Reconnaissance

For this episode of Reconnaissance, we’re listening back to conversations that Fred had in Vienna last fall, exploring ideas about solidarity and allyship on “the left,” and how Israel figures into those politics—as both a real place, and an amorphous set of ideas. We’ve both been struck by how much symbolic weight Israel and Palestine hold for people in different parts of the world. This episode is one attempt to explore how and why that happens, in the very specific context of Vienna.

This episode of Reconnaissance is the product of audio recorded at public meetings, conversations, and demonstrations in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn over the past six months, chronicling the civic protest of the proposed multi-million dollar redevelopment of the historic Bedford Union Armory, which has existed up to the present as public land, into a combination of a small number of a recreation center, “affordable or low income housing units,” luxury condominiums, and office and retail space.

Following Trump’s election, we wanted to think more deeply about what people mean when they talk about “working class America.” What is the future of the labor movement? In the spirit of imagining an alternative, we explore a different democratic process—that within the Teamsters Union. Reconnaissance, Episode 9: Winning America features interviews with Teamster union members and organizers, and reflections on this political moment by labor journalist Asa Jaffe.

On Saturday, January 28, 2017, eight days into Donald Trump’s official reign, thousands of people gathered at JFK and at airports around the world, to demonstrate our refusal of the “Muslim ban,” and recent, despicable offenses towards immigrants and human life in general. Asa recorded the crowd outside of JFK’s Terminal 4, which grew into Saturday evening: chanting, questioning, and participating in a vigil marking the occasion of Holocaust Rememberance Day. This recording is edited from four hours of audio, which we share as a document of new and familiar rallying cries, and an overwhelming sense of history—as news arrives via human microphone that while we were occupying this space, Judge Ann Donnelly ruled an emergency stay on deportations on those with valid visas who were detained following Trump’s executive order. What else can we make at our airports?

San Juan County is a sparsely populated area in southeastern Utah, made up of large swaths of federal land, pocked with small towns. It is inhabited by a large Native American population, primarily Navajo. A portion of the county is referred to as Bears Ears, a name taken from two ear-shaped buttes that loom large in the landscape. Five Native American tribes have banded together to push for a National Monument designation in this area, to protect the rich assortment of archaeological and sacred sites located there, and to shield against possible future resource development in the area. Predictably, this proposal has not gone without resistance from both local forces and Utah state government. The ensuing ideological conflict may be seen as a proxy for the current national conversation around land rights, federal abuse, and Native American rights.

Wall and Water is an audio essay about how historical narratives are written and rewritten continually, about the work of remembering. Through conversations with artists, historians, educators, and city officials, we connect the history of the site of the eighteenth-century Municipal Slave Market on Wall Street, and the sign that’s been standing there for the past year, to ongoing experiences of systemic racism and resistance. Wall and Water became a meditation on freedom and rebellion in New York.

In the days following the Fourth of July weekend, we watched videos and news of more murders of people of color by on-duty police officers across the US, including Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Delwarn Small. Friends and strangers continue attending actions and scanning social media feeds: alert, horrified, or half-asleep. Fred recorded this public conversation that was impressively moderated by Carlene Pinto at Union Square on July 7. We share the unedited recording with those who were and those who were not able to attend that night. This is a document of terror and pride, an outpouring of advice, anger, and reflections on what it means to be a person of color in the United States, what it means to be a person, an ally, accountable.

We speak with our friend Derrar Ghanem about his experiences working as a fixer with international journalists over the last few years in Palestine. A fixer is someone a journalist contacts in an unfamiliar context to help support their reporting: fixers often help translate and facilitate interviews, make contacts and help journalists navigate political contexts. Derrar reflects on the professionalism and ethics involved in speaking with the mothers of martyrs in the West Bank, and why he’d never heard about instances of creative resistance to Israeli occupation in small villages.

Talking with Oath Keeper and Police Academy Instructor John Karriman challenged us. Re: Missouri, Valid Fears is our first attempt at debriefing and following up. We spoke with Sam Andrews on the phone after he listened to an edit of our interview with Karriman. Andrews is an independent arms contractor in Eureka, Missouri. During the protests in November 2014 and August 2015, he was among the Oath Keepers who went to Ferguson. Andrews became increasingly critical of the ways that Oath Keepers were approaching Black Lives Matter activists and the politics underlying their presence in Ferguson. He spoke out and has since alienated himself from the group. He spoke to us about how and why.

Maybe you’ve seen photographs of Oath Keepers perched on the tops of buildings in Ferguson, Missouri, wielding assault rifles. We saw these images in the fall of 2015, when we first learned about the Oath Keepers. Confused about what they were doing in Ferguson, we got in touch with John Karriman, the Spokesman for the Missouri chapter of the Oath Keepers. We met Karriman in a meeting room at the Hilton Garden Inn in Joplin, Missouri. We spoke about the militarization of United States police forces, outsider politics, and the participation of Oath Keepers in the demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri in November 2014 and August 2015. Featuring sounds by John Niekrasz.

Since the Gaza war and first Ferguson protests, many projects have traced intersections between these two contexts: the role of military power and systemic oppression of POC in Israel and in the US. We visited the African Hebrew Israelites’ Village of Peace in Dimona looking for less familiar language to describe the colonial legacies connecting Israel and the US. What we got was a lesson in deep history, meta-narrative, and prophetic visions. And, many lingering questions: about what it means to reclaim an ancestral home, a promised land; about the margins of Israeli society and the politics of outsidership there; and about the legacy of slavery in the US today.

In September 2015 hundreds of thousands of refugees fled in Syria and other countries and ended up in Austria, most on their way to other European countries. In October hundreds of thousands of people continue to flee, by foot, car, bus, and train. In United States media they are described as waves, masses, a crisis. What makes a crisis? Over the month of September a large volunteer effort collected and organized themselves at Wien Hauptbahnhof, one of two central train stations in Vienna. People set up cooking stations, child care stations, prayer and medical stations, all within the train station. Reconnaissance, Episode 2: Your bed in Vienna, describes the scene at and around Wien Hauptbahnhof in September.

We talk with friends, collaborators, and strangers, asking each of them a leading question: “What happened on September 11th, 2001?” By asking people with different kinds of expertise to provide straightforward narrative accounts of the events of a day now so firmly congealed in public consciousness, we hope to learn something about the construction of political stance through language and memory. What conversations does such a question provoke?

We talk with friends, collaborators, and strangers, asking each of them a leading question: “What happened on September 11th, 2001?” By asking people with different kinds of expertise to provide straightforward narrative accounts of the events of a day now so firmly congealed in public consciousness, we hope to learn something about the construction of political stance through language and memory. What conversations does such a question provoke?

We talk with friends, collaborators, and strangers, asking each of them a leading question: “What happened on September 11th, 2001?” By asking people with different kinds of expertise to provide straightforward narrative accounts of the events of a day now so firmly congealed in public consciousness, we hope to learn something about the construction of political stance through language and memory. What conversations does such a question provoke?