← New Books Network
Loading summary
Transcript32 lines
- [00:01]
Robinhood Narrator
Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform? Well, now you can trade all in one place on Robinhood. That means you can trade individual stocks and ETFs and also buy and sell crypto using seriously powerful and intuitive tools at one of the lowest costs on average without needing to manage multiple apps. Robinhood makes withdrawing and depositing crypto seamless. Send crypto to your Robinhood account or send crypto from your Robinhood account to other wallets without deposit or withdrawal fees from Robinhood. Trade all in one place. Get started now on Robinhood Trading. Crypto involves significant risk. Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto llc. Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not FDIC insured or SIPC Protected Network fees may apply to crypto transfers. Crypto transfers may not be available to all customers. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal securities. Trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC member sipc, a registered.
- [00:55]
Expedia Narrator
Broker dealer Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes. But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia. She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia made to travel flight Inclusive packages are atoll protected this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible Financial Geniuses, Monetary Magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [01:55]
Sarah Schulman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:00]
Clayton Gerard
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Clayton Gerard. My pronouns are he, him and Today I am honored to be speaking with Sarah Schulman, author of the Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity for those who seek to combat injustice. Solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work and why it matters. Shulman examines a range of case studies from the fight for abortion rights in post Franco Spain to to NYC's AIDS activism in the 1990s to the current waves of campus protest movements and against Israel's war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer Palestinian feminist and artistic struggles for justice, Shulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today's world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and the oppressed. That action comes at a cost and is not always effective. And yet without it, we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. So today to discuss more of that, I want to thank Sarah Schulman for joining me to talk about such a important and timely book for a lot of the issues that we're struggling against. And before we dive in to talk about the fantasy and necessity of solidarity, I'd like to invite Sarah to introduce herself to the listeners.
- [03:53]
Sarah Schulman
Okay, well, thank you so much. So I'm Sarah Schulman. I'm 67 years old. I'm a native New Yorker, and I've written, I've published 21 books. I've had three plays produced, and I've written four movies that have been made. But I also have stacks of things that the world has never seen. And I'm a professor at Northwestern. I'm now the director of the MFA program for the next two years there. And I'm on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
- [04:23]
Clayton Gerard
Awesome. Thank you so much for that introduction. I didn't realize that you've written 21 books, but I was recently in a conversation with a friend and we were talking about gentrification. And I was like, oh, Sarah Schulman has a good book called Gentrification of the Mind. And she was like, you know what? Sarah Schulman always has a book about what I'm dealing with right now. She's always the one at the forefront of these ideas. So I just want to put a plug in for that of how influential your books have been and especially from such a prolific writer and activist. So I guess to start off this conversation, I'd love to kind of just center on how this book came about for you and the process of writing it and the important ideas that you engage with. What was it like bringing this about?
- [05:11]
Sarah Schulman
Well, you know, the goal of the book is to make solidarity more doable. My proposal is the way that we can enter into it more freely is if we get rid of ideas of perfectionism. I think a lot of people are afraid to act because they're afraid of making mistakes. And we have to make mistakes because we're human. So it's this inhuman concept of being perfect is what keeps us from going forward. So throughout the book I look at mistakes that I've made, which I go into with great detail. And I also try to look at a wide range of movements, not just the typical ones that people already know, but some movements that have never been written about, and also some artists and some activists that perhaps people are not familiar with, but who've had very eclectic and creative approaches to solidarity just to kind of see ways in, because it's really a creative process. So that's the goal.
- [06:17]
Clayton Gerard
Awesome. Yeah, thank you for speaking to that and really setting the tone there. And one thing that I picked up on in this book that's really just kind of been echoing my mind sense is the statement that you, right towards the beginning that the personal is historical. And as you're talking about this practice and this goal of trying to make solidarity more doable, it's happening in a very stark political and historical moment where a lot of, you know, the histories of different conquests and empires are converging at the moment. And I wonder if you could also speak to a little bit about that, of how you're highlighting these solidarity struggles and movements in order to really confront a lot of the suffering, genocide, fascism that is happening at the moment.
- [07:10]
Sarah Schulman
Well, you know, I think historically there's this concept of solidarity that is horizontal, right? So you have like there's the shop and the workers in the shop and there's the boss. And if the workers unite, then they can win better working conditions. But now the BOST is a globalized conglomerate. So these kinds of concepts. There still are places where horizontal solidarity is very important, but really we're now in a place where people have to reach across different levels of access and exclusion in order to build solidarity movements. And because of that it's inherently unequal, this relationship, and therefore it's fraught. And so that's just another reason to think about it as something that you're going to have to be constantly self critiquing and changing and listening and moving forward. I think people who are familiar with my other work know that I really do believe in conflict and I do believe in making mistakes and being self critical. And I think that real friendship and real love is critical and gives each other support for looking at ourselves critically. And this is so different than the old model. You know, we have this historical idea of the left that there's a correct line. And it's decided by the central committee. And everyone in the movement has to mouth or fight for the same analysis or the same strategy. And now we know that that has never, ever worked. There's not one example in history where that has worked, because people are different. And I know that that's like a simple thing to say, but it's the hardest thing in the world to accept. You know, I mean, I joke, I say I've been in therapy for 40 years trying to accept that other people are different. And it's a struggle. Right? But that's why we need movements that are flexible. And one of the models that I use is ACT up. You know, I was in ACT Up. I was an AIDS reporter before ACT UP was founded. I wrote a 600 page history of ACT up New York. Jim Hubbard and I have done the active oral history project. I know quite a bit about it. And it's one of the most successful social movements of our time. This is the AIDS activist movement of the 80s and 90s. But one of the reasons that it was successful was that it had a bottom line. It had a one line statement of unity, direct action to end the AIDS crisis. But after that, you could do things even if other people didn't agree with you. So let's say you had an idea and I thought it was terrible. I would yell and scream at you because New York and ACT UP was very confrontational or whatever. But in the end, I wouldn't try to stop you from doing your idea. I just wouldn't do it. Then I would get my five people to do my idea. And what this radical democracy structure produced was a simultaneity of response so that so many different kinds of people were trying different strategies and approaches with different aesthetics and different milieu at the same time. That actually that facilitation of difference is what created the paradigm shift that helped make that movement successful. You know, we're in a time now where practically every community is under attack. I mean, at my school, Northwestern, the government has cut huge amounts of money for Alzheimer's and cancer research. I mean, they get Alzheimer's and cancer. I mean, every single group of people are under attack. So if we have a politic that insists that everyone agrees, we'll never get anywhere because it's too diverse. So this is a time for working with people when you can and stepping away when you can't. And the takedown critique is not something that I think is very helpful in this moment.
- [11:14]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, I really appreciate that framing that you're giving us in that context of. Context of ACT UP and the multiple ways in which people were trying to engage in direct action and the ways that that kind of overwhelmed a lot of, you know, power systems and structures and also helped facilitate a paradigm shift, like you mentioned. And I wonder if this will be a good opportunity to kind of unpack some of the terms in the title of, like, solidarity being a fantasy and a necessity. Would you be able to maybe unspool some of that meaning of what it means that solidarity can be a fantasy? And.
- [11:52]
Sarah Schulman
Well, you know, one of the opening pieces in the book is about this movement that occurred right after Franco died. This is at the end of the 1970s, and France was going through an incredibly progressive period for women. They had new abortion rights laws. But Spain, abortion had been illegal. And even though Franco had died, the transition to democracy had not fully taken place. And it was illegal for Spanish women to leave the country to get an abortion. And so this is a story of French feminists who started an underground railroad working with, actually Argentinian women who were in exile from fascist Argentina at that time to help Spanish women come into France to get these, you know, abortions that were legal in France but illegal for them. And so the French feminists gave each woman who came a task. You know, when you go back, take a phone call from somebody who wants to come or bring in this box of diaphragms or whatever, and no one would ever do it, you know. And finally the French women realized, well, these Spanish women had lived under 40 years of fascism. They had all grown up under fascism, and they were acculturated to not be able to help in this way. So then the question was, was this project a failure? And the answer is no, because the necessity was that these women who needed abortions got them. And so the necessity of this solidarity relationship was fulfilled. But the fantasy that the French women had was that the Spanish women would become just like them. And that was impossible because they came from such different experiences. So that's what I'm trying to bring together. You know, there's rescue fantasies. There's fantasies that if you enter into solidarity with profoundly oppressed people, that you're gonna not have to pay a price. And that is increasingly not the case. I mean, we're seeing people, you know, and so at all levels, people are being alienated from their families. They can lose their jobs, like Rachel Corey, you can lose your life. You know, there is a price to pay, but the larger price is doing nothing. And we know what happens then because really the only thing that is in our control is our integrity. It's the only thing we can make expand in this period. And so I search for a kind of internal coherence. You know, that's how I try to live where I can live with myself. And that's worth a certain degree of punishment. You know, it's so interesting looking at all the appeasement that's going on right now, it's like the entire administrative class is in appeasement. Elected officials, totally in appeasement. Heads of universities. Oh my God, I've never seen a more ineffective group of people in my life. It's so pathetic. People are resigning immediately rather than fighting back or making the Trumpers kick them out. There's so much capitulation on the media. So the New York Times is a rag. MSNBC is like to the Democratic Party where it foxes to the Republicans. I mean, it's a really pathetic time of appeasement by the administrative class. But people know that the war on Gaza is wrong and millions of people are in the streets all over the world. It's incredible to watch college students who three years ago were ecstatic that they got into some fancy school and that they were entering the hierarchy and they were going to have all that status. And now you're watching people blow it up at their valedictory speech and have their diplomas withheld and they don't care because they're about something bigger than that, you know, and that's the most promising force in the moment.
- [16:12]
Blinds.com Narrator
At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
- [16:41]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. That's such a like resonant point with me because over the past, like, I don't know how long at this point, years, but like especially the past few months here in the us seeing the capitulation like you mentioned has been pretty mind boggling because it's like it resist seems to be like a natural answer to a lot of these things. But it's not what's happening. But I really appreciate how you're drawing in a more expansive view, especially from your historical perspective, to be like, this fight against, you know, what's happening in Palestine has been happening for decades. And, like, it is something to really recognize that, like, the movement and, like, grassroots organizing is spurring a lot of the conversations that, like, corporate media and politicians and everyone else is trying to quell and stifle and, like, repress. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about university as you brought that up, because this podcast is a bit more academically adjacent with the books that we talk about, but this is such a pervasive issue happening right now in the US and in other places about movements and solidarity with Palestine. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about some of the ways you analyze what's going on in the book about what's happening with university administrators and faculty, but also the movement and solidarity building that's happening on the ground from students and faculty who are really.
- [18:18]
Sarah Schulman
There's so many ways of. There's so many elements to this. The whole thing is so fascinating. But. So let's just start with this question of punishment. I think that this class of people, you know, deans, provosts, all of these, you know, college presidents, a lot of them are people who've never been punished. You know, they are at the top of their fields, right? And they got there by following the rules. And I think that on some very deep level, they're terrified of punishment. Terrified, you know, and that motivates a lot of their behavior, whether it's to capitulate or to run. Like, it was amazing to watch these college presidents be falsely accused of antisemitism on campuses where no one is being persecuted because they're Jewish, and then be driven from their jobs and resign and never say this accusation is false because they're so afraid of not being good boys and good girls that they've been all their lives. They can't just tell the truth. So that's rather astounding. All they want to do is keep the books balanced. And the faculty are like this annoying gnat that they just want to get out of the way. It's amazing watching schools now, the great book school, University of Chicago, getting rid of their humanities programs. And, you know, it just. Obviously these institutions have lost their way a long time ago. As a person who worked at CUNY for 25 years, and now I'm in a private elite school for the last three years, I really don't see any reason for there to be private universities. I mean, I'm very committed to the idea that open admissions in all forms is better for the society. And, you know, when I taught at the College of Staten island, it was open admissions. If you had a ged, you could be in my class and I would have 32 kids in a class at night school and they would bring their kids to school and all this type of thing. And now I have four. And it's, you know, I love my students, but it's not like these students that I have now are any better than those people were. It's just that they were had an accident of birth, you know, that enabled them to have access to all these privileges. So, you know, when these schools began, they lost their way many, many years ago. And that's why they're not equipped to respond. I know for myself, like in. I've been a friend of Palestine for over 15 years. And at the College of Staten Island, I was a faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine, which at that time was a mostly Palestinian organization. And in 2016, I was accused of antisemitism by CUNY. And this is as crazy as it is. I had to go before I had a hearing, you know, and I was like, I have two Jewish names. Sarah Ann Shulman. Like, why am I here? Was completely insane. And after six months, I was exonerated. But once I went through something that absurd and Kafkaesque, I ceased to be afraid. And that's why I'm wondering if these people at the top have never been punished. Like, they're so worried that if they lose their status, they're not going to exist or they're not going to know who they're looking at in the mirror. So clearly the wrong kind of person are in those positions. And I'm glad to see that people are starting to fight back. The cdc, the Fed, black women at the Fed, like any black person with a job is a DEI job as far as this government is concerned. And to see somebody stand up and say, no, you don't have the right to do this and I'm going to fight you. That's what all of these people should have been doing. So it's opening a new door, right?
- [22:19]
Clayton Gerard
For sure. And I think it's so interesting looking at as you're talking about just the gatekeeping of the university and also what that means to knowledge and who gets to know about what things. And I think that also kind of factors into what you're talking about with this Afraid to be punished is like a lot of, like, I'm from the older side of Gen Z. But so much of what I just read in your book I've never heard about before. Or like, these nuanced conversations about solidarity and the complexity of like, working across movements and struggles and everything else. Like, it's not something that we're taught about. And so to be exposed to these ideas is really a paradigm shift in a lot of ways to be like, oh, there actually is another way of, like, navigating these systems. And I think that's something that your experience with ACT UP and other activist struggles as well as, like you mentioned 15 years of being a friend of Palestine is something that really gives this book so much heft. Is that, like, you're showing us there are other ways and there's been other ways. I wonder if you could also talk a little bit about that and speaking to like the bds, the boycott divest and sanctioned campaigns and these that you're part of that are trying to shift the power dynamics and hold these institutions accountable and such.
- [23:47]
Sarah Schulman
Well, one of the things that I've learned from many years in politics is that you have to have demands that are winnable. It's very, you know, and this was, it was so interesting. When I was writing the history of Act Up, I went back and reread Martin Luther King's 1964 Letter from Birmingham Jail. And I realized that he actually employed the same approach, strategic approach that ACT UP used, even though we had never discussed that at the time. But it said, you become the expert on your issue, you come up with a reasonable, winnable and doable solution. Don't infantilize yourself asking the powers that be to solve the problem, because they're never going to do that. They don't want to solve it. They don't know how to solve it. They're not going to. You have to do that. I mean, like in ACT up, we had a problem with the FDA because they were so in ACT up, the Food and Drug Administration was not letting sick people get access to new drugs. And a playwright, this guy Jim Igoe in ACT UP studied the Food and Drug Administration designed a thing called Fast Track, parallel track, it became known as, so that sick people could get drugs. I mean, he created the solution and then ACT UP did a demonstration at the Food and Drug Administration to show through the media that we had the solution. So you need to have demands that are winnable. Now we know that boycott, divestment and sanctions are winnable because it's already been won with South Africa, universities divested from South Africa. So we know that that is a totally winnable and doable solution. I get concerned when people don't have winnable demands because movements need successes. And the left, sometimes the left does something and it doesn't work and then they do it again exactly the same way. And it's like, if it doesn't work, don't do it again. And I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. You know, some of the things we do that we should stop doing, like marching around in the rain and then standing listening to people give speeches telling us things we already know, okay, that does not help us. And yet we do it over and over and over again. But having demands that are winnable do help us. So as you know, Palestine, Palestinian civil society in 2005 started the boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement, asking internationals to boycott Israeli state sponsored institutions, anything that gets Israeli government money as a way of pressuring Israel. And one of the founders, Omar Barghouti, had been a Columbia graduate student during the anti apartheid movement. So he had learned that tactic from experiencing it. So that's something that I really am behind. I really like very concrete things. I think the reason you do actions is because you're building a campaign. And this is something that people in our movement really need to focus on. Just getting a lot of people out there to yell and scream. Sometimes you need to do that. But really you can be much more effective if you have a cam. If you're building a campaign, you have your demand, you've brought it to the powers that be. They say, no, you do actions to communicate through the media that your demand is reasonable. And that's what a campaign is. So that all your actions are building support for your reasonable demand. Without that, you're just dissipating energy over and over again. And it just takes a little more practice. But really the goal of activism is to be effective. I mean, sometimes you just have to be expressive. But in the big picture, you really want to be effective.
- [27:47]
Clayton Gerard
I appreciate that so much because that's something that I've really been trying to find my footing on. And as I mentioned without having much experience in these realms of things before the past few years, it's something to really learn about. And there's the balancing, I guess, of not giving into the purity politics of assuming everything has to be perfect, but also like making sure that demands are winnable and actionable. And it's something that I see a lot where it seems to be A lot of the invocations and the ways in which we're meant to be inspired and motivated in movement building ends and just like. And let's reflect on how we're complicit in these systems. Or let's like, think about things and like, it doesn't get to that next step of like, actually doing something about it, which I so appreciate that you're speaking to. And I wonder if you could also speak a bit about the case of Wilmot Brown. Am I saying her name correctly? And how she used the media and these different organization movement buildings.
- [28:53]
Sarah Schulman
Oh, this was so great. This wasn't my experience. When I was 22, I was writing for a feminist newspaper called Woman news. This is 1980, and this is at a time when every city in the country had a gay paper and a feminist paper and some of them had more than one. And there was this whole cadre of journalists all over the country who were covering these movements and covering these communities. And none of us got paid. But a lot of writers came out of that time. So at Woman News, we got a press release saying that a group called the New York Prostitutes Collective was holding a press conference at Queens College and we never heard of them. So my friend and I ran out there. And at that time there were only three major television stations. It was cbs, NBC and abc. They were all there with their cameras because prurient interest of New York Prostitutes Collective. So this woman steps out, Wilmette Brown. She's obviously a butch lesbian, this black woman. Now at that time, you hardly saw women on tv to see a black butch lesbian on tv, no. And she steps out and she goes, the New York Prostitutes Collective is announcing that we are raising our prices for the Democratic Convention. And I was like, this woman is brilliant. Maybe there were four people in the New York Prostitutes Collective. I don't know if there even were more than one, but. But this all went out on like the five o' clock news. And so many people saw this. And you know, and it's like she was so smart, she manipulated their sexism. And I'm sure many people were able to charge more at the Democratic Convention because they saw it on the five o' clock news. And I just learned a lot from that. You know, a few people can do a lot and can have a big impact. I mean, act up. At its height, Active's largest demonstration was only 7,000 people. And you know, at its height it was between three to 700 people. It never was a mass movement. Even like my collaborator of 40 years, Jim Hubbard and I, we did the Act up oral history project. So just for people who are listening, it's actuporalhistory.org so for 18 years, we interviewed 187 former members of ACT UP, long form interviews. We put all the interviews online for free. We put all the transcripts online for free. 14 million people have gone to that website. 700,000 people have downloaded those transcripts. We're just two people. A small group of people can accomplish a lot if you are effective. One of the reasons that Jim and I have been able to be so effective, we co founded the Mix Festival, which is all, you know, thousands of people have shown their work there. We've historicized ACT UP in a way that I think has made it very accessible to new generations, is because if I say to him, I'm going to do this on Wednesday at 3 o', clock, I do it on Wednesday at 3 o' clock so he knows it's going to happen so he can plan something for Wednesday at 4 o' clock knowing that I'm going to keep my word. And if you just keep it at that level, just keep your promises, you can get so much done. You know, in the Lesbian Avengers, which was a group that I co founded, the people who started the Dyke March, we had this thing we used to do at the end of every meeting where you would go around a circle and every person would say what they had promised to do during the meeting. And it was very grounding, you know, because keeping promises is part of solidarity.
- [32:34]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah. And that really speaks to the relational aspect of solidarity as well. And you have to invest in these relations and take them seriously in order to do things.
- [32:43]
Sarah Schulman
But also it produces relationships. I mean, you know, activism creates all kinds of community. I mean, people in ACT up, even people who hate each other, love each other, you know, people are bonded forever because we change the world, you know, so. Yeah, absolutely. No, I wanted to talk a little bit about the question of motive.
- [33:05]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah.
- [33:06]
Sarah Schulman
One of the things that I address in the book is this myth of pure motive. And, you know, it's a waste of energy to challenge people's motives and to say that they're not doing. They might, they may be doing the right thing, but they're not doing it for the right reason, because nobody has a right reason. In fact, I start the book with my own psycho history about like my terrible family and how that helped me identify outside of my tribe and just giving the psychological dimensions of how I was produced as a person. Because I want, you Know, it's not heroic. People don't do these things for heroic reasons. So anyway, I have a chapter in the book on Jean Genet and I really enjoyed working on this. So he is the great gay French novelist who was a very bad boy and was in prison and did all kinds of things. Anyway, he was a great friend of Palestine. In fact, he's really the beginning of the openly gay queer movement in solidarity with Palestine. Palestinians knew he was queer. He was there. Arafat gave him a pass through Palestinian territories. I mean, it was a very mutually recognized relationship. He spoke in public, he did all kinds of things. He wrote a very important book on the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. When you go into his life, you start to realize that, you know, among his many motives, he was really into Arab guys. You know, most of his partners were Arab. And you're like, okay, he had an erotic interest in Arab men. Now you can say that that's bad or that's good, or it means nothing, or it means that his motives were mixed or whatever, but I'm saying it doesn't matter. What really matters is the concrete outcome of your actions. His actions were beneficial to Palestine. Palestine recognized that, and that's what's important. So I'm just trying to get rid of heroism as even a category within, within the, within the question of solidarity.
- [35:16]
Clayton Gerard
No, I appreciate that so much. And it also kind of connects how. I'm thinking a bit about how you talk about creativity too. And like you mentioned being connected with different Palestinian activists and other people around being like, we can't come up with your strategies for you. And that in itself is also connected with, with motive and the actual practice of living out solidarity. And I wonder if you could speak a bit more about just like the creativity that is needed for solidarity.
- [35:50]
Sarah Schulman
You know, one of my things is like, and I do this in a lot of my books, I try to show things that I've done wrong because, you know, I'm trying to model, like being self critical on some level. I'm sure I could be a lot more self critical than I am, but I'm trying. Okay, so, so one of the examples that I show that I really was wrong about was when I first met with Omar Barghouti, that's one of the founders of the BDS movement in Ramallah in Palestine, in the West Bank. I was so moved by everything he said. And I was like, omar, I want to do help you. Tell me what should I do? And he's like, well, you're Creative. You'll think of something, you know. And then later, I had the exact. I repeated the same error a few years later with Haneen Mikey, who at that time was the director of a Palestinian queer organization called Al Khaus. And I was like, what do you want me to do next? And she's like, it's not my job to think up your strategy. And I was like, oh, I had to be stupid twice and be told off twice. But they didn't say, I'm never going to talk to you again, Sarah, because you're trying to make us do your work. They were just like, no, that's not my job. And then finally I was like, oh, okay. You know, it had to be repeated before I could understand that it's my job to think of my strategy because I'm working in my context. And this is why I reprinted in the book this really fantastic document that was printed by the BDS movement where they talk about a kind of radicalism that's actually viable. And they give. They, you know, aside from. They also say make demands that are winnable, but they also say, don't factionalize. I mean, the Palestinians putting out this document, this was for student activists. Don't factionalize. If you don't like what those people are doing, don't do it. You don't know what their situation is. Every campus is different. Certain things can be won on some campuses that can't be won on others. There were some university presidents who brought in the police and beat up their own students and arrested their own faculty. There were other people who negotiated. In our school, there was a negotiation to produce scholar at risk positions. So different things are possible in different places. Don't go around putting people down for situations you don't totally understand, because this is not that kind of movement. This is a movement of all different kinds of. It's like if you're a professor at Harvard, you don't want to lose your money and you don't want your students to be arrested. You're from Salvador. You don't want to end up in Uganda, right? So you have two groups of people with very little overlap. I'm sure there is some overlap, but not much. But they have the same forces that oppose them. They're being oppressed by the same forces. So there has to be some alignment. But to ask these two very different kinds of people to have any kind of identical politics is absurd. It's like the Catholic Church, you know, I hate the Catholic Church, but now we have this new pope who's very good on immigration. And he is sending people from the church into the courts, you know, in Chicago and places like that. And that's fantastic. It doesn't mean that I would stand with them in some anti abortion way. I absolutely wouldn't. But you have to be able to meet people when you have agreement. It's just. It's a kind of maturity, you know.
- [39:16]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, that's so important. And I really want to also focus on a lot of the practicality that you mentioned and like realizing what it looks like to be in solidarity. And it kind of goes with what we've been talking about. But one of the quotes that I grabbed from the book, you say, quote, grasping that solidarity is more relational than heroic, makes it more possible, which really speaks to what we're talking about with purity of motive, purity of the politics and everything else. But you also provide three guideposts for being an active solidarity. And those are intervention, listening and being effective, which we've like touched on in different ways throughout the conversation. But I wanted to kind of open it up to see if you could dive in a bit more of like living those guideposts out. Like, what does it mean to be intervening or listening and being effective? And how can we, like, you know, have concrete actions to do so?
- [40:17]
Sarah Schulman
Well, you know, I was born in 1958 and I come from a Holocaust family, and I was born 13 years after the end of the Holocaust, which is not much. And when my family talked about things, they talked about how other people had just stood by and let this whole thing unfold. And so from the time I was born, I knew about bystanders, that bystanders could be the most dangerous people on earth, you know. And so when you're talking about people who need solidarity, reaching across privilege levels, right, to create unequal people coming from unequal spaces, having to work together. The two main groups are bystanders and what I call conflicted perpetrators. And that would be like me, that would be like people in Jewish Voice for Peace, People who that genocide is being committed in our names. People who probably at some time in our lives participated in or swallowed Zionism or Zionist propaganda without questioning it, and who have to go through a transformational process to step away from that role and to switch sides, basically. And in order to do that, you have to listen. It's very hard to hear Palestine. I just did a 20 city book tour in the spring. I'm about to go out again. And it was really interesting to go around America talking about Palestine. It was fascinating because There are a lot of decent people out there and they don't have access to information and they really want to understand because unless you watch Democracy now, basically there is no American news source that is reliable and people don't know how to get the information and put it together. So listening to Palestine is really difficult. You have to go on Twitter, you have to watch Al Jazeera, you have to read the Guardian, you have to read Electronica Tifada, you have to go to all these different sources to try to grasp what is going on. But there are a lot of books. One thing that's really interesting about this movement is that groups like Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice for peace are over 30 years old. These movements have produced books, they have produced strategies, boycott, divestment, sanctions, they've produced concepts, pink washing. They've done a lot of work to build an infrastructure for movement so that people who are coming into it today have a lot of tools, but they have to get them. So that's where listening comes in and, you know, intervening. And we've discussed this at the top is a risk taking process. And yes, people might look down on you and they might say bad things about you, they might make false accusations. You could lose your status, you could lose your access. Maybe you wanted to have your play done and maybe the person who producing those plays doesn't like your politics about Israel and your play is not going to get done. You know, yeah, maybe your dreams will not come true. It's true. But look at what happens if you're complicit with mass murder and look at how many people are suffering, I mean, every single day. And that both of our political parties have created this situation. So the only people we have to turn to are each other because there's almost no one at the top. And I say this hoping that Mamdani is going to be the mayor of New York and New York will come back. New York will be the cool place again and he will stand up to ICE because we are a sanctuary city and we're not supposed to cooperate with ice And a lot of good things can happen. But right now we don't have someone like that. So it's up to us.
- [44:13]
Clayton Gerard
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that and just hearing your perspectives from working in ACT UP for being involved in these activist struggles for many decades that like really does provide a necessary perspective on what this can look like. Because I mean, as you're mentioning, we don't hear these stories from, you know, the powers that be because that challenges their place. So I really appreciate that and to kind of go along with that. I wanted to see if there's anything that we haven't yet had a chance to discuss that you want to make sure is in this conversation that people hear about.
- [44:53]
Sarah Schulman
I'd like to end with this. You know, when AIDS was first identified by Science, which is 1981, gay men were a profoundly oppressed group. You know, today we have Peter Thiel's of the world and all of that, but people had no basic rights. Gay sex was illegal. You could lose your job, you could lose your apartment. Familial homophobia was the norm. Street violence was like a form of public entertainment called gay bashing. And these people who were very oppressed joined together and forced the country to change against its will. And they did it by being effective. And I'm privileged because I was in a movement that succeeded to some extent, so I know that they can. And that's where I get all my optimism from. It is possible it doesn't happen tomorrow, but solidarity is a way of building infrastructure for the future.
- [45:54]
Clayton Gerard
Awesome. Thank you for speaking to that. That's so important and so important here at the moment as well, when things look very dire. And as we're wrapping up, if listeners are interested in learning more about the issues that you're discussing, obviously, as we mentioned at the top, you have a long list of books that you've already worked on, but are there other resources that you would guide people to to learn more about these issues and how to live in solidarity and be in solidarity?
- [46:27]
Sarah Schulman
Well, you know, like I said, there's the Palestinian press, electronic intifada. There's, I watch Al Jazeera. There's a lot of information there. There's groups like Palestine Legal, which is an incredible organization. I mean, anyone who is harassed by the government, defended by Palestine Legal, Jewish Voice for Peace now has 35,000 members, which is a hell of a lot for an anti Zionist pro BDS Jewish organization. And there's a huge group of people working for Mamdani to get him elected in the fall. So there's a lot of places to plug in and build relationships and create the infrastructure that could become the way we all live in the future.
- [47:11]
Clayton Gerard
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today and speaking about your new book, the Fantasy and necessity of Solidarity. I appreciate so much all the work that you put into this book and the information and insights that you share and hope listeners will pick it up and be sure to learn about how we can live in solidarity. So thank you so much for joining me today.
- [47:32]
Sarah Schulman
Great. Thank you. Take care you this well.