Reconnaissance Asa Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales

For this episode of Reconnaissance, we’re listening back to conversations that Fred had in Vienna last fall, exploring ideas about solidarity and allyship on “the left,” and how Israel figures into those politics—as both a real place, and an amorphous set of ideas. We’ve both been struck by how much symbolic weight Israel and Palestine hold for people in different parts of the world. This episode is one attempt to explore how and why that happens, in the very specific context of Vienna.

This is a portrait of the people of Crown Heights, the strong legacy of civic engagement and coalition-based community organizing here, especially around the politics and economics of housing. This is also a story about capitalism failing the people, propelling systemic inequality, white supremacism, and corporate greed—and how this might be a moment to build positive alternative models at the level of local government. This is also a story about what you learn when you just show up places and listen.

Following Trump’s election, we wanted to think more deeply about what people mean when they talk about “working class America.” What is the future of the labor movement? In the spirit of imagining an alternative, we explore a different democratic process—that within the Teamsters Union. Reconnaissance, Episode 9: Winning America features interviews with Teamster union members and organizers, and reflections on this political moment by labor journalist Asa Jaffe.

On Saturday, January 28, 2017, eight days into Donald Trump’s official reign, thousands of people gathered at JFK and at airports around the world, to demonstrate our refusal of the “Muslim ban,” and recent, despicable offenses towards immigrants and human life in general. Asa recorded the crowd outside of JFK’s Terminal 4, which grew into Saturday evening: chanting, questioning, and participating in a vigil marking the occasion of Holocaust Rememberance Day. This recording is edited from four hours of audio, which we share as a document of new and familiar rallying cries, and an overwhelming sense of history—as news arrives via human microphone that while we were occupying this space, Judge Ann Donnelly ruled an emergency stay on deportations on those with valid visas who were detained following Trump’s executive order. What else can we make at our airports?

San Juan County is a sparsely populated area in southeastern Utah, made up of large swaths of federal land, pocked with small towns. It is inhabited by a large Native American population, primarily Navajo. A portion of the county is referred to as Bears Ears, a name taken from two ear-shaped buttes that loom large in the landscape. Five Native American tribes have banded together to push for a National Monument designation in this area, to protect the rich assortment of archaeological and sacred sites located there, and to shield against possible future resource development in the area. Predictably, this proposal has not gone without resistance from both local forces and Utah state government. The ensuing ideological conflict may be seen as a proxy for the current national conversation around land rights, federal abuse, and Native American rights.

Wall and Water is an audio essay about how historical narratives are written and rewritten continually, about the work of remembering. Through conversations with artists, historians, educators, and city officials, we connect the history of the site of the eighteenth-century Municipal Slave Market on Wall Street, and the sign that’s been standing there for the past year, to ongoing experiences of systemic racism and resistance. Wall and Water became a meditation on freedom and rebellion in New York.