Item: I have just finished my Zoom presentation about Mississippi and the Civil Rights Movement to the LA classroom I visit weekly. Alex, their teacher, has opened the chat for any additional questions or comments. “Do you root for the Dodgers?” inquires one student. For the many of you who are not baseball fans, The LA Dodgers were last year’s World Series champions. They operate with one of the...
We agreed to meet them in the parking area outside the terminal. Diving into a sea of people after living all that time with what the Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton called a “cave mentality” was a bridge too far. And what to do about hugs? All week we had been reading contradictory recommendations about the safety issues around this most human of gestures. We decided we would have to see where...
It’s not even Black History Month anymore, but in the course of a recent week we were invited to do three different school presentations on The Civil Rights Movement and our experiences in Mississippi. What better way to spend the week before Passover, the commemoration of the Jews’ liberation from slavery? Talking with students promised to be a lot more uplifting than the ritual cleaning and the...
In 1968, the year before my father’s retirement, my wife, infant daughter and I returned to New York from three years in Mississippi, where I had been pursuing the justice dictated by my Jewish upbringing and perhaps in some small measure by my early immersion in the world of union socialism. Within a few months I was drawn into the maelstrom of the legendary Ocean Hill/Brownsville teachers’...
This is the first in a two-part retrospective look at my roller coaster relationship with unions, beginning with today’s piece about the central role my father’s union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (the ILGWU) and moving next week to my experiences with teachers’ unions, beginning in New York in the late ‘60s and continuing to evolve during this controversial pandemic...