The below is a response to President Kaler’s email threatening disciplinary and legal action against students for their Gaza solidarity assembly at CWRU

Hello President Kaler et al.,

As a member of the CWRU and the Cleveland Jewish community, I am deeply disturbed by the rhetoric of this email which implies that there is rampant anti-Semitism at the protests and on our campus. Members of my Jewish communities have been standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine long before October 7. It is my duty as a person of the Jewish faith to employ our values of tikun olam (repairing the world) and pikuach nefesh (saving and valuing all lives). This includes but is not limited to being in solidarity with my Palestinian siblings in our community. For the past 7 months, they’ve watched in horror as their family members and loved ones abroad in Gaza face forced displacement, forced starvation, and extreme violence that we are priveleged enough to never be able to fully comprehend.

Our brave students are risking everything to stand up for these Jewish values of repairing the world and saving all lives. As a Jewish person, I am not afraid, I don’t feel unsafe, and I am not intimidated by seeing community members of all faiths (again, including the members of the Jewish community) come together for interfaith prayer, dialogue, study, and wellness activities. In fact, I think what we are witnessing is a beautiful display of students living out our CWRU mission of the “promotion of an inclusive culture of global citizenship.”

To reiterate, I am not threatened by the students singing, practicing yoga, praying, and gathering for meals together. What I am afraid of, however, is the increased surveillance and policing measures we are seeing all across campus. Acts of surveillance only seek to antagonize our students who are peacefully exercising their right to protest our institution’s silence and complicity in the horrors we are witnessing from afar.

President Kaler’s email regarding the student protests, sent on 5/2/2024 to intimidate the camp and slander its participants.
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We urge you to write your own response to the administration’s attacks against student organizers and their supporters:

Provost’s Office: provost@case.edu
Presidents Office: president@case.edu
Office of Student Affairs: katie.brancato@case.edu

The post Letter from a member of Case Western’s Jewish Community appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Lifelong peace organizer and trade unionist Dennis Serrette has passed away at 83.

Students here in New York and across the country are staging protests and encampments on university campuses in solidarity with Palestinians under siege in Gaza for over 200 days. The student movements are united by a common call for their institutions to divest and boycott the state of Israel, companies, and institutions complicit in Israel’s occupation and ongoing genocide in Gaza. In response to this vast mobilization of students, the university administrations at Columbia, NYU, CUNY and elsewhere have handed out mass suspensions & even threats of expulsion to students involved in the encampments, in addition to unleashing NYPD to arrest students protesting peacefully on their campuses. Tonight, we will hear from the students themselves. We will hear from Britt, a student organizer at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at CUNY City College, about the ‘Five Demands’ of the students to the CUNY administration. We will also be joined in-studio by Erin, a student at NYU and a member of the National Coordinating Committee of YDSA, to hear the latest from the NYU encampment and what YDSA is doing to meet the national moment. 

 

*This episode was recorded at 7pm Tuesday night before the NYPD sweep and mass arrests of students at Columbia and CUNY. Go out and provide jail support for the arrested students & comrades opposing genocide at One Police Plaza  

 

Link to CUNY Gaza Solidarity Statement: https://twitter.com/cunygse/status/1785677626431934751/photo/1

DSA San Diego has endorsed Power San Diego, a ballot measure to move the City of San Diego to its own municipal electric utility. The measure is currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November 2024 ballot. DSA members are helping gather signatures, including at some of the events you can find on the Power San [...]

Read More... from We can do better than SDG&E

The post We can do better than SDG&E appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America | San Diego Chapter.

In this episode, we sit with Dr. Tim Conder and Dr. Daniel Rhodes of the Black Mountain School of Theology and Community to discuss a marxist, community-centered mode of theological research, organizing, and education. Visit their website at https://blackmountainschool.org

Connecticut DSA (CTDSA) condemns the arrest on Monday morning, 4/22/2024, of over 40 protesters by the Yale Police Department (YPD) and New Haven Police Department (NHPD) at Yale University’s Gaza solidarity camp in Beinecke Plaza. We stand in solidarity with those who were arrested and all students calling for Yale to divest from apartheid Israel and its genocidal actions in occupied Palestine. We celebrate the efforts and leadership of student organizers, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, SJP chapters and other Palestine solidarity formations, Yale YDSA, and National YDSA in the growing wave of college occupations.

The successful struggle for telework, transit subsidies, alternate work schedules and similar programs was the result of the hard work of federal workers and their unions.

In this episode we meet Jonathan Soto, the DSA endorsed candidate running for New York State Assembly in the North East Bronx. Jonathan is a public school parent, an inter-faith organizer and a democratic socialist, campaigning to unseat longtime incumbent Michael Benedetto in Assembly District 82. 

This commentary by CVDSA member Tanya Vyhovsky originally appeared in VTDigger. A clinical social worker and former school services clinician, Vyhovsky represents the Chittenden-Central District in the Vermont State Senate.

Ordinarily in Vermont, we in the Senate give the governor great deference when it comes to whom he appoints to serve in his cabinet. While we may have policy differences with an appointee, the governor was elected by the people, and he deserves the benefit of the doubt when making appointments.

Not this time.

After years of methodically hinting at his preference for private schools, Gov. Phil Scott made it crystal clear where he stands when it comes to education funding here in Vermont. By choosing a former executive of a for-profit charter school company to be his next education secretary, he is finally saying the quiet part out loud — public education money should be able to flow freely to private and religious schools.

After meeting with the nominee, it is clear to me that she is very smart and accomplished. However, she is not qualified to lead the Vermont public education system past this inflection point and into the future. The nominee’s scant experience in public schools does not give me confidence in her ability to strengthen our public schools in this time of turmoil, and it further shows the governor’s lack of commitment to our public schools. 

Couple that with a State Board of Education that seems willing to at the least be complicit in the governor’s agenda to privatize our schools. This nomination raises alarm bells that should give every one of us who cherishes our local public schools great pause.

I have always been proud that in the state of Vermont, the Constitution guarantees quality public education for all children. That imperative has been carried out over the centuries by dedicated educators, volunteer school boards, administrators, parents, communities and others who believe — rightly — that education for all Vermont children is a valuable asset to all of us.

Indeed, our local public schools — despite assertions to the contrary — deliver the goods year after year, preparing our children with the tools to be happy, healthy and successful in whatever life they choose.

But that egalitarian opportunity is in danger as private and religious schools ramp up their ongoing efforts to co-opt taxpayer dollars for private gain. 

This comes with the tacit approval of the governor and, as of two years ago, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. Those justices, in Carson v. Makin, made it clear that states like Vermont that give publicly funded vouchers to private schools must also open the public purse to religious schools as well. 

I am profoundly disappointed that we as a Legislature have failed to address this very real threat to our public schools.

It will further undermine our public education system if the charter school company executive chosen by the governor becomes the next guardian of Vermont public schools. If confirmed by the Senate, she will have a compliant pro-private-school State Board of Education to remake rules that will not only allow those schools to become even more unaccountable to the public, but to expand the amount of public resources flowing in their direction and further undercutting our top-in-the-nation public school system.

I am not alone in my deep concern over this nominee. Many of my colleagues have expressed reservations about this appointee, and I’ve heard from hundreds of Vermonters who say charter schools and the further privatization of public education are just plain wrong. 

The governor and those who work in his cabinet want us to believe that opposition to his appointee is personal, sexist or based on where she came from. But those accusations — taken directly out of the D.C. GOP handbook — are meant to distract from the nominee’s deep experience as an executive for a for-profit charter school company that has siphoned public education dollars from students and into the pockets of shareholders, and her utter lack of experience leading a public school system.

We will, as promised, fully explore the nominee’s record. We will conduct hearings and respect the nomination process. But as we do so, we must ensure that the next education secretary is dedicated to protecting, preserving and supporting our local public schools and the 90% of Vermont kids who rely on them every day.

As of our March 7th general meeting, DSA Cleveland has resolved to adopt a Palestine priority plan for the next six months.Though we have been showing up the last several months (and beyond), this represents a significant deepening of our solidarity work. Our chapter now has a dedicated leadership body elected to implement Palestine work according to a specific plan, with measurable goals and specific democratically decided tactics. This priority status also renders this work the near-exclusive focus of our chapter’s Steering Committee and our membership as a whole. The time is now to join with your comrades and demand a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

On October 15th our Chapter’s Steering Commitee released a statement calling on “all people of conscience to oppose genocide in Gaza”, calling for an end to occupation and apartheid in Palestine, and calling on our fellow DSA members, chapters, and leaders, to stand proud against intimidation, death threats, legal attacks, slander, and misinformation. We are proud to say that our organization has done so. For the last five months, since the conclusion of our Abortion rights priority campaign, Cleveland DSA has joined our allies in the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community at city hall, on the highways, and in the streets protesting Israel’s cowardly genocide against the Palestinian people. In December we organized a fundraiser concert generating over $3.5k for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. We have devoted ourselves to the study of Palestinian history, and hope to deepen our education further.

Join us to launch this project with a fundraiser concert at the Happy Dog! Friday at 9pm, we’ll raise money for UNRWA and hear from local bands The Last Gasp, Arms & Armour, GRVE and Mud Whale. Then join us at County Council on Tuesday at 5pm to demand divestment from Israel Bonds – check our calendar for details.

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