February 6, 2011

Broadcast Date: 
Feb 6 2011

A look back at Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation, and his profound impact on community organizing in the United States, with Nicholas von Hoffman, author of Radical, a colorful new memoir of von Hoffman's decade as Alinsky's right hand man; plus scholars Francis Fox Piven and Peter Dreier weigh in on what Alinsky means to progressives — and to the far right.

Episode segments
  • Ten Years with Saul Alinsky
    National Politics, Domestic Policy, Civil Rights
    Nicholas Von Hoffman, the author of Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky, spent 10 years as Saul Alinsky's top community organizer before moving on to a distinguished career in journalism at the Chicago Daily News, the Washington Post, CBS radio and tv, The New York Observer and the London Spectator.  He is also the author of numerous books
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Probably no one has had a greater impact on what we know today as community organizing, the crucible that helped shape Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton and organizations like the Industrial Areas Foundation and Acorn, than Saul Alinsky.  Beyond the Pale talks with Nicholas von Hoffman about what it was like to be an organizer for Saul Alinsky in the Chicago of the1950s, and about Alinsky the man, and his approach to, and rules for, organizing.

  • Saul Alinsky's Legacy
    National Politics, Domestic Policy, Civil Rights

    Frances Fox Piven is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  An activist-scholar she is an expert on the development of the welfare state, political movements, urban politics, voting, and electoral politics.  She is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is The War at Home: The Domestic Causes and Consequences of Bush's Militarism 

    Peter Dreier is E. P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program, at Occidental College in Los Angeles . He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City His next book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, will be published in late 2011 by Nation Books. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Saul Alinsky's organizing model has been demonized as well as copied by the right and lauded as well as critized by the left.  In this segment of Beyond the Pale we talk about this dual legacy with activist scholars Frances Fox Piven and Peter Dreier.