In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

People love underdogs. Researchers have time and again observed that the public, and perhaps especially the American public, is drawn to stories in which an average person, through some combination of luck and gumption, trounces a far more formidable opponent in a lopsided conflict. One of the most plausible explanations for this appeal is that underdog narratives stir our deep-seated desire for a just world, one where virtuous people actually get what they deserve. Personally, as a writer, I’m attracted to these accounts because they tend to be full of what William Faulkner once called “the old verities and truths of the heart” that stories need to succeed—that is, “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

My new book, Valley So Low, is something of an underdog story: It follows a small-time Knoxville lawyer who takes on the powerful Tennessee Valley Authority after a disaster at one of its coal-fired power stations sickens hundreds of blue-collar workers. Over the five years I spent working on it, I looked for inspiration in nonfiction books that took a similar shape. The ones that most resonated were immersive, carefully created works of journalism that followed ordinary Americans facing long odds—in the courts of law, in the workplace, or in their own neighborhoods. The authors of these books in many cases spent years collecting details to bring their characters to life on the page to a degree typically reserved for fiction. These seven standouts are each about everyday people pushing back against wildly difficult, often unfair circumstances. And, even though the protagonists don’t always win or come out ahead, exactly, they at least endure, which is often its own sort of victory.

Vintage

A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr

Most nonfiction books, even immortal ones, like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, rely heavily on scenes that the writer has reconstructed through reporting and research; that is, the writer typically didn’t witness the events described firsthand. A Civil Action—about a lawsuit against two giant corporations, Beatrice Foods and W. R. Grace, over water pollution in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the 1980s—is remarkable in that Harr seems to have been present for nearly every meeting, every hearing, and every round of drinks after each brutal day in court. Harr’s main character, Jan Schlichtmann, is an idealistic attorney representing eight families sickened with leukemia by chemicals that the two companies allegedly dumped into a river near their homes, poisoning their drinking water. Thanks to Harr’s efforts—he worked on the book for eight years, and often slept on Schlichtmann’s fold-out couch while reporting—A Civil Action illuminates, in cinematic detail, why regular citizens struggle to win toxic-exposure suits against corporate polluters: Even if the plaintiffs have compelling facts and a dedicated attorney, like Schlichtmann, the polluters almost always have more money, and money will buy you time. And when your clients are sick and dying, Schlichtmann learns, time is a powerful enemy.

[Read: Why the EPA backed down]

“The Escape of Mrs. Jeffries,” by Janet Flanner

Sometimes an obstacle blocking your path feels like a mountain, and other times the obstacle is, in fact, a mountain. Such was the case for Ellen Jeffries, a middle-aged American expat who was trapped in wartime Paris with no easy way to return to the States after her adopted country fell to Adolf Hitler. Fearing internment, she hatches an audacious plan: flee south through France, cross over the Pyrenees on foot to Spain, then finally catch a flight back stateside. Flanner, who was The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for almost 50 years, thrillingly recounts Jeffries’s efforts to evade the Nazis on her trek to freedom, which include a harrowing nighttime river crossing before a mountain ascent to the relative safety of Spain. In relaying Jeffries’s story, Flanner pioneered a form of nonfiction writing that her New Yorker colleague John Hersey would later mimic to fame-making effect in his horrific 1946 story “Hiroshima,” wherein nearly all traces of the author’s reporting have been excised, leaving only a novelistic rendering of events. But Flanner, the world should know, did it first, in 1943. A stand-alone audiobook version of Jeffries’s story came out last year; you can also read it in Janet Flanner’s World or in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces.

Vintage

Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner

Every wrongful-conviction story is tragic and pitiful, but the ordeal of Edward Lee Elmore is especially so, as Bonner’s tightly written account of his case makes clear. The book opens with the 1982 murder of a well-off elderly white woman, Dorothy Edwards, in Greenwood, South Carolina—a murder for which Elmore, an intellectually disabled Black handyman, is swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But the story really gains momentum when a defense attorney named Diana Holt, whom Bonner profiled for The Atlantic in 2012, becomes convinced of Elmore’s innocence and decides to fight to win him a new trial. Holt has grit: She’s a former runaway who, in her youth, survived all manner of hellish abuse. Still, she struggles to overcome the fact that once a person is convicted in a court of law, not even exonerating new evidence guarantees that they’ll get off death row, never mind get another shot at justice. Elmore, through no shortage of legal miracles, eventually sees the outside of a jail cell, but it’s a victory tainted by the irrevocable wrongs done to him, which is why Bonner dares not call his release justice.

[Read: Why are innocents still being executed?]

Blue Rider Press

Almighty, by Dan Zak

One night in July 2012, an 82-year-old nun named Megan Rice and two companions break into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This, as it turns out, proves to be pretty easy, even though the place is nicknamed “the Fort Knox of Uranium.” But exposing the ease of infiltrating Y-12, where the government produces and stores atomic-bomb fuel, is Rice’s main objective. She’s a member of the anti-nuclear group Plowshares, and in this dynamic, accessible book, Zak, a reporter for The Washington Post, unspools how Rice and other activists seek to end nuclear-arms proliferation through “actions” intended to scare the wits out of policy makers and the public by revealing the poor security at nuclear-weapons sites. Maybe then, the activists reason, nations will agree to decommission their warheads before they fall into dangerous hands. Toward the end, Zak shifts his focus to the lawmakers and military leaders who ultimately decide our nuclear-arms policies. In doing so, he details how emerging threats have reinforced Washington’s view that the best way to avoid the next major-power war is through stockpiling more warheads—and observes that the disarmament crowd’s desire for a nuclear-free world likely won’t be realized in our lifetimes, if ever, unless that dynamic changes.

Power to Hurt, by Darcy O’Brien

O’Brien, the son of Hollywood actors, had a knack for turning lurid crimes of the sort you might find on Dateline or 20/20 into something akin to art, and Power to Hurt is his crowning achievement. Published in 1996, the book follows Vivian Forsythe, a divorced young mother from Dyersburg, Tennessee, who, in a stroke of unimaginably awful luck, applies to work for local judge David Lanier. Lanier rapes Forsythe during a job interview, which O’Brien recounts in upsetting, unwavering detail. Afterward, Forsythe tells no one about the attack, because Lanier and his brother, the local district attorney, effectively control the county. But eventually Forsythe and Lanier’s other victims—and there are many, she discovers—meet an FBI agent and work together to bring down the old judge, a campaign that takes the better part of a decade and comes to involve the U.S. Supreme Court. Power to Hurt is ultimately less a true-crime book than a post-crime book in which victims summon radical courage to confront a monster.

[Read: ‘Nobody is going to believe you’: Bryan Singer’s accusers speak out]

The Last Cowboy, by Jane Kramer

Henry Blanton wants to be a cowboy—a real cowboy. Never mind that he already runs a ranch, and the job is not all that great: He’s an unhappily married foreman of a 90,000-acre tract in the Texas Panhandle. But, at age 40, he still dreams of becoming an old-time gunslinger who roams the open plain, like the heroes of the Western movies he watches compulsively. The problem, as Kramer captures in this sharp 1977 book, is that modernity has made the free-ranging life of Blanton’s dreams almost impossible: Barbed wire constrains the cattle; Eastern conglomerates control many of the ranches; and paychecks are piddly for hired hands like Blanton, whose struggles to get by eventually drive him to a breaking point. Kramer, who’s in her 80s now and seldom publishes new work, has become a name that only serious magazine lovers would recognize, even though she spent decades covering Europe for The New Yorker. That is a shame, because her journalism at its best, as it is in this book, is as textured and compelling as that of her better-known contemporaries, and she masterfully captures life at the edges of America.

Vintage

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson’s masterpiece begins roughly in the middle of the oppressive Jim Crow regime in the South, in the years leading up to and immediately following the Second World War, as three young Black people—a doctor, a sharecropper’s wife, and a fruit picker—flee the region for better jobs and possibly friendlier neighbors in the North or West. Her three characters stand in for the approximately 6 million other Black Americans who made similar journeys as part of the mass exodus that would become known as the Great Migration. Wilkerson spent 15 years writing and reporting her book on the subject, and the effort paid off: The New York Times recently ranked it as the second-best book of the 21st century. What makes the book remarkable is less Wilkerson’s sweeping history of the southern exodus (though she handles this deftly) than her granular reporting on her central characters, who each face unexpected hardships in their adopted new homes. The result is a tale about a too-frequently ignored chapter of American history that continues to shape our country’s present.

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms. In three months, we’ve been hit by three hurricanes, of escalating severity: Debby, Helene, and Milton. Governor Ron DeSantis may have barred any mention of climate change from state statutes, but the seas are getting hotter and hotter, brewing the fuel that powers these bigger, badder storms. Towns from Siesta Key, on the Gulf, to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic, are in pieces, roofs ripped off and thrown around like Lego pieces, boats snatched from their moorings and dumped onto people’s front yards. The damage is estimated in the billions; the storms have caused about 60 deaths in the state.

Many of us are asking the question that has long occurred to onlookers from elsewhere: Why on earth does anyone want to live here? What’s the fatal charm that entices hundreds of thousands of people to move to Florida every year and keeps them here?

To paraphrase Henry James—who visited Palm Beach County in 1905 and didn’t think much of the place—it is a complex fate to be a Floridian. Still, millions of us embrace the complexity, finding our own Florida in the kaleidoscope colors of the state. If you want a rich mezcla of food and music, we have that; if being near water uplifts your spirit, we have lakes, rivers, lagoons, bays, and beaches where the sand looks like icing sugar; if you want to fight against the “woke,” Florida is a good base of operations. For me, it’s the landscape of my childhood, my history, the place that made my family and made me, no matter how infuriating I often find it.

Florida can be every bit as alluring as advertised. Despite the best efforts of drain-and-pave developers hell-bent on monetizing every square inch of potential real estate, it has areas of blazing beauty: the Everglades in early summer; saw grass lit by a pink and orange dawn; the turquoise waters of the Forgotten Coast; the millennium-old mounds standing in green dignity on the shore of Lake Jackson; the bald-cypress trees that were saplings when Augustus Caesar ruled Rome and 100 feet high when the Spanish arrived to colonize the land they named after Pascua Florida, the Feast of Flowers. Florida was multicultural before multicultural was cool, drawing immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula, France, Britain, Greece, Latin America, and the Caribbean, interwoven with the native peoples who survived my forebears’ arrival and the descendants of enslaved Africans brought in to work the rice and cotton plantations when Florida became part of the United States in 1821.

Politicians, condominium touts, and tourist-board boosters will tell you that Florida is paradise, a Garden of Eden at North America’s southeastern corner. Citizens of the upper 48 are sold a daydream Florida of poolside cocktails, low taxes, and conservative-leaning politics. They imagine a life spent tootling around on golf carts or lolling on pontoon boats, liberated from shoveling snow and having to pay for public schools and social services.

For them, Florida operates in a state of amnesia, promising an endless vacation wasting away in Margaritaville. If people actually faced the fact of climate change, we’d stop building on barrier islands; we’d retreat inland; we’d demand a halt to the destruction of mangrove forests and wetlands that mitigate storm surges. But that’s not happening, not while money’s to be made creating an illusion of paradise.

Read: Florida’s risky bet

As a teenager, I declared I’d move away and never live in Florida again. My issue wasn’t the hurricanes: We taped up the picture windows, filled the bathtubs with water and got on with it. It wasn’t the politics: Florida in the 1980s was a progressive state, determined to cure a pounding Jim Crow hangover. Mainly, I just wanted to experience places where college football wasn’t the biggest social event and not everybody knew your family.

So I left: first for university in England, where I stayed 10 years, then for academic jobs elsewhere in the United States. Yet here I am, right back where I was born, in Tallahassee. I chose to return, partly because Florida is congenitally eccentric, a story gold mine for writers, partly because of the startling loveliness of my part of the state, with its icy springs and red-clay hills, and partly because it’s where my kinfolk are. We’ve lived in Florida for more than 200 years; I feel a deep sense of ownership and responsibility.

Life here can be challenging. I teach at Florida State University, where, despite DeSantis’s efforts to legislate away all learning about race and gender as “woke,” faculty and students persist in fostering diversity and seeking knowledge. Yet several colleagues in my department are leaving, saying they refuse to raise daughters in a state that denies them reproductive freedom. Families with trans kids are also moving in order to protect them from repressive state laws that impede gender-affirming treatment.

You now can’t get an abortion in the state after six weeks. But you can buy pretty much any kind of gun and carry it concealed to the beach, church, or Walmart. As of last week, Florida had suffered 24 mass shootings this year.

Florida is also home to Moms for Liberty, whose self-proclaimed mission is to “protect childhood innocence.” I’m with the comedian Wanda Sykes, who says, “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.”

Florida has a long history of focusing on the wrong shit, from defending slavery in the Civil War, to trying to drain the Everglades in the early 20th century to make the land turn a profit, to pretending climate change is not real despite regular flooding in the streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Nevertheless, Florida’s stubborn refusal to accept certain realities is perversely fascinating. I kind of admire it—and enjoy living in a place that embraces the aspirational over the actual. I just wish that we could find a way to be more generous toward our people and our environment.

The right stuff to focus on would be fixing the insurance market—Florida has the most expensive premiums in the country—and doing something to move us toward sustainable energy. Yet the governor and legislature’s culture-wars obsession excludes dealing with these very large, very real problems. As a result, people whose lives have been wrecked by the hurricanes struggle to scrape together the money to rebuild their splintered houses, hoping next year will be different. And if they can’t afford to rebuild, a developer will come along and buy the place, restarting the cycle by putting up bigger and more expensive residences for new Floridians convinced that their beachside dream house won’t be smashed in next year’s storms.

So, ineluctably, people will keep leaving their old homes and heading south, craving the fiction that is Florida while ignoring its unsettling realities. Sometimes, I wonder if people move here to be absolved of the need to ever think again. Then again, who am I to preach? I can tell you all the reasons to leave, but I choose to stay. Spending so long on one patch of ground shapes the soul. I know where home is. And someone has to bear witness to the Florida that’s daily disappearing.

In 1923, as elite American universities began adopting quotas restricting the number of Jews they admitted, an organization was formed to provide a home for Jewish students on campus where they could congregate to pray, socialize, and feel welcome. This organization was called Hillel, and it has been the central address for Jewish life at colleges and universities ever since. That’s how I found my way to it when I was a student at UCLA; overwhelmed by the size of the university, I was looking to connect with a smaller group of individuals with whom I likely shared values, history, and a sense of cultural belonging.

I found this at Hillel, where I discovered so much about who I am in this world, and formed relationships that have lasted my entire adult life. That is why I have been heartbroken and horrified in recent months as the broader Hillel organization has become the target of regular threats and attacks.

Hillel is where I was taught how to pray, how to learn, and how to participate in charity and social-justice work. Hillel is where I learned to define my Judaism not by my immigrant grandparents’ experience and the Holocaust, but by the joy and beauty of Jewish culture as it is unfolding to this day.

Hillel has been foundational to so many Jewish stories over the past century. In the 1930s, it established a student refugee program, saving the lives of nearly 150 young European Jews. In 1947, it helped Hungarian-born Tom Lantos come to the U.S., where he became the only Holocaust survivor to ever be elected to Congress. In the 1950s and ’60s, Hillels across the country organized robust support for the civil-rights movement. In 1960, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Hillel director Max Ticktin addressed 500 students in a march on Library Mall and called for an end to both local and national discrimination, and encouraged students to fight against racist Jim Crow laws. I have raised my children at Hillel, continuing to participate in many capacities even after I received my doctorate; many Hillels are also community centers of a sort, providing religious and spiritual services, meals, and a sense of belonging for those who find themselves at a transition point in their life. When I travel the country and the world, I often visit a local Hillel, and find myself feeling perfectly at home.

[Read: The wrong way to fight campus anti-Semitism on campus]

And this organization is being attacked all over the country, a dynamic that emerged after October 7 and that appears to have grown only more frequent and intense in recent months, as students have returned to campus. At the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a message on social media posted by the UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine stated that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” specifically mentioning Hillel. The post went on to say that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned,” and that Zionist groups will not be normalized or welcomed on campus. At Hunter College, in Manhattan, students at Hillel found a sign depicting an assault rifle, calling on students to Bring the war home next to a sign reading Hillel go to hell with an upside-down triangle, indicating that this Hillel is a target. At a recent Baruch College Hillel event held at a Midtown restaurant in New York City designed for incoming freshmen to learn about campus life, Jewish students were met with protesters shouting references to the hostages recently executed by Hamas; a video posted on Instagram featured a protester shouting to a female student, “Where’s Hersh, you ugly-ass bitch?” (The reference was to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American citizen recently murdered by Hamas.)

In my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA, I thrived as a student leader at Hillel under the guidance of a boldly liberal Zionist rabbi. He said then what I still believe now: The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and dignity, and deserve better from their own leadership as well as from Israel. As students, we sought to have peaceful, respectful conversations with students on campus who advocated for the establishment of a Palestinian state. We were met with accusations of racism, swastikas chalked on the bricks of Bruin Walk, and protesters who donned Hamas armbands and stared at us in stony silence. We watched in bewilderment as the “Zionism is racism” campaigns began to take hold on campuses across the country. It was astounding that students would not engage with even those of us who were trying to find common ground and believed in coexistence.

In the 1990s, many of us felt that we had little choice but to accept that a few student organizations were comfortable branding Zionism as a form of racism, or wearing regalia of terrorist organizations whose charters included the explicit elimination of the Jewish state. The refusal of some students to engage in dialogue was once an unspoken policy; now it is an explicit one. Anti-normalization is the name for this trend. It is rooted in the idea that merely talking with people who hold a different point of view from you is tantamount to recognition or acceptance of that view and should be avoided at all costs. The refusal to engage shuts down any dialogue and any sincere attempt to bridge our pain and find ways to communicate with empathy and compassion. This tactic reveals an intellectual weakness, an inability to respond reasonably to a point of view that is not your own. And it is fundamentally contrary to the basic values of the university and academia at large: exposure to and a free exchange of ideas, as well as the ability to find creative and positive outlets for differences of opinion.

[Read: How resilient are Jewish American traditions?]

It is, to put it plainly, undemocratic to support the tactics of drowning out and protesting Israeli or Jewish speakers simply because they are Jewish. It needs to be called out for what it is: anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitic to seek to deny Jewish students the ability to access the most important organization for Jewish life on campus. We cannot allow this to be normalized.

As for me, I have been uninvited from venues since October 7 simply because I am Jewish. I have been shouted down, asked to leave, accused of a hatred I know not how to summon. And my response is one that I and generations of students have learned at Hillel. Hillel teaches that we should not be afraid to be Jewish. We can be proud to be American. And we deserve the rights and privileges awarded to every minority on campus: a safe place to gather, to pray, to learn, and to fight for what is right.

Tim Walz stumbled and struggled on the debate stage in New York last night, while J. D. Vance spoke smoothly and effectively.

I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction. Yet theater reviews aside, three issues of substance stayed with me.

The first is that Vance truly is no friend of Israel’s.

The evening opened with a question about yesterday’s Iranian missile barrage. This question presented Vance with a trap. On the one hand, Vance’s party wants to criticize the Biden-Harris administration as weak on defense, soft on Iran. On the other hand, Vance is himself intensely hostile to U.S. alliances. He has led the fight to deny aid to Ukraine. He keeps company with conspiracy theorists who promote anti-Semitism. Vance managed that contradiction in the debate mostly by evading the question about what the U.S. might do to support Israel. Israel’s actions, he said, were a matter for Israel to decide; beyond that, he had nothing to say.

[Read: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

But the trick in evading a question is that the evasion works only if it goes unnoticed. This evasion does not. If you care about Israel, what you heard was nothing where there needed to be something. He offered no solidarity with the Israeli families who had spent the evening in bomb shelters because of the most massive country-to-country ballistic-missile attack in the history of the world. No friendship, no sympathy, for the state of Israel. Above all, what Vance delivered—Israel will do what Israel will do—was a message of abandonment, not a message of support. If you wondered what kind of voice Vance would be in the Situation Room when Israel is under threat, now you know: not a friend.

The second enduring impression is that Vance has thoroughly analyzed the Republican problem on abortion and decided that the only option is to lie his way out.

When the Trump Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, it opened the door to a new regime of state-level policing and punishment of American women. After this year’s election, Republicans may or may not have the votes in Congress to pass a national abortion ban. That’s not the most important question, however. The most important question is: Will a Republican administration use executive power to aid Republican states in their surveillance of American women? Vance’s own record on that is emphatic: Yes, he will, and, yes, he has.

Onstage, Vance disavowed his record. He professed support for generous investment in maternal health and child nutrition. But his record has not disappeared because he denied it. Vance’s actual preferred health policy is to restore to health insurers the right to treat people with preexisting conditions differently—to do less risk-sharing, not more, even if that leaves many Americans without affordable insurance. Women and children face more health risks than able-bodied men. Vance’s policies are the direct opposite of Vance’s slogans.

American women have had their privacy and autonomy ripped away from them—and Vance offered nothing to protect them. He was able to purr his way past his own cat-lady comments. But if American women were wondering, What happens to us under a Trump-Vance administration?, they have their answer: Your sex life and reproductive rights will be subject to government control in a way it has not been for half a century.

[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]

The third enduring impression is that Vance remains all in on Trump plots to overthrow the election. At the podium last night, Vance refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. That’s not just a lie about history. It’s a threat to the future.

Right now, Republicans in key states are working to bend the law to convert voting defeats into Electoral College victories. They hope to disenfranchise unwanted voters, to disqualify unwanted votes, to use a bag of old Jim Crow tricks and some new ones to defeat the people’s verdict in 2024. Vance’s answer about Trump’s violent coup after the last election expresses his willingness to support and assist his party’s stealthier subversion of the coming election.

You have been warned.