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  • Human Rights for Sex Workers: An Interview with Melinda Chateauvert

    Fifty countries treat sex work as a legitimate job, and it has been legalized with restrictions in eleven others. Nevertheless sex workers are still widely stigmatized, discriminated against, harassed, and, in those countries where prostitution is considered illegal, treated as criminals. This is especially true in the United States, which is one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution. As Melinda Chateauvert reveals in her new book Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk, these laws have put sex workers at risk. 

    Chateauvert agreed recently to talk with us about Human Rights Day and how important it is that the international campaign for human rights include sex workers, who have always been key activists in the struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, labor organizing, prison abolition, and other human rights–related issues.
     

    The first SlutWalk in Toronto (photo by Anton Bielousov)

    The first SlutWalk in Toronto (photo by Anton Bielousov)

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  • A Timeline of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

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    On December 5, 1955, just days after Rosa Park's historic arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife Coretta watched tensely from their living room window as the first moments of the Montomery Bus Boycott unfolded. Dr. King recounts those anxious early minutes in his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, part of our King Legacy Series:

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  • Reading Recommendations for Jewish Book Month

    Jewish Book Month, which originated in 1925 right here in Boston, ends tomorrow with the beginning of Hanukkah. We thought we'd commemorate the annual tradition with some never-too-late reading recommendations by a few of our authors. For more suggestions of Judaic titles to read during Hanukkah, or for any occasion, Beacon Press has you covered.

     

    Susan Katz Miller, author of "Being Both"

    Author photo: Stephanie Williams

    Susan Katz Miller, author of Being Both, offers several titles that celebrate the diversity of interfaith life: 

    Mixed-Up Love by Jon M. Sweeney and Michal Woll is important as the first memoir written by a rabbi married to a Catholic. Jon and Rabbi Michal will appear on a panel with me in March at the Jewish Community Center in Silicon Valley. They tell their story in alternating voices, providing both perspectives, which reminded me of the classic pioneering joint memoir by interfaith couple Ned and Mary Rosenbaum, Celebrating Our Differences.

    For hilarious, poignant, gorgeous writing, pick up Growing Up Golem: How I Survived My Mother, Brooklyn, and Some Really Bad Dates, a magical realist memoir by former Village Voice writer Donna Minkowitz. I came under Donna's potent spell when we sat next to each other (alphabetical order: Miller, Minkowitz) at a Jewish Book Council event last summer.

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  • Contextualizing JFK’s Legacy, part 2

         In the second part of our literary examination of JFK's legacy, we begin with a look at the hopes that the next generation brought to JFK's candidacy, and how those hopes—combined with the pressures of the campaign and the mounting conflict in Vietnam—led to the impromptu "definition" of the Peace Corps during an unplanned campaign stop at the University of Michigan. Later, Claire Conner takes us to Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, where she as a curious young woman—and daughter of the national spokesman for the ultraconservative John Birch Society—had gone to see the presidental motorcade, only to witness anguish and paranoia in the aftermath of JFK's assassination.

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  • Contextualizing JFK’s Legacy, part 1

        There is perhaps no modern President whose legacy resonates in the public consciousness as much as John F. Kennedy's. It was, in a sense, the first modern presidency: The first to be televised—from its historic inauguration to those shocking final moments in Dallas fifty years ago today—and the first to truly grapple with the maelstrom of social unrest that would lead eventually to the posthumous passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just months after his death. In this first of two posts on JFK's legacy, we reach into some of our recent books for look at the Kennedy administration's complex and evolving relationship with race and the Civil Rights Movement, starting with the struggle between the Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall and Washington Redskins owner George Marshall over the integration of his team, and ending with an on-the-ground accounting of the 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights, and JFK's meeting with the major civil rights leaders of the time.

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  • #WeStandWithYou: Young Activists Fast for the Climate

    By Wen Stephenson. 

    Note: This article and its accompanying updates appeared previously on Wen Stephenson's blog at The Nation.

    Yeb Sano, lead Filipino delegate to the UN Climate Conference (Creative Commons, courtesy tcktcktck.org)

    Yeb Sano, lead Filipino delegate to the UN Climate Conference
    (Creative Commons, courtesy tcktcktck.org) 

    Hunger allows no choice
    To the citizen or the police;
    We must love one another or die.

    W.H. Auden wrote that, sitting in a dive on 52nd Street nearly three-quarters of a century ago, as the world plunged into darkness on September 1, 1939. I’ve been thinking of those words a lot lately. Because it feels to me, and many others I know, like we’re poised at the edge of another darkness.

    It’s a darkness already visible, right now, in the Philippines, where thousands are dead and many hundreds of thousands made refugees by the force of a storm like none had ever seen.

    And it’s a darkness visible in the bright corporate halls of a conference center in Warsaw, where delegates to the nineteenth annual U.N. negotiations on climate change are divided and dithering, even as the window to prevent civilizational catastrophe rapidly closes.

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  • A Visit to Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary

    Editor's Note: We were all shocked to read the recent news that the western black rhinoceros, teetering on the edge for decades, had been officially declared extinct. At Beacon Press, we understand the urgency for ecology and conservation as part of our broader humanitarian mission. What can be learned from the tragedy of extinction? That now, more than ever, we must redouble our efforts to save those species that remain close to the brink: the Bengal tiger, the giant panda, the Sumatran elephant, or—as conservationist Nancy Merrick details below—our closest relative, the chimpanzee.

    By Nancy Merrick.

    Two-year-old Sara has moxie. Dangling upside down, one hundred feet above the forest floor, she is absolutely fearless even though today is one of her first forays into this African forest.

    Not every orphaned chimp discovers their tree-climbing talent so readily, we’re told. It all depends on how they were treated, how little they were when they lost their mothers, and their innate nature. But Sara’s genes seem programmed for audacity. We gaze upwards to feast on Sara’s first time launching from limb to limb as though she were spring-loaded, first time grabbing whole handfuls of fruit while dangling one-handed from a tree branch, and first time nonchalantly scaling upwards into the canopy to dazzle the other chimps.

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  • Muslims and Jews Standing Up for the Other

    This weekend, over three hundred synagogues, mosques, and Muslim and Jewish organizations, and thousands of Muslims and Jews in over thirty countries on all six continents will begin to come together to celebrate unity between the two religions. It is part of the "Weekend of Twinning" programming series, a growing effort by Jews and Muslims to confront Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in their communities and beyond, and to replace hatred and fear with increased understanding and a sense of shared purpose. Programming will continue through the end of the year.

     

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  • After “Aftermath”

    By Louise Steinman.

    Going full
    out for the distressing double-header, I saw the Polish film Aftermath the
    same weekend as 12 Years a Slave. Both films were an opportunity to view how
    a filmmaker handled a country’s national shame through the art of storytelling. Aftermath, is a fictional film inspired by Jan Gross’s book Neighbors, about the Jedwabne pogrom, a 1941 massacre of a
    Polish village’s Jewish population by their Catholic neighbors. It’s just been released in the US. 12 Years, based on the diary of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and pressed into bondage in the American South, brings to
    Technicolor luridness the hideous cruelties of the slave trade.

    Both films
    are deeply disturbing and both films necessitate a revising of a national
    self-image. For Poles, that involves admitting that they were not always the
    victims in World War II; on some occasions, they were perpetrators. Americans must countenance
    that our country’s literal foundations were built on the blasphemy of human
    bondage. 

     

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  • What Does Prejudice Reveal About What It Means to be Human?

    By Jeremy Adam Smith.

    What happens when we define some people as more human than others? A Q&A with Susan Fiske about the new science of racism. Note: This post originally appeared on the Greater Good.

    The questions raised by racism and xenophobia go straight to the heart of what it means to be human, for they involve dehumanization. Prejudice means we implicitly embrace a definition of humanity that includes some—usually those who most resemble us—and excludes others.That’s why Susan T. Fiske was invited to speak at Being Human 2013, a showcase (co-sponsored by the Greater Good Science Center) of scientific insights into the nature and direction of our species.

    Susan T. Fiske speaks at Being Human 2013.

    Susan T. Fiske speaks at Being Human 2013.

    As the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, Fiske has become one of the leading investigators of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and she is the author or co-author of many books, including Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us, and The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies, just released this month.

    Fiske has especially explored how snap judgments shape our social interactions. She has found that people we see as warm and competent elicit the most positive emotion and behavior from us. Unfortunately, however, her studies show that those perceptions are heavily influenced by factors like race, age, gender, disability, and more—and that this millisecond social-sifting translates into widespread stereotyping and discrimination.

    As Fiske described at Being Human, all over the world it is the poor, homeless, and immigrants who bear the brunt of discrimination, eliciting feelings of outright—but often subconscious—disgust from study participants. I spoke with her backstage at that event about her research and hopes for a future without prejudice.

    Jeremy Adam Smith: What does prejudice reveal about what it means to be human?

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