In the early 1900s, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order fought for multiracial democracy and Yiddish culture, building solidarity across ethnic and racial lines — until it was destroyed by the Red Scare. Review of From Popular Front to Cold War
Is this a prelude to asking for the names of all Black people on campus who could have experienced or witnessed racism in the workplace? Or all women, queers, or trans people? Probably not – that would be woke DEI and critical race theory stuff.
The most informative of all studies of humor on US television in its early golden years, this biography deserves wide reading. For readers sympathetic to today’s protests against media-created monsters it will offer reflections on what comedy can do
Readers Comments: Trump Screwing Country, World, Climate, Gaza, Now Ready to Make Deal with Sex Trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell; McCarthyism and Its Victims: Here We Go Again; Keep ICE Out of MLB Stadiums; Israelis Call for Crippling Sanctions on Israel
Switching gears
This is a poignant tale of remembering parents in trouble, careers dashed and of steady FBI harassment. The end is not happy, except that the boy survives and makes his own life as an admired cultural commentator on radio.
Martin Luther King's speeches from 1954's Montgomery Bus Boycott to the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Compiled by Abdul Alkalimat, Prof Emeritus Dept of African American Studies and School of Information Sciences, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.
Chan Davis, died last month at 96, faced down McCarthyite blacklists and imprisonment to pursue a brilliant academic career. Davis knew how to change and learn from political experience, but he always remained loyal to his socialist principles.
The postwar Second Red Scare successfully smashed the American left. But in the midst of its devastation, a small number of old leftists refused to be shut up by the climate of fear. Without their heroism, the New Left could never have emerged.
Spread the word