Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Campus spies. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter trackers. Biometrics. Student security consultants. Professors of homeland security studies. Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012.

Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America's towns and cities, its...

Never forget.

For ten years now, we've repeated the magic words, the gestures, the rituals. Today, of course, we can hardly forget to remember: to return to that luminous Tuesday morning, when the autumn day turned to darkness, and thousands turned to dust. And yet we find, more and more...

I was 16 when I wrote these words in September 2001.

As a New Yorker of Generation 9/11 and a staunch supporter of Park51, I am publishing them for the first time today. Although they were written nine years ago, I believe their message is more urgent than...

In the bloody wake of the Mavi Marmara, with its righteous torrent of international outrage, and in view of a new confrontation impending at sea, a point of vital importance has gone missing. It is one that many Jews and many Gentiles grasp, but do not...

Amid an otherwise festive ethos at New York City's Salute to Israel Parade, hundreds of paraders ended up facing off with a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel. The annual festival unfolded Sunday against a backdrop of growing divisions over Israel within New York's...

This morning, for the first time in 10 years, graduate employees at New York University returned to the offices of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to file a petition for recognition of their union and a formal union election.

From hand to hand,...

TODOS SOMOS ARIZONA.

"We Are All Arizona. No to the Law against Immigrants."

Here, in the hands of this man at Saturday's May Day march in Foley Square, opposite the New York State Courts, was a sign both to the hunted humanity of Arizona and to the rest of us....

Yesterday Wall Street, for perhaps the first time, answered directly to the people.

As more than ten thousand union members and community members took the streets in the heart of New York's Financial District to demand fundamental financial reform and "make Wall Street pay," bankers and traders in...

Ours is a culture of questions. Whenever we're not kvetching, we're questioning, and our culture of questions is sanctified in the Passover seder. There, the youngest Yidele is roped into the ritual singing of Ma Nishtana, song of the four questions. I give you an abridged rendition:

Q: Why eat...

Here, amid the glittering ruins of globalized gentrification's gilded age, a kind of glocal tenants' movement is taking shape, at once locally rooted and globally connective.

On April 6, 2008, a gathering of global dimensions was afoot on the steps of New York's City Hall. You may...

It was seven years ago that I found myself running the wrong way up Sixth Avenue with my high school sweetheart.

Through the rain we ran, with peace on our lips. New York's Finest were running after us, as they had a way of doing with pesky antiwar protesters.

The...

This week, New York City's Jewish community is riven by protests, counterprotests, and now, Jew-on-Jew threats over the question of Israel and the Palestinians.

On Tuesday night, over 500 people gathered and marched in silent protest outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi, Chief...

Yesterday, as college students were walking out, teaching in and rallying at universities citywide and nationwide, thousands of local high school students were streaming out of school gates and into the streets of New York.

It was by far the largest protest to hit the State...

Note: Are you or is someone you know impacted by the elimination of the Student MetroCard? Tell your story.

Today, the Metropolitan Transit Authority launches a whirlwind tour of public hearings citywide. These hearings,...

They don't take it lying down, these people.

And King Coal sure does dish it out. Last week, Massey Energy Company continued the bombing of Coal River Mountain, West Virginia, the Friends of Coal distributed "Let's Learn About Coal" coloring books to kids, and the Senate confirmed...