Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Judith Mahoney Pasternak, Paris-based activist-writer, is a veteran journalist in the alternative media, author of several books on travel and popular culture, and the former editor of WRL’s The Nonviolent Activist, the earlier incarnation of WIN. Her activist training was in the Second Wave of the feminist movement; since then, she has worked for peace, for social and economic justice, and for justice and self-determination for Palestine.

Editorial: My Favorite Issue

My Favorite Issue

Advocating revolutionary nonviolence is never easy. It’s adaunting task just to communicate the why and the how of turning the world upside down, of achieving profound social justice and peace using no weapons but our bodies and our faith in the rightness of the goal. The hours are long, the pay—when there is any—is low, and the task doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We who work at it can sometimes see, at a distance, glimmerings of that goal achieved; more often, it’s out of sight, maybe real in some distant future, and maybe existing only in our hopes.

Review: Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community

Doing Time for Peace (book cover)
Edited by Rosalie G. Riegle

Doing Time for Peace:
Resistance, Family, and Community
Edited by Rosalie G. Riegle
2012, Vanderbilt University Press,
408 pages, $29.95 paperback

This is oral history at its most inspiring, stories of people who have willingly gone to prison for declaring war on war, told in their own words and in the words of their partners, their children, and the members of their communities.

Classic Revisited: The China Syndrome

Still of Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome

The China Syndrome
Directed by James Bridges
1979, IPC Films, 122 minutes

March 11, 1979: The “fallout from ‘[The] China Syndrome’ has already begun,” declared the New York Times.

The phrase “China syndrome” wasn’t yet part of the national vocabulary; the Times article had to explain that the phrase had “nothing to do with China.” The article was referring, not to the potentially deadly result of the exposure of a nuclear power plant’s core, but to a soon-to-be-released film carrying that title.

WIN News

Protesters at the French Embassy in Cairo. Photo by Ellen Davidson
Winter 2010

The Gaza Freedom March in Cairo

More than 1,000 people from 40-plus countries gathered in Cairo just after Christmas, headed for a December 31 march in Gaza to commemorate Israel’s attack on Gaza in December of 2008 and to demand an end to the blockade of the besieged territory.

Only a handful—80-odd—reached Gaza. The rest, banned by the Egyptian government from crossing the border, held a week-long movable protest in Cairo.

Disarm

Afghan de-miner at work. © Disarm

Uprooting Violence

Disarm
Directed by Mary Wareham and Brian Liu
Next Step Productions/Toolbox P.C.
Available on DVD from www.Indiepixfilms.com

When peace comes, there are going to be massive casualties,” says Yeshua Moser-Pangsuwan of Nonviolence International, speaking from the troubled border between Thailand and Myanmar.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Moving the Middle

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
by Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster, 2006.
264 pages; $27, hardcover

Despite anything you may have read to the contrary, former President Jimmy Carter’s latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, continues his own and the 20th-century tradition of Christian support for Israel. (Carter, for those who have forgotten, brokered the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, under which Egypt essentially agreed for the first time to recognize Israel.)

Winning the Vote

Remembering the Ladies
Who Got Women the Vote

Winning the Vote:
The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement
Robert P.J. Cooney Jr. 2005, American Graphic Press in collaboration with the American Women's History Project; 479 pages, 960 illus.; $85, hardcover