A Public Affair Douglas Haynes, Ali Muldrow, Carousel Bayrd, Allen Ruff, & Esty Dinur

On today’s two part, A Public Affair, host Esty Dinur is first joined by Robert Schoville who is best known in Madison as the founder of the Brazilian percussion group, The Handphibians. Robert has spent the last five years living on the Aegean coast of Turkey with his family. He joins us in the studio to talk with Esty about life under the current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the role of the country in the Middle East, and much more. 

Then, textile artist Laila Hasan joins us by phone. For many years she has brought women textile artists together to develop shared sales opportunities for their hand made items. Many of the artist now the sole economic support for their families. She talks with Esty about her art making as well as the current situation in the West Bank.

Laila will be presenting and selling art in Madison on June 9th from 1:30-3:30 at Madison friends meeting house:  (1704 Roberts Court).  There will be snacks. Learn more here. 

Image “Turkey, Fairy chimneys, Natural landscape” by flaviospugna from Pixabay

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In a recent Truthout article, Stephen Zunes writes that the U.S.’s continued military aid to Israel violates both the Section 6201 of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act and the 1999 Leahy Amendment. “The Biden administration refuses to abide by these laws and neither Congress nor the courts have been willing to enforce them,” he says. Zunes joins host Allen Ruff to discuss his latest piece and the global response to the war happening in Gaza.



Dr. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he served as founding director of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. He is currently serving as 2024 Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Research Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Image of International Court of Justice in La Hague, Netherlands by Victor R. Ruiz. Used under the Creative Commons License.

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In May 2023, the COVID-19 public health emergency expired. The declaration had previously laid out all sorts of protocols and funding to combat the deadly respiratory illness. The end of the official public health emergency didn’t mean that COVID-19 disappeared. People are still getting newly infected, and millions now suffer from a complicated immune disease called Long Covid. 

Today, host Chali Pittman marks the one year anniversary of the Biden Administration’s declaration that the COVID pandemic was over with guest Paula Tran. She’s Wisconsin’s State Health Officer at Department of Health Services, and the Administrator for the Division of Public Health. She’s the former director of a group at the Population Health Institute that worked to understand root causes of community health. 

Chali and Paula talk about COVID illness, discuss the impact of vaccines and other preventive measures, and dive in to other public health threats as we are all more aware of community health. 

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

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“What is the climate justice issue in Milwaukee? It’s not an issue of an of a sudden disaster. It’s not a flood. It’s about slow violence,” says Arjit Sen. “It’s something that has been happening historically over time, in which Black and brown communities in Milwaukee are not just segregated, but they’re seen as lacking value.” An exhibit currently showing at the Milwaukee County Historical Society and running through June 1st aims to shine a light on slow violence and the resilience of Milwaukee communities. It is a project of the Humanities Action Lab, a coalition of universities led by Rutgers University-Newark that creates traveling public projects on the past, present, and future of pressing social issues.

The show starts with the national exhibition “Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice.” It is participatory public memory project that aims to share the histories of “frontline” communities who have contributed the least to the climate crisis but bear its heaviest burdens

The Milwaukee specific exhibit, “Unfinished Project,” features the work of the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Field School, which has been an active partner in Milwaukee neighborhoods like Sherman Park, Midtown, Washington Park, and other areas. It is broken into to work up into three categories: Food Justice, Housing Justice, and urban guardians.

Arijit Sen joins host Douglas Haynes along with Camille Mays, founder of Peace Garden Project in Milwaukee and Wilmarie Medina-Cortes, exhibitions and program manager for the Humanities Action Lab. They discuss the significance of community gardens and public exhibits in addressing climate inequality and shared perspectives on community-led efforts for social justice, healing, and creating safe spaces in neighborhoods affected by violence.

 

 

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On today’s two-part show, host Esty Dinur is joined by translator Luke Leafgren and publisher Judith Gurewich to discuss Nasser Abu Srour’s book, The Tale of a Wall. Abu Srour is a Palestinian imprisoned in Israel. His book covers decades of imprisonment and the effect it had on his mind, body, and soul. It’s also a book about the history of Israeli occupation and the struggle of the Palestinian people told with great feeling, lyrical prose, and magical realism. 

In the second-half of the show, historian and journalist Rick Perlstein talks about his recent essay, “The New Anti-Antisemitism.” Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan

In his article, Perlstein responds to the requests he gets to make historical parallels between current student encampments in protest of the war on Gaza and student protests in 1968. Perlstein says comparing the current encampments to 1968 takes the focus away from the issue at hand and distracts from recent trends in higher education, such as ongoing erosion of liberal institutions by conservatives. He says a closer comparison would be 1980s anti-apartheid protests.

Image courtesy of Penguin Random House/Other Press.

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In an attempt to silence criticism of Israel, accusations of “anti-Semitism” have increasingly been leveled against those protesting Israel’s Gaza war. To discuss this trend, on today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined by critic and essayist Abba Solomon. 

They talk about the history of Zionism from the nineteenth century on and how this movement had allies in anti-Semitic groups. Solomon shares his insight into strands of non-Jewish Zionism and how Zionism became such a hegemonic viewpoint in the US. Ruff and Solomon also discuss how younger generations of Jews in the US identify less with the state of Israel than older generations. 

Solomon also weighs in on the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would outlaw criticism of Israel and contribute to an effort to smear and intimidate the oppositional movement on US campuses and elsewhere. This position is often based on the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

While certainly not new, the claim that criticisms of Zionism and Israel are anti-Semitic has reached new heights as growing numbers of dissenting Jewish individuals and organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have been dubbed “anti-Semitic.” 



Abba Solomon is a researcher of the history of American Jews and Zionism. He is the author of The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel and The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech “The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews.” 

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