CBH Talk | Remembering Barbara Ehrenreich
In-person attendance for this program is at capacity! Please join the livestream on the Center for Brooklyn History Public Programs YouTube Channel. To watch the broadcast live, click HERE. Note that we generally overbook our free events to ensure a full house. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment; we will do our best to accommodate everyone! Doors will open at 6:30 pm.
An activist, journalist, social critic, and author of 21 books including the groundbreaking Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich amplified the voices of America’s disempowered by bringing her sharp perspective to the myth of the American dream, the labor market, health care, poverty, women’s rights, and a society rife with hypocrisy. Join us for a look at Ehrenreich’s intellectual and political legacy and how it might be carried forward today with Cornel West, Jia Tolentino, Alissa Quart, Frances Fox Piven, Matthew Desmond, Janet McIntosh, and Tom Lewandowski. Senator Bernie Sanders pays tribute by video and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir raise the house.
Presented in collaboration with Ehrenreich’s children, Rosa Brooks and Ben Ehrenreich.
Participants
MacArthur “Genius” and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond is the author of The New York Times bestseller and 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and Poverty, by America. Praised as “an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography” by The Washington Post, Evicted transformed our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a uniquely American problem. His next book, the instant #1 bestseller Poverty, by America, has been praised by the New Yorker as “urgent and accessible” and by Esquire as “another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart.” Drawing on history, research, and original reporting, the book reimagines the debate on poverty, and makes a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, and the founder and principal investigator of The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In 2018, The Eviction Lab published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000, and it has gone on to serve as a resource hub for the millions of American renters who faced increased housing insecurity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Desmond is a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune.
Photo by Barron Bixler
Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology Emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among her books are Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements, Why Americans Don't Vote and Challenging Authority.
Tom Lewandowski is director and co-founder of the Workers’ Project researching, innovating, and organizing workers’ voice and power. His work history of eighteen widely varying jobs includes GE production worker (third generation), janitor, gas jockey, historian, central labor council president, city councilor, advisor to Solidarnosc, as well as very long lay-offs and several firings. He currently lives in the Fort Wayne, Indiana area. Along with his two children and three grandchildren, he mourns the loss earlier this year of Brenda, his wife and co-conspirator for nearly 56 years.
Photo by Samuel Hoffman
Janet McIntosh is a Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, and the author and editor of three books and numerous academic articles about society and language in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. Janet was Barbara’s research assistant in the 1990s. She relished their conversations over the decades about topics ranging from spirit possession to narcissism.
Alissa Quart is the author of five acclaimed books of nonfiction including Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Squeezed, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded. She is the Executive Director of the non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich and built together. She has published two books of poetry, written for The Washington Post, the New York Times, The Guardian and TIME, and is an Emmy and an SPJ award-winner. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir, directed by Savitri D, are a secular performance 'Church' which engages in direct action and organizing campaigns against injustice and in service to the earth. The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the 1990s by actor and playwright William Talen. Director Savitri D is the principal designer of the Church of Stop Shopping’s Choir. The Choir is a radical performance community whose members come from a range of creative and activist backgrounds. In 2011, the Stop Shopping Church elevated Barbara Ehrenreich to the rarified status of 'Fabulous Saint.'
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Previously, she was the deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at Hairpin. In 2023 she won a National Magazine Award for Columns and Essays.
Photo by Elana Mudd
Dr. Cornel West is a philosopher, activist, and public intellectual. Currently Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, Dr. West is a former professor at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton. The author of more than 20 books, including Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and, most recently, Black Prophetic Fire, he is currently running to be the Green Party’s 2024 nominee for President of the United States.
We are very excited to have you back at our events and would like to remind you that we are still in the midst of the pandemic. Please be considerate of your fellow guests and stay home if you’re feeling unwell. Also, consider wearing a mask when attending CBH's indoor events. You’ll be doing your part to help keep yourself and everyone healthy and safe.
In-person attendance for this program is at capacity! Please join the livestream on the Center for Brooklyn History Public Programs YouTube Channel. To watch the broadcast live, click HERE. Note that we generally overbook our free events to ensure a full house. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment; we will do our best to accommodate everyone! Doors will open at 6:30 pm.
An activist, journalist, social critic, and author of 21 books including the groundbreaking Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich amplified the voices of America’s disempowered by bringing her sharp perspective to the myth of the American dream, the labor market, health care, poverty, women’s rights, and a society rife with hypocrisy. Join us for a look at Ehrenreich’s intellectual and political legacy and how it might be carried forward today with Cornel West, Jia Tolentino, Alissa Quart, Frances Fox Piven, Matthew Desmond, Janet McIntosh, and Tom Lewandowski. Senator Bernie Sanders pays tribute by video and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir raise the house.
Presented in collaboration with Ehrenreich’s children, Rosa Brooks and Ben Ehrenreich.
Participants
MacArthur “Genius” and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond is the author of The New York Times bestseller and 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and Poverty, by America. Praised as “an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography” by The Washington Post, Evicted transformed our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a uniquely American problem. His next book, the instant #1 bestseller Poverty, by America, has been praised by the New Yorker as “urgent and accessible” and by Esquire as “another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart.” Drawing on history, research, and original reporting, the book reimagines the debate on poverty, and makes a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, and the founder and principal investigator of The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In 2018, The Eviction Lab published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000, and it has gone on to serve as a resource hub for the millions of American renters who faced increased housing insecurity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Desmond is a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune.
Photo by Barron Bixler
Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology Emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among her books are Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements, Why Americans Don't Vote and Challenging Authority.
Tom Lewandowski is director and co-founder of the Workers’ Project researching, innovating, and organizing workers’ voice and power. His work history of eighteen widely varying jobs includes GE production worker (third generation), janitor, gas jockey, historian, central labor council president, city councilor, advisor to Solidarnosc, as well as very long lay-offs and several firings. He currently lives in the Fort Wayne, Indiana area. Along with his two children and three grandchildren, he mourns the loss earlier this year of Brenda, his wife and co-conspirator for nearly 56 years.
Photo by Samuel Hoffman
Janet McIntosh is a Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, and the author and editor of three books and numerous academic articles about society and language in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. Janet was Barbara’s research assistant in the 1990s. She relished their conversations over the decades about topics ranging from spirit possession to narcissism.
Alissa Quart is the author of five acclaimed books of nonfiction including Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Squeezed, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded. She is the Executive Director of the non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich and built together. She has published two books of poetry, written for The Washington Post, the New York Times, The Guardian and TIME, and is an Emmy and an SPJ award-winner. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir, directed by Savitri D, are a secular performance 'Church' which engages in direct action and organizing campaigns against injustice and in service to the earth. The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the 1990s by actor and playwright William Talen. Director Savitri D is the principal designer of the Church of Stop Shopping’s Choir. The Choir is a radical performance community whose members come from a range of creative and activist backgrounds. In 2011, the Stop Shopping Church elevated Barbara Ehrenreich to the rarified status of 'Fabulous Saint.'
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Previously, she was the deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at Hairpin. In 2023 she won a National Magazine Award for Columns and Essays.
Photo by Elana Mudd
Dr. Cornel West is a philosopher, activist, and public intellectual. Currently Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, Dr. West is a former professor at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton. The author of more than 20 books, including Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and, most recently, Black Prophetic Fire, he is currently running to be the Green Party’s 2024 nominee for President of the United States.
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