By:
Ellen (merekezet tochniot), Mat (gizbar) and
Rachel Jenkins-Stevens(gilboa)
Community Garden
Street Party
New York is full of
community gardens. These are generally vacant lots in the middle of the city
which have been leased from the city and turned into green space. Schools often use these gardens for projects
and they are open to the public. Recently the city of New York decided to take
back the gardens to ‘develop them’ and will action them off to real estate
moguls in the beginning of May. To
protest the senseless destruction of greenery, a protest/party was staged. The protest/party started at a beautiful
community garden on 5th St in the East Village in Manhattan. Everyone was dressed up in crazy garden
costumes, a marching band warmed up and the kids who had come earlier for face
painting and hat making ran around in the light drizzle. After congregating at
the garden we all marched a few blocks to a busy street where the party started
in earnest. The street was blocked off,
chalk was given out to draw on the sidewalks as were cards explaining what to
do if you got arrested. The band
played, fire jugglers juggled, stilt walkers walked and everyone danced.
Eventually a number of people were arrested but they left behind a street
covered in chalk drawings of trees and flowers and a sense that the community
was not without concern for itself. -e
Score 9.5 out of 10
Brooklyn
Bridge March Against Police Brutality
(for more info see last month’s B’Tnua)
Police brutality in New York
is a serious issue. Many young visible
minority men have lost their lives at the hands of brutal and racist police
officers. Most recently an unarmed
Giuanian man named Amadou Diallo was shot by police. To protest these actions a march across the Brooklyn Bridge was
staged. We missed the march, but Mat
(our Gizbar) Rachel and I made it to the rally at Federal Plaza where the march
was to finish. Once everyone arrived, Amadou Diallo’s father, the former mayor
of New York David Dinkins, Al Sharpton and others spoke to the crowd. In many ways this was a more mainstream
protest than others had been as the focus was about how to work within the
system to create change, but it got a lot of people out to support a very
important cause. -ef
Score 7.5/10
Millions For
Mumia
This past Saturday, I headed
down to Philadelphia to join the Millions for Mumia (Abu-Jamal) protest for the
black panther, who was convicted of killing a white police officer and has been
on death row for sixteen years. There
is a lot of controversy about the case because there is a lot of evidence that
Mumia did not get a constitutional trial.
He has also become a symbol for the anti-death penalty movement to
organize around. We spent the sunny
Saturday outside city hall, first spending a couple of hours listening to many
speakers and talking to the thousands of activists who were there passing out
literature and having great radical conversations. We ran into a lot of Habonim ma’apilim (workshop 47 was
especially well represented) as well as other college aged friends living on
the East Coast. After the opening rally
we marched around the downtown area for about two hours, cheering and chanting
in unison with the other Mumia supporters. It was great to feel and see so many
different kinds of people and radical causes being represented in one place,
from around the country (and Canada!). At
the end of the day we were happy and exhausted. Some of the speeches had left a bit to be desired, but a good
time was had by all.
DLF
Hokey-Pokey Dance Protest
In the 1920s a cabaret law
was established in New York which stated that dancing was only allowed in
places with a cabaret license. Recently
the Mayor of New York brought this law back out of obscurity and started
closing down public places where people are found dancing unlicensed. Really.
Just like Footloose. The newly founded DLF (Dance Liberation
Front) is opposed to this and so organized a protest dance. Everyone met in downtown New York dressed in
wacky costumes and did a conga–line dance to city hall where we all created the
largest hokey-pokey circle ever. The organizers
(one dressed like a space-aged mouse in pink platform boots) spoke about the
freedom to move and the ridiculousness
of defining what is dance as well as about the racist origins of the law. They then presented a list of demand
including one requiring that every employee of the city of New York take a 4PM
dance break. -ef
Score 7/10
Take Back the Night
I went to the recent Take
Back The Night rally Barnard and Columbia on the Upper West Side. I marched with about 1500 other women
through the streets chanting “whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes
and no means no” and other such raucous cheers and then we met up with a whole
bunch of sympathetic men who had been at a men’s meeting talking about their
feelings and experiences with sexual violence. We all marched together to a big
lawn where a mic was set up for a speak out.
At the speak-out women could come up and speak about their experiences
with rape and other kinds of sexual violence.
The idea of the speak out is that we can’t begin to solve any problems
that we don’t talk about and The night was lots of fun (who doesn’t love to
march through the middle of the street yelling with their 1500 closest feminist
friends?) and left me with a great feeling of solidarity and empowerment. –rjs
Score: 8/10
Spencer Tunick’s Public Photography Project
One morning at 6:15AM, around 200 people, myself
included, gathered at the intersection of 47th St. and Broadway.
Spencer Tunick, a local photographer, had planned to take a photo of a large
group of people lying naked in the street. The event served a dual purpose of
being an artistic vision, as well as a public statement against the
‘sterilization’ of New York that has been going on under Mayor Guiliani. When
Spencer gave the word, I, along with 200 other people, disrobed, and rushed
into the street to lie down side by side, covering the entire street from 46th
to 47th. The entire event: disrobing, running to the street, getting
out photo taken, running back to the sidewalk, and getting dressed again, took
about 1 ˝ minutes. Tunick was arrested before he got the shot, and his camera
was seized, but there is no doubt we will try again. – m
Score: 9.5/10