1.

ABE OSHEROFF, 1915-2008: HE LED A RICH LIFE OF ACTIVISM
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
April 6, 2008

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/358021_obitosheroff07.html

Abe Osheroff's start to more than seven decades of political activism -- fighting the good fight for what the left calls social justice and what he called radical humanism -- started by helping evicted tenants during the Great Depression.

His struggle sent him to Spain in the 1930s, where he took up arms against fascism and shared drinks with Ernest Hemingway; to Mississippi at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; to Nicaragua in support of the Sandinista regime in the 1980s; and in 2003, to the campus of the University of Washington and to meetings across Seattle, rallying opponents of the war in Iraq. Along the way, he protested militarism and repression in Vietnam, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, and Panama.

Osheroff's life journey ended Sunday morning when he suffered a heart attack at his North Seattle home, friends said. He was 92.

"What always impressed me about Abe was the warmth and love he exuded and his courage to fight injustice," friend Howard Gale said. "He was truly an independent thinker in terms of confronting injustice."

Born to Jewish immigrants Oct. 15, 1915, Osheroff graduated from City College of New York and headed for the coal-mining country of Pennsylvania and Ohio as a union organizer. In 1937 -- motivated by newsreel footage of Nazi planes bombing the undefended city of Guernica -- Osheroff left to fight in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the 3,000 American volunteers who tried to defend the leftist democratic government of Spain against Gen. Francisco Franco and his allies Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Though he had no experience as a filmmaker, he decided to make a documentary decades later about Franco's Spain and bribed U.S. TV networks for archival footage with "a hunk of money and a bottle of booze." In 1974, his film, "Dreams and Nightmares," was shown at a festival in then-communist East Germany and was given the festival's top prize.

"Dreams and Nightmares" set Osheroff off on what amounted to a new career: traveling to universities to lecture and show his film. He also made presentations at high schools.

"I went to one of his lectures, and he knew the kids' language," friend Joe Colgan said. "You could see the respect they had for him after learning what he did. He really could inspire young people to follow their heart."

Colgan, whose son was killed in Iraq, met Osheroff after the longtime activist wrote him a letter. In April 2006, they and five others staged a peaceful 27-hour sit-in at Sen. Maria Cantwell's office.

Friends said Osheroff, who moved to Seattle in 1989 after passing through, had been in declining health in the past few years.

"But his head always worked well," Colgan said. "He was always sharp as a tack."

His life story is so rich, it almost sounds unbelievable.

He worked as a carpenter in Brooklyn, N.Y., and ran unsuccessfully in 1940 as a Community Party candidate for the Legislature. After Pearl Harbor, he volunteered with the Army in World War II. He was an FBI fugitive and went underground when the agency rounded up suspected communists. He traveled to Mississippi for Freedom Summer and his car was firebombed the night he arrived.

Late last month, he went with friends to San Francisco where he was one of the few survivors honored at the unveiling of the country's first Abraham Lincoln Brigade monument.

"One of the things that impressed me was he was not a dogmatist; he was not simply an apologist for everything the left did," Boston University historian Howard Zinn told the *Seattle P-I* in 2004. "He was still a radical, but he was not going to be hemmed in by ideology."

Friends said Osheroff, who had three previous marriages before meeting his longtime partner, Gunnel Clark, is survived by seven children. Service arrangements are pending.

--Information from P-I reporter Greg Roberts is included in this obituary. P-I reporter Casey McNerthney can be reached at 206-448-8220 or caseymcnerthney@seattlepi.com.

2.

MONUMENT TO LINCOLN BRIGADE UNVEILED
By Cecilia M. Vega and Carl Nolte

San Francisco Chronicle
March 31, 2008

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/31/BAB6VSI4R.DTL

David Smith was a young college student with no military training when he shipped off to Spain to fight in the brutal Spanish Civil War.

On Sunday, a throng of Bay Area history buffs gave him a standing ovation and shouted "Viva Dave!" as the now-92-year-old Berkeley resident teared up and pumped his fist in the air at the unveiling of San Francisco's newest public monument: a memorial to soldiers who fought in the lost war more than six decades ago.

About 2,800 Americans battled against Gen. Francisco Franco's forces in an international force known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Today, there are just 39 survivors, and 11 of them were on hand for the unveiling of the monument, which one organizer called "an antidote to amnesia."

"Our monument is to remember a group of people who stood up to take a stand," said Peter Carroll, chairman of the board of the New York-based Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

The war, fought between 1936 and 1939, was widely seen as a prelude to World War II. The Spanish rebels fought under Franco's leadership with the support of Hitler's Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascist regime. The United States at the time was strongly isolationist, and Spain seemed far away, and its battles between the Fascists on the right and the Spanish republic on the left were difficult to understand.

The republican forces were defeated in the war and many of the Lincoln Brigade volunteers were regarded with suspicion by conservatives, particularly during the McCarthy era following World War II.

Nate Thornton, 93, remembers it well.

He and his father enlisted together and fought in Spain, where Thornton's duties included driving a truck and an ambulance to transport supplies and troops.

"I knew I was getting into a fight against the Fascists and that was the main thing," the Hayward resident said. "I was hoping I could help the Spanish government become a socialist government."

Ninety-two year old Abe Osheroff of Seattle recalled a battle in which 80 out of 250 crew members died when the ship they were on was torpedoed off the coast of Spain. On Sunday, he thanked San Francisco for erecting the country's first-ever Lincoln Brigade monument and "for making us immortal."

The monument, 40 feet long and 8 feet high, is located near the Vaillancourt Fountain on the Embarcadero, not far from San Francisco's Ferry Building.

"We picked San Francisco because the city is tolerant and progressive," said Carroll. "Standing up for what is right is a San Francisco thing to do."

The structure is made of 45 onyx panels held together by a steel structure. The translucent stone squares show scenes from the war and faces of soldiers, as well as words about the period from writers like Ernest Hemingway.

It was designed by Ann Chamberlain and Walter Hood and cost $400,000, donated by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and Veterans and Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Spanish Ambassador Carlos Westendorp y Cabeza attended the unveiling and thanked the veterans for risking their lives for his country.

"It is a monument that does justice to a heroic deed," he said.

--E-mail the writers at cvega@sfchronicle.com and cnolte@sfchronicle.com. 3.

[Excerpt]

MY MOST RECENT READING LIST
By Charlie O.

January 17, 2008

http://charlieosreadingroom.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-most-recent-reading-list.html

***

For a year now, I've conducted a series of interviews with Abe Osheroff, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and a radical activist since he was 16. To supplement our conversations, I did a bunch of reading, and discovered several titles that I would like to pass on.

Abe grew up in Brownsville, a poverty stricken Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, the compost heap that not only produced Murder, Incorporated, but also produced the initial members of the Celtics, Danny Kaye, Joseph Papp, and Alfred Kazin. In the 1950's Kazin wrote an account of returning to his old neighborhood and the memories it evokes. A Walker in the City is a wonderful recounting of a youth, of a neighborhood he couldn't wait to leave, of a place he longed to return to.

There are hundreds of books about the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, three generals staged a rebellion against the democratically elected government. Immediately the rebellion was supported by Hitler and Mussolini, making the civil war the dress rehearsal for World War II. A recent synthesis on the war is the very readable The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor. Beevor is a rabid anti-communist, and this slant hinders his judgments. Because the left has romanticized the Republic, he sets out to destroy every pillar of idealism holding up that romantic theater, but he doesn't weigh in as much on the house of horrors built by the fascists. However, the historical detail is so rich I highly recommend it with this important caveat.

In 1964, Abe raised $20,000 to build a community center for an African-American community in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. For background, I discovered Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer. It's a very readable narrative history of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, starting with the squashed efforts after World War II, and leading to the success of Freedom Summer. . . .

4.

LESSONS FROM ABE OSHEROFF AT THE END OF HIS DANCE
By Robert Jensen

April 2008

That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home.

Osheroff is remembered most for his rich life of political activism. From the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War to the streets all across the United States, he was a master strategist, energetic organizer, and courageous fighter.

But when I think about a world without Abe, it’s Osheroff-the-philosopher I will miss the most. Conversations with Osheroff were wide ranging philosophy seminars -- an inquiry into the maddening complexity of being human in an inhuman world, facing difficult questions that he always pursued with intellectual rigor and a moral accountability that he expected from himself and others. And at the same time that Osheroff was in this relentless pursuit of more knowledge and a deeper understanding, he squeezed all the joy possible out of this life. He taught and he told stories -- he learned and he loved -- with incredible passion.

First, the activism: Early in his career Osheroff organized tenants, the unemployed, and workers. In 1937 he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the U.S. wing of the internationals fighting in Spain. After Pearl Harbor, he re-entered the fight against fascism with the U.S. Army in Europe. He spent part of the 1950s moving around the country semi-underground, avoiding the FBI’s campaign to jail Communist Party members. After leaving the party in 1956, Osheroff moved to California and got involved in community organizing against real estate developers on the Venice canals. In 1964 he went to Mississippi to help build a community center. He worked behind the scenes in the Vietnam antiwar movement in California. In 1985 he went to Nicaragua with the Lincoln Construction Brigade, which he organized to build housing with a workers collective. Living in Seattle since 1989, he and his wife, Gunnel Clark, worked in that city’s antiwar movement. Osheroff continued to give talks at universities and high schools until several spinal surgeries made it increasingly difficult for him to travel. Along the way he made two films about Spain and the legacy of the civil war, the award winning “Dreams and Nightmares” in 1974 and “Art in the Struggle for Freedom” in 2000.

Second, the philosophy: Abe was a doer and talker, but rarely a writer. Perhaps the only disappointment friends may have with Osheroff is that he never wrote a book that would have left for us the lessons he took from his life. That’s why a few years ago I asked him to sit for a long interview, to make sure some of those ideas would be available. A transcript of that interview is online at:

http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html

with the full interview in a PDF file at

http://thirdcoastactivist.org/abe-osheroff.pdf

I was privileged to know Osheroff for a few years, and there are hundreds of friends and family members who knew him longer and better. I look forward to hearing their stories in the coming years, as we all collectively remember not just the things Abe Osheroff did but a spirit that embraced an uncompromising resistance and an endless love for this world. I think it was that balance between a rage against injustice and a love for the beauty of creation that was at the soul of what Osheroff called “radical humanism.”

As we face the difficult times ahead -- dealing with the mounting consequences of human arrogance and greed -- more than ever we will need to find in ourselves the strength Osheroff had to never stop fighting and never stop loving. We will need to harness, as Osheroff always did, both our hearts and our minds to the tasks ahead. We will need to remember to celebrate, as Osheroff always celebrated, both the joy and the sorrow of being human.

--Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center . His latest book is Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.