June 21 2009

Broadcast Date: 
Jun 21 2009

The longest hotel workers' strike in U.S. history divides Chicago's Jewish community; an upsurge in violence by right-wing extremists in the United States; plus a new documentary on anti-Semitism, Look Into My Eyes, screens at Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Episode segments
  • Congress Plaza Hotel Workers On Strike for Six Years
    Labor
    Nathaniel Popper is News Editor at The Forward the national Jewish weekly newspaper, where his article about the Congress Plaza Hotel strike appeared.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Housekeeping and Restaurant workers at Chicago's Congress Plaza Hotel have been on strike since June 15, 2003.  The strike pits the hotel's Jewish owner and management (supported by their local orthodox synagogue) against a Jewish led union (Unite/Here), a Jewish union organizer, and local Jewish community activists from the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA), synagogues (including one orthodox congregation) and community centers.  

  • The Rise of Right Wing Violence
    Holocaust, Christian Right, American, Anti-Semitism
    Leonard Zeskind is the author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream.  For decades he has been writing about racism, anti-Semitism, and the extreme right in the U.S. in venues that include the New York Times, the  Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect. Zeskind is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In the months since President Obama was inaugurted, right-wing extremists have murdered nine people, including Stephen Tyrone Johns, a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.  Are we once again entering a period of right-wing violence in the U.S.?  To help us make sense of what's likely to be coming, we talk with Leonard Zeskind.

  • Look Into My Eyes Screens at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival
    Film, Arts & Culture, Anti-Semitism
    Israeli documentarian, Naftaly Gliksberg
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In  his film, Look Into My Eyes, Naftaly Gliksberg travels from Poland to France to the U.S. and to Germany to learn what anti-Semitism looks like now and how people feel about Jews and Israelis.  Look Into My Eyes can be seen at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival next on Monday June 22nd at 6:30pm and Tuesday June 23 at 4:00pm.  For the full festival schedule, click here.