For any decent person looking over the crises in the world or in the academy, the question is what one can and should do. How can an individual respond?

There are lots of legitimate and helpful ways to find an answer to that question. One of the ways I seek answers, as a Jew, is to ask what my ancestors would do now. What they would want me to do. And the answer is: organize.

I’ve told this story before on here, but here’s another version: my mother’s father, born 1918 the youngest child of two Yiddish-speaking immigrants, believed in agitation. The agitator is the part of the washing machine that gets the dirt out, he’d say.

In high school he ended up on police watch lists for hanging out with (presumably being) a Communist and going to interracial dances. @gwtweets withdrew his admission because he organized his high school classmates.

GW University He went to UVa instead and spent his time organizing against militarism and white supremacy. He got evicted from an apartment for talking to (organizing?) the Black housekeeper; he went to every county in the state to organize fellow students for peace, democracy, and freedom.

(Sometimes it astounds me to consider the violence he must have faced as a Jewish 19 or 20 year old in rural Virginia organizing for a Communist platform against white supremacy. How terrified his parents must have been.)

He was expelled from UVA for passing out handbills “in the Colored section of town,” as the police report described it. He briefly became a cause celebre.

UVA There’s much more I could say (and have said) about my grandfather, including his actual adulthood, when he kept organizing and protecting others who organized as an immigration lawyer and an ACLU man.

Meanwhile on the other, German Jewish side of my family, my father’s grandfather was devoting his time and energy as a boss towards true collective bargaining in the ladies’ neckware industry. (His factory made collars and cuffs.)

Anyway, the point is, when I ask what my ancestors l would do in the face of global crisis, looking fascism, genocide, injustice—problems big and small, close to home and personal and big an international—I know the answer. You organize, because no, you can’t do it on your own.

The thing that defeats fascism, the thing that wins just economic transitions, the thing that will save the American academy from the politicians and donors and administrators who seek to dismantle it—it’s workers coming together and fighting. It’s unions.