- What makes people afraid in this moment is that there is a cost to solidarity.

You can lose relationships, you can lose your job.

But we all know that if we do nothing, all those things are gonna happen anyway.

I'm in a sense an optimist because I have experienced a successful movement of profoundly oppressed people, and so I know it's possible.

But we do have an incredible opportunity right now to try to articulate what it is we do want.

Where do we wanna go?

And that's a very exciting moment.

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders & Friends," the place where the people who say it can't be done take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) If asked, I will say that what distinguishes independent media from the commercial sort is that while commercial media's job is to deliver the audience's attention to advertisers, ours is to deliver the public to each other.

At the end of the day, that's what I would say we are doing here, introducing people to one another.

And in her own way, that is what today's guest has been doing throughout her long career as a writer, teacher, playwright, and activist.

In her latest book, "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity," Sarah Schulman defines solidarity as the, quote, "essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter.

Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us individually are not the only people with dreams."

Often messy, often imperfect, the actions may not achieve their stated goals, but they do add up to something structural for movements to draw on, if not now, then later.

And something personal, a sense of integrity, that Sarah says in tough times like these is the one thing that a person can actually control.

Along the way, Schulman introduces her audience to a slew of interesting people and actions as she has throughout her many decades writing journalism, novels, nonfiction books, and plays.

Sarah Schulman's nonfiction books include "Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993," "Conflict is Not Abuse," and "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity," which came out this April from Penguin Random House.

She's won a Fulbright and a Guggenheim, holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Northwestern University.

She's on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

And while we rarely see each other, she is in fact one of my oldest friends.

So, Sarah, welcome back to the show.

It is so great to kind of connect with you every time you have a new book out, and this one seems as timely and important as ever, so thank you.

- Thank you, Laura.

- To get to that question of solidarity, it's not, as you say, that image that some of us have in our head of the kind of Soviet expressionist painting of the class uniting as one to rise up against the czar.

It's something else.

What?

- Well, you know, the goal of my book is to make solidarity doable.

And my idea about how to do that is to strip away any ideas of heroism or perfectionism, anything about the requirement of pure motive, 'cause I feel like those are obstructing people from moving forward.

If we can accept that solidarity is a process of making mistakes constantly and of having to self-correct and learning how to listen and also to hear, I think it becomes more possible for people to do.

I mean, as you referenced, there is a traditional idea of solidarity as something horizontal, you know?

You have the workers in the shop and there's the boss.

And if the workers all unite, then they can win better working conditions.

But now the boss is a globalized conglomerate, so sometimes horizontal solidarity isn't enough.

And in those cases, you have to bring in other groups of people which I identify as bystanders, people who are not implicated but know that there's an injustice.

And then conflicted perpetrators like myself and people in Jewish Voice for Peace, where the killing is taking place in our names, and so we have to stand up and oppose it.

But that means that this new solidarity is inherently a relationship of inequality, and so it's fraught.

And for that reason, to expect it to be heroic or perfect or that there's no cost or that you're gonna be embraced is unreasonable.

And so in the book, I show this wide range of crazy iconoclastic creative people, and interesting, daring movements, many of which have not been historicized yet, to show that creative ideas about solidarity that are out of the box can advance us a little, in terms of building the infrastructure for the future.

- Now, I mentioned that you're on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and we've talked about their actions in the past, but Jay Saper puts it very beautifully, one of the versions of solidarity that you're talking about, in this clip after the Grand Central action in 2023 when Jewish Voice for Peace brought protestors into that great basic hall, in that busy, busy train station.

- [Reporter] Waving Palestinian flags, wearing black T-shirts, and shouting a number of chants including "Let Gaza live."

- [Protestors] Let Gaza live!

- [Reporter] The protest, organized by the group Jewish Voice for Peace, brought together Jewish New Yorkers and supporters of Palestine.

- Nobody's safety can come at the expense of another people's safety.

Right now, we're seeing that the fate of Palestinians and Israelis is intertwined, because every bomb that drops on Gaza endangers the 2.2 million Palestinians there as well as the hundred Israelis held hostage.

- So that's one model of solidarity, Sarah, one that is about finding common interest, that, I think, is exactly that question of inequality versus equality that you're getting at.

Like if you're claiming a common interest that's not necessarily the same, it's tricky.

So how do you operate in that kind of messy, imperfect environment?

- Well, one of the great things about that action at Grand Central is that it's based on a famous action by ACT UP, The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, during the first Gulf War when we occupied Grand Central Station.

And a lot of my lessons are learned from ACT UP.

I mean, I did write a 600-page history of ACT UP, and Jim Hubbard and I interviewed 188 surviving members of ACT UP over 18 years.

This is one of the most successful movements of our time.

One of the reasons they were successful is because they did not operate on a consensus model, and this is so important for where we are today.

You know, in ACT UP, there was a one-line statement of unity, direct action to end the AIDS crisis.

And basically, if you had an idea that was that, you could do it.

But let's say you had an idea and I thought it was terrible, I would yell and scream at you because ACT UP.

But in the end, I wouldn't try to stop you from doing it, I just wouldn't do it.

And then I would get my five people to do my idea.

And this simultaneity of response is radical democracy.

Radical democracy is the acceptance of difference with a bottom line, and that allows people to respond from where they're at.

Movements that try to force everybody into one analysis or one strategy have all failed historically, and there's no exceptions to that.

Basically, because people are different.

And that's what I, you know, so that's why I'm addressing the inherent inequality in the contemporary structure.

- All right, but we've got now two models of solidarity, it seems to me.

One is that model of we're all in one single class and you just have to organize all the class and we're clear who our opposition is.

The other is that we need to find our kind of common interest and find what actions suit us.

The other piece of it that you lay out so importantly in the book is that actions may not accomplish their goal, as I said at the top, but they do lay some kind of infrastructure.

And I've thought that a lot as I've watched the uprising around Gaza.

Who would've known that uprising could actually happen so quickly with so much diversity, such clarity, when it seems like just years ago you could hardly even talk about the actions of the government of Israel without being attacked.

And in fact, those conversations rarely happened.

- Well, so, you know, the movement that we're talking about, the Palestine Solidarity Movement, some of the key organizations that are still at play, like Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace, these are 30-year-old organizations.

Over decades, people have written books, built a strategy, boycott, divestment, sanctions, that's the strategy of our movement, one of the strategies, and we have concepts like pink-washing.

I mean, so much infrastructure has been built that when students have erupted in this country, they have a movement that's coherent.

And the student milieu in my view is the most moral, ethical milieu in American society today.

It's the people who are leading the rebellion against the corruption, and it's amazing to watch.

And, you know, I'm in a sense an optimist because I have experienced a successful movement of profoundly oppressed people, and so I know it's possible.

- Well, the book is rich and it's very persuasive.

And at the same time, there was a voice in the back of my head, me also now in my 60s, wondering, you know, is this our effort to make peace with the defeats that we've sustained?

Because while you describe, for example, ACT UP as a successful movement, which it was in its own moment, we now have another situation where the cutbacks to USAID are going to be costing tens of millions of deaths around the world from the AIDS epidemic that has never stopped.

We have not been able to stop the Israeli assault on Gaza, even with the support that you described.

We've elected an administration that is gonna bring hell down on communities that we care about and on our ability to function, such as, I don't think we've even seen in our lifetimes.

So how well did we do, really?

- Well, you know, that's not how you evaluate it.

I mean, right now we're in the middle of a cataclysm of fascism, and there's no quick fix and we have to understand that.

The idea that you can go in and just fix it is a supremacy concept.

What makes people afraid in this moment is that there is a cost to solidarity.

You know, it's not this scot-free thing that our privilege is gonna protect us from.

So you can lose access, you can lose status, you can lose relationships, you can lose your job.

But we all know that if we do nothing, all those things are gonna happen anyway.

So we have no choice but to try to mitigate this moment and think ahead to gradual progress towards the next.

- You also win things.

I mean, I had a guest on our show recently, one of the participants in the Columbia encampments, who said, you know, he was moved by the students that are today, a year later, threatening, you know, being willing to risk their futures.

And I was thinking, well, no, they're just choosing perhaps a different future.

And that's why I wanted you to mention what happened in 1979, in the sense that decisions that you made then set you on this path.

That has been a pretty rewarding life, it seems to me.

- That's correct.

(Laura laughs) I dropped out of school because I was arrested, but that was a great moment in my life, you know?

Because all these institutions are just hierarchies, pompous hierarchies that keep people down, these highfalutin schools that people are so glad that they get into, and there's a way that they're coming out the other end realizing that there's a lot of malarkey to those structures.

- Well, that takes me to the more glass half-full side of my own thinking about this moment, which is we are in a moment of, if not recreation, at least creative invention, to meet the needs that aren't being met by corporations, by government, by one another.

It's also a time, as you say in the book, to reimagine, and reimagine systems that we've never had.

I don't know what the timeline is on achieving them, but that's where the creativity, it seems to me, comes in.

- Well, a lot of these institutions that are being torn down in very brutal ways, that are very destructive to individuals and to society at large, these were never good institutions in the first place.

They were unjust and they were dysfunctional.

You know, things like the FBI, healthcare delivery, the NEA, which was totally inadequate, private universities, all of these things.

So we're not lamenting, we don't wanna return to these unjust structures.

So we do have, as you say, an incredible opportunity right now to try to articulate what it is we do want.

You know, where do we wanna go?

And that's a very exciting moment.

- In the current book, the role of creativity comes up over and over again in the context you've just described, but also in the artist that you mentioned.

And one person that I think of is Alice Neel, the single mother, painter, kind of countercultural character who never really got her due, but whose voice is captured in this wonderful documentary by her grandson.

She died in 2007.

Here's a clip.

- [Alice] Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity.

Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

- Used to say that her nerves are at the ends of her fingers.

They were raw and exposed.

- [Alice] I go so out of myself and into them that after they leave, I sometimes feel like an untenanted house.

- She was, to a certain extent, committing artistic suicide.

She was saying goodbye to the scenes.

- It's like you are broadcasting and nobody's picking up a signal.

- [Alice] I did my best to have everything.

Choices are difficult.

- In there, it's so moving to me how Alice Neel talks about what motivates her painting, even if it's not gonna make her money, even if it's not gonna gain her great fortune.

That's what you pick up in the book too.

Is it just inbuilt, do you think?

Or is it a function of social factors?

- You know, I really related to a lot about her, and it is characterological in a certain way.

I mean, she did have a communist background.

She came from that generation in the '30s that were very class-oriented.

She was quite poor as an adult.

So she had real politics.

But her paintings, she painted people of color.

She was a white woman who painted portraits of people of color, and it wasn't ideological.

It was because it was her neighbors in East Harlem, it was her Puerto Rican partner's family, was people that she was connected to.

And she also painted a lot of gay men.

And for years, people theorized that the reason she painted all these people who were not represented necessarily was because she had this humanist, inclusive politic.

But actually, when you analyze, and this is something that I'm doing, like, similarly to Genet, you realize that the gay men she's painted were men with quite a bit of power in the art world.

And so her impulse towards them was very different than her impulse towards her neighbors and family members.

So, you know, even in a case like that, I mean, as with everybody, I'm just trying to show that the motives are complex.

Often they come from wounds.

I know in my own case, I think they do too.

And then you try to turn them into something that's material and productive and that builds relationships with other human beings, and then I think there's a success that's achieved.

- How did you unpack your own identities over the years?

We've talked about some of them on this program, but there were clear junctures where you are required to kind of shift your self-definition or self-image.

- Well, you know, I was born in 1958, which is 13 years after the end of the Holocaust, which is not a lot.

And I come from a Holocaust family.

My grandmother, who I grew up with, had two brothers and two sisters who were exterminated.

And my grandfather's sister was murdered at Babyn Yar.

Okay, so I knew about the Holocaust since the day I was born.

And, you know, my family emphasized the issue of bystanders, that people stood by, who knew what was occurring and allowed this to occur.

But then my own family was also extremely homophobic and also sexist, to the point that I would say was pathological.

And this went counter to the values that they had taught me.

So I had a huge contradiction there that I had to grapple with.

And as I went through my life, I mean, I really was, been outta my family since I was about 16, I didn't have that kind of mythology about family, that kind of loyalty to the family system that Zionism, for example, is based on.

I mean, you're supposed to privilege people because you're biologically connected to them, and I didn't have that.

So in a way, I was in a position where I could hear more at an earlier date than I was prepped for.

And similarly, going through AIDS.

The virus that came to be known as AIDS was identified in 1981, and I became an AIDS reporter in like '82 or '83.

So by the time I joined ACT UP in '87, I'd already been writing about AIDS for about five years.

So, you know, going through this experience, not only a mass death experience, which is the phrase, but AIDS itself, as you know, was a horrible, horrible disease, and you're watching young people suffer terribly.

And especially when you're in a movement like ACT UP, you're surrounded by dying people, it's very intense, and there's a sense of abandonment there.

And then when I confronted the Israeli occupation of Palestine, something resonated for me emotionally between that and the AIDS experience, because what I felt that was similar was that people who were endangered were being falsely depicted as dangerous.

- Have you had to reimagine your self-concept in the course of your life as an activist?

- A million times.

I mean, getting involved with Palestine was a huge thing for me.

I mean, what happened was I had written a book about homophobia in the family.

And I was invited, this is like 2009, I was invited to Tel Aviv University to give a talk on the book.

And I had a homophobic Jewish family and I wanted to go.

And then a Jewish Turkish colleague of mine was like, "You can't go, there's a boycott."

And I'm like, "What boycott?"

Because the boycott happened in 2005, so this was four years later and it hadn't reached me.

So my colleague was like, "Well, find out about it."

So I thought, okay, I'll find out about it.

So I emailed Judith Butler.

Now, this is why people should answer every email, because Judith Butler wrote me back in three hours and sent me all these links and articles and things.

And by the time I read everything that they had sent me, I was like, "I can't go, there's a boycott."

So I said publicly why I wasn't gonna go.

And then suddenly, I received this email from someone named Omar Barghouti in Ramallah, West Bank, and I found out that he was one of the founders of the BDS movement, because he had been at Columbia when you were there- - That's right.

- During the anti-apartheid movement and he saw how that had worked.

And he was like, "Professor Schulman, thank you for taking this principled stance."

And I thought, uh-oh, I don't know what he thinks about gay people.

So, through a whole labyrinth of people, I got in touch with two queer Palestinian organizations, Al Qaws, who at that time had a number of branches in the West Bank, and Aswat, which was Queer Palestinian women.

And they said, you know, "Come on your own dime, read at anti-occupation venues, and come meet with us in Ramallah and also meet with Omar."

So I arrived, and I didn't know what I was doing.

I just went on instinct.

I made so many mistakes, it was unreal.

I read in an anarchist vegan cafe, as I was instructed, and then a bunch of an anarchists drove me to this Palestinian village called Bil'in, and this is when they were building the wall and they were having demonstrations every Friday.

And I was in this demonstration.

And then suddenly, the Israeli soldiers come.

And I look at them, and they look exactly like me, of course, because if my grandparents hadn't gotten visas, that would've been me.

And I'm sort of staring at them, and then they shoot tear gas at us.

And the Palestinians take a cut onion out of their pockets and hold it to their noses to override the tear gas.

And suddenly, like, my head spun like I was in "The Exorcist."

And this whole concept of who is we completely changed for the rest of my life.

And I went to Ramallah and I met the queer Palestinians and I met Omar, and then I made my big mistake and I said, "Omar, what should I do?"

And he said, "You're creative, you'll think of something."

And that was when I started to learn, it took me years to figure this out, that it's not their job to tell me my strategy, you know?

I have to build it for myself based on my own concept, my own context.

- And part of that strategy turned out to be coming on what was then "GRITtv," a previous iteration of this program.

- With Omar.

- With Omar.

- Yes, and you- - And talking about exactly this.

- It was on your show where he made his public statement supporting gay rights, and that was part of his vision for Palestine.

- That's right, which turned around a lot of heads in this country about who were the forces in Palestine to be aligned with.

- Exactly.

- I have to say, the closing passages of your book are so beautiful.

I'm inclined to ask you to read them.

But because you might not have the book handy, I don't know if you do- - I don't.

- I will just quote.

You say, "There's a kind of happiness that comes from trying to be a consistent person, and sometimes that's the only obtainable goal, to try.

After all, there is a pleasure in thinking for yourself that, once it finds its home, becomes rejuvenating, fascinating, and life-giving.

No power structure is stagnant.

Healing takes place in relationship, and that is personal and also social.

New approaches, understanding, and conversations are needed now and will always be needed.

Solidarity is our way of life."

As you think about this moment and what we need, what stands out?

And are you finding what you need?

- You know, we're not winning right now, but we do have a vision, and I think my goal for myself is to be internally coherent, which I feel that I am.

- Internally, just for people that are listening carefully, not eternally- - No, internally coherent.

And as you opened this conversation with, the only thing we can control is our own integrity, so expand it.

- Sarah Schulman, thank you so much.

The most recent book is "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity."

It's out now.

- Thank you.

(cymbals crashing) - The full significance of the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband is just sinking in.

And there are still those saying this was the act of an individual man gone mad.

Obviously, there are many Trump-related reasons to dispute that, but here's another reason.

Hortman stands out as the model of a strategic, progressive lawmaker who didn't just dream big dreams but built the scaffolding to achieve them.

In 2022, she didn't just ride a blue wave, she helped to orchestrate it, leveraging years of groundwork laid by coalition building, solidarity work, and the careful balancing of urban progressive interests with moderate rural ones.

It all paid off in that so-called Minnesota Miracle that wrote abortion rights into law, expanded LGBT protections, and brought Minnesotans paid family leave and medical leave and childcare and environmental protections and so much more.

Will her killing strike a blow?

Absolutely.

But it's worth remembering that much of what she did and built on bears the name of another Minnesota legislator who was taken too soon: Paul Wellstone, the Wellstone Way.

I suspect Melissa Hortman's name will live on as his does.

In the meantime, you can find my full uncut conversation with Sarah Schulman by subscribing to our free podcast all the information's at the website.

Till the next time, stay kind, stay curious.

For "Laura Flanders & Friends," I'm Laura, thanks for joining us.

For more on this episode and other forward-thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full, uncut conversations.

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