Rising Up With Sonali Rising Up With Sonali

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FEATURING DORTELL WILLIAMS - California imprisons nearly 200,000 people in various types of detention centers, including prisons and jails. If California was a country, it would have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Of this number, thousands are serving sentences of “life in prison without the possibility of parole” (LWOP), meaning they will live and die behind bars. 
According to Human Rights Watch, “More than 5,000 of the nearly 56,000 men and women sentenced to LWOP in the United States are in California, the third largest number of any US jurisdiction.” Now, states such as Pennsylvania are considering overturning LWOP as unconstitutional. 
For the last 20 years Rising Up host Sonali Kolhatkar has been communicating via letters with Dortell Williams, who has been imprisoned in California under an LWOP sentence. 
Williams has filed commentaries for Prison Radio, written books and earned multiple academic degrees during a life that has mostly been behind bars. For the first time in their decades-long correspondence, thanks to newly enacted reforms in prison communication, Williams was able to speak face-to-face with Kolhatkar and appeared as a guest on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. He shared what it has been like for him to be incarcerated for decades with no prospects of freedom. 



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FEATURING ELEZ BERESIN-SCHER - As university students continue to hold their ground at Free Gaza encampments on campuses around the nation, Jewish students remain central to the movement. 
In January 2024, a Bryn Mawr College sociology major Elez Beresin-Scher spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about the Shabbat for Ceasefire campus actions she was organizing. 
Beresin-Scher, a junior who has been active with Jewish Voice for Peace since her freshman year, has now joined a newly set-up Free Gaza encampment on her college campus. She returned to YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali from the Bryn Mawr encampment to explain why she was protesting.



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FEATURING JACOB AND RITHIK - A nationwide uprising led by college students has sprung up to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it’s on-going occupation, and U.S. arms sales to Israel, as well as for universities to divest from Israel. 
Students have set up encampments, reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street and other movements for social justice and have been met by violent police repression. 
Epicenters include Columbia University in New York, University of Southern California, and the University of Texas at Austin. But the list of campus encampments has continued to grow and students remain undeterred by arrests, suspensions, threats of censure and accusations of antisemitism. In fact, many of the protests are dominated by Jewish students. 
San Francisco State University students on Monday set up their encampment, and two student organizers give us an inside view of the protest actions.



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FEATURING AMY FITCH-HEACOCK - The Arizona Supreme Court earlier this month restored a civil war era law banning abortion in all cases except when the life of the biological parent was in jeopardy. It is currently considered the most draconian abortion ban in the nation. When that law was first enacted in 1864, scientists did not even understand how ovulation worked. The ruling comes ahead of a ballot measure in the November election that seeks to enshrine abortion access in the state’s constitution. Pro-choice advocates say there is an increased surge of interest in passing the measure now.



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FEATURING CEDRIC DE LEON - Workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) last week in a historic win for organized labor. Volkswagen is a German automaker and its Chattanooga plant was the only one in the entire company to not have union representation. It was also the first time a foreign-owned auto manufacturing factory in the southern United States unionized. UAW’s next union vote will take place at two Mercedes plants in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in mid-May.
Republican governors in Southern states have taken a hard line against UAW. The Governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas signed on to a letter referring to the UAW as, “special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”



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FEATURING SHANA L. REDMOND - Several elite college campuses such as those of Columbia University, New York University, Harvard and Yale were closed on Monday following major protest actions in support of Palestinian rights and against Israel’s on-going genocide in Gaza. This comes days after more than a 100 activists at an encampment were arrested at Columbia. 
Protesters have been vilified as antisemitic even though they include sizeable numbers of Jewish students. Many of those students joined in a seder at the Columbia encampment to mark Passover on Monday. Similar encampments have cropped up at college campuses across the United States. 
Meanwhile, news emerged of the discovery of a mass grave containing more than 300 bodies in southern Gaza, lending even greater credibility to genocide accusations against Israel. The United Nations reported that victims were found stripped naked with their hands tied. 



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