July 27 Movie Night : Israelism, Palestine & the Responsibility of Americans

26 07 2024

One of the rich pleasures of going to the movies is the chance to talk about it after. Kopkind’s Movie Night on Saturday, July 27 – 7 pm at 118 Elliot in downtown Brattleboro – will feature the documentary Israelism, followed by comments from special guests from the Palestine solidarity movement of Western Massachusetts, who will then engage the audience in discussion. In the project’s tradition, this is an inter-generational group, with two people who have been doing organizing and activism together for more than twenty years, and two who have worked together on a number of actions over the past year, including the UMass Amherst encampment. The event is free and open to the public.

A bit more about our guests, in their own words:

Hind Mari was born and raised in Palestine. She was nearly 6 years old when the Six-Day War took place in June 1967, placing her city of Nablus under Israeli military rule. She has vivid memories of the bombings and the earliest days of Israeli military occupation. In early September of that year, her dad, who was a school superintendent, was jailed for six weeks for going on strike and refusing to start the new school year as a protest to a ban by Israel on 84 textbooks.

Hind likes to call herself (and her brother) the original BDS organizers for their refusal to buy Israeli candy in 1967, and for convincing the neighborhood kids to follow suit. She went to college in Nablus, Occupied Palestine, where her education was interrupted by school closures, roadblocks and jailings. She earned a Fulbright for her master’s in 1986 and came to UMass Amherst, where she earned her doctorate and continues to work.

Alisa Klein grew up an ardent Zionist in a Jewish American family, and lived as a teenager and young adult on a kibbutz in the north of Israel. She completed high school there, served two mandatory years in the Israeli army, and attended university in Tel Aviv. What she experienced in the army, and then studied at university, ultimately brought her to an understanding of the inherent inhumanity and genocidal nature of the settler colonial project that is Zionism and the State of Israel. After writing her master’s thesis in Amman, Jordan, and serving as the editor of a Bethlehem-based online journal of alternative analysis of Israel and Palestine, she returned to the US as an ardent Palestine liberation activist and annual visitor/activist to the West Bank. Since 2000, she has lived and conducted activism in Northampton in Western Mass. 

Molly Aronson grew up in an observant Jewish and politically minded household, and became skeptical of Israel and the Zionist project at an early age. In college at the University of Michigan, they were one of a few vocal Jews advocating for divestment, and later got involved in more radical Palestinian solidarity movements. While Zionism had made Jewish spaces unattractive for most of their life, learning about the history of anti-Zionist Jews and organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace opened up a new road into organizing for Palestine and connecting with their own faith, history and lineage. Since October, Molly has been organizing for Palestine in Western Mass with Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace Action and the Western Mass Coalition for Palestine. They were a lead organizer of the 25 Mile March for Palestine – a march the length of Gaza that mobilized more than 600 people from Northampton to Springfield, MA. 

Louai Abu-Osba is a Palestinian American, born to parents from Salama, Palestine. Salama was the first village to be ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias from Europe during the Nakba. He grew up primarily in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with a sprinkling of Connecticut, Maryland and Qatar. He graduated from Hampshire College in 2003, where he was elected student commencement speaker. During his commencement speech, Louai characterized Israel’s founding as genocide, its policies in occupied Palestine as apartheid, and strongly advocated for Hampshire College to divest its endowment from Israeli companies. Louai has worked as a content creator and software engineer in media and entertainment ever since, and recently founded The ArtStead, a permaculture and experiential media lab focused on social justice, climate change and community activism.

Israelism tells the story of two young Jewish Americans who were raised to love Israel unconditionally but whose perspectives take a sharp left turn when they witness the brute realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over US policy in the Middle East and modern Jewish identity.

We decided to show this film now because despite the multicultural, multiracial, multigenerational masses demanding a ceasefire and opposing US complicity in genocide in Gaza – in other words, the evidence of one’s own eyes and reality – so much media and political bloviation has sought to downplay or even erase not only the participation of young Jewish Americans in the protests and campus encampments but the decades’ long movement for Palestinian liberation in this country.

Simultaneously, the vast majority of reportage on Israel and Palestine in most anyone’s memory – as well as on the genocide in Gaza – has invisibilized the Palestinian experience or rendered it narrowly, prejudicially, often stupidly or in a deliberately deceptive fashion. Our guests on the 27th are all involved in the current movement. Hind and Louai’s life experiences as Palestinian, what they want audiences of the film to know and be thinking about beyond the confines of its story, are especially critical to any informed consideration of the solidarity movement and of this crisis for the people of Gaza, the Occupied Territories, the diaspora and the world. A genocidal war is everyone’s business. Given longstanding and current US foreign policy, every American has a responsibility to try to stop it.

The question of Palestine and a people’s right to self-determination have been part of Kopkind’s concerns from the start of this project. They were critical issues that Andrew Kopkind wrote about and analyzed in his journalism. Alisa Klein, who has been the central organizer of the panel for the upcoming post-screening discussion, was a ‘camper’ at the Kopkind/Eqbal Ahmad Initiative seminar/retreat on the Middle East in 2003. This free Movie Night culminates Kopkind’s first session this summer, with political journalists and organizers, who have been meeting and thinking for the past week on the theme ‘The Politics of Life vs. Death’.


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For Life Against Death — Join Us at Two Public Events This Week!

22 07 2024

Kopkind began its first seminar/retreat session in this 25th anniversary year on July 20 with left journalists and organizers who hail from as far away as Lafayette, Louisiana, as near as Brattleboro, and towns and cities in between – who focus on issues as diverse as tenants’ rights and the criminalization of dissent; workers’ power and land use; body autonomy and tech sector organizing; prison abolition and, for all, both ending the genocide in Gaza and stopping fascism at home. Their mentors for a week built around the theme “The Politics of Life vs Death” are Margaret Cerullo, who was one of Kopkind’s first mentors, in 1999; and Dania Rajendra, who was a young Kopkind ‘camper’ in 2001. As do often the case, we’re bringing it all home.

We’re putting on two free public events at 118 Elliot in downtown Brattleboro this week. Everyone in the area: please come!

Wednesday, July 24, 6:30 pm:  Speaker’s Night. Margaret Cerullo will speak on the Zapatista movement and prospects in Mexican politics under its new president, the first woman to hold the post. Margaret, a professor emerita of sociology and feminist studies at Hampshire College, has focused on social movements, global migration and Latin America, having been involved with the Zapatista movement since its emergence on the world stage on January 1, 1994. Her latest book, co-edited with her fellow members of the Lightning Collective, is a translation with commentaries: Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World. The book’s foreword is written by Kopkind president and program director JoAnn Wypijewski. The collective’s introduction quotes Andy Kopkind, whose Nation editorial almost immediately upon the 1994 uprising remains a model of historical analysis, political acuity and style. Margaret’s talk will be followed by discussion. This event is being hosted by the Windham World Affairs Council.

Saturday, July 27, 7 pm: Movie Night. Featuring Israelism, a documentary by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, about two Jewish Americans whose consciousness takes a sharp left turn as they see the brute realities of occupation firsthand and later pronounce, “We came to Israel and left from Palestine”. The screening will be followed by comments from a panel that represents the long-building grassroots movement for justice in Palestine: Hind Mari and Kopkind alum Alisa Klein, a Palestinian-American and Jewish Israeli-American, respectively, have been doing Palestine liberation organizing and activism together in Western Mass for more than 20 years; Louai Abu-Osba, a Palestinian-American who organizes with the Western MA Coalition for Palestine, and Molly Aronson, a Jewish American who is a central organizer of the Western Mass chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, have worked together on a number of actions over the past year, including the UMass Amherst encampment. This panel will then engage the audience in discussion.

Kopkind recognizes the essential connection between language, history, analysis and action in the realization of Freedom Dreams, as Robin D. G. Kelley discussed at a Kopkind public event years ago. The Zapatistas, as Andy explained way back in 1994, surprised the world with their rebellion, but its roots went deep, and they persist. “They have infused left politics”, Cerullo writes, “with an imaginative, literary, or poetic dimension—organizing horizontally, outside and against the state, and with a profound respect for difference as a source of political insight, not division.” The movement against genocide in Gaza and US complicity is the profound insurgent development in the US this year, but it too did not come out of nowhere. Kopkind mentor Dania Rajendra, a journalist and activist who has been working at the crossroads of capitalism and authoritarianism, has long been involved with Palestine solidarity, and her work on the political instrumentalization of antisemitism to promote anti-Muslim bias, racism, patriarchy and exploitation is used by community organizers in the US and Europe.

Please join us!

Kopkind has done remarkable things across the past quarter century. Our mentors have included eminent radical historians like Peter Linebaugh, brilliant longtime strategists and organizers like Makani Themba (who, along with Margaret, was our first mentor), astute independent journalists like Alexander Cockburn, who was a great friend of Andy’s. Our young participants have gone on to play critical roles across the country in the founding of Black Lives Matter, in youth organizing, in Palestine solidarity, in documenting the rise and political agenda of Christian nationalism, in advancing ideas about economic democracy and collective ownership, in fighting homophobia and the culture war, in arguing for abortion and bodily autonomy, in telling stories out of a queer/feminist/black radical tradition, in fighting the state’s power to kill and imprison, and in presenting alternatives. Our filmmakers have told luminous stories about culture and politics through the lives of Lorraine Hansberry, Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag, William Kunstler, Bayard Rustin, Gilda Radner, and the experiences of communities, movements and individuals around the world. Our events have, like the seminars, raised provocative ideas but on a public stage – from Robin Kelley, Edward Said (via film), Laura Flanders, Eddie Glaude, Patricia Williams, Kenyon Farrow, Jeff Sharlett, Tariq Ali, Najla Said, Elena Letona, Vijay Prashad, Grace Paley and more.

Andy Kopkind wrote out of a left analysis, a gay sensibility, a profound curiosity and sense of history, a resistance to inhumanity and a radical hope. This living memorial has strived to honor and advance all of that across the 25 years. In troubled times, we continue to keeping the left alive.

Kopkind has always relied on the kindness of friends and strangers. Please hit the Donate button above to contribute to this project that is unlike anything else.


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Scenes From a Pandemic: 18

3 08 2020

by Najla Said

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe it.

Mural on the apartheid wall in Occupied Palestine. (photo: Abeer Salman)

Diary of a Never-Ending Crisis

New York City

March. I remember Beirut in 2005, after a car bomb went off, trying not to go near parked cars, and stopping, hyperventilating, catching my breath, and drilling into my brain: “Keep walking, keep going; you can’t control it; you have to keep going.” I need to do this now, here.

Having spent my childhood between Beirut during two wars and NYC in the 1970s–’80s, I have learned to be prepared. I tell myself, “I fear nothing and live for human solidarity.”

Half my Pilates clients are away, some are over 70 and canceled out of fear, and the rest just don’t think it’s a good idea right now. I am officially income-less. My production of Palestine in Chicago will be pushed back at least two to three weeks as of now. I have waited 10 years for a theater to want to do my play again. Now I’m pretty sure it ain’t happening.

I’m making a pink glittery unicorn T-shirt for my niece. I have no problem staying busy. I don’t feel like I have ADHD anymore, because without the confines of other people’s structure, I can do things at my own rhythm.

My shrink says that many traumas will be reactivated during this crisis and asks me how I am doing.

“This is kind of like Beirut, but easier.”

“Oh right. Well, for you it’ll be easier, then.”

I predict the return of telephone calls. I hope no one calls me. I’m an introvert; I hate the phone.

In the store the guy behind me has a cart filled with bottled water. “You must be Lebanese,” I say.

He laughs. “How can you tell?”

“The bottled water.”

There is no need to stock up on water in New York, but that is what Lebanese people do.

I tell people that niqabs (veils over the mouth and nose) were originally worn in the desert to keep sand out of people’s faces, just as masks now are supposed to keep the virus out of our mouth and nose. I explain that Arabs invented soap and the word “quarantine.” No one cares.

There were 6,000 911 calls in the city yesterday. In Beirut, I would hear bombs and artillery fire, and then the sirens. Here it is just sirens. Which is eerie, more unsettling.

Diary of a crisis: nothing is happening; everything is happen-ing. Month after month. I am income-less. I keep busy. I fear nothing, and many things. I feel I am living in a Beckett play.

April. My birthday. My cousins organized a Zoom call for me, and people rang me on the phone. I made a cake. I sang “Miss Mary Mack” with my niece, talked to my nephew, and virtually jumped on a trampoline with my goddaughter. Expect nothing, do nothing, no pressure—perfection.

I’ve knit five scarves. I make pudding, even though I don’t eat pudding.

CNN keeps saying that other countries have more beds in ICU and better medical systems to respond to the virus: “Why? It’s a long story.”

I want to scream, “Socialized medicine! Duh!”

Easter is soon. Maybe Jesus will come back and fix this mess.

For many Americans feeling unsafe is too much. But the whole world lives this way all the time. American exceptionalism needs to die and stay dead.

Meanwhile, I am living in a Beckett play, making up things to do and say so that I exist. There is something satisfying about that.

May. George Floyd is dead.

“Mama, Mama…”

My heart shatters.

My nephew changes his Instagram profile pic to one of John Carlos with his fist in the air, and shares a photo of the George Floyd mural on the wall in Palestine. The kids are alright.

I think about the importance of breath, and breadth. I worry about all that gets left out in our politics. I seem to be out of place. I’m Palestinian and Lebanese; I’m a New Yorker. I tell myself, ‘Keep walking, keep going.’

June. Between the virus and George Floyd’s death, I think about the importance of breath.

I make connections with Palestine, explaining that the IDF trains our cops, that the move used to kill Mr. Floyd is from Krav Maga. I’ve been told that expressing Palestinian solidarity is “co-opting” the black struggle. I should be quiet.

Cornel West keeps mentioning Edward Said on TV. I’m grateful, because no one seems to know that my father’s work helped us get to this point.

I’m glad people are getting radicalized, but I worry about all that gets left out. I worry about the inability to make connections.

I wonder where I fit in this new BIPOC acronym. I just got chased down the street by a nutjob who screamed that I’m a stupid white bitch who doesn’t care about Black lives.

“I’m Palestinian!” I yell, for all the Upper West Side to hear.

“Yeah, bitch, and I’m Cherokee.”

What. The. Fuck.

I am not Black. Or Indigenous. Am I POC? I never seem to have a place here.

A nice gay boy asks if I’m OK.

Happy Pride.

July. Extroverts text and call too much; they need to call other extroverts.

Outside New York, no one wants to wear a mask. Almost everywhere else in the world, people value community. Here it’s the individual, who always seems to be complaining.

We have another family Zoom call—relatives in Beirut, New York, South Carolina, Connecticut, London, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle—my mom’s generation, my generation, the kids.

My cousin, on his way to Beirut, stops at different ATMS to bring cash and medicine to family members. Lebanon is in free fall for other reasons, but still they test everyone on the plane before and after the flight; anyone who tests positive is sent to a hotel for two weeks. That seems like the proper way to do things.

I kind of loved lockdown at the beginning. Now some days the silence is too much and I just cry.

Nothing is happening; everything is happening.

I am invisible. I am exhausted.

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Najla Said is an actor and playwright, and the author of Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (Riverhead Books). In 2010, Kopkind presented a staged reading of her one-woman play, Palestine.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on July 29, 2020, on The Nation‘s website. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: A Song by and for Nurses

A nurse on a Covid ward in Teheran. (photo: Mohammad Ghadamali/AP Photo)

In New York the 7 pm clapping for nurses and other health care workers stopped months ago. It was always more a ritual for the benefit of those in lock-down; it told us we weren’t alone. Nursing has become symbolic, but let’s honor the work. The WHO, the International Council of Nurses (INC), and Nursing Now recently reported that worldwide there is a shortage of six million nurses–especially affecting the Global South–and deep income disparities. The INC has made a music video in recognition of the work and the people everywhere who do it. In Kopkind’s immediate family, one of those people is Dave Hall, our longtime operations manager and cook, John Scagliotti’s partner, our brother, and a psychiatric nurse in Vermont. For Dave and all nurses of the world: “I Am a Nurse.”


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The World Turns at Kopkind Harvest Festival

17 09 2010

October 9-10, 2010
Najla Said in “Palestine”
13th Annual Harvest Late Brunch Benefit, featuring
Vijay Prashad on “Trembles in the Tropics”

The theme will be internationalist at the Kopkind Colony’s Harvest Festival this year, on the weekend of October 9 and 10.

On Saturday (Oct 9)  evening, Najla Said will perform at the Hooker Dunham Theater in her acclaimed one-woman show, “Palestine.”

On Sunday, events move to The Organ Barn at Guilford, where Vijay Prashad, the award-winning author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, will be the featured speaker, following a “late brunch” tapas feast.

Najla Said star of "Palestine"

“Palestine” opened Off-Broadway earlier this year and had an extended run. The play is, by turns, funny and harrowing, a canny, deeply personal, disarmingly political coming-of-age story, written and performed by Najla Said. In “Palestine,” Said, daughter of the eminent scholar and human rights advocate Edward Said (also a member of Kopkind’s honorary board until his death in 2003), engages questions of identity, cultural fluidity, love and suffering from many angles, in many locales, from New York’s Upper West Side to Gaza to Beirut and back. As an actress, Najla Said brings a sense of the absurd even to deadly serious situations, and, in one reviewer’s words, as her “sweetness turns to incredulity … you begin to understand the madness endured in war-torn countries.”
The performance begins at 7 pm, at the Hooker Dunham, 139 Main Street in Brattleboro. Suggested donation is $15 adult, $10 student.

Vijay Prashad will cap the weekend events with a talk titled “Trembles in the Tropics (In which we will consider the projects to end all human pain, and then wonder for ourselves, seeking necessity in the North).” A spirited, original thinker, he is the author of eleven books, including Karma of Brown Folk, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting and Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism. His path-breaking Darker Nations tells the history of the cold war from the perspective of the world’s poor, and limns the life and death of the Third World as an ideological project that had people across the globe “fired up for freedom,” sovereignty and cooperation, and then collapsed under the weight of debt, globalized capital, internal conflict, corruption, militarism and cultural nationalism. His new project, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, will pick up the story from the 1980s to explore why we are in such a morass today, where is the motion, and what the currently amorphous movements for land, water and human rights in every country, on every continent might spell for the future. Prashad was born in Calcutta, educated in India and the US; he directs the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford. He is a contributing editor of Himal South Asia (Kathmandu, Nepal), an editor of Bol (Lahore), a columnist for Frontline (India) and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, ZNET and a host of others US publications. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Sunday’s events begin with the tapas feast at 2 pm, at 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford; the talk follows in the Organ Barn. Tickets are $35 adult, $25 student.

This will be the 13th annual Harvest Late Brunch benefit for Kopkind and is our only fundraising event of the year.

“Discussions at the retreats this summer revolved around  the interconnection of culture, history and politics, and the relationship between personal stories and larger political or historical currents,” Kopkind programming director JoAnn Wypijewski said. “In different registers, Vijay Prashad and Najla Said bring that all together, while drawing our attention in a new direction, to the wider world, on which our fates depend, whether we recognize it or not.”

Reservations for both events can be made by sending a check payable to the non-profit Kopkind, to 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301, or e mailing stonewal@sover.net. For directions, people can e mail that address or call 802.254.4859.

Vijay Prashad, speaker at Harvest


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