Thursday Evening in Midtown: Gabriel Thompson and "Working in the Shadows" at the Mid-Manhattan Library

Gabriel Thompson is one of America's finest progressive journalists, and this evening at the Mid-Manhattan Library, we got to hear him discuss his most recent book, Working in the Shadows.

Time Magazine's review lays its premise out pretty well:

Whether or not they choose to acknowledge it, most people know that immigrant and migrant workers are paid poorly in the U.S. What they may not know is how hard these laborers toil for their earnings. That's why Gabriel Thompson, a journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., spent months undercover working alongside mostly Guatemalans and Mexicans in the lettuce fields of Yuma, Ariz., at a chicken plant in rural Alabama and as a delivery guy for a restaurant in New York City. His goal was not to survive on his income, which he quickly realized was nearly impossible even at the lowest standard of living, but to remain at each job for two full months, no matter how bad the back pain, how sickening the smell of raw meat or how crippling the fatigue. Thompson succeeds--mostly. He gets found out and fired from the chicken plant a week before his self-imposed deadline and hangs up his delivery bike after seven weeks of risking his life in New York City traffic. Therein lies perhaps the only blemish on the book's premise: Thompson has the luxury to quit.

Over three years ago, after seeing Gabriel Thompson at Bluestockings, we read his book There's No José Here, a masterly study of Mexican immigrants in Brooklyn which let their stories speak for themselves in an eloquent way that made it so much more effective than the typical rhetoric on the subject of immigration, even from pro-immigrant politicians.

Tonight at the Mid-Manhattan Library, Gabriel spoke to a fairly large crowd, most of whom were, uh, weren't born yesterday (although his own three-month-old son came close) about his year in these low-wage jobs that, after hearing him read his excerpts (we're definitely going to read the whole book), sound so horrific that we wouldn't take them if they paid the income of a hedge fund manager.

Gabriel Thompson is a wonderful journalist: he's eloquent and doesn't get in the way of his reportage; he cares a lot for ordinary people and their struggles; and he can see the larger picture and make it clear for his readers. He was as thoughtful in answering questions (for a really long time) as he is in his writing. We're going to try to find Working in the Shadows tomorrow.

Thursday Morning in Downtown Brooklyn: "We Are All Arizona" March over Brooklyn Bridge gathers at Cadman Plaza

Along with an enormous crowd of people from all walks of life, we gathered early this morning at Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn for the "We Are All Arizona" march over the Brooklyn Bridge and rally at Foley Square.

Here are some of the pics we took in Brooklyn

before our cell phone memory gave out just before we were about to get on the bridge.


Yesterday, in what was no surprise to anyone familiar with constitutional law, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction to halt today's implementation of the xenophobic, racist, and hateful Arizona immigration law,

SB 1070, from going into effect. (We turned on the news at 3 p.m. expecting to hear about the injunction, and we were not disappointed.)

But today is a nationwide protest against Arizona,

which is appealing the ruling to the Ninth Circuit

and no doubt the final decision will come from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Demonstrations still went on all over the Cactus State and the entire nation in a National Day of Action Against SB 1070,

including our protest starting in downtown Brooklyn this morning.

Luckily the rain cleared up about an hour before.

We waited for about half an hour for everyone to arrive before the march began.

It was great to see so many people of all ages turn out, both individuals with homemade signs and members of religious, political, and social action organizations.





We'll let the news media give the coverage of today's event,

but it really made us feel good to see so many folks come out and support Arizona's beleaguered immigrant community and stand up for justice and the American way of doing things.

Our event today in New York was organized by the New Sanctuary Movement, Families for Freedom, Immigrant Defense Project,

Churches United to Save & Heal, Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights,

DRUM-Desis Rising Up & Moving, Black Institute, VAMOS Unidos,

American Friends Service Committee, and Wind of the Spirit (New Jersey).

It was sponsored by, among others, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition,

Damayan, Sistas and Brothas United, NY Immigration Coalition, World Can’t Wait, Sikh Coalition,

Urban Youth Collaborative, Immigrant Communities in Action, Center for Immigrant Families,

United for Peace and Justice, South Asian Americans Leading Together,

Boycott Arizona Coalition, Muslim Consultative Network, New Immigrant Community Empowerment,

CAAAV, Center for Constitutional Rights, Peekskill Area Pastors Association, La Union,

National Economic & Social Rights Initiative, Coney Island Avenue Project, Youth on the Move,

South Asian Bar Association of NY, Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund, Adhikaar, NYS Youth Leadership Council

- and that list isn't comprehensive, as you can tell by glancing at some of the banners here.

We are a part-time Arizona resident and we vote and have a house and car in Apache Junction.

Currently we're running for the as the only candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the August 24 Green Party primary in Arizona's Sixth Congressional Distict

in the East Valley of the Phoenix metro area. We support comprehensive reform and amnesty and obviously we oppose the odious SB 1070 and are always really happy to be in this city, but today we were especially glad and proud, to be in Brooklyn, a place we've loved since we were a boy.

Thursday Afternoon in Maspeth: Charles Fine on "The Road to New York from Eastern Europe" at the Queens Library Maspeth Branch

We often are the oldest person at an event we go to, but today we attended an event geared toward seniors where we were pretty much the youngest: a talk and video on "The Road to New York from Eastern Europe" at the Maspeth branch of the Queens Library (we still like the old formal title we grew up with: Queens Borough Public Library).

It's a pretty easy trip from Williamsburg on the Q59 bus straight across Grand Street, which becomes Grand Avenue once you cross the bridge over Newtown Creek from Brooklyn to Queens. Just a few blocks from the LIE/BQE entrance/exit perpetual traffic tie-up, the library's in the section of Maspeth that looks more like the center of towns in Nassau County.

The library, like most branches in Queens, was filled to the rafters with people of all ages and all ethnic backgrounds. The meeting room, which was eventually filled, had an audience of old white people, as you'd expect given the subject matter and the description: "Historian of the Lower East Side Charles Fine traces the journey of immigrants from Poland, Russia and Lithuania to New York through video, discussion and artifacts."

Actually, the title of the lecture, "The Road to New York from Eastern Europe," was somewhat misleading, since it was entirely focused on Jewish immigration from the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement. As another gentleman with BPH said to us as we waited for restroom access afterwards, "I expected to be more ecumenical. I'm Jewish, but this is Maspeth, after all."

Well, we guess they were looking to educate people who might not know about the massive Jewish immigration from what's now Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, etc. But since we'd passed a branch of the Polish and Slavic Credit Union nearby on the bus ride down Grand Avenue, you might think the presentation would cover the many non-Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

No matter. Charles Fine was, as he'd probably say, a hamishe guy, someone obviously caught up in the lure of the Lower East Side of World of Our Fathers, and he showed a nice 17-minute video on the mass immigration featuring the classic Roman Vishniac photos of shtetl life and scenes from the Lower East Side, the mostly densely populated place on earth at the turn of the 20th century - when his parents (and our grandparents) were brought to the U.S. from Europe as little kids. (No one in our family lived on the Lower East Side. Our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents headed straight for Brooklyn: mostly Brownsville and then East Flatbush, Boro Park and Flatbush.) Who doesn't enjoy seeing old pics of a talis factory?

The talk hit all the highlights and was probably not news even to the most secular and un-Jewish (namely us) of Jewish Americans over thirty. Still, it was interesting to see someone who's a link to the past. (Our dad, it turns out, is just a year younger than Mr. Fine but seems like two decades younger; he doesn't care much for any of this - Dad grew up in Brownsville but the last book he read about the place was Nelson George's City Kid, not exactly his grandparents' era - nor did our mom before Alzheimer's struck. A junior high school friend, after coming to our house for the first time, said, "You are the most Christian Jewish people I've ever met.")

Still, we enjoyed hearing for the first time in over thirty years about the feud between the Litvaks and the Galitzianos, which we first learned about from a girlfriend at Brooklyn College. And Mr. Fine's reading from the 1903 constitution of the Eldridge Street Synagogue was priceless (the president has the power to grant charities monies five times quarterly, but not to exceed the sum of two dollars; the sexton must be able to prove he can read and write).

Mr. Fine - assisted by his friend Gertie - was fun, charming, and likeable, and the crowd (overwhelmingly goyim, some of his friends might say) seemed interested and appreciative. He showed his mom's naturalization certificate and unfurled a family tree created by his daughter, a Northewestern University genetic counseling expert - that was almost as long as a Torah scroll (and probably a lot more interesting).

He talked more generally about the highlights of Jewish-American history from Peter Stuyvesant's day through the Civil War, the Galveston Plan, etc. His only nod to recent immigration was mentioning that the burial societies (like our Grandpa Nat's family's Lenyin and Lachver Benevolent Association, whose name we love - though Grandpa Nat, when he died at 90 in 1988, ended up next not with a headstone in New York but under a metal footstone plaque in a cemetery in Hialeah) are today mostly active for indigent recent Russian emigres.

Mr. Fine did repeatedly stress that while his talk was about Jewish immigration, the listener might just strike out the word Jewish and substitute the nationality of his or her own ancestors, because he said the experience of all American immigrants is different mostly in the details and specific history.

When we walked out of the library, we held the door open for an entering woman in a stylish jilbab. We're grateful to the Queens Library for its existence - once we got our driver's license 40 years ago, we were at the central library on Merrick Boulevard about once a month and went more often to branches in Rockaway near our house

- and we're grateful for events like Charles Fine's talk today.