Review of The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir by Michael Ansara (Cornell University Press, 2025)
Campus opposition to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, since the fall of 2023, has been quite triggering for veterans of student organizing against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In progressive media outlets, now old “New Leftists” have mainly weighed in with welcome expressions of support, tempered with cautionary notes about political mistakes, excesses, and “bad choices” that might be better avoided this time around.
Early on, there were some Bronx cheers from “elders” who were much farther left six decades ago (and perhaps regretting it now). Writing in the Nation, one such alumnus of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a retired academic from upstate New York, quit Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) over a downstate chapter’s “willing[ness] to embrace the most extreme positions on the Palestinian question — up to and including denying Israel’s right to continued existence.” In contrast, a well-known former SDS leader at Columbia University praised present-day protesters at his alma mater “for their moral clarity and courage.” He also warned them about “the mistake of answering police violence with anger, fighting them and calling them pigs,” which, in 1968, “blurred the line between nonviolence (the occupation of buildings) and violence (our slogans and rhetoric), thereby undercutting our moral position.”
Seventy-eight-year-old Michael Ansara, a leading member of this generational cohort, has gone further in offering 276 pages worth of advice to college students today. In his recently released memoir, The Hard Work of Hope, Ansara asks timely questions like,…
Auteur: Steve Early
