The New York City Labor Chorus (NYCLC) was the first group of its kind when it formed in 1991 with members of different unions joining together in song. Song, Struggle and Solidarity: The New York City Labor Chorus in Its Twenty-fifth Year is the product of Mark Abendroth’s ethnography on the NYCLC during its calendar year from fall 2016 to spring 2017. Abendroth was in his sixth year as an active member of the chorus at that time. He kept field notes of nearly every NYCLC performance and weekly rehearsal during the year. He also interviewed twenty-eight of the approximately eighty-five members and studied documents in the group’s history. Chapters include a history of singing in the labor movement in the United States, a history of the NYCLC in its first twenty-four years, and a focus on developments during the group’s twenty-fifth year. The book ends with the author’s conclusions on the NYCLC’s accomplishments, challenges, and possibilities.

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

Account of the first year of Occupella, an activist song-leading group that grew out of song circles at Occupy Oakland and Occupy Berkeley formed by five professional singer-songwriters in 2011. Occupella is still busy leading songs at rallies, marches and meetings..

Provides lyrics, music, and chord notation for work and protest songs and discusses each tune's significance in the labor movement

In Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, Gaye Theresa Johnson examines interracial anti-racist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and the cultural expressions and spatial politics that emerge from the mutual struggles of Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present. Johnson argues that struggles waged in response to institutional and social repression have created both moments and movements in which Blacks and Chicanos have unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing the strategies, cultures, and politics of each others' experiences. At the center of this study is the theory of spatial entitlement: the spatial strategies and vernaculars utilized by working class youth to resist the demarcations of race and class that emerged in the postwar era. In this important new book, Johnson reveals how racial alliances and antagonisms between Blacks and Chicanos in L.A. had spatial as well as racial dimensions.