Tidbits – June 18 – Reader Comments: Art of the Deal; MAGA Inequality; Everyone Loves the Knicks; Fifty Years of Zionism and the Bund; Jews for Salah Vigil; Fight Ellisons’ Takeover of American Media; America at 250: A Conversation; Socialism 2026!

Reader Comments: Art of the Deal; MAGA Inequality; Everyone Loves the Knicks; Fifty Years of Zionism and the Bund; Jews for Salah Vigil; Fight Ellisons' Takeover of American Media; America at 250: A Conversation; Socialism 2026! - Early Registration

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Tidbits - Reader Comments, Announcements and Shorts - June 18, 2026 | Portside

 

Shorts:

 

Announcements:


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Tiny Arch - Triumphal Twit  --  Cartoon by Steve Sack


Trump has declared his new Iran deal a tremendous, historic, spectacular victory. There’s just one tiny problem: none of the goals he originally set out to achieve appear to have been achieved.

But why let outcomes ruin a perfectly good victory lap? The arch is built. The trumpets are blaring. Somewhere, a commemorative coin is already being minted.

Steve Sack
June 16, 2026
The Art of Sack
 



 

Speak Softly  --  Cartoon and Commentary by Nick Anderson
 

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President Trump wants Americans to celebrate his new Iran deal as a triumph of strength and diplomacy. But judging from the terms that have emerged so far, Tehran may have more reason to celebrate than Washington.

Trump entered the conflict talking about “unconditional surrender,” regime change, and eliminating Iran as a regional threat. Instead, the war appears poised to end with the Iranian regime still firmly in power, the Revolutionary Guard intact, Iran’s missile and drone capabilities largely preserved, and sanctions relief potentially flowing back into Tehran. Iran suffered damage, but it survived, and for Iran’s Islamic regime, survival is victory.

The administration’s defense is that the deal prevents Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Yet Iran had already pledged not to pursue a bomb under the Obama-era nuclear agreement that Trump himself abandoned. Now, after military strikes, threats, and months of brinkmanship, the administration is once again celebrating a framework that leads to more negotiations. The great achievement of the war seems to be creating an opportunity to negotiate a new version of the agreement that once existed.

Even the Strait of Hormuz—the central economic battleground of the conflict—illustrates the problem. Trump declared that he had authorized its reopening, but shipping companies remain cautious and Iran continues to hold enormous influence over what happens there. Announcing that the strait is open is one thing. Convincing the world that it is actually safe is another.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the agreement is how many of its details remain unclear. American officials and Iranian officials appear to be describing different deals. The White House says sanctions relief will be conditional. Iranian media suggests substantial economic benefits are already secured. Supporters insist the agreement is a strategic breakthrough. Critics see a ceasefire that leaves Tehran stronger, richer, and still in power.

Maybe future negotiations will produce a more durable settlement. Maybe they won’t. But it is difficult to square Trump’s original promises with the apparent outcome. He began by demanding surrender. He appears to be ending with coexistence. And while the president celebrates another deal, Iran’s rulers are still in power, still negotiating from a position of leverage, and still claiming victory.

When both sides insist they won, the first question is not who is right. The first question is whether anyone actually achieved what they set out to accomplish.

Nick Anderson
June 16, 2026
Pen Strokes
 



 

Re: Everyone Loves the Knicks. Everyone Hates James Dolan
 

Owners of big sports franchises are some of the worst people in the world.

John Emerson
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
 



 

MAGA Inequality  --  Cartoon by Jesse Duquette
 


Jesse Duquette
Week of June 17, 2026
Jesse Duquette
 



 

Re: The Spectre of Gen Z Socialism Is Haunting the World…According to The Economist
 

I love it when the right, far, extreme, whatever, call me woke or socialist as if it's a bad thing. I proudly own up to being both. Curiously, they hate being called fascists or bigots. Clearly they know they're in the wrong but can't cope with the reality. ??

Lissa McDonald
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

     =====

I guess all those speechwriters and media pundits who have been convincing Americans for the past 44 years that anything left of Reaganomics is socialism have finally been hoisted on their own petards.

Peter Ruark
Posted on Portside's Facebook page




 

It’s not easy being green…  --  Cartoon by DCartoonist
 



DCartoonist
June 16, 2026
r/PoliticalHumor
 



 

Re: Facing the Future: Reflecting on Fifty Years of Zionism and the Bund
 

It has become very popular of late, particularly among non-Jewish leftists but also among some Yidden, to reopen what was a central debate before the Second World War. Mostly the discussion fails to acknowledge that the Jews that adopted the Internationalist positions by joining Socialist or Communist organizations or retaining their cultural independence through the Bund were on the whole treated horribly by their non-Jewish comrades. In the Soviet circle, many ended up in Gulags. In the Socialist movements, many were pushed aside. During the war, Jewish partisans were often betrayed to the Nazis or attacked by fellow partisans.

My heart is with the Bund, but our history has chosen otherwise. Now, the history is being re-examined largely as a way to justify Anti-Zionism. This is a manipulation of history. Bundist Anti-Zionism took place at a time before Israel as a nation was even a real option. It suggested another approach, and is not the same as today's Anti-Zionists which call for the dismantling of a country.

There is much legitimate criticism for Israel and much to admire for the historic Bund. However, the pathway is forward. Time, except in science fiction, only moves in one direction.

Zvi Baranoff
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

     =====

Zvi Baranoff: in defense of the kids, I ask, would equal rights for Arabs require dismantling a country?

Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page




 

Re: The World Needs a Living Left
 

The US in particular….

Al Cholger
Posted on Portside's Facebook page




 

Supporters Travel Hundreds of Miles for the Jews for Salah Vigil

 


 

Milwaukee’s Jodi Melamed convenes the Jews for Salah vigil outside of the Clay County jail in Indiana.  (Photo by Andy Chen / Wisconsin Muslim Journal)


by Sandra Whitehead
June 16, 2026
Wisconsin Muslim Journal

A coalition of Midwestern Jews from across political and denominational spectrums, joined by Muslims, Christians, elected officials, immigrant rights advocates and others, traveled hundreds of miles Sunday to gather outside the Clay County Jail in Brazil, Indiana, to oppose the detention of Salah Sarsour, the president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.

More than 150 people rallied in front of the detention center where Mr. Sarsour has been held since March 30 to demand, as their T-shirts proclaimed: “Free Salah Sarsour” and “No ICE terror.”

“We have participants from across political and geographical divisions, a huge spectrum of the Jewish community,” said lead organizer Jodi Melamed, Ph.D. “We all want freedom and justice for Salah. All of these Jews coming together from such diverse places speaks to the power of Salah’s story and to our commitment not to let him be taken from us in the name of Jewish safety. 

“We oppose the state terror done in the name of Jewish Americans against Salah and other Palestinians,” Melamed said. (Melamed advocated for Sarsour’s release in an opinion article in the April 25 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)

Brazil’s a very small town in the middle of vast farmlands, “but people came from Indianapolis, Bloomington and Champaign Urbana, from Chicago and Milwaukee, on a bus, in cars, Jews and non-Jews, immigrant rights folks,” she continued. “We are really grateful they want to stand with us to protest the conditions Salah’s experiencing in detention, which everyone in detention is experiencing. We want to say, ‘Free Salah and free them all.’”

[Article continues here ]




 

Red Lives Author Event - Detroit: Geoffrey Jacques in Conversation with Alan Wald - June 23

 


 

Source Booksellers
4240 Cass Avenue
#105 Detroit, MI 48201

Tuesday, June 23  •  6 PM - 7:30 PM

FREE  --  Reserve a spot  

Dive into gripping stories and meet the minds behind Red Lives in a chill, in-person hangout you won't want to miss!

Join us to celebrate Red Lives: Our Years in the U.S. Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 1: Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements with editor and contributor Geoffrey Jacques in conversation with Alan Wald,H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. Get ready for a rich conversaton about a one-of-a-kind history, a Q & A session and a booksigning line.

Save your Seat

There are Free tickets at this link. Books will be for sale at the event. If you have any questions or need accommodations please email us at alyson.sourcebooksellers@gmail.com or call the bookstore at 313 832-1155.

About the Book:

Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000) is the first collection of historical analyses and reminiscences by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Communist youth movement in the US from the 1950s through the 1990s. The nearly fifty first-person testimonies bring to life a missing chapter in the history of US radicalism and demonstrate the influence of the post–World War II generation of Communists on social justice movements.

Most histories of US Communism end in 1956 when Red Lives just begins, when McCarthyism was on its final legs, the Civil Rights Movement was sweeping the American South and the whole country, the student movement was taking its first breaths, and a new generation of young people were seeking out socialists, communists, and the Communist Party in order to craft a radical, anti-establishment politics. At a time when the launching of Sputnik, the Cuban Revolution, other revolutions sweeping Africa, and the example of the Vietnamese people fighting for their freedom and independence were inspiring the world, one-third of the world was also socialist, led by the Soviet Union and China. The time was propitious for a new generation in the US to also be seeking out, and joining, the CPUSA. This first volume of Red Lives, Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements, brings the stories of that generation to the forefront of American history at a time when narratives of resistance are more needed than ever before.

Editor and Contributor:

Geoffrey Jacques is a poet, writer, and editor who has been an activist and worker in the peace, labor, and left-wing political movements since the 1970s. Born in Detroit in 1953, he was the Daily World correspondent in that city from 1978 to 1983, and a New York City-based Daily World staffer from 1983 to 1985. He has worked as a business representative and organizer for Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, and from 1990 to 1996, he was assistant editor, then associate editor, of 1199 News, the monthly magazine of 1199 SEIU, the New York City-based health and hospital workers union. He was the founding managing editor of the journal New Labor Forum and has published articles in many other journals and periodicals. Jacques earned his PhD in English from the City University of New York (CUNY), and has taught classes in English and US literature, African American studies, American studies, writing, and humanities at York College, CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California Institute of the Arts, and elsewhere. His books include the poetry collections The Orchestra of Wind Chimes (2023) and Just for a Thrill (2004), both from Wayne State University Press, and the literary-critical study A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (Massachusetts, 2009). His poem, ”Trump,” appeared in 2019 in the journal Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. His essay “A New Civil Rights Movement, a New Journal,” an introduction to the online archive of the complete run of Freedomways magazine, appears in the open-access Reveal Digital–Independent Voices archive at JSTOR. Since 2014, he has been a moderator for Portside. He and his wife, Sherri L. Barnes, live in Ventura, California and Detroit, Michigan.

In converation with

Alan Wald is an American professor emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and writer of 20th-century American literature who focuses on Communist writers; he is an expert on the American 20th-Century "Literary Left.

Red Lives tells their story from the inside with sixteen autobiographical narratives of those who fought for a socialist America by mounting almost every barricade there was to mount.” ~ Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan



 

Film screening and Actions to Fight the Ellisons' Takeover of American Media - Online - June 25  (The Media and Democracy Project)
 



SPECIAL EVENT: Film screening and actions to fight the Ellisons' takeover of American media

Join Pulitzer Prize-winner and other panelists to learn how to help fight media consolidation and attacks on press freedom.

Join the Media and Democracy Project for an encore two-part event on Thursday, June 25, at 7 pm ET. First, we’ll present a group screening of "Democracy Under Siege" (2024), a film by Oscar-Nominated Director Laura Nix. The screening will be followed by a discussion with another powerhouse panel, featuring Nix; Ann Telnaes, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist formerly of The Washington Post; Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation; and Milo Vassallo, executive director of MAD. Telnaes is also featured in the documentary, which was released around the time she courageously left The Washington Post. Her departure from that legacy news organization happened after her editor, acting as an emissary of Post owner Jeff Bezos, rejected her cartoon, included below.

The panel will grapple with the ever-growing dangers of media consolidation to freedom of the press and the already damaging effects of having the voices of the many filtered through the ownership of the few. They’ll also outline specific actions you can take to join those fighting back!

Please sign up for tickets for this FREE virtual event here. The event will be streamed through Kinema, not Zoom. Instructions to set up a simple Kinema account in advance can be found here. Tickets are limited — so please don’t claim a ticket unless you are coming.


(Credit: Ann Telnaes) 


In addition to Telnaes, the 2024 film features the cutting insights of historian Heather Cox Richardson, Representative Jamie Raskin, political scientist Steven Levitsky, attorney Gowri Ramachandran, and others. The film offers "a razor sharp critique of political hypocrisy as top American political commentators confront viewers with urgent questions about the future of American governance."

We need to #BlockTheMerger to #StopTheCorruptTakeover

Since MAD’s last screening of the film on May 5, Larry and David Ellison have continued to demolish, with the help of their emissary Bari Weiss, CBS News and 60 Minutes, most recently firing June 2025 MAD Hero Scott Pelley. They also now control the TikTok algorithm and the site’s data, with the goal of controlling narratives to advance their agenda. On June 12, the corrupted MAGA Department of Justice enabled the Ellisons even further, approving the deal delivering control of Warner Brothers to the family. This merger is another in a long list of blows to the American public, democracy, consumers, the entertainment industry, press freedom, and diversity of voices in the media at the hands of the Ellisons, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Murdoch, and others.

Good news! It's not a done deal.

We hope you will join us to learn more and join the fight.  

Team Media and Democracy Project
 



 

America at 250: A Conversation with Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher - Online - June 29  (Boston Review and Dissent)
 



Monday, June 29, 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT - 1:15 PM EDT

FREE -  Get tickets here 

A conversation with Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher

In partnership with Dissent, join us for this online event with Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher, moderated by Nikhil Pal Singh, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The panelists will discuss their recent pieces in Boston Review and Dissent on the legacies of the American Revolution at home and abroad, its gutted promises, and how its ideals might still inform our politics of resistance and solidarity today. 

Subscribe to Boston Review and Dissent to read the latest work by Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher. For a limited time, you can get both magazines in print for just $60, or become a digital subscriber for just $35. 

To subscribe, just add a BR membership to your cart in our online store and use the code DISSENT60 to save on print or DISSENT35 for digital.

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Adom Getachew is Chair of Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and a contributing editor at Boston Review. Her essay "New Declarations" is featured in the latest issue of Dissent.

Aziz Rana is Professor of Law and Government at Boston College and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book is The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. His essay "The American Revolution in Global Retreat" is featured in the latest issue of Dissent.

Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. He is the author of Race and America’s Long War. 

David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest book is The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence. His essay "The Spirit of ’76" is featured in the latest issue of Boston Review.

ABOUT BOSTON REVIEW AND DISSENT
 

Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, politics, and culture. Independent and nonprofit since 1975, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world. Our essays, book reviews, criticism, and analysis take a special interest in matters of injustice, from war, poverty, and mass incarceration to the many faces of inequality and threats to democracy and human rights.

Our 50-year archive includes work by leading writers, intellectuals, and activists, including Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Vivian Gornick, Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, Arundhati Roy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robin D. G. Kelley, Pankaj Mishra, Eqbal Ahmad, Sadiq Al-Azm, Seyla Benhabib, Jhumpa Lahiri, Christopher Hitchens, Cornel West, Elias Khoury, Nancy Fraser, Frances Fox Piven, Staughton Lynd, Manning Marable, Sarah Schulman, and Adrienne Rich, among many others.

Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Their most recent issue on America at 250 asks what the anniversary can mean to us, featuring contributions from Aziz Rana, David Bateman, Julie C. Suk, Patrick Iber, Adom Getachew, and Jeffrey C. Isaac.

DETAILS

This event is free and open to the public. But when you register, please consider making a small contribution of $15—or any amount you can donate—to help fund future events like this and the work of Boston Review. Event registrants will be added to our email newsletter list.



 

Socialism 2026!  -  Chicago  September 4 - 7  (Haymarket Books)
 



We are living through the reshaping of the world. 

Neighborhood raids and imperial aggression aim to create compliance and pacification. But against the forces of fear and division, our communities are standing up with stunning acts of bravery and organization. Old networks and tactics are being revived, and new alliances are being forged in the heat of struggle. It has never been more urgent for us to come together and strengthen our movements by learning from one another. 

This September, the Socialism 2026 Conference will bring together activists, organizers, and communities from across the country and around the world. A four-day conference featuring over a hundred participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops, Socialism is the place for both seasoned radicals and new activists to sharpen analysis, hone strategy, and build community. 

Join us in Chicago, September 4-7, for Socialism 2026!

Featured speakers at Socialism 2026 will include: Angely Y. Davis, Saul Williams, Amy Goodman, Sophie Lewis, Dorothy Roberts, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, John Washington, Sarah Jaffe, Brian Jones, Vicky Osterweil, Beth Howard, Kyle T. Mays, and many more.

The Socialism Conference is brought to you by Haymarket Books and over a hundred endorsing left-wing organizations and publications. Visit socialismconference.org to learn more and register today.

Early Bird Registration Now Open! 

Socialism 2026

Fri Sep 4, 2026 9:00 AM - Mon Sep 7, 2026 2:00 PM

Hyatt Regency McCormick Place

Socialism 2026  - • - Brought to you by Haymarket Books




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