less accountability.

“I think the administration was very reluctant to create targeted programs,” says the Women of Color Policy Network’s Mason. “But you cannot just ignore [these communities] and say, ‘Well, everything will work itself out.’ This is the same problem with the trickle-down economics,” she continues. “If I have a broken leg and you have a small cut on your finger, it doesn’t make sense to put a patch on both those things. They’re different remedies, and they call for different types of responses.”

And there’s another problem. Some of the most effective stimulus programs were either too narrow in scope or too poorly funded to make the difference they could have. The summer youth employment program is one example. An enormously useful way to introduce young people into the workforce, this program provided jobs and training to more than 35,000 young New Yorkers during the summer of 2010. But it was not funded adequately enough to meet the full need, and its three-month time limit undercut its purpose. “The summer program by itself is not enough to change people’s lives,” says Sum. “You’ve got to do year-round job creation.”

More distressing is the case of the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund. This program created some 240,000 jobs nationwide for low-income parents receiving welfare and was considered so effective that even some Republicans were gaga for it. So what happened? Congress let its funding lapse on September 30—leaving people like Pamela Brown, the former Bank of America assistant, stuck cleaning streets for the welfare department. “They’ve never looked at my résumé,” she says.

* * *

Outside the precincts of New York, the story is not much cheerier. As Andrew Sum and Ishwar Khatiwada’s study demonstrates, nationwide, suffering during the recession followed a straight Euclidean line from poorest to richest, with the poorest enduring catastrophic job losses, those in the middle enduring significant though less pervasive job losses and the richest enjoying scarcely a blip. Or put differently, New York is a near perfect allegory for the cruel geometry of this recession.

A glance at more recent unemployment data that Sum and Khatiwada updated for The Nation tells the story. Between January and October 2010, average unemployment rates for workers in the lowest income decile (those with a household income of $12,499 or less) hovered at 29.4 percent, a figure that surpasses the Great Depression’s nationwide unemployment high of 25 percent. For those in the second-lowest income decile ($12,500 to $19,999), unemployment hovered at 20.1 percent. Among those in the third-lowest ($20,000 to $29,999), it was 14.9 percent—and on and on in an increasingly cheerful progression to those in the top two deciles ($100,000 to $149,999 and $150,000 and above), who enjoyed the impressively low unemployment rates of 4.1 and 3.4 percent respectively. “See those last two groups?” asks Sum. “We call that full employment.”

Sum and Khatiwada did similar analyses for underemployment rates and underutilization rates (a figure that combines the unemployed, the underemployed and those who are not looking but still want work). In each instance the data follow the same distressing pyramid pattern. Underemployed workers in the bottom decile were working part time or at reduced hours at almost ten times the rate of those in the top decile, or 19.5 percent compared with 2 percent. Underutilized workers in the bottom decile were “underutilized” at roughly seven times the rate of those in the top income decile (and two and a half to three times the rate for their own group in the 1990s). Which is to say: while 49 percent (or one out of every two) of the poorest Americans were “underutilized” during the first ten months of 2010, only 6.8 percent of those in the top income decile shared this fate. Overall, nearly 30 million workers were “underutilized.”

“This [disparity] is worse than the worst third world country I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Sum. “And nobody wants to openly admit this because they want this little myth that we’re all in this together—the jobless is everybody. No, it is not. It is overwhelmingly among low income and then low-middle income.”

For Sum, the solution to this skew is at once obvious and challenging. At its most basic, it primarily requires good old-fashioned, WPA-style job creation, particularly for young people, the group hit hardest by the recession. “I would take all the stimulus money and put it directly into job creation,” he says. But in an important twist on what the government did the last time around, this stimulus would be “very targeted.” There would be guidelines requiring any company or agency that gets stimulus money to hire real people—not just stash the money away in their budgets, as so many did—and to hire unemployed people more specifically. Moreover, there would be incentives, in the form of wage subsidies and tax credits, to induce companies to hire low-income workers, young and adult. And there would be training and education. Call it a trickle-up recovery.

But how does any of this happen now? In the wake of Republican victories, it’s hard to imagine that we’re in for a change in policy anytime soon. And yet there are faint stirrings of hope: in the coalitions of the unemployed; the 99er unions; the grassroots groups that have come together to fight for job creation, unemployment insurance, TANF funding and more. They have not given up.

Pamela Brown was never an activist during her years in the banking trenches, but unemployment and welfare have made her a self-described dissident. In 2009 she joined Community Voices Heard, a grassroots group of low-income New Yorkers, and became a leader in its fight for jobs and welfare rights. “The only way we’re going to change our lives collectively is to get politically engaged,” she says. “It’s that simple.”

In January 2009, during a lull in the bombing of Israel’s "Cast Lead" operation against Gaza, I spoke by telephone with an old family friend, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, from his home on Gaza’s Salah al-Din Street. In a voice etched with panic, he told me about his family’s dwindling water supply, his children’s terror, his dream of escaping. He asked if I could help find a way for him and his family to leave the Gaza Strip. I made some genuine efforts to solicit help from friends with more connections than I, people who might actually be able to do something, but it pains me to this day that I did not do more. The next time we spoke, it was about the death of his three daughters.

On January 16, 2009, three of Dr. Abuelaish’s eight children—Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, and Aya, 14—were killed when Israeli soldiers trained the nozzle of their tank on the Abuelaish house and fired. Twice. The blasts killed all three girls immediately, as well as their cousin Noor, and it wounded their sister, Shatha, another cousin and an uncle. Dr. Abuelaish himself was unharmed, but in a harrowing turn of events that is now well and painfully known, he phoned Israeli newscaster Shlomi Eldar and, in a frantic tangle of Hebrew and Arabic, begged for help on Israel’s nightly news. "Oh God, oh my God, my daughters have been killed. They’ve killed my children," he cried. "Could somebody please come to us?" The phone call, which was broadcast live throughout Israel, sounds like a shriek out of hell. It is almost impossible to listen to.

In the wake of this tragedy, Dr. Abuelaish, a well-known peace activist, remained resolutely, even stubbornly, committed to reconciliation and understanding. He did not want revenge. He just wanted accountability. "They were my beloved girls, very beautiful, very kind. Why were they killed?" he asked in a phone conversation shortly after his daughters’ deaths. "I don’t ask for anything, just [for the Israeli military] to admit and say sorry."

"Take responsibility," he begged.

Now, two years have passed, and Dr. Abuelaish is suing the state of Israel. He is asking for the apology he never got and for damages, which, he said, would go to the foundation he started in memory of his daughters. He did not want to sue. He still believes in peace and rapprochement. But he wrote in an e-mail, "I was forced to go to the court as I did not find any open minds, ears, or hearts from the Israeli government. I did my best for about two years to settle it peacefully. Unfortunately [I] did not succeed."

That Dr. Abuelaish did not succeed should distress anyone with the slightest bit of empathy. And it should disturb anyone who cares seriously about human rights, peace and basic justice. Because if Dr. Abuelaish can’t find open minds, ears or hearts in the Israeli government—Dr. Abuelaish, who has continued to look for the best in Israel even after his daughters’ deaths, who has both prominent connections and international stature, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize—then who can? What about all the other victims whose stories are not as famous but are no less harrowing?

Certainly there are plenty of them: parents like Khaled and Kawthar Abed Rabbo, who watched a soldier gun down their daughters, Souad and Amal, ages 7 and 2, as they left their house, white flags waving; or women like Abir Mohammed Hajji, who lost her husband, young daughter and unborn baby during a days’ long odyssey to find refuge during the invasion. More than 300 Palestinian children died during those twenty-two days, and hundreds of adult civilians lost their lives. Another 5,300 Palestinians were seriously wounded.

In the wake of Cast Lead, there have been efforts to bring some kind of justice to bear for these victims. The Goldstone Report, the convulsive United Nations document that found that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes during the Gaza conflict, provided mechanisms for aiding and acknowledging the many civilians who lost lives, relatives, limbs and livelihoods in the war. These mechanisms included prosecution of perpetrators and compensation for victims—and helped earn the report the unmitigated condemnation of the Israeli government. And yet, while the Goldstone Report has been vehemently denounced by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Benjamin Netanyahu as an attack on Israel’s legitimacy, its mission is far more simple and nowhere as sinister: it is to induce Israel, as well as Hamas, to take accountability, claim responsibility, for the many, many people who lost their lives in a torrent of disproportionate force—all in the hopes of preventing that disproportionate force in the future. Call it a roadmap to end impunity.

Dr. Abuelaish himself has often dreamed aloud that his daughters’ deaths would help bring an end to the blood-letting. "If I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then I would accept their loss," he writes in his powerful, just-released book, I Shall Not Hate. But if the prospect of peace is measured in a government’s willingness to take responsibility, even apologize, the odds do not look promising.

A statement issued by the Israeli Defense Ministry’s legal adviser in response to Dr. Abuelaish’s lawsuit suggests just how far the government is from acknowledging responsibility. "Despite the severe outcome, from a legal standpoint our stance is that the operation during which Dr. Abuelaish’s family members were hurt was an operation of war," the legal adviser, Ahaz Ben-Ari, told the press. "The State of Israel does not carry the responsibility for the damage it caused."

And yet this "damage" that Ben-Ari refers to so casually wasn’t a car or a house or a television set. It was Bessan, Mayar and Aya, three young girls who were killed in an attack that has become famous as a symbol of the brutal excesses of Israeli military might. And, sadly, they have not been the last. Earlier this month, a 36-year-old woman, Jawaher Abu Rahma, died after soldiers doused her and others with excessive quantities of tear gas at a nonviolent protest in the West Bank town of Bil’in. She is but one of the most recent.

As I write this, I can’t help but think of the happy-heartbreaking day in February 2000 when I first visited Gaza with Dr. Abuelaish. He and my mother had become friendly several years earlier and would often meet when they were on each other’s side of the globe. He would visit when he was in the United States, as he did when he joined us in sitting shiva for my grandmother in 2004; and she would cross into Gaza when she was in Israel, as she and I both did on that crystalline day in 2000. On this particular visit, we had made our way down from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva, where Dr. Abuelaish was practicing medicine at the time, and he then escorted us through the corrugated fortress of the Erez checkpoint and on to his home in the Jabalya refugee camp. Dr. Abuelaish was born and raised in the camp (his parents had originally lived in a town called Huj, later a kibbutz in Israel, until they were expelled in 1948), and he made a voluble guide as he drove us into that walled-off world of Gaza. This world was one that many Jews don’t go to see, but that, if they did, would (or should) shatter their hearts. It’s a place where open sewers run in the dusty streets, where concrete homes stand half-open to the elements, where electricity flickers feebly and where the tourniquet of the occupation chokes almost everything but poverty.

And yet, it is also a place where, ten years ago, doe-eyed children played cheerfully in the courtyard of a United Nations school, where generous hosts presented feasts of chicken and hummus to almost-strangers, and where a doctor’s young daughters proudly showed off their artwork. At the end of the day, in a scene that somehow conjured Chagall in its beauty and absurdity, Dr. Abuelaish treated my mother and me to a trip to a strawberry patch where we munched lush strawberries pulled straight from the impossible, brown dirt.

Now, of course, much of that world is gone. The strawberry patches. The schools. The Abuelaish girls.

So, two years later, I echo Dr. Abuelaish’s plea: admit and say sorry.

JANNA BROWER

These are not happy days for America’s young and striving, Lizzy Ratner found. Young people have lost 2.5 million jobs to the crisis, making them the hardest-hit age group. If you’re 18 to 35 years old, The Nation wants to know: how has the recession impacted you? Share your story in the form provided here.

When David Thyme was an even younger man than he is today, his fantasies of early adulthood did not include a 9:30 pm curfew and a bed in Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth. Then again, they also didn’t include a recession so severe that his financially strapped father would ask him to help with rent–or that when he couldn’t find an entry-level job to do so, his father would ask him to leave home. “He was like, Son, you got to do what you got to do. I can’t have you in my house,” recalled the thin-faced 18-year-old from the Bronx.

Shawn Bolden, an earnest 23-year-old from Harlem, also nursed a different vision of his youthful years. A graduate of Monroe College with a degree in criminal justice, he imagined dedicating his days to nurturing the minds of the next generation of neglected students, doing his part to solder shut the school-to-prison pipeline. But since losing his job teaching arts and college prep at a local nonprofit in June, he’s been struggling to find his way back into the classroom, all the while worrying about feeding his newborn daughter.

And then there’s Charles Channon. A 25-year-old graduate of George Washington University, he dreamed that his postcollege days would be devoted to an onward-and-upward career with an international development firm–or at least a job with which to pay off $65,000 in college debt. “I wouldn’t pretend that there’s absolutely no conceit in me, but I do want to get out there and make the best difference I can,” he said.

So much for youthful fantasies.

These are not happy days for America’s young and striving. Indeed, as the economy has rocked and tumbled its way through 2009, spewing jobs like a sea-sick tourist, these have become very, very bad days. In September, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 hovered morosely at 18.1 percent, nearly double the national average for that month. At the same time, the actual employment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped to a startling 46 percent, the grimmest such figure on record since 1948, the year the government began keeping track. Taken together, this same group of young people has lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the economy began deflating in December 2007, roughly one-third of all the jobs lost, making them the hardest-hit age group of the recession.

And it gets bleaker. Bad as the youth unemployment numbers are, the underemployment numbers are even more distressing, with young people once again taking the hit. During the second quarter of 2009, for instance, the underemployment rate for workers under 25 was an alarming 31.9 percent; for workers between 25 and 34 the underemployment rate was 17.1 percent.

All of which suggests that for all this country’s unbridled fascination with the glories of youth; for all the teen-lusting TV dramas, wunderkind “it” kids and peewee tech moguls, to say nothing of all the industries built on making the rest of us look and feel teen-queen young–being a member of today’s youth explosion isn’t a particularly enviable position after all.

“Young people under 30 have been far more affected than other groups in the economy during the recession,” says Andrew Sum, professor of economics and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “And the younger you are, the worse off you’ve been.”

The reasons for this are multiple and complex, but perhaps the one that young people cite most is their desperate new job competition: adults twice their age with college degrees and decades of experience are now applying for entry-level positions. Moreover, those young people lucky enough to have found work often fall prey to the old “last hired, first fired” syndrome, putting them right back where they started. The result is that young people are not only working less than at any time since the Great Depression but could suffer the consequences deep into their individual and collective futures.

“These effects are long-lasting; they’re not short and measly-lasting,” explains Sum, citing several studies suggesting that a slow employment start can have long-term consequences. In the case of white male college graduates, for instance, an influential study showed that for as long as fifteen years after college, those who graduated into the recession-rocked economy of the early 1980s earned less than those who graduated into a sunny employment market. Equally disturbing: those who work only part time when younger, as so many young people must now do, see little benefit to their future wages compared with those working full time.

“We are throwing out of the labor market those kids who will benefit the most from the work experience they get, and they will lose that for the rest of their lives,” Sum warns. “That’s why it really is a depression for young workers. And I don’t use that word lightly.”

This was not the graduation party that most young folks imagined when they daydreamed about their liberation into early adulthood. It’s certainly not the champagne-and-streamers rager that millennial boosters and other youth gurus anticipated when they dashed off all those messianic star charts predicting that this new wave of young folks would usher in the next epoch of dreamers and do-gooder types: the next Great Generation.

And yet, bleak as the current climate is, the story behind the statistics is also far more complicated–and, in some ways, uglier–than many of the recent apocalyptic pronouncements about a “lost generation” and “dead end kids” would suggest (see BusinessWeek‘s October 19 cover story and the September 27 New York Post, if you dare). Certainly there are scads of lost young souls roaming the aisles of job fairs, cluttering unemployment offices and weighing whether it’s more important to pay the electricity or the phone bill. But in this generation of 80-odd million, some people are far more lost than others, while some have the luxury of not being lost at all. Quite simply, the real danger of the recession is not necessarily a lost generation of unemployed millennials so much as a Swiss cheese generation where the places once occupied by the least affluent–particularly the least affluent people of color–have simply been carved out.

“I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it’s hurting the weakest,” says Dedrick Muhammad, senior organizer and research associate for the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good, who has done extensive research on the recession’s disparate, and decidedly racial, impact on the people of this country.

Once again, the data help tell the story. As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early October, young African-American teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have an unemployment rate of 40.7 percent, while young Latinos of the same age are unemployed at a rate of nearly 30 percent–both drastically higher than the 23 percent unemployment experienced by their white peers. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the disparity is even more dramatic: while young white workers in their early 20s have an unemployment rate of 13.1 percent, their African-American compatriots are unemployed at the rate of 27.1 percent, more than twice as high.

Or as Sum summarizes, “If you are both low-income and black or low-income and Hispanic, you have lost the most. And if you are young, affluent and a woman, in terms of just labor market studies, you’ve done OK… although across the board everybody has lost.”

These losses have stacked up quickly, but today’s great youth crisis didn’t happen overnight, the sudden result of an immaculate recession. For young workers–and in particular young, low-income and workers of color–the struggle began long ago, with the changes that began refashioning the economy as far back as the 1980s: the decline of unions; the long, slow death of manufacturing; the rise of the service economy; and the near-total disappearance of proactive government policy. The last decade in particular, with its post-dot-com recession followed by a jobless youth recovery, has been particularly bruising.

The result of all this has been that many of today’s young people–again, especially the poor, those with less education and people of color–have a measurably harder road to travel than their generational elders, according to “The Economic State of Young America,” a report published in spring 2008 by Demos, a New York-based research and advocacy organization. Between 1975 and 2005, for instance, the typical annual income for workers between the ages of 25 and 34 decreased across all educational brackets, with the exception of women with bachelor’s degrees. Men without a high school diploma suffered most, their annual income plummeting by 34.2 percent, while men with a high school diploma or the equivalent earned the runner-up slot, with an income drop of 28.5 percent. As for women, those with less than a high school diploma, as well as those possessing just a diploma, lost less ground than their male counterparts; but then again, they’re still doing worse than before and, perhaps more to the point, they still fare significantly worse than men their age.

At the same time, today’s young workers have had to do more with less. College tuition rates have skyrocketed–in fact, rates for four-year public universities have more than doubled since 1980–with the unsurprising result that nearly two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2008 left in debt. The cost of childcare now eats up as much as 10 percent of a two-parent family’s income in many states (as much as 14.3 percent in Oregon). And young people between the ages of 19 and 34 are the most likely population to be uninsured–not because they don’t want health benefits but because employers don’t offer them. A case in point: 63.3 percent of recent high school graduates had employer-provided healthcare in 1979, whereas just 33.7 percent had it in 2004.

“What we’re looking at is a situation where young people entered the recession already feeling the brunt of thirty years’ worth of pretty gradual but nonetheless dramatic economic and social changes,” says Nancy Cauthen, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos. “The recession just made a bad situation worse.”

Thankfully, there’s something of a pewter lining surrounding all this bleakness: not only are certain swaths of this generation among the most politically engaged in decades but the generation’s politics in general trend decidedly toward the progressive. Indeed, many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy, to push for everything from green jobs to increased bank regulation to state budgets that aren’t balanced on students’ backs (thank you, University of California protesters!).

This is promising, since the list of much-needed solutions to young people’s recession problems is long and daunting–beginning, many researchers agree, with the need to create more jobs: green jobs, Job Corps jobs, public works jobs, even tax credit-induced jobs. However, these can’t be just any old jobs; they must be jobs targeted toward young people, jobs for which employers are induced to hire the youthful, inexperienced and most vulnerable, because, as Sum says, “Very few kids are being hired by the stimulus.” His solution: pull them into the workforce either through direct job creation, partial subsidies or targeted tax credits to youth-hiring businesses. Moreover, he advises, these jobs also must last longer than a brief six- to twelve-week summer fling. That’s how long the roughly 284,000 summer youth jobs funded by the stimulus lasted, even though there is almost no evidence that a quickie summer job has any lingering effect on a young person’s long-term prospects–though there is evidence that summer jobs that extend into longer-term employment help quite a bit, according to Sum.

But above all, these new jobs have to be far more plentiful and ambitious in scope than the ones created thus far, not the least because it will take years for the country to crawl out of the vast employment hole, roughly 10.7 million jobs deep, created by this recession. And while 284,000 summer youth jobs certainly represent an important start, they not only don’t meet the current need but seem downright piddling compared with the nearly 1 million government-sponsored summer youth jobs that existed during the late 1970s.

“This is classic of Obama’s situation: Obama can double something or increase it 100 percent from the previous administration, but it’s still so insignificant to the problem,” explains Dedrick Muhammad. By contrast, he observes, “Wall Street’s booming because the government took seriously their problems and did a massive intervention.”

Of course, even if a slew of youth jobs materialized overnight, it would only be the beginning, since, as Cauthen cautions, “the recession could end tomorrow and that’s not necessarily going to mean a bright future for young people.” For that, she and others have argued, this generation needs more systemic, probing change, including easier access to the protection of unions in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act, more affordable health insurance in the form of universal health coverage, childcare that doesn’t decimate their paychecks. And that’s just for starters. With these policies in place, the rising generation still has a chance at the starry future that’s been predicted for it. Without them, well, just imagine the way things are now–and then extrapolate.

Two recent events in New York City illustrate the way the world is trending for two very different groups of young people–the young and bailed-out versus the young and bailed-on. The first took place amid the brick-and-ivy greenery of Columbia University, in the world of the bailed-out. It was mid-September, and several hundred college students had packed into the school’s Faculty House for an intimate evening with a team of Goldman Sachs recruiters. A year earlier, these recruiters probably seemed like a dying species, a herd of expensively dressed mastodons taking their valedictory spin, while the sober-suited students must have looked almost pitiable. But on this evening, the recruiters looked very much alive–downright brash–as they wooed the standing-room-only crowd of eager if anxious-looking students. Clutching brochures that urged them to “make the most of your talent,” these students listened in unblinking awe as the recruiters spoke of their bank’s “competitive advantage,” its “global impact,” the golden “opportunity” that awaited all Goldman employees, old and young.

And in case the students missed the point, there was a promotional video, starring a comely squad of young analysts (all programmed, it seemed, to repeat the word “unique!”), that ended with the cultish mantra, “I believe, I believe, I believe in Goldman Sachs.” It was as if it were 2006, not 2009, as if the good old days of overpaid young analysts with Town Cars and expense accounts were back again–which, thanks to the government, they essentially are.

“If you do well and you’re ambitious, you really can do well,” a handsome young trader of mortgage-backed securities promised a throng of students who’d gathered around him for advice.

Meanwile, several weeks earlier, in a part of town not touched by bank bailouts, a very different scene played itself out in a Covenant House conference room. There, nine homeless New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 20–among them, David Thyme–huddled around a table topped with pizza and soda and shared their failed attempts at finding a job. All of them wanted one, but none had managed to find one despite months of scratching at the closed doors of just about every fast-food, retail and service joint in town. According to Jerome Kilbane, Covenant House New York’s executive director, the organization’s job training program has placed 40 percent fewer young people over the past year.

“It’s kind of discouraging when you go out and you come back empty-handed every day,” said Samantha, a serious-faced 19-year-old who dreams of becoming a physical therapist someday but is currently so strapped for cash she can barely afford a MetroCard to look for a job.

“I feel if I had a job I wouldn’t be here,” added Leonda, who is charismatic, chatty and also 19. “Not to say that this is a horrible place, but I’d be able to stand on my own two feet and live as an adult and be me.”

Samantha and Leonda, who are part of a wave of homeless young folks that has swollen the ranks of Covenant House’s residents by 25 percent, expressed deep anxiety about their future. But they also knew their worth. When asked what they wanted to tell the people in power, Samantha didn’t hesitate.

“I say, We are your future. If we don’t make it now, then who’s going to take care of you when y’all is in y’all retirement phase?” she asked. “If we don’t make it out of this, then basically the whole world don’t make it out of this.”

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DOMESTIC WORKERS UNION

Deloris Wright has been a nanny for twenty-one years. In the strange class warp of Manhattan’s Upper East and West Sides, this places her squarely among the ranks of the invisible, a ministering ghost who is rarely seen and never heard. And yet, there she was on a startling spring Saturday, a 54-year-old Jamaican domestic worker standing at the edge of Central Park, demanding her rights.

“We take care of your children. We take them to school, to French classes, we clean your homes, do your laundry, and we care for your aging parents, right here in this neighborhood,” she shouted into a microphone. “Now, with the economic crisis, we are thrown out into the street with no notice and no severance pay, no unemployment, no safety net, no nothing…. Some of our employers treat their pets with more humanity than they would treat us.”

Before her, a crowd of several hundred supporters whooped and hollered. They were union leaders, young activists, sympathetic employers and, of course, domestic workers–women from a UN’s worth of countries who understood Wright all too well. Patricia Francois, 50, a Trinidadian nanny, had recently been forced to leave her job after her male employer–a documentary filmmaker who lives opposite Carnegie Hall–allegedly punched, slapped and verbally abused her. Mona Lunot, a Filipina domestic worker, had spent her first nine months in the United States all but indentured to an employer who took her passport and denied her a single day off–a situation she endured until she finally escaped in the middle of the night.

Like many domestic workers, these women toiled in underpaid drudgery even during the best of times, members of a profession so devalued it is still excluded from many of the nation’s labor laws. But as the economy collapsed, their lot grew even harder. So they headed to the Upper East Side–epicenter of the domestic trade, playground of Wall Street’s bailout chiefs–to press their case for their own government rescue plan: the first ever Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.

This bill, which has been battling its way through the New York State legislature for five years, aims to provide basic protections to many of the estimated 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and eldercare-givers who labor in New York State. Backed by a diverse coalition of labor and religious groups and even employers, it calls for severance and overtime pay, advance notice of termination, one day off a week, holidays, healthcare and annual cost of living increases, among other fundamental rights. By most accounts, it should have passed in June, but an epic power struggle in the State Senate halted all business for a month. Now domestic workers are hoping their bill will pass in September.

“We are fighting for the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, for respect, for recognition, for justice,” declared Wright, rousing the crowd before sending it marching past the pre-war palaces of Wall Street honchos like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley co-president Walid Chammah and former Treasury Secretary and ex-Citigroup director Robert Rubin. On normal days some of these women might have turned in to one of these buildings, unseen and uncounted, the real invisible hands of the market. But on this day they sang and chanted: “We’re fired up! We won’t take it no more!”

Throughout the long history of American domestic work, women have come together to demand rights, respect, a livable wage and, literally, a room of their own (domestic workers have all too frequently been banished to basements, laundry rooms and couches). In 1881, for instance, members of an Atlanta group called the Washing Society successfully organized washerwomen to strike for higher wages. The twentieth century saw at least two extended organizing episodes–one in the ’30s and one led by the Household Technicians of America in the ’70s–as Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen explained in the December 2008 issue of WorkingUSA.

As the fight for the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights suggests, a new movement is rising, with ambitions to take a mortal thwack at the industry’s injustices. “We are looking to change the law, we are looking to make history, we are looking to get fair labor standards,” says Francois, now a movement leader.

This latest domestic-worker uprising extends well beyond New York, though the Bill of Rights campaign is its most visible expression. In fact, throughout the past decade, nannies, housekeepers and eldercare-givers have been coming together in Florida, Texas, California and beyond–first a few women, then a few more in a rare kind of political parthenogenesis. Together, these women forged a movement that spans ten cities, several thousand members, dozens of nationalities and ever more groups. In 2007 thirteen of these formed the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a multiethnic, multilingual coalition; now it has eighteen member groups. Though they are all still evolving, their efforts have already garnered ecstatic praise.

“It is really a multiracial, multiethnic form of feminism that we haven’t seen very often in US history,” says Nadasen, a professor of history at Queens College. “Through their activism they are expanding our notion of what feminism means.” Ed Ott, former director of the New York City Central Labor Council, adds that the campaign represents “a model project for people who are working under the most brutal conditions.”

Others, meanwhile, praise the women for weaving three of our era’s most important movements into one: a women’s movement, striking out at the stigma against household labor as women’s labor and therefore not really labor at all; a workers’ movement, defying notions about what kinds of workers can and should be organized; and an immigrants’ movement, melding the struggle for rights here with the struggle for rights abroad.

This new movement began stirring in immigrant enclaves during the Clinton years, as the country’s rising appetite for domestic labor began increasingly to be satisfied by poor women from far-flung lands. “This generation of domestic-worker organizing really started in the mid-’90s out of the changes in the political economy,” explains Ai-jen Poo, 35, the whip-smart lead organizer of New York’s Domestic Workers United (DWU). “On the one hand,” Poo says, “you had globalization pushing people out of their home countries in search of a means to support their families. And then you had global cities like New York that needed a workforce of low-wage service workers who would meet the day-to-day needs of the sort of white-collar workers who were operating the global economy.”

If this sounds theoretical, it has nonetheless had very real implications for the country’s growing domestic labor force (estimated at around 2 million). The ranks of domestic-worker activists are filled with globalization’s refugees–with women like DWU member Barbara Young, 61, who lost her job as a bus conductor in Barbados in 1992 after the IMF pushed the government to downsize its transit force; and Linda Abad, 57, a Filipina domestic worker and organizer who opted to “join the global surplus labor” supply, as she put it, because the structurally adjusted Filipino economy made survival (and her kids’ education) increasingly difficult.

Abad is a taut, quick woman whose story is instructive. When she left her family to find work in this country, she didn’t expect a rosy transition, but she didn’t expect the “discrimination” and “alienation” either: the New Jersey employer who refused to help with medical treatment after she injured her back on the job; the Park Avenue beauty magazine editor (married to a Goldman Sachs executive) whose building required Abad to ride the service elevator; the editor’s frequent screaming episodes, which inspired one of the kids to do the same while hitting her and pulling her hair. “Because they have the economic power,” she says, “they think they can do anything with their workers inside their homes.” So she joined with other domestic workers to found the Damayan Migrant Workers Association.

Certainly there are instances of benevolence, but the women interviewed for this article cited a breathtaking range of abuses, from denial of minimum wage, days off, holidays and overtime pay to wage theft, verbal and physical abuse, sexual harassment, even slavery. Poo still gets teary when she remembers one of the first women who sought her help, a Jamaican housekeeper and nanny who was brought to this country by an electronics executive and his family at age 15 and held in latter-day servitude. For fifteen years, she raised their three kids and never received a salary because she was told that her mother was getting her checks. But the checks were never sent, and her employers gradually cut off her communication with her family. “Ultimately the way she escaped was that the kids she took care of saved their piggy bank money and gave it to her to run away,” recalls Poo. “And she didn’t want to press criminal charges because she didn’t want to take the parents away from the kids.”

Poo and her colleagues managed to win the woman a $125,000 settlement. For several years after that, DWU and other groups focused on the plight of individuals. But before long, domestic-worker activists recognized that if they really wanted to change the industry, they had to organize–an awareness that seems to have happened almost simultaneously across the movement. The members realized that “for every single case that our legal department might be able to resolve, there’s always going to be another one or another ten coming through,” recalls Alexis de Simone, 27, the former women’s organizer at CASA de Maryland, a Latin American immigrants’ rights group.

Put differently, they realized that they had to begin attacking the roots of domestic-worker exploitation, which extend at least as far back as slavery–in many ways the structural antecedent of modern domestic work–and touch on everything from the devaluation of women’s work to the ravages of neocolonialism to the very institution that’s supposed to protect people’s rights. “The government is in this, very much so,” says Abad.

The government has been an active player in the exploitation of domestic workers for years, but the cardinal example belongs to the 1930s: that’s when the architects of the New Deal, when doling out labor rights, explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers (both predominantly African-American) from such landmark laws as the National Labor Relations Act. Arguments around the government’s right to regulate the private sphere played a role in the decision, but skin color was clearly the defining factor. “It was an exclusion premised primarily around the issue of race, that Southerners would continue to have control over the labor force of the South,” explains Nadasen.

Seventy years later, some of these wrongs have been partially righted–thanks largely to the last great domestic-worker movement, which managed to win federal minimum wage and other protections in 1974. But enormous gaps remain. “Casual” workers like baby sitters and “companions” for the elderly are still barred from minimum wage protections, and all domestic workers remain excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right to organize, as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Act. And because most domestic workers labor in environments with fewer than fifteen employees, they are also excluded from such key civil rights legislation as the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and Title VII, which bars most kinds of employment discrimination. Add to this the difficulty of enforcing even the few protections that do exist–particularly for undocumented workers–and for many domestic workers it’s still 1934.

All of which raises some weighty questions. How do you begin to undo all these decades of exploitation, particularly without the right to organize? How do you build power where there’s been none before?

One increasingly popular answer has been to push for legislation creating rights for household workers. In 2003 New York City domestic workers persuaded the City Council to pass a bill requiring placement agencies to obtain signed promises from employers to respect minimum wage, overtime and Social Security obligations. Five years later, the women of CASA de Maryland led a successful campaign for a bill requiring employers in Montgomery County to provide workers with written wage and benefits contracts. More recently, a number of the groups have gone international, working with domestic-worker unions in South Africa, Trinidad, Hong Kong and elsewhere. Their current goal is to persuade the International Labor Organization to pass a convention protecting the rights of domestic workers by 2011.

Still, by far the biggest effort has been the battle for the Bill of Rights in New York–a campaign that is being closely watched by domestic workers across the country, though particularly in California, where groups have already begun plotting their own 2010 push for a bill. (In 2006 they nearly passed similar, if more modest, legislation, but it was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.) “We know that if it gets passed in New York, it’s going to help legislative efforts across the country,” said Beatriz Hererra, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) in San Francisco.

On a sparkling afternoon, four domestic workers sat in the basement offices of Adhikaar, a women-led Nepali rights group in Queens, discussing the Bill of Rights. Escapees of Nepal’s civil strife, they were mostly middle-aged and older, and their tales ranged from nasty, name-calling employers, to seventeen-hour workdays for $4 an hour, to one woman’s four-year nightmare toiling for a family that refused to pay her or let her leave. These women know that the Bill of Rights won’t solve all their problems; for that they’ll need even greater transformations in women’s rights, immigrants’ rights and global economic policy. But when asked what the bill could mean, they shouted enthusiastically.

“We have to work seventeen hours a day, and hopefully with this we’ll have to work less,” declared a woman named Basanta. “It will be better than now!” added another named Brinda. “We can get our leave!” “Christmas Day, New Year!” “Minimum wage!” shouted others.

By most accounts, the quest for the Bill of Rights began out of discussions like this–specifically, out of the dreams of some 250 domestic workers who gathered in 2003 to discuss what it would take for them “to feel respect and recognition on the job,” according to Poo. The resulting legislative odyssey hasn’t always been easy. Even in the absence of any vocal opposition, some legislators (in particular, those whose constituents tend to be employers) have balked at some of the bill’s most basic demands, like health benefits and severance pay.

Nonetheless, this past spring, the legislative gears finally began to turn, and after years of lobbying and forging alliances with labor unions, religious leaders and sympathetic employers, a Bill of Rights is close to becoming reality. Governor David Paterson supports the bill and has promised to sign it. On June 23 the State Assembly passed a modified version, a so-called Inclusion Bill that guarantees important rights like overtime, a day of rest per week and inclusion in state human rights and collective bargaining laws (though it leaves out important others). Now all that remains is for the State Senate to pass its version, which organizers hope will strengthen the Assembly version.

“At the end we’re going to have what we all hope is protection for domestic workers, with some dignity in their work life, a real degree of enforcement for them, and a change in the discussion of how domestic workers should be treated,” says State Senator Diane Savino, the Senate bill’s lead sponsor, who has been pushing for a stronger version.

Will it be the dream Bill of Rights? Certainly it will be a powerful initial step, the first time a state has guaranteed domestic workers some of the rights and respect they have been denied for so long. But don’t expect domestic worker activists to stop there. “The work has just begun,” says Christine Lewis, a Trinidadian nanny and DWU activist. “To say that when the Bill of Rights comes through, that it’s going to be a walk in the park–the work will just begin.”

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On January 14, as the combined forces of recession and foreclosure continued their long, cruel assault on the Rust Belt, Cleveland’s public school system marked the new semester with a troubling piece of data: the number of students who had been homeless at some point during the school year had jumped to 1,728. Compared with the same date in 2006, this number represented a spike of nearly 150 percent and served as further confirmation that, for all the whingeing of Wall Street executives, the poor and vulnerable have been hardest hit by the flailing economy. Not that Cleveland’s poorest students needed reminding. In December, when Project ACT, a social service program for homeless students run by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, asked a group of homeless parents what they wanted for Christmas, the parents responded with wish lists worthy of Little Dorrit: toilet paper, bleach, paper towels, food.

“We figured they’d be asking for some nice things, [but] they were asking for basic, basic household things,” said Marcia Zashin, Project ACT’s director. “Times are tough. They’re very tough.”

Such are the stories pouring out of schools and homeless shelters these days, evidence of a crisis that many fear is bound to get worse. Throughout the country, homelessness is rising, with ever more families in ever more towns and cities sleeping in shelters, surfing friends’ couches and camping in their cars. In San Bernardino, California, for instance, the City Unified School District counted roughly one-third more homeless students in the 2007-08 school year than in the previous one, part of a stomach-churning trend that has pushed the number of homeless students in the state past 224,000, according to local officials. In Boston the number of families without homes shot up 22 percent, from 3,175 in December 2007 to 3,870 in December 2008. And in New York City, which shelters an astonishing 36,000 homeless people each night (including nearly 16,000 kids), the number of newly homeless families entering the shelter system hit an all-time high in autumn, with the influx in November 44 percent higher than the previous year. Along the way, the total number of homeless families bedding down each night in shelters topped 9,700–the highest number since the city began keeping records more than twenty-five years ago.

By most accounts, there’s little mystery to this rise in the ranks of shelter seekers. It’s the economy and, more specifically, the recession and the foreclosure crisis. As people have lost their paychecks, or as the homes they were renting were foreclosed–most of today’s homeless foreclosure victims are renters who were evicted, even though they paid rent, because their landlord had not kept up with the mortgage–their tenuous grip on stability has slipped away. And many housing experts think this could be just the beginning. Because the recession is far from over; because the unemployment rate hit 7.2 percent in December and is expected to climb; because the foreclosure crisis has more misery to dole out; and because homelessness is a lagging indicator–families tend to cling to their homes as long as they can, forgoing food, clothes and medication just to keep their roof–the number of homeless families will likely continue to spike.

But there’s another essential point, one that bears fundamentally on how we understand–and tackle–this crisis. While the recession has swollen the ranks of the homeless population, modern homelessness has been with us for more than a quarter-century. Long before subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the most recent stock market crash, the United States was in the grip of the longest period of sustained mass homelessness since the Great Depression. Indeed, even before the current economic downturn some 3.5 million Americans (including 1.4 million children) experienced homelessness during the course of a year. For this we can thank not a periodic dip in the business cycle but an affordable-housing crunch spawned by nearly three decades of slash-and-burn housing policy.

Just as the Wall Street meltdown can be traced to the deregulate-at-any-cost ideology of the Reagan years, modern homelessness and the widening housing affordability gap were fostered in the Gipper’s free-market nursery. From the earliest days of his administration, Reagan set about systematically dismantling federal housing programs, slashing funds for federal rental vouchers and public housing. He also initiated the shift in federal low-income housing policy away from subsidized development to tax-credit programs, which fail to help the poorest families. The reason was pure conservative hocus-pocus: the idea that housing is a commodity best created and priced by the unregulated, unfettered market and that government should play little or no role in guaranteeing shelter to its poorest citizens.

During the next decades, this ideology never disappeared, and it enjoyed a particularly virulent renaissance in George W. Bush’s America. Even as the Bush administration made a show of doling out small increases to the homeless services budget (though never enough to meet the need), it hacked away at public housing, Section 8 vouchers and other housing programs, undermining any attempt at reducing family homelessness. Indeed, since 2004 funding for affordable housing programs has declined by $2.2 billion. The result is a country in which only one in four eligible low-income households receives federal housing assistance while those forced to go it alone, without any government assistance, face an increasingly harsh landscape of rising rents and declining wages. It’s no wonder the number of poor renters paying more than half their income for rent rose by more than 1 million households, or 29 percent, between 2001 and 2007.

Fortunately, we have a chance to rewire the country’s housing policy, an opportunity born of the start of Barack Obama’s administration and a climate made more receptive to public investment by the awful imperatives of the economic meltdown. More than at any time in recent history, this moment calls for the kind of visionary and dramatic action too rarely seen from leaders–certainly not Republicans but also many Democrats, who have spent much of the past two decades fidgeting on the margins of federal housing programs.

There are a lot of ways President Obama could begin tackling such a challenge–including a bold and unequivocal commitment to ending homelessness once and for all. As another critical first step, the Obama team (including New York City housing commissioner Shaun Donovan, who is expected to be confirmed as the new head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development) and Congress can adopt a $45 billion proposal, drafted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and forty other progressive policy groups, as part of the stimulus package. This plan is premised on years of academic research: that the best way to solve homelessness is to provide people with homes–to create permanent supportive housing (i.e., affordable housing with support services) for people living with mental illness and other special needs and to offer affordable housing assistance (in the form of vouchers or low-income housing) to homeless families.

Toward this end, the plan calls for a minimum of 400,000 new rental vouchers as well as a $10 billion infusion over two years in the recently created National Housing Trust Fund–a move that would jump-start construction of badly needed low-cost homes. To help address more imminent needs, the plan suggests expanded aid for victims of foreclosures and another $2 billion for vital homelessness prevention services. Additional investments of $15.4 billion would address the long-neglected upkeep of public housing and help these and other subsidized developments “go green” by improving energy efficiency. Taken together, these initiatives will help more than 800,000 vulnerable households and create more than 200,000 jobs.

Of course, cleaning up the wreckage of three decades of failed federal housing policy will take more than one stimulus; these measures are just the beginning of what’s needed. But if change is the order of the day, dismantling the Reagan-Bush legacy of modern homelessness would be a promising way to start.

The stories sound like strange echoes from another era, as if someone had wound up the old Victrola of history and let the Dixie tunes rip. They begin on a half-abandoned street in St. Bernard Parish, an aggressively white community on the southeastern edge of New Orleans. That is where Daphne Clark, 39, an African-American supervisor at a group home, rented a house with help from a rental voucher last year, and that is where the harassment began. First, the Confederate flag hoisted over a neighbor’s house followed by stares and sneers; then the official torment by the parish government as it waged a post-Hurricane Katrina crusade against the specter of rental housing. For Clark, this took the form of a series of “notices of violation” warning her that the parish would disconnect her utilities–not because she had done anything wrong but because her landlord had failed to apply for a rental permit, as required by a new parish law. According to Hestel Stout, a white contractor working on Clark’s house, the parish official who delivered one of these notices explained to him, “How would you like those types living next to you?”

Around this time, in nearby Jefferson Parish, Leatrice Hollis was enduring her own losing battle with the forces of housing prejudice. The founder and director of People’s Community Subsidiary, a nonprofit housing development agency, Hollis had just completed plans for a mixed-income development that would have created forty-nine occupant-owned homes, with twenty-five going to moderate- and low-income “first responders.” But just as she was ready to close the deal, Parish Councilman Chris Roberts declared that he wouldn’t approve parish funding for any affordable housing in his district. The project was killed.

And then there is the tale of Maria Tejeda, 48, a receptionist and janitor who lived in the Redwood Apartments complex–in apartment L, “as in love”–before the storm. Located in Kenner, the Redwood complex was a 400-unit subsidized housing development and longtime anchor for the area’s Latino community. But after the storm, the city decided not to rebuild it. And in April, just two weeks after nearly 1,500 poor and mostly black and brown people lined up overnight to apply for affordable housing vouchers, the parish council unanimously passed a yearlong moratorium on the building of multifamily housing–a measure that effectively halts affordable housing construction in Kenner and leaves people like Tejeda struggling to pay market-rate rent in New Orleans, miles from her community and 12-year-old son. “Maybe in the future I could find me a nice place for me and my child to live,” she sighed.

Such are the stories drifting out of New Orleans and its environs these days, dispatches from a rebuilding effort that often bears an alarming resemblance to a segregation re-enactment. Throughout the region, historically white suburbs, as well as one African-American neighborhood, have been tightening the housing noose by passing laws that restrict, limit or simply ban the building–and even renting–of homes that traditionally benefit poor and working-class people of color. Couched in the banal language of zoning and tax credits, density and permissive-use permits, these efforts often pass for legal and rarely raise eyebrows outside the small community of fair-housing monitors. But taken together–and accompanied, as they so often are, by individual acts of flagrant racism–they represent one of the most brazen and sweeping cases of housing discrimination in recent history.

“It’s been like a wildfire,” said Lucia Blacksher, general counsel for the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, an advocacy group that has been leading the fight against post-Katrina housing discrimination. “Local governments have been creating legal barriers–legal, in the sense they created laws–to prevent people who are African-American from returning. And I’m saying that because we all know what we’re talking about here. Affordable housing or multifamily housing is where African-Americans lived. And if you don’t let that kind of housing back, you’re not going to give people who are African-American or Latino an opportunity to live [here].”

The intensity of this discrimination has surprised even veteran advocates like Blacksher, who grew up in Mobile, Alabama, with a civil rights attorney father. But in many ways it was foreshadowed–though not necessarily foreordained–by the powerful racial tectonics that have shaped New Orleans and its surrounding parishes for decades. Since as far back as 1960–when New Orleans schools were ordered desegregated and its white majority rioted, resisted and fled to neighboring parishes–the region has been defined by a vigorously maintained bull’s-eye shape. At the center was the black-majority city, while the outer ring belonged to the mostly white suburban parishes.

Hurricane Katrina threatened to shake everything up, both within and between parishes. With 80 percent of New Orleans flooded; with much of its poor black population uprooted and blocked from returning (witness the decision to tear down public housing); and with millions of dollars in low-income-housing tax credits flowing into the area, a rare possibility emerged: displaced New Orleanians might try to move into historically white parishes. But these parishes were not about to let that happen.

Among the first and most aggressive to take action was St. Bernard Parish, 84 percent white before the storm and working to rebuild itself that way. Barely two months into the recovery, St. Bernard’s governing council passed a twelve-month ban on “the re-establishment and development” of multifamily dwellings, stalling the reconstruction of affordable housing complexes. But the council truly distinguished itself in September 2006 when it passed an ordinance that, critics said, danced about as close to legalized segregation as perhaps any law since 1972, the year Louisiana finally deleted its Jim Crow laws. Known as the “blood relative ordinance,” this law prohibited homeowners from renting their properties to anyone who was not a bona fide blood relation without first obtaining a permit–a loaded concept anywhere, but particularly in St. Bernard, where the white majority owned 93 percent of the pre-storm housing.

Ultimately, the parish was forced to remove the offending “blood relative” term and pay more than $150,000 in attorneys’ fees and damages, thanks to a 2006 lawsuit brought under the Fair Housing Act by Blacksher’s organization. But even so, the modified law retained much of the toxic thrust. All homeowners wishing to rent their property, either to strangers or blood relatives, were required to submit to an arduous and costly permit process. If they did not, they–and their tenants–would suffer serious consequences, from fines to utility shutoffs, as Clark and others discovered during an enforcement campaign that began this past winter. Among the highlights: the flood of notices warning tenants that their utilities would be disconnected; the visits from officials demanding they vacate their properties; the spate of utilities cutoffs (the parish denies this); reports of police officers stopping black renters as they drove to their homes in once-white neighborhoods (“Only homeowners should be in this area,” one renter recalls being told by a cop); and, in the most egregious incidents, the arrest of a Nigerian-American landlord and the arson that destroyed another black landlord’s property. Call it “Louisiana burning.”

“They don’t want the blacks back,” explained Lynn Dean, 84, a quirky, self-styled “mini-mogul” who served for years on the St. Bernard Parish Council and was one of only two council members to oppose the blood relative law. “What they’d like to do now with Katrina is say, We’ll wipe out all of them. They’re not gonna say that out in the open, but how do you say? Actions speak louder than words. There’s their action.”

Such race-based “actions” have made St. Bernard notorious in the post-Katrina housing discrimination frenzy. But it has plenty of company–from Lakeview, a white, middle- and upper-income neighborhood, to New Orleans East, where the cruelties of class prejudice, perhaps more than race, have been on bold display. A traditionally middle-income African-American community with pockets of immense wealth and poverty, New Orleans East has been the site of several moratorium efforts as well as other legislative maneuvering to fend off mixed-income housing developments, Section 8 housing and anything else that might allow poor people to live there. Not surprisingly, Confederate flag waving has been absent in New Orleans East. In other ways the situation has been distressingly similar to that in other districts: the same fears of crime and the same angst about property values and blight, all emphasizing the interplay between race and class, with one occasionally trumping the other, but with the two far more often combining and amplifying each other.

Jefferson Parish is a prime case of the latter. Located just west of New Orleans, it was nearly 70 percent white before the storm and is perhaps best known as the old stomping grounds of rabid ex-Klansman David Duke (in 1989, 8,456 parish citizens elected him to the State House of Representatives). From the beginning, it was clear that the parish was going to be a problem. Just three days after Katrina, police officers from the mostly white outpost of Gretna blocked the bridge known as the Crescent City Connection as desperate New Orleanians tried to escape to drier, safer ground. Armed with shotguns, the police fired into the air over the evacuees’ heads and demanded they turn back. “The only two explanations we ever received was, one, ‘We’re not going to have any Superdomes over here,’ and ‘This is not New Orleans,'” a witness told 60 Minutes.

Three years later, the Crescent City Connection incident hasn’t really ended. It continues in vigilante acts of intimidation like the one visited on Travis and Kiyanna Smith, a young African-American couple who moved into the area in May and were treated to a crude welcome: three crosses and the letters KKK burned into their lawn. And it continues in the moratoriums passed by cities like Kenner and Westwego, as well as the machinations of Councilman Roberts, an ambitious young Republican who has made a hobby of killing affordable housing proposals while mouthing off about the “ignorant” and “lazy” tenants who might live in them. Among Roberts’s accomplishments: spiking plans by Volunteers of America, a century-old social service organization, to build a 200-unit housing development for low-income seniors in his district. (Roberts did not return calls seeking comment for this article.)

And yet, for all Roberts’s cruel maneuvering, legislators of his ilk, if not bluntness, are disturbingly common in the annals of housing discrimination. Even before Katrina, legislators from New Orleans East and all but one other Orleans Parish district had tried to pass moratoriums on multifamily housing, and the Gulf Coast can hardly claim credit for inventing these tactics. Indeed, in the forty years since Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which is supposed to prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and national origin (as well as sex, disability and family status, thanks to later versions), exclusionary land use policy has become the preferred means of maintaining this country’s stark separate-and-unequal housing patterns.

The post-Katrina orgy of ordinances and moratoriums falls squarely within this tradition. But there are some essential differences, beginning with the fact that the post-storm frenzy is fundamentally more: more overt, more excessive, more widespread. “It is extreme,” said Milton Bailey, president of the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency. “If we can do away with NIMBYism, we can solve every single housing problem and every single social problem there is in this state. The single most interfering, stick in the mud, big hill to climb is NIMBYism.”

Bailey wasn’t being melodramatic. Hurricane Katrina damaged as much as 80 percent of the New Orleans area’s affordable housing, leaving as many as 12,000 people homeless and tens of thousands unable to return. These people need homes, but even in a best-case scenario, the number of planned affordable housing units is expected to meet only 45 percent of the post-storm need, according to Bailey; the federal government simply didn’t cough up cash for more. And now, thanks to the rash of ordinances and moratoriums–coupled with the national housing crisis–even this scenario looks distressingly unlikely.

Part of the reason for this bind goes back to the guidelines set by Congress when it allotted hundreds of millions of dollars in low-income-housing tax credits to Louisiana after the storm. Under the guidelines, the state is required to have all its tax-credit-supported projects in the ground and completed by December 31, 2010, or the government snatches the credits back. But as things stand now, more than one in five tax-credit-backed projects already in the pipeline–roughly 6,100 units–could fall victim to the combined catastrophes of housing discrimination and the capital markets crisis, according to Bailey.

“This is a very valuable resource, and for it to go unused as a result of NIMBYism is a crying shame, because we don’t get to carry those tax credits forward,” said Bailey. “But [the parishes] don’t get it…. They refuse to see it because we are blinded by the fact that we don’t want those people in our neighborhoods.”

This self-destructive logic is on full display in St. Bernard Parish. With its tax base in tatters and vast swaths still uninhabited, if not uninhabitable, the parish could reasonably give medals of bravery to each person who chooses to return. But, as Okechukwu Okafor, a soft-spoken Nigerian-American, soon learned, some prejudices die harder than the will to recover.

Okafor, 29, purchased three houses in St. Bernard after the storm in the hopes of renovating and renting them. (He had initially hoped to sell them but, like many landlords, got caught in the real estate meltdown and couldn’t find buyers.) Two were in the lily-white Lexington Place subdivision and one in the black-friendly neighborhood of Violet. When he began renting them out he was unaware of the rental ordinance, and when he found out he held off applying for permits because he feared the process was not genuine. “I think it was just a deliberate ploy to prevent you from having you rent it out at all,” he said.

But woe to the person who defies the parish! In February, a lock was placed on the water meter of one of Okafor’s Lexington Place houses, and on March 11 Okafor was arrested after he confessed to telling his water-deprived tenant that it was OK to break the meter if he was desperate. One moment Okafor was sitting in a meeting with parish officials cordially discussing the meter matter, and the next he was handcuffed and hauled off to jail, where he was questioned about whether he was in this country legally and how he got the money to purchase his properties.

Okafor’s twenty-four hours behind bars culminated in two charges: theft of a utility and criminal damage to property. But curiously, he was approached shortly after his release by the chief administrative officer for St. Bernard Parish with an offer to amend those charges. According to legal documents, the administrative czar told Okafor the charges would be dropped if he would “empty the houses” of their three tenants, which Okafor obediently did. (The charges, however, have not been dropped, and Okafor is still awaiting his day in court.)

When asked to explain these strange goings-on, Craig Taffaro, the parish president, zealously denied that they were the result of anything less than altruistic impulses. “There has been absolutely zero racial influence for what has taken place,” he said, explaining that what has been cast as “prejudice” is simply economic acumen, a desire to prevent out-of-town developers from “destabilizing” the housing market and “changing the face of St. Bernard” from a “predominantly owner-occupied community” to a renters’ town.

And yet, who tends to own homes in St. Bernard Parish? And who tends to rent? Certainly there are white renters in St. Bernard, and some of them have been harassed with notices. But for each story of white families caught in the anti-rental onslaught, there are many more anecdotes reeking of racial prejudice, like that of Kiana Alexander. A former Post Office employee with carefully coiffed hair and shy eyes, Alexander, 34, is among the landlords who did apply for a rental permit. She paid her application fees ($250 apiece for her three St. Bernard Parish properties), mailed notices to neighbors and, on January 22, attended a parish council meeting during which the council was supposed to vote on her application to rent her house in Buccaneer Villa, a historically white enclave. The council ended up tabling the matter–it said she’d applied too soon for the permit because she hadn’t completed the renovations–but that didn’t quell the group of angry parishioners who’d shown up to express their displeasure.

And then, less than five hours later, Alexander’s house was in flames. For Alexander, who had no insurance, there was only one explanation for the fire that destroyed her house. “Somebody at the meeting,” she said. “Because the house has been sitting there since September, so why burn it after the meeting? The day of the meeting! Why?”

Alexander is still awaiting an answer, as are dozens of other St. Bernardians who have been burned, literally or figuratively, by the parish’s anti-rental campaign. In fact, the drama continues; in July, the planning commission recommended denying eighteen permit applications. And more than seventy property owners have joined a lawsuit brought this past spring by Henry Klein, a New Orleans attorney suing the parish for overregulation of land use. (In a victory for tenants, shortly after the suit was filed the parish agreed to stop threatening them with utility shutoffs.) But even if they win in court–a big question mark–it’s hard to imagine much improvement as long as their fellow parishioners refuse to acknowledge even the possibility that racial prejudice has fueled such outrages as the blood relative ordinance or the arson that destroyed Alexander’s house.

“Aw, that’s bull,” growled St. Bernard Parish fire chief Thomas Stone during a phone conversation in which he demanded to know whether The Nation was going to write about all the other arson cases that have afflicted the parish. He even suggested that Alexander might have set the fire “to draw attention to herself.” And he added, “I don’t think there’s any problem with race relations at all in St. Bernard Parish–none whatsoever.”

Alexander’s neighbor, a 35-year-old German-born mechanic with a penchant for Confederate flags, was even more dismissive of the discrimination theory. Although he refused to share his name, he gladly shared his thoughts on the blood relative ordinance (he approved) and the hype of “racism.” “Now everything’s ‘racist’ if they try to do something to keep a neighborhood the way it was, just because it was all whites before,” he complained. “I liked the parish before the storm. I don’t like the way it’s goin’ now.” Then he shook his head and chuckled. “Ain’t no chance for whitey.”

Georgia Danan was both laughing and crying. It was Friday, June 6, and she was sitting in a Barnard College classroom, telling the tale of how she came to be a 76-year-old Filipina domestic worker fighting to win $22,000 in back wages from a recalcitrant employer. Speaking in hurried, distraught sentences, she unfurled the story of how she immigrated to Los Angeles in 2005, sought a job as a domestic worker through the Mt. Sinai Home Care agency, and then, like so many before her, found herself being both poorly treated–she said she was regularly yelled at and accused of stealing–and cheated out of a minimum wage. For one fifteen-day period, she said, the agency didn’t pay her at all.

“I am old. If I get sick, if I have no money, what will happen to me for my medicine and doctors?” said Danan, a former third-grade schoolteacher, as she wiped two streaks of tears from beneath her bifocals. “So I am appealing for the sake of all caregivers that are exploited like me. I am appealing that we should have justice!”

And then she chuckled.

This gesture of defiance in the midst of despair, of humor amid horror, was the dominant if unofficial theme of the first National Domestic Workers Congress, which took place June 5-8. For four days, some one hundred nannies, housekeepers and caregivers came together in New York City–one of the most important domestic-work capitals–to share their stories and to strategize solutions with regard to their collective mistreatment. Many of these women (and they were almost all women) had traveled long distances to be there: from Miami, Denver and as far as San Francisco. And many, like Danan, had undertaken personal journeys that stretched back even farther: to India, Mexico and the Caribbean. These treks had been followed by excruciating tours of misery in the homes of wealthy, and occasionally violent, employers. Several women had actually been hit or otherwise assaulted in the line of duty. By the time they reached New York, they were determined to make themselves heard.

“For too long we women have been silenced,” said Joycelyn Gill-Campbell, a Barbados-born nanny-turned-organizer for Domestic Workers United, one of the leading New York-based domestic rights groups, during a speech to her sister congressgoers. “But today we are in the forefront, we are moving forward… We are going to build an enormous movement!”

The time is certainly ripe for a movement of domestic workers. In the annals of contemporary American labor injustices, the ills suffered by domestic workers remain among the most stark and stomach-churning. Barred from even the minimum protections of basic labor laws like the National Labor Relations Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, domestic workers float in a kind of legal zero-gravity zone where they have no right to organize and no guarantees of paid sick days, paid vacation days, severance pay or advance notice of termination. Some forms of domestic work are also excluded from portions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (a fact that helps explain the wide pendulum-swing of wages that domestic workers earn, from as little as 50 cents an hour to, say, $10). As a result, all too many women who make their living in other people’s homes–cleaning their dishes, raising their kids and otherwise making their lives possible–find themselves enduring everything from humiliation to exploitation to worse.

“The lady said, ‘Scrub it, scrub it, scrub it!'” recalled Araceli Herrera, a 58-year-old housekeeper in San Antonio, replaying a former employer’s obsessive insistence that she clean, clean, clean even though Herrera was suffering from agonizingly painful gallstones. Later, when she tried to return to work after a monthlong recovery from gallbladder surgery, she found that the employer had hired somebody else.

Not that this was the first time she had been ill treated by an employer. An immigrant from Mexico City who arrived in the United States at the age of 40 after a harrowing weeklong trek across the border and through the desert, Herrera has experienced a post-immigration life that reads like a latter-day Steinbeck novel, from the forced separation from her then-16-year-old son–a memory that still makes her cry–to the story of her first employer, who paid her $45 a week, made her sleep on the kitchen floor, let her rest only a few hours a night and then fired her when a hip injury prevented her even from walking. Even some of her kindlier employers have often shown an all-too-callous thoughtlessness, taking vacations at whim while refusing to let her spend Christmas with her ailing mother–now deceased–in Mexico.

“They never think we are humans,” Herrera said, her genial voice turning suddenly raw. “I am a lady. I am a woman. I have dreams. I want to do something. No, they never [think] that. They maybe think we are machines.”

To many of the women at the congress, stories like these, enraging as they are, are hardly new. As Gill-Campbell observed, they’ve been playing out their brutal plots since the beginning of time–or at least since the earliest days of this country. “The roots really date back from the days of slavery,” she said, tracing the evolution of modern-day domestic work from the forced household labor performed by women slaves, to the free but rarely voluntary housework performed by post-abolition-era African-American domestics, to her own degrading treatment in the house of her first employer.

“To see the way I was treated in that first job, having to wear a white uniform from head to toe and white shoes,” said Gill-Campbell, describing a scene in which, while dressed in this full servant regalia, she was forced to push her employer’s dog in a stroller.

Moreover, such scenes of humiliation just seem to be proliferating. The Census Bureau estimates that there are currently 1.5 million domestic workers toiling and struggling in the United States, and domestic-work advocates say that, anecdotally, this number is rising, spiking upward with the tide of increasingly wealthy Americans who feel that time, work or money makes them no longer capable of cleaning their own toilets.

“The documentation has shown that as wealth inequality grows, so does the domestic industry,” said Ai-Jen Poo, 34, a tall, preternaturally calm organizer who also works for Domestic Workers United.

In an effort to begin reversing this trend–or, at the very least, the exploitation that so often accompanies it–domestic workers and the groups that represent them have been forced to conjure up canny and sometimes unexpected solutions, like, working with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice to educate and organize sympathetic employers. At the same time, the New York groups have been waging a fierce campaign for a bill of rights, which, if passed by the New York State Legislature, would finally extend basic labor rights to the state’s roughly 200,000 domestic workers.

This campaign was in full swing on the third morning of the conference, when the women of the National Domestic Workers Congress gathered in front of City Hall in Lower Manhattan with banners, a sound system, and yellow T-shirts embossed with the words, “Rights, Respect, Recognition for Domestic Workers.” In reality, this rally probably would not serve as the grand, suasive push that would tip certain legislators in their favor (despite the bill’s uncontroversial, and incontrovertible, merits). And, it was excruciatingly hot. But none of this seemed to take any air out of the women’s lungs.

“We are the strength of this city, whether they know it, yes or no,” shouted Deloris Wright, a veteran nanny with a graceful Jamaican lilt, who served as master of ceremonies for the English-speaking part of the rally. “We are a powerful group of people!”

The crowd cheered, unleashing one of those wild roars usually reserved for large sporting events. The rally was just beginning. Perhaps some of those sleeping Albany legislators would hear them after all.

Even by New Orleans’s forgiving standards, the church at the corner of South Derbigny Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a startling monument to decay and neglect. Once a gaudy Spanish-style structure, it was abandoned several years ago after its eccentric owner was murdered and now hovers like some creepy Stephen King creation over one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods. In front stands a torchless replica of the Statue of Liberty, a pair of Mardi Gras beads dangling from her crown, while inside, a jumble of busted tiles, fire-charred debris, mold and electrical wires fill the empty rooms. An inscription etched beneath a small statue of Jesus in the main chapel promises better times to come: “Now indeed you have sorrow, but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice.”

This message of hope, however, did not seem to have reached the 42-year-old man who lay on a dingy foam pallet on the second floor of the church one crisp November night. Skinny and scraggly-haired, with a rumbling, freight-train cough, he gave his name as Salvador and said he had come to New Orleans a year ago to join the teams of immigrant laborers working to rebuild the city. At first he had made enough money to rent his own room, but somewhere along the way day labor had become scarce, and in October he lost his place. He had been sleeping on the floor of the church–sometimes alongside other Mexican workers, sometimes by himself, always with the rats and mice–ever since.

Salvador is part of the growing ranks of homeless men, women and children struggling to survive in New Orleans–a group that has swelled from roughly 6,000 people before Hurricane Katrina to an estimated 12,000 today (a conservative figure, according to some homeless-services providers). Like Salvador, many of these newly homeless are migrants, either from other states or other countries. But many are native New Orleanians who returned to their city only to find that rents had soared and the city’s already meager safety net had been shredded. With nowhere to sleep and few social services, they have resorted to whatever makeshift shelter they can find: abandoned houses stalked by rats, park benches patrolled by police, bushes, underpasses, cars and, until recently, a sprawling tent city that sprang up in July in front of City Hall. At its height, it had more than 250 residents.

“This is a Dickens novel that we’re dealing with right now,” said Don Thompson, executive director of the Harry Tompson Center, which is part of a consortium of Catholic groups providing some of the few daytime services to New Orleans’s homeless. “It’s like A Tale of Two Cities.”

A Tale of Two Cities or just about any chronicle of destitution and despair that was written before the rise of the welfare state. In post-Katrina New Orleans, in which every opportunity has been taken to pulverize–and then privatize–New Deal legacies like public housing and government-run social services, homelessness is the inevitable endpoint for thousands. It is the bitter past relived as an all-too-ugly present where modern-day Twists and Nicklebys make their way alongside 80-year-old men and 6-year-old girls, paranoid schizophrenics and former prison inmates, men who work three jobs, women who can’t find any jobs and, in one particularly egregious case, a 51-year-old quadriplegic veteran. When he was found by a local outreach worker, he was living beneath the I-10 overpass, his wheelchair parked beside the doubled-over comforter that served as his bed.

“Poor people just have not been the priority in this recovery,” said Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, the lead agency for a consortium of more than sixty groups working to end homelessness in the city. “And I think the fact that this situation hasn’t been treated with the urgency it deserves is exactly why we’re seeing these huge homeless camps in New Orleans, why so many people are living in abandoned buildings and why so many people are suffering in Third World conditions in the United States of America two and a half years after Katrina.”

Or, at least, why one segment of the city is suffering in such hardscrabble conditions. For another swath of the city–for the New Orleans of Garden District doyennes, booze-happy tourists and moneyed speculators–life has all but returned to jazzy normal. Each night, this New Orleans swings within the decadent fortress of the French Quarter. It simmers amid the mix of old and new restaurants that tempt diners with even more culinary options than they had before the storm–900 in all! And late at night, it slumbers soundly in the occasional luxury apartment building.

Indeed, just this month Donald Trump and his partners announced that they have begun selling units in the Trump International Hotel and Tower New Orleans, a 70-story colossus of glass and garishness that is expected to rise over the city’s central business district. Billed as the “number one address for elegant living” and the tallest building in the city, it dwarfs in scale–and certainly in price–any single multifamily affordable housing development attempted thus far.

“It is five-star, the top of the line,” boasted Irene Rand, director of sales for the Trump “condotel,” which, she said, will offer some 725 hotel suites and condominiums starting at $400,000.

Back among New Orleans’s dispossessed, life on the streets has turned increasingly ruthless. Overnight, working men and women who have always lived with roofs over their heads have found themselves sleeping with the stars and fire ants, while the most vulnerable–those with chronic mental illnesses or addiction disorders–have fallen deeper into the ravine of homelessness, with fewer ways out. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency evicts some 6,400 residents from Louisiana’s remaining FEMA trailer parks this spring, the problem will likely get worse.

For many, the most glaring reason for their homelessness has been the persistent shortage of affordable rental housing in a city that was once a renters’ town. Before Hurricane Katrina, more than half of all New Orleans residents rented their homes. But since the flood destroyed some 52,000 units of rental housing, fair-market rents have ballooned an average of 46 percent, floating right out of many working people’s grasp.

Suddenly the fair-market rate for efficiencies shot up from $522 a month to $764, while the rate for one-bedrooms jumped from $578 to $846, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Meanwhile, advocates and renters report that many of the more affordable apartments have nearly doubled in price–and not because they’ve been gussied up. As one frustrated apartment seeker said, these houses are still the same bug-infested dumps as before the hurricane–utilities (which have also skyrocketed) not included.

“Rent’s gone up sky-high since the storm,” said Kimberly Barrow, a 22-year-old single working mother who spent nearly a year hopping among friends’ houses and a shack in someone’s backyard before finding temporary housing through Hope House, a small nonprofit. “So we was bouncing. I felt like a ball, from house to house to house.”

The federal government might easily have stepped in to ease people’s suffering, either instituting rent controls–as every advocate and service provider interviewed for this article suggested–or providing far heftier incentives than it actually did for developers to rehabilitate affordable rental housing.

Instead, Congress and the Bush Administration did much the opposite. Rather than pour money into restoring New Orleans’s devastated rental housing stock, Congress channeled 85 percent of all Road Home program funds to homeowners–a far more “desirable” demographic than renters–leaving a paltry 15 percent to rehab rental housing. At the same time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) chose to bulldoze some 4,500 relatively unscathed public housing apartments. The result is that the funds allocated by Washington’s recovery gurus to rebuild the Gulf area are expected to restore only 43 percent of Louisiana’s rental apartments–and only 37 percent of the city’s most affordable rental housing, according to PolicyLink, a national advocacy group promoting social and economic justice.

“Homeowners have really been prioritized over renters,” said Annie Clark, a PolicyLink program associate who helped produce several reports on the New Orleans housing crisis. “But also, in general, there has not been enough money to rebuild housing in New Orleans or the Gulf region.”

As for local leaders, they have sometimes seemed less interested in resettling the poorest Katrina survivors than in finding ways to keep them out of their neighborhoods. In numerous instances, from eastern New Orleans to Westwego, elected officials have pushed bans on building multifamily apartment complexes–measures that would effectively freeze poor, often African-American renters out of those ZIP codes. In fact, in one particularly revealing instance, the lily-white St. Bernard Parish passed a “blood-relative” ordinance in 2006, which made it illegal for single-family homeowners to rent to anyone who wasn’t a member of the same near-and-dear gene pool. It was only after the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center filed a lawsuit accusing the parish of discrimination that it agreed to suspend the ordinance.

Nor is affordable housing the only necessity that’s evaporated since the storm. Basic social programs have also gone the way of Katrina’s 145 mile-per-hour winds, turning New Orleans’s historically flimsy safety net into a doily.

A case in point: before the storm, New Orleans–which has never had anything resembling a department of homeless services, let alone a publicly supported shelter system (the shelters are mostly run by churches)–limped by with some 2,800 shelter beds, of which only 837 served as emergency (as opposed to long-term or transitional) placements. Now the total number of shelter beds has fallen to roughly 2,045, the number of emergency beds to 505, and yet homelessness has doubled. Some of the shelters, like the Salvation Army, even charge a fee.

As for mental health and detox services, forget it. With the shuttering of the city’s storied Charity Hospital and the scattering of its therapist class, spontaneous self-healing seems to be many needy New Orleanians’ best hope. “We have so many people right now who have mental health issues, and there’s no mental health services available. A lot of these people are self-medicating, and it’s just snowballing,” said Clarence Adams, the assistant administrator of the Ozanam Inn, one of New Orleans’s four major homeless shelters.

Like the flooding of New Orleans itself, the city’s homeless crisis is not something that just happened. It’s a man-made catastrophe, in this case a crystallization of the many manufactured ravages of the “rebuilding” effort–from poor planning and incompetence to the gutting of the New Deal and especially perhaps the planned “upscaling” of the city.

From the very beginning, the city’s business and political elites, along with their friends in Washington, have treated the rebuilding effort as a grand experiment in social re-engineering–a chance to landscape the city with a different “demographic.” “Only the best [public housing] residents should return,” declared HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson in April 2006. It’s a sentiment that has been echoed by everyone from local businessmen to 504Cracka, a commenter on the Times-Picayune website, whose suggestion for solving homelessness was gleefully cruel: “Move them to Park Island,” he (or she) said, referring to an upscale island neighborhood where Mayor Ray Nagin lives.

It’s no wonder so many homeless have concluded that they are being reconstructed right out of New Orleans. “If you want my honest opinion, I think that New Orleans is trying to eliminate the people–and the black population–from coming back home,” said Raymond Tony Batiste, secretary of Homeless Pride, the grassroots group of homeless people that gave birth to the encampment in front of City Hall. “They don’t want these people to be able to afford to live here.”

Batiste offered this insight as he sat one afternoon in the square in front of City Hall, a patch of trees, grass and garbage that looked remarkably like a modern-day Hooverville but is actually known as Duncan Plaza. All around him, the red humps of tents and bare hides of mattresses blotted the landscape, while ragged men and weary women wandered about after a hard day of minimum-wage work or simply surviving. Some of them had been drawn there largely out of an instinct of self-preservation, a sense that it was safer to sleep among the many than the few. But for others it was an act of protest. They called it a movement.

“Our mission is to end homelessness in New Orleans and to make a difference,” said Batiste, who like many Duncan Plaza dwellers had never been homeless before the storm. “Because we’re not homeless by choice. We’re homeless because we cannot afford what’s going on after Katrina.” At the time Batiste uttered these words, he and Homeless Pride were entering their fifth month in Duncan Plaza. The encampment had sprung up on July 4, 2007, when a handful of the city’s homeless staged an overnight protest that then stretched from days into months and became one of the most visible symbols of the homeless crisis. Throughout the many months that it festered in front of Mayor Ray Nagin’s office, however, few members of the city’s leadership seemed to notice.

“We say, Hey, Ray, What do you say? We need housing today!” chanted Batiste, re-enacting one of his favorite protest cries. “But he never shows up.”

Batiste never did get his wish. Instead, most of the help that trickled into the encampment arrived in the form of nonprofits like Unity of Greater New Orleans, which launched a massive campaign to house all of Duncan Plaza’s homeless between Thanksgiving and Christmas. At the time, Unity did not actually have the funds to carry out this campaign–these funds, which had been allocated as part of the Road Home program, were tied up in the Kafkaesque-sounding Office of Contractual Review–but the agency decided to make the push anyway. The impending winter weather supplied the initial incentive. But a second unholy shove came when the state government announced in early December that it was going to cordon off the area and roust all the homeless. The excuse: the demolition of two nearby government buildings (for which the state had not yet obtained demolition permits).

“In some ways it was kind of like a refugee airlift with people begging to get onto the vans going to the hotels,” said Kegel, the Unity director, of the monthlong effort to place 249 Duncan Plaza dwellers in hotels, followed by permanent housing.

Down in New Orleans, the evacuation quickly made headlines as the first time so many homeless had been moved so quickly into temporary housing–a feat made all the more astonishing because it was done peacefully, without a marauding horde of police in riot gear. Even more miraculous, the state agreed to begin releasing $3.8 million in Road Home money it owed Unity, and the city joined in with a pledge to donate $260,000.

For Kegel, a no-nonsense woman with a wry laugh, the lesson was obvious: when government decides (or is persuaded) to collaborate with nonprofits, people get roofs over their heads. “The incredible success of the Duncan Plaza evacuation would never have been possible without government,” she said. “It showed the power of what a modest but significant infusion of government resources partnered with incredibly dedicated nonprofits can do.”

Although that’s true enough in the narrowest sense, the full story of the rebuilding effort offers a far less forgiving portrait of post-Katrina social policy. In this postdiluvian reality, nonprofits, not government, often do the heavy lifting. They find homes for the homeless, manage their cases and often front the money for the whole operation while public agencies dither and dawdle.

This unhappy two-step between needy nonprofits and lumbering government agencies has been one of the most persistent narratives of post-storm life. It began as early as two weeks after the flood, when HUD’s regional office froze $11.4 million worth of funds to its New Orleans grant recipients, a mistake for which it eventually apologized. Later, the agency refused to give homeless-services organizations permission to pay for repairs to their flooded and storm-thrashed buildings using their regular HUD grants. In fact, until recently, the entity that had given most generously to help the New Orleans homeless recover from the flood was the government of Qatar, which donated $2 million in 2006 to help restore the aforementioned damaged buildings. (In fairness, HUD did provide organizations with some staff support and equipment early on.)

Even now, a $70 million measure that could provide “permanent supportive housing” to 3,000 elderly and disabled homeless New Orleanians remains suspended in the priority-addled murk of Congress. Permanent supportive housing is an elegant hybrid innovation that offers tenants a mix of affordable housing and on-site social services and is widely recognized as the best tactic for keeping poor people with disabilities housed and stable. Louisiana’s Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu, understood this when she introduced the proposal as an amendment to an emergency spending bill in the summer of 2006. So did her Senate colleagues who, in a rare act of bipartisanship, supported it.

But during the back-and-forth of conference committee negotiations, House members booted the measure from the bill. As one source with knowledge of the discussions suggested, some of these committee members felt that New Orleans had already been provided with a handsome chunk of money in the bill and didn’t need the extra infusion. (In fact, the money fell short and had to be supplemented with an extra $3 billion.) Other committee members simply didn’t grasp the concept of permanent supportive housing.

Eighteen months later the measure has yet to make its way out of legislative purgatory, despite the ongoing efforts of both Landrieu and advocates as well as the full support of the Louisiana delegation. Even the state’s two ranking conservatives, Senator David Vitter and Governor Bobby Jindal, have given it their blessing. All of which raises the possibility that, as in the days after the flood, when New Orleans’s poor and desperate died waiting for help, the city’s ill and elderly homeless might be better off waiting for Sean Penn to paddle by and rescue them than for government to do the right thing.

Senator Landrieu has vowed to keep pushing her colleagues. “I have been fighting for almost two years to get the funding,” she said through a spokesperson, “and have been assured by Senate leadership that we will be able to include these funds in the next supplemental appropriations bill.” No doubt this will be welcome news to many. But even so, one has to wonder: will the measure survive the partisan tug of war that seems bound to break out around the next supplemental appropriations bill–which is, after all, expected to be an Iraq appropriations bill?

Indeed, with so much struggle just to win basic services, it’s little surprise that many homeless partisans are pessimistic. Few said they foresee the day anytime soon when homelessness is simply a problem, not a Category 5 crisis, and some even predict harder times to come.

And yet, despite all this–despite the brutal fact of old women with dementia and middle-aged men with colostomy bags sleeping every night in Depression-era conditions–New Orleans’s advocates keep advocating, and its homeless keep surviving.

“This is new to me. This is not where I want to be,” said Byron Turner, 37, a large man nursing a mild case of pneumonia, as he lay bundled under a dome of blankets, beneath the Claiborne Avenue overpass–the patch of concrete and car fumes he’d called home for nearly seven months. In the weeks since Duncan Plaza closed, this area has become the new epicenter of homeless despair. “But I’m basically trying to make it,” he said. “I’m trying to make the best out of what I can.”‘

In 1925, at the glorious, brutal height of roaring ’20s excess, Sinclair Lewis introduced a new kind of protagonist to the American literary imagination: the tortured, truth-seeking medical hero. He named this hero (who he insisted was not actually a hero) Dr. Martin Arrowsmith, and gave him his own novel, Arrowsmith, the story of the young doctor’s struggle to navigate the competing forces of idealism and greed, curing and commercialism. Written with characteristic flashes of satire, the book captured the excruciating contradictions of its era’s medical moment–the promise of life-saving treatments for pneumonia and plague mixed with the consuming pressures of business–and won its author a Pulitzer Prize. Lewis turned down the award–as a satirist and social critic, he felt he could not in good conscience (or any conscience, really) accept a prize intended to honor the book that best presented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” But he left a lingering portrait of an era in which the Gospel of Ford, with its tenets of commerce and competition, first began to overtake the sacred disciplines of science and medicine.

Eight decades later, a group of prominent doctor-writers–among them Sherwin Nuland, Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande–has resurrected Lewis’s fascination with the truth-seeking physician and ushered in a new era of medical criticism. Today’s doctor-authors tell vivid stories of the contradiction between the doctors they had once dreamed of being and the ones they have since become–the very contradiction that plagued Lewis’s hero. But unlike Arrowsmith, their stories touch only lightly on the themes of greed and commercialism, and speak not at all of issues like HMOs or universal healthcare (subjects Lewis might have spun into glistening satirical threads). Instead, they focus on the threat posed to medicine by the modern medical industry’s cult of technology, emphasis on action and obsession with quick-fix procedures. In the face of a fast-paced, algorithm-obsessed medical culture, they ask how a doctor can go about the business–or is it the art?–of doctoring. How does a physician heal rather than just treat?

Atul Gawande, the Harvard-trained surgeon, writer and medical golden boy, thinks he has the answer. He certainly has the résumé, and media savvy, to make other people think he has the answer. At 41, Gawande is a general surgeon at the respected Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New England Journal of Medicine. He is also a former Rhodes scholar and 2006 MacArthur fellow–or “genius”–who, like his colleague Malcolm Gladwell, has managed to parlay his success and savoir-faire into demi-celebrity status. His books and articles have a tendency to feel less like dialogues between peers or with interested patients than guides for other MDs, how-to tracts advising them on how they too “might make a worthy difference.”

His latest thoughts on making a difference–which he also refers to as achieving “success in medicine”–are laid out in his new book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. As the title suggests, Better is about what it takes to become a “better” clinician–to go beyond the purely doctorly skills that make a physician competent (skills like “canny diagnosis, technical prowess, and some ability to empathize”) to the skills that make a physician outstanding. Gawande has identified three of these magical skills, or the “core requirements” necessary “for success in medicine–or in any endeavor that involves risk and responsibility.” They are “diligence,” “doing right” and “ingenuity,” and he dedicates his book to teasing them apart in chapters on everything from the life-saving importance of hand-washing (vigilance) to the ethics of participating in prison executions (doing right–or, in this case, not doing right) to the creation of the Apgar score for assessing the health of newborn babies (ingenuity).

In a world in which doctors are called upon to do ever more in ever shorter periods of time; in which radiologists read slides for as many as 25,000 cases a year and a surgeon like Gawande cuts into as many as 350 patients; in which it’s easy even for someone of Gawande’s stature to feel like a “white-coated cog in a machine,” a doctor’s best chances for “success,” he argues, come from obsessively honing these three “core” traits–or, quite simply, from “the drive to do better.”

“Betterment is a perpetual labor,” he writes in his introduction, sounding something like a Protestant schoolmarm or, perhaps, an inspirational business guru. This message gets additional plugs throughout the book from the introduction to the afterword, as when Gawande urges his readers to “make a science of performance” and when he cites five recommendations for how medical students can themselves become “positive deviants.” They are: Ask an unscripted question, don’t complain, count something, write something and, vaguely yet boldly, “change” (by becoming an “early adopter,” as the business buffs might say).

If all of this sounds a bit pat or corporate, a bit like a self-help manual for the aspirational MD, that’s because it is. Like the author’s friend Gladwell, who receives a “thank you” in the acknowledgments for his contributions to the book, Gawande has perfected the art of couching business-management-style messages in compelling, vigorous prose. He has loaded his book with lofty-sounding ambitions, but no matter how sharp the writing, the ultimate result is banal, a plea not to make a better system but to make better selves to fit the system.

This is not to say that the book does not have its moments, even its merits. Gawande explores some fascinating subjects in his attempt to understand how doctors “succeed”–subjects that include an exploration of how an understaffed band of military doctors has managed to save a greater percentage of soldiers’ lives than in any previous US war. And he calls attention to some of the mixed-up funding priorities of today’s medical culture, in which pharmaceutical companies pump streams of money into developing dazzling new cancer vaccines and decoding the genome but hospitals scrimp on efforts that could save tens of thousands of lives a year simply by forcing doctors and nurses to wash their hands more frequently. (Hospital infections, which are often transported by poorly washed hands, kill some 90,000 patients a year in this country, far more than the number of people who die from breast and prostate cancer combined.)

Still, the chapters of Gawande’s book don’t quite add up to a larger whole. The project seems ad hoc, as if he’d simply strung the pieces of Better together by using a convenient motivational theme. This is not altogether surprising, since, in a sense, Gawande did string the book together–or at least large chunks of it–molding articles he had already written for The New Yorker and The New England Journal of Medicine into a bound product. This product is proficient, as is everything Gawande does. But for all his awards and plaudits, perhaps he could have done better than writing a how-to primer for the high-performing physician.

Pauline Chen does do better. A 42-year-old transplant surgeon who most recently held a faculty position at UCLA, she is, at first blush, Gawande’s West Coast female double. Like Gawande, she has won her share of awards and accolades–she was named Outstanding Physician of the Year by UCLA in 1999 and was a finalist for a 2006 National Magazine Award for a piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review called “Dead Enough? The Paradox of Brain Death”–and she too has recently published a treatise on doctoring, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality. But while Gawande’s book feels meandering and at times thin, Chen’s elegant medical memoir offers a series of extended meditations on mortality–and by extension humanity–that stay with you long after you’ve finished the book. Like the story of little Max, for example.

When Chen was still a young surgeon rising through the ranks of elite fellowships, she became obsessed for a time with a hapless patient named Max. Max was just a baby, but he was a sickly little thing, born with a horrific birth defect that seemed to have been dreamed up by a deeply disturbed soul–a “gaping” hole in his abdominal wall that required pediatric surgeons to remove nearly all of his bowels within hours of his birth. When, after four months, his overburdened teenage mother gave up custody of him, Chen and colleagues became his de facto medical guardians–and torturers.

They never meant to be. Like all good doctors, they had made a vow to do no harm, to avoid “those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism,” as the modern Hippocratic oath puts it. But along the way they had become “bound” to their technology, as Chen later reflected, and “despite inklings of self-doubt” felt compelled to make use of the tools science had provided them. So they kept at it, poking, prodding and transplanting through half a dozen surgeries that left the surface of Max’s belly raw and gangrenous, his body invaded by infection. When he finally died, a nurse told Chen, “Maybe it was a good thing, huh? I mean, how much can you do to a person?”

The story of baby Max haunts the pages of Final Exam. In a book full of distressing tales, it is among the most disturbing, an object lesson in the seductive dangers of practicing medicine for medicine’s sake–and of the occasional, unspeakable cruelty of trying to stave off death.

For Chen, death is medicine’s primary socializing force, the thing that repeatedly tests the humanity of physicians. While she went into medicine with dreams of saving lives and presiding over a clinic of “grateful, cured, modern-day Lazarus equivalents,” she quickly learned that death, not life, is medicine’s lingua franca. And since few doctors ever learn to cope with death–since medical training is, in fact, a series of “lessons in denial and depersonalization”–many physicians end up being “unable to care humanely for the dying.”

Chen’s own initiation into this culture of denial began within her first few days in medical school, with her human anatomy class. Anatomy is the notoriously grisly course during which first-year students learn the intricacies of the human body by dissecting a cadaver, one formaldehyde-soaked muscle at a time. Chen paints this process with a writer’s sense of poetry and a doctor’s precision; she describes how the back muscles of one group’s cadaver reminded her of the “big chunks of meat” she had seen in the butcher section of her supermarket, while her own cadaver’s legs were “turning outward like those of a dancer in the first position” after a classmate sawed apart its pelvis.

Despite (or perhaps because of) her eloquence, however, this section of Final Exam is almost impossible to get through–a series of descriptions of brutal acts that a reader can barely read, let alone imagine performing. And that’s the point. The process of taking apart another human is a violent undertaking, a violation that contradicts all our notions of the body’s sanctity. Not surprisingly, students in human anatomy resort to all kinds of distancing and dehumanizing strategies–suppressing their fear of death, sublimating the horror of slicing up another human being, turning them into “cadavers” rather than people, even, perhaps, hiding in literary language–something their professors encourage by example and by withholding all personal information about the bodies except their age. That the students receive scarcely any psychological support only compounds the problem. By the time they put down their scalpels at the end of the course, they have stripped their first “patients” of any and all humanity.

“We learned to suppress our instincts of fear and even of repulsion,” writes Chen. “We pushed those emotions out of our consciousness in order to further medical knowledge. We had become initiated.”

Initiation was only the first step, however. With anatomy class behind them, Chen and her peers moved on to participating in messy “code blues,” bloody surgery deaths and slow, painful expirations in lonely hospital rooms. Final Exam describes many of these episodes and, with them, the various dysfunctional (but rather understandable) responses that Chen and her peers perfected. We watch her absorb the bureaucratic nonchalance of older residents who have reduced death to a pile of paperwork they need to fill out. We see her puzzle over the behavior of a team of physicians who all but abandon an elderly patient once it becomes clear they cannot save her. And we observe how the chronic pressures of residency–the long hours, the intricate operations she must learn, the constant risk of killing a patient–turn her into an operating machine with little time to reflect on the loss of the patients who don’t make it.

“I forgot their humanity,” she says of the patients who died on her watch. “I forgot that they had families and friends, likes and dislikes, and hopes probably not that dissimilar from my own. For me, these dead were just another middle-of-the-night operation.”

Chen’s turning point came during an operation to remove the organs of a 35-year-old Asian woman who had been irremediably injured in a car accident several days earlier. The procurement, as these organ-harvesting operations are known, was Chen’s eighty-third, and might have been as routine as all the previous ones. But as she prepared to slice into the woman’s breastbone, the sterile drape covering her chest fell away and she noticed that the woman’s breasts resembled her own. The “thinness” of her chest, the “texture” of her skin–it all reminded Chen of her own 35-year-old body. “I felt as if I were pulling apart my own flesh,” she writes.

Chen began writing shortly after this incident, spewing forth “fictional stories” that were “almost always thinly veiled narratives” about her patients. Along the way, she rediscovered her patients’ mortality, as well as her own, and with it the good old-fashioned humanism at the heart of medicine. It’s the kind of positive ending that could easily fall into cliché, were it not for the fact that Chen’s thesis–that doctors who can’t confront their mortality make poorer clinicians–is supported by so many terrifying anecdotes and statistics. With more than 90 percent of us destined to die from a “prolonged illness,” with one out of four oncologists failing to tell their patients they have terminal cancer, often because they are too busy or because they simply don’t know how to break the news, it would be reassuring to know that our doctors have spent enough time confronting their own mortality to take care of our failing bodies when the time comes.

In her chapter on Max, Chen traces the birth of today’s dysfunctional medical culture to the scientist-physician of the late nineteenth century, whose various medical innovations–standardizing training and procedures, introducing anesthesia and sterile practices, and giving up archaic treatments like bloodletting–had turned the body from some “mysterious repository of disease” into “a rational, potentially reparable biological machine.” It was an evolution that has saved many lives but that also, when taken to its extreme, has stripped doctors of their humanism, their patients of their humanity. No doubt Sinclair Lewis would have recognized the paradox.

“We battle away until the last precious hours of life, believing that cure is the only goal,” Chen writes. “We inflict misguided treatments on not just others but also ourselves. During these final, tortured moments it is as if the promise of the nineteenth century has become the curse of the twenty-first.”

Amy Goodman didn't know if anyone was listening.

It was the morning of September 11, 2001, and the host of the muckraking radio news program Democracy Now! was broadcasting from her studio in a converted firehouse just blocks from the World Trade Center. She was hunched over her microphone, intent on painting an audio portrait of the "horrific scene of explosions and fires," but the truth was she didn't know if anyone could hear her. The phone lines were dead or temporarily blocked, and she had already overshot her slated hourlong broadcast time. More serious, she had recently been banished from her professional home at Pacifica Radio after a hostile internal shake-up, and she was only being aired by twenty or so affiliate stations.

Still, as the neighboring businesses evacuated into the streets, Goodman decided to go on talking. She kept the lines open and the microphones hot, throwing her voice into the radio murk in case any stations chose to pick up the feed. "We are not going to draw any conclusions at this point, just reporting the information of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings, the plane crashing into the Pentagon, a fire at the Pentagon right now," Goodman said in her grainy alto, at the beginning of what would become an eight-hour marathon broadcast that was eventually picked up by KPFA, the one Pacifica station still airing her broadcasts. And then, shortly after 10 am, she announced: "It looks like the south tower of the World Trade Center has collapsed…"

Three and a half years and two wars later, Goodman is still talking into her microphone, reporting on the big and small crises of the day. She is still broadcasting from the firehouse studio, still sending her war-and-peace reports into the media ether, except that these days when the engineer flips the switch on her microphone, she can expect hundreds of thousands of listeners to tune in.

In the years since 9/11, Democracy Now! has shape-shifted from a popular niche radio program broadcast on some twenty-five independent stations to a multimedia institution beamed each day to some 330 community radio and television stations (it has also returned to Pacifica). The skeletal four-person crew has ballooned to twenty-seven full- and part-time staff, including seven radio and TV producers, two outreach organizers and, yes, a professional archivist. And the drafty garret studio has been abandoned for a larger space on the first floor of the firehouse, which will soon be abandoned for yet another, larger firehouse studio. On any given day, the Democracy Now! website logs a solid 50,000 visits. "It's the lifeline for a lot of people," says professor and media critic Robert McChesney. "I think it's probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time."

The story of how Democracy Now! transformed itself from a scrappy daily radio program into an independent media empire (OK, maybe not an empire, maybe more of an emerging nation) is in some ways the larger story of progressive media during the Bush years: extremist President concocts bogus war, quashes dissent, then "embeds" the mainstream media, creating a news crisis that sends the information-starved citizenry fleeing to the indie frontiers for sustenance. But in many ways the story of Democracy Now! is its own twisty narrative, which progressives will be analyzing, emulating and debating as they attempt to build a robust alternative media landscape.

Goodman herself lays the credit–or blame–for the program's success squarely at the well-rested feet of the mainstream newsmakers who, she said, leave "a huge niche" for Democracy Now! "They just mine this small circle of blowhards who know so little about so much. And yet it's just the basic tenets of good journalism that instead of this small circle of pundits, you talk to people who live at the target end of the policy," she says as she sips double espresso in a favorite Chinatown coffee shop. Dressed in her customary black vest and cargo pants, her wispy gray-brown hair hanging to her shoulders, she looks like a journalist in combat mode, as if she's just come off the war-beat in Baghdad. "I think the Bush Administration not finding weapons of mass destruction laid bare more than the Bush Administration," she adds. "It laid bare media that act as a conveyer belt for the lies of the Administration. You know governments are going to lie, but not the media. So I think people started to seek out other forms of information."

Goodman certainly has a point. But the story of Democracy Now! goes beyond the traditional voice-in-the-wilderness thesis. That's certainly part of it, but it's also a story about the unsung slog and labor of "doing" independent media: about organizing and movement-building and an unusual cross-media collaboration that Democracy Now! launched shortly after 9/11.

And, of course, it is a story about Goodman, who, at 48, has come to be seen by many on the left as a kind of human megaphone for the collective progressive unconscious. To these supporters, the slight and intense Goodman–whose shows range from on-the-ground testimonials by Iraq War victims to debates on Social Security between Paul Krugman and Michael Tanner–is one of the lone disciples of a fiercely independent, muckraking brand of journalism practiced by I.F. Stone and George Seldes, Upton Sinclair and Seymour Hersh. "What Amy's doing is trying to recreate a democratic society where you have varied, independent perspectives on the world," says MIT professor and political activist Noam Chomsky.

But Goodman also has her critics–people who have clashed with her strongly held opinions or had the misfortune of being on the opposing side of a debate. Others find her brand of journalism too "ideological," too "reflexively left." "Before she went to Democracy Now! she did some very good pieces for NPR," says John Dinges, a former editorial director of National Public Radio and a professor at Columbia Journalism School. "But at some point she became more of an advocate than we were comfortable with."

The reality, of course, is that Goodman's brand of reporting is unflaggingly political. She covers a hurricane in Florida the same way she covers an election in Iraq, which is to say, with an eye to unearthing the forgotten victims or hidden handshake behind the story. And, as she herself has said, "I don't really think of it as, there's politics and then there's your life." But while some critics see this approach as advocacy, Goodman would call it just a matter of "going where the silence is."

"That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful," she wrote in The Exception to the Rulers, the book she co-authored with her younger brother, David Goodman, published last year. "It is the best reason I know to carry our pens, cameras, and microphones into our communities and into the world."

This strain of journalism is not for the weak-willed or faint of heart, and Goodman, perhaps not surprisingly, is neither. After twenty years in the progressive trenches, she is one of those quirky combinations of tough and compassionate, fearless and sensitive, headstrong and kindhearted. When confronting her opponents, for instance, Goodman can be relentless, even withering, but her friends sing paeans to her compassion and loyalty. In the same spirit, she doesn't flinch at the idea of flying off to a war zone, but the prospect of breaking that news to her mother makes her pulse race.

Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, a colleague of Goodman's, sums up this paradox with his own idiosyncratic anecdote. "Amy's not the easiest person to work with; number one, she never sleeps. She's essentially always working and basically tires everybody out who tries to keep up with her," says Gonzalez, who is also a part-time co-host of Democracy Now! "But Amy can also be very thoughtful to her staff. She's always bringing in cupcakes for birthdays or taking photos to, you know, preserve the moment." He chuckles. "Whenever she's at my place, she spends more time with my daughter than with the adults."

On a blustery afternoon in early March, Goodman sits huddled in the tin-can compartment of a Long Island Rail Road train, en route to Long Beach to visit her 108-year-old grandmother. The idea is to have a chance to talk away from the whir and distraction of the studio, but even as the train barrels through tunnels and low-reception zones, Goodman's cell phone keeps buzzing with updates from her producers. "It's going to be a very interesting show tomorrow," she says, brown eyes twinkling, after a debriefing on one segment: a debate on the Democratic Party's decision to recruit antichoice candidates to run for Senate.

As Goodman is quick to point out, she is not herself a big fan of being on the other side of the microphone, at least when the subject is her own life. She is strenuously private, and personal questions tend to elicit a polite, pained expression: a suble tightening of the muscles around her lips and eyes. But she does enjoy telling a good story, of which she's collected quite a few over the years. And so, as the train rumbles past the bulky two-family homes of Queens and Long Island, she slowly begins unraveling the strands of her career, beginning with her accidental discovery of Pacifica Radio.

It was 1984, and Goodman had just graduated from Harvard with a degree in anthropology. She was living with her parents on Long Island, contemplating graduate school in biochemistry, when she happened to station-surf across WBAI. "I was just completely shocked by this place I stumbled on," she recalls. "It was just raw. It was all the beauty and horror that is New York in all of its myriad accents. And I said, What is this place?"

Not long after, Goodman landed an apprenticeship at the station. She started out making documentaries, then moved to covering local news stories, and two years later she was running the WBAI newsroom."For the first couple of years, Amy was the person I learned everything from," says independent radio producer David Isay, who got his start in 1987 when Goodman encouraged him to produce his first radio piece and who went on to win a MacArthur "genius" award. "She was fired up. We would stay up all night working on stories. She was basically exactly the same as she is now."

Goodman grew up in the cozy middle-class suburb of Bay Shore in a tight-knit, progressive-intellectual family. Her father was an ophthalmologist who helped found the Long Island chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility; her mother was a social worker and teacher of women's literature and history who also founded the local SANE/FREEZE group. "I think [my politics] come originally from my parents' concern about social justice," says Goodman, "and I think also from learning about the Holocaust as I was growing up, with so many family members who died. I took to heart that slogan, 'never again,' for everyone."

While Goodman says she's "generally a shy person," she's made her career, at least in part, on hand-to-hand verbal combat, throwing rhetorical left-hooks at everyone from former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey to Newt Gingrich, of whom she demanded in 1994: "Why haven't you apologized to American women for calling [the First Lady] a bitch?" Her most notorious run-in, however, was with President Clinton, who called in to WBAI on Election Day 2000 as part of a get-out-the-vote push for Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. The President had no doubt been expecting the usual brief and chatty star treatment, but instead he got a thirty-minute grilling about NAFTA, the death penalty and sanctions against Iraq, among other topics. "Now let me…now, wait a minute," he finally spluttered. "You started this, and every question you've asked has been hostile and combative…"

Responded Goodman, "They've been critical questions."

For Democracy Now! fans, this episode ranks among the all-time greats, the indie-news equivalent of the M*A*S*H finale. But for Goodman the most "pivotal" story of her career was the story of East Timor, the small island nation north of Australia that was invaded by the Indonesian military in 1975–with an approving nod from Washington. Few reporters cared, or dared, to go there, but in 1990 Goodman headed over with fellow journalist Allan Nairn because, she said, journalists should cover what it means to be "at the target end" of US foreign policy.

In November 1991, during a second trip, she and Nairn were nearly killed in a massacre of at least 271 Timorese. It was, Goodman said, the most horrifying moment of her life. "To be there as these soldiers opened fire on innocent people and gunned them down, and ultimately understanding there was nothing we could do to stop it, that it was only getting word out that could make a difference…" she says, trailing off.

For Goodman, the Santa Cruz Massacre, as it came to be known, became the signal example of "going where the silence is," and in many ways the last thirteen years of her career can be tied to that moment, when the abstract horror of war became real for her. When she returned home, Goodman linked up with Timorese activists and their allies, and set about trying to tell the story to both mainstream and independent media. Some critics took issue with this activist style of journalism, but it won her praise in other quarters. What happened in East Timor "probably comes as close to genocide as anything in the late twentieth century…but it was impossible to get anyone to hear about it," says Chomsky. "Amy brought it to public attention."

In early February 1996 Democracy Now! went live for the first time over the airwaves of Pacifica, the country's largest progressive radio network. But a more significant marker for the purposes of this story might be early September 2001, when Democracy Now! made its first leap beyond radio into the multimedia world of television and beyond.

It was a few days before 9/11, and Goodman had just been forced from the studios of WBAI, the local Pacifica station, during what is commonly known as "the Pacifica crisis"–a period of several months of fierce debates over the mission and management of the network. In the scramble to keep broadcasting on affiliate stations, she had landed at the firehouse, a small limestone castle of a building owned and operated by Downtown Community Television. The independent media collective also rented space to Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a cable access channel, and in early September a MNN producer had the notion of switching on the TV cameras and videotaping Goodman's radio broadcast. The idea was to air the show on MNN once or twice a week.

Then came 9/11: All of a sudden Democracy Now! was the closest national broadcast to Ground Zero. "About two days after September 11, I was sleeping at the firehouse and Anthony Riddle, then the head of MNN, called," recalls Goodman. "'We'll go live with the show today,' he said. 'The camera will go on; we'll flick the switch.' And then it just started."

The news that Democracy Now! was going live on TV and needed volunteers traveled quickly through New York's lefty grapevine, and before long a group of refugees from the topsy-turvy post- 9/11 world began appearing at the bright red doors of the firehouse. I was one of those refugees, a stray who showed up during the confusion of mid-September and ended up staying for nearly a year. It didn't seem to matter that I had no radio or television experience (heck, I didn't even own a TV); such was the nature of the times–or the desperation–that on my first day in the studio I was plunked behind one of the cameras and told to shoot. Eventually I began helping produce the program.

Those early weeks of Democracy Now! TV were a surreal, and occasionally comical, brew of trial, error and improvisation, served up daily against the backdrop of the steroidal news cycle (War! Anthrax! Patriot Act!). While the radio portion of the show remained strong–Goodman was adamant about that–the television component was very much a spit-and-glue kind of operation. The set, for instance, was little more than a black table backed by a wall of newspaper clippings meant to convey "serious news program" while also reducing the glare from the lights. The show's billboard, which was intended to identify the program for the audience, was written in masking tape against the control room window. And when a guest couldn't come in to the studio but had to call in to the program, as was often the case (this was still primarily a radio show), the crew simply trained its cameras on the telephone–for five minutes at a time. "It looked like a televised radio show," says Goodman, with a good deal of generosity.

Still, for all the kinks and knots, Democracy Now!'s early TV adventures hinted at a larger possibility: a collaborative, independent news program that used all the available public forms of media distribution to break through the static of the mainstream noise machine. "What Democracy Now! understood was this need for a multi-platform strategy–and by that I mean distributing your program on television, cable, analogue radio, satellite radio, Internet, MP3s, etc.," says Dan Coughlin, executive director of Pacifica and Goodman's first Democracy Now! producer. "At a time when the old media are dying, this is something that most independent progressive media are going to have to move toward."

For Democracy Now! this strategy has consisted largely of building alliances, knitting a motley jumble of independent broadcasters and public-access stations into a smooth, cross-media collaboration. The first of these alliances–with the progressive cable network Free Speech TV and the public access collective Deep Dish TV–grew quite naturally out of previous projects; both organizations had worked with Democracy Now! to produce a daily telecast during the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2000, and both had been looking to air a daily news program ever since. When Goodman reached out to them in September 2001, they readily agreed to distribute the show.

But Democracy Now! has also done its share of wooing stations, and it's done this in a rather unconventional way: by hiring organizers who work with local activists to lobby their public broadcasters to air Democracy Now! This tactic reflects perhaps as much about Democracy Now!'s movement-style credo as it does about the rocky public-access terrain, but it also seems to be savvy strategy. Since hiring its first organizer two years ago, Democracy Now! has recruited more than 200 radio and television stations.

Still, despite the focus on cultivating new stations, Democracy Now!'s most significant relationship remains that with Pacifica–though this, too, has changed over the years. In January 2002, following the court-ordered settlement of the Pacifica crisis, Democracy Now! returned to its old slot in the network's schedule. Then in June 2002 Goodman reached an agreement with Pacifica to turn Democracy Now! into a separate nonprofit organization that would continue to broadcast on the network but would also be free to build up its TV program. The deal generated some grumbling at the time from those who felt that Democracy Now! was abandoning Pacifica, but Goodman and Coughlin maintain that the move has been "tremendously successful" for both the network and the program: Pacifica continues to provide the show with $500,000 in operating support, while Democracy Now! continues to raise some $2 million for the network through quarterly fund drives. (Democracy Now! raises the rest of its $1.8 million budget through contributions from its TV broadcasters, Link TV and Free Speech TV, as well as through foundation grants, individual donations and sales from its online store. It does not accept commercial or corporate sponsorship.)

Meanwhile, as all this was unfolding, the television program was making its slow journey out of the technical Stone Age into modernity. In January 2002 Goodman hired a director to begin whipping the program into visual shape, and eventually she added three TV producers. The resulting changes have been gradual but unmistakable, as five-minute phone shots have given way to in-studio guests, Reuters video feeds and, yes, a TelePrompTer. "It's been a process, because I'm all about the packaging, and they are all about the content," says the program's director, Uri Gal-Ed. "From the beginning there were elements in place, but we basically created a TV show from scratch."

Shortly before 9 o'clock on the soggy evening of March 28, Amy Goodman strides onstage at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan amid an explosion of whoops and applause. She is the last in a line of speakers for an event billed as both a fundraiser for WBAI and the launch of the paperback leg of her book tour, and Goodman has sold out the several-hundred-seat house.

"AAAMY!" hollers a fan from the nosebleed seats.

Goodman's indie-media star status had been building since well before 9/11, but it's begun to approach critical velocity during the past year, as she's traveled the country to promote Exception to the Rulers. Goodman has dubbed this second leg the "Un-Embed: the Media Tour," but in many ways it has been less of a book tour than a "free the media" organizing drive. Each event has been an occasion for Goodman to exhort her audience to "be the media," as well as to raise money for community broadcasters. To date the events have raised more than $1 million.

To skeptics, this tour is perhaps little more than the standard self-promoting book junket–fronted by an author who happens to have the stamina of the Grateful Dead. But in many ways this effort–particularly Goodman's call to "take back the public airwaves"–is what has set Democracy Now! apart from its sibling media outlets, giving it the texture of a movement as well as a radio and television show. Because what Democracy Now! has recognized, perhaps better than most progressive news outlets, is that without the strength of a grassroots movement it's tricky–perhaps impossible–to create a robust, independent media; and without an independent media there is little chance for free, unfettered reporting. And, of course, without unfettered reporting, well, there's not much hope for democracy.

"I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across this country, that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day: life and death, war and peace," Goodman says, winding toward the end of her speech at the Ethical Culture Society. "Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.

"Democracy now!" she adds, punching the air lightly with her fist. And then, with a sudden, self-conscious smile, she steps back from the microphone.

Annette Baptiste* still cries when she thinks about what the United States did to her ten years ago on its Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba. Sitting in her Brooklyn apartment, she recalls how the United States detained her and 276 fellow Haitians in the Alcatraz of refugee camps, imprisoning them for some eighteen months simply because they, or their loved ones, had HIV. “I relive Guantánamo every day,” she says in Creole. “It’s all in my head.”

Guantánamo is also in Pierre Avril’s* head, say the friends who looked after him in the United States. Avril was just 14 when he arrived at Guantánamo, and the trauma of the experience–the fear, the uncertainty, the stigma–left permanent damage. Today he is once again in detention, this time in a psychiatric correctional facility in upstate New York.

Joel Saintil* never even had the luxury of post-traumatic stress. He died just days after he was freed from the camp, at the age of 26. For months, human rights attorneys had begged the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to send Saintil and other gravely ill Haitians for treatment in the United States, but the agency had refused until a federal district court judge ordered the sickest released. Saintil was flown to his father’s house in Florida, but it was already too late. He became one of the camp’s first casualties.

This June marked the tenth anniversary of the closing of the Guantánamo HIV Camp, one of the world’s first, and only, detention centers for people with HIV/AIDS. Today the story is all but forgotten, but at the time it captured people’s conscience, and its demise made headlines.

On June 8, 1993, US District Court Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. declared the camp unconstitutional in a scathing opinion. “The Haitians’ plight is a tragedy of immense proportion, and their continued detainment is totally unacceptable to this court,” he wrote. It was a David-beats-Goliath victory–the culmination of a legal and grassroots battle waged by refugees, human rights attorneys and a coalition of Haitian immigrants and AIDS activists–and its impact was immediate. By June 18, the last of the refugees had arrived in New York and Miami to cheers and champagne.

Ten years later, however, few people remember this victory–or recognize that the complicated legacy of Guantánamo lives on. “The process has not been easy,” says Dr. Marie Carmel Pierre-Louis, the director of the HIV/AIDS program of the Haitian Centers Council, who has been working with the refugees since their arrival. “A few people were able to pull their lives together. [But] a lot of them are still struggling.”

At the same time, the INS continues to detain fleeing Haitian refugees–these days in detention centers in Florida and Pennsylvania–and the law that bars HIV-positive immigrants from coming to the United States is still in force. As for the naval base, it’s back in use as a detention center, this time for alleged “enemy combatants” from the US terror wars. Today, some 680 men and boys languish on Guantánamo, detained in such dismal conditions and with so much uncertainty about their fate–the Bush Administration says it can hold these prisoners indefinitely, and rumors have begun to circulate of plans to build an execution chamber–that eighteen have attempted suicide, according to recent news reports.

The White House’s decision to keep “enemy combatants” on Guantánamo, not far from where the Haitians were once detained, is hardly a coincidence. As the Justice Department argued in both cases, Guantánamo lies outside the jurisdiction of the United States and is, therefore, beyond the reach of the US Constitution. This is exactly the point. “The parallel between the Guantánamo HIV Camp and the current situation is that the United States wanted to have people in a place where they would not have any constitutional rights,” says attorney Michael Ratner, who represented the Haitians in 1993 and represents several of the camp’s current residents.

The grim irony, of course, is that “constitutional rights” were exactly what the Haitians were seeking when they wound up on Guantánamo. These people were political refugees, activists seeking freedom and safety who had fled Haiti in boats after a military regime overthrew the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But before their boats could each Cuba, the Caribbean, or Florida–any port that would take them–they were plucked from the high seas by the US Coast Guard and forced to a large refugee-processing camp on Guantanamo Bay.

By right and precedent, the refugees should have been flown to the United States to apply for asylum, since they had all proved they had “credible fear of persecution” in Haiti. But before they were allowed into this country, the INS did something unprecedented: It tested them for HIV/AIDS and, under a 1987 statute barring HIV-positive immigrants, denied those found afflicted entry to the United States. Without even explaining why, it flung them and their relatives into a new refugee camp designed specifically for people with HIV/AIDS.

The new camp was “hell,” to quote the refugees, a barren plot surrounded by heavily armed Marines and a wall of barbed wire. The conditions were squalid, and despite the Haitians’ immune-compromised systems, they were cramped into makeshift barracks that provided neither protection nor privacy. The Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services, James Mason, and the Centers for Disease Control both warned the INS of a potential public health disaster, and even the military cautioned that there could be “a serious medical problem if any type of infectious disease hits the camp.”

But the INS ignored these warnings and refused to close the camp or to airlift the sickest refugees, like Joel Saintil, to hospitals in the United States. When asked by reporters why it ignored the refugees’ medical plight, an INS spokesman, Duane “Duke” Austin, responded with unrepentant candor: “They’re going to die anyway, aren’t they?”

Such brutal disregard typified the refugees’ treatment at Guantánamo, the less-than-human status the INS and Marines accorded them. Under their watch, and at their insistence, the refugees endured hunger and humiliation, and a strict curfew, and were manpipulated into Depo-Provera injections (a form of female birth control with potentially serious side-effects). At least four of the refugees attempted suicide. Others organized protests. Drawing on their activist roots, the refugees launched demonstrations and strikes, which the Marines met with attack dogs, batons and tanks.

“I have lost in the struggle for life,” wrote Elsa Fils in a letter that was smuggled to her family in Haiti on the eve of a six-week hunger strike. “There is nothing left for me. Take care of my children, so they have strength to continue my struggle….. I have lost hope. I am alone in my distress.”

This distress was pervasive, and it followed many of the refugees to the United States, as they settled, largely, in New York and Miami. And with little trauma counseling, rage, depression and domestic violence ran rampant, says Sabine Albert, who worked with the refugees at the Haitian Women’s Center.

So did denial. Because of the way the Haitians had learned they had HIV–they were never shown their test results but simply “informed” of them one day over a loudspeaker–many refugees had difficulty believing they had the virus. Others accepted the diagnosis but rejected treatment all the same because they didn’t trust US doctors (after all, it was US doctors who had plied them with Depo-Provera and other suspect medications). The result was that many refugees died too quickly, according to Betty Williams, an AIDS housing activist who became a foster mother to two children in the camp. “There were a huge number of unnecessarily early deaths,” she laments.

Today, approximately half the refugees are dead, Williams estimates. Of those who remain, a number have managed to build new lives for themselves. But a good number still struggle–like Avril, who wiles away his days in a psychiatric institution; or Raoul Surpris, who struggles with drug addiction and is homeless.

Then, there are the refugees still in immigration limbo. All the children who were born on Guantánamo are effectively stateless, since the camp authorities would not give them US birth certificates and Haiti has not extended citizenship rights to them either. “Their status is still hanging in the air,” says Pierre-Louis.

As for the adults, many are still waiting for their asylum applications to be processed, still waiting to find out if they can live in the United States or will be sent back to Haiti. And while the asylum process can drag on for any applicant, many refugees see their wait as more evidence of discrimination. “So many bad people have a place, but I’m not official,” says Fils, who applied for asylum in 1994 and whose HIV-negative sons and parents have already gained refugee and permanent-resident status. One son even joined the Marines. “Why I give my son to fight for this country and I can’t have a place here?”

Ten years later, questions like these remain unanswered, and the hard lessons of Guantánamo have yet to be learned, while many of the old mistakes are being repeated.