Sarah Schulman, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian is the Ralla Klepak Professor of English at Northwestern University.
She was a member of ACT UP, New York from 1987 to 1992, and a co-founder of the Lesbian Avengers. Today she serves on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and is co-director of The ACT UP Oral History Project ( https://www.actuporalhistory.org/).
She is the author of 21 books, including Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York 1987-1993; Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair; and The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To A Lost Imagination.
Her latest book is THE FANTASY AND NECESSITY OF SOLIDARITY, published by Thesis.
Adam Shatz‘s latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, examines the intersections of the African diaspora in the Caribbean Islands, WWII France and it’s aftermath, and the inevitable violence that colonialism creates and requires to maintain itself. He is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is also a visiting professor at Bard College and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.” He is the author of two earlier books: Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination.
Perhaps like me, you were aware of Frantz Fanon. You saw his books, particularly THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, in the bookshelves of people your respected, but you didn’t really know too much about him.
Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925. He was educated to identify as a French man, and as he wrote in his book, BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK, it was a shock to serve in WWII, be wounded, receive a medal and still be seen as an African, an object of fear. He studied in Lyon, France, and became a psychiatrist in the post-war intellectual ferment of existentialism and the rise of decolonization movements.
He was a playwright, a practicing psychiatrist, the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, a teacher, a diplomat, a journalist, the editor of an anti-colonial newspaper, the author of three books, and a major Pan-Africanist and internationalist, who became a political militant as France efforts to suppress the Algerian independence movement became more violent and vicious. But unlike most militants, he had the training and intellectual capacity to analyze and articulate the processes internal to the individual and external to the culture that lead to the point of violence, and whether violence can be justified or even dis-intoxicating.
Like Ernesto “Che” Guevara–another revolutionary who valued the poetic and was a committed internationalist, doctor, soldier, teacher, and theorist–Fanon’s life has much to inform our understanding of where we find ourselves in struggle today.
Our guests today on Forthright Radio are two journalists from the non-profit on-line news organization, The Intercept, Jon Schwartz and Elise Swain.
We watched in horror on October 7, 2023 as Hamas gunmen launched surprise attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets along the Gaza border during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. It came 50 years and a day after Egyptian and Syrian forces launched an assault during Yom Kippur to retrieve territory Israel had taken during the conflict in 1967. The New York Times reports that there were about 1,200 deaths, including 766 Israeli civilians, 36 of them children, and 373 members of the security forces, plus approximately 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers taken hostage, including 30 children. The attack is considered the bloodiest day in Israel’s modern history, and the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust.
In response, The Israeli Defense Forces launched and sustained brutal retaliatory bombings and near total restrictions on water, food, fuel and other necessities for life, vowing to continue til Hamas has been destroyed. As of January 11, 2024, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, the overwhelming majority of them women and children. Unknown numbers of others remain buried beneath the rubble of the obliterated homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, churches, and other crucial infrastructure.
International efforts for a cease fire have been thwarted by the US Government in the United Nations, even as President Biden has gone around Congress to send more US weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. In the United States and around the world, huge demonstrations continue to occur in support of g an immediate and sustained cease-fire. Many of these demonstrations are organized by Jewish peace groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Rabbis for Ceasefire.
These things and much more, leave me uncharacteristically unable to process the emotions that arise. The horror, the knowledge that through my government, without whom this could not and would not continue, I am complicit, my feelings of helplessness to affect change. So, the piece that Jon Schwartz and Elise Swain published on The Intercept on Christmas Eve, Merry Christmas! We All Belong in the Hague, spoke to me and moved me to invite them to Forthright Radio.
Elise Swain is Photo Editor of The Intercept. Prior to this role, she was an associate producer for the Intercepted podcast, while working across various mediums for The Intercept, including writing, photography, video, illustration, and audio. Before joining The Intercept, she worked as a freelance artist and has a BFA in photo and video from the School of Visual Arts. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Before joining First Look Media, Jon Schwarz worked for Michael Moore’s Dog Eat Dog Films and was a research producer for Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.” He’s contributed to many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Slate, as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.” In 2003, he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of mass destruction.
We are especially grateful to David Rovics for permission to include songs from his recent collection, NOTES FROM A HOLOCAUST IN STANDARD TUNING, in the web post of this edition of Forthright Radio. You can find more of his songs here: https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/sets/gaza
The heading photo is of an American flag flying behind barbed wire and fencing at Guantanamo Bay on June 27, 2023 by Elise Swain. Used with permission.
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