WHEN SARAH SCHULMAN WALKED INTO MY APARTMENT, a month or so after Artforum magazine fired me in October 2023 for publishing an open letter in support of Palestinian liberation, her first words were, “How can I help?” I think this is the most ethical sentence in the English language. She said it like she meant it. This orientation toward the world permeates her latest work,The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (Thesis, $30). It’s more than a handbook for activists; it’s a guide for staying human in hell. “The purpose of this book is to make solidarity doable,” she writes plainly, not long after she gives us the most beautiful and useful definition of the term I’ve ever read: “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter.”
I feel lucky to live in a world with someone like Sarah—“the Cassandra of the Lower East Side,” her friend Bryn Kelly used to call her. “Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno,” Marco Polo says at the end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “then make them endure, give them space.” Sarah is the fire against inferno. For a little while one day in another apartment, a month or so before her book was published, she taught me how to scout a clearing, how to fight flame with flame.
David Velasco: Where should we start?
Sarah Schulman: Well, how did you feel reading about yourself? Let’s start with that.
I felt honored to have been thought about in this vein. Because on the one hand, publishing the open letter was very much an action of solidarity—eight thousand people signing on against genocide. But it was also disorienting because when I was fired I became a figurehead for this act that was not about me, but which of course had to do with something much larger. And I have mixed feelings about what to do with that.
In your book, I love these case studies of individuals, getting specific about where things work and where they don’t. It’s complicated. We hear a lot of people saying “It’s complicated” as a placeholder for a conversation. But you persist in believing that complexity is not an excuse to push something aside, it’s actually how we can equip ourselves to be in solidarity.
You can’t be effective if you can’t deal with complexity. And many of the individuals I talk about in the book, their projects fail a little bit. So that’s part of it. There are no heroes.
The myth of a single person standing in the face of history and making change by themselves is an extension of the same liberal myth used in our daily oppression. Every change has at least a few people. It doesn’t have to be hundreds. Sometimes a small group, maybe four—which my friend hannah baer reminds me is Thich Nhat Hanh’s minimum number for a sangha—will be more effective than a group of one thousand or ten thousand, you know? But it’s not just one.
That said, because you’re also speaking to a reader, it is useful to speak to what individuals can accomplish, and to look closely at why certain individuals do what they do.
Yeah, right motive. That pure motive is an unreasonable expectation.
And that’s the “fantasy” of the title—our attachment to the ideal of pure motive. You start by recalling a conversation with Vivian Gornick. You’re talking about solidarity that’s rooted in inequality, and how because of this cross-class texture there will be impure motivations. She says, “Isn’t solidarity like-minded people with a shared struggle?”
I think Vivian—who is unbelievable, genius, right? And has influenced all of us—she’s thinking about the mass working-class movement that she grew up in, and that’s not where we are.
You finished this book before Trump was elected?
Right.
What would you include in a version being written right now?
I don’t think the book would be published now. And I think I would have been more afraid. But now I’m feeling very fearless.
I start with a Ghadir Shafie quote, “Ask what you can do, not what you can lose,” and I’m trying to have that be my mantra. I don’t have that much at stake because I am older, I have had a great life, and it’s like if I lose my job or something, which I don’t think is imminent, I’ll deal with it. You’re dealing with your situation. These things seem cataclysmic, but you do come out the other side.
I mean, you do, but sometimes you don’t.
Let me say it differently because you’re right. Because suffering doesn’t make us better. It makes us worse. But things that feel like they’re not possible sometimes painfully become possible.
A student at a talk recently asked me, “What hope do we have?” And one of the things I’ve been trying to do is to invite my despair into the room, not cast it aside, in the same way that you might need to learn to invite people you disagree with or who you fear to the table. I think the solidarity we achieve inside ourselves is reflected in the solidarity we create with others. And I said I think we have to learn how to work without hope as we might know it. We certainly have to learn how to work with our despair.
In a time like this when we know it’s going to get worse, the main thing to focus on is maintaining your integrity. I think that’s even more important than survival on some level. Because who are the people that we look back to from other fascist periods? The people who tried to tell the truth. During the McCarthy era, people destroyed other people’s lives. They got access to things but now they’re despised, even in death. Think of Elia Kazan, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire. When he got his lifetime achievement Oscar, people did not stand up. It’s never forgotten when you betray people.
So, in a way, you’re taking in the historical horizon. You’re able to remember that this moment is not everything.
It’s an advantage of age. Tragedy, you can’t avoid it, but you have to feel like you’re a real person and that you feel good about how you’re responding. And one of the things I wanted to do is to thank people like yourself who’ve done the right thing, because there are so few. I’m looking at what’s happening at Columbia University right now and all these famous professors, they’re not saying a word! But you’ll always have that, that you’ve done the right thing, and they won’t.
It’s also liberating because now that there’s a record of what I’m about I might as well say whatever I want.
You should tell those kids. Don’t tell them to be hopeful, tell them to have integrity and feel good about how they’ve responded.
It’s true. I’m not even saying that one should be hopeless, but that hope is not a sturdy ballast for politics.
Unless you’re hoping that you’re going to be a person you can be proud to be.
That’s beautiful.
In the book I reprint and rely on a document by the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] Movement that explains their political concept “Strategic Radicalism.” It is a call to enact strategies that can get you somewhere—even if it requires a long view. Look at the context and try to understand what is actually possible, instead of ideologically pure. And they advise against factionalism—after all Palestinian society is like every society, multidimensional. There are many points of view because people are different. Success relies on trying to avoid micro-critiques and emphasis of other people’s differences characterized as failures. It doesn’t mean anything goes, not at all. But complaints need to be actions that can make things better.
Could you tell us how you became the kind of person who does this work?
I grew up in a Holocaust family. I’m the oldest, and I had a grandmother who lived with us who was a refugee, and I was raised with this idea that the most dangerous person in the world is a bystander. And I internalized that. My mother was a social worker, and she took us on these union buses with no heat down to Washington, DC, for the big Vietnam War actions.
But my parents were profoundly homophobic, incredibly sexist, and also prejudiced against Arabs, because they saw Israel-Palestine as an extension of the Holocaust. I was a smart girl, which was a problem in my family, and then being gay was like a cataclysm—and got me pushed out. But I retained those first values and saw where my family didn’t follow through.
I came out into a lesbian community when I was sixteen that was very politicized. The heroes were like Audre Lorde and
Adrienne Rich, and poetry readings were where people went and all that. My first book came out when I was twenty-four. Now I’m sixty-six. My life has been writing about the people who are reading it. And that’s a very interesting experience because they care a lot about how they’re represented, and they give you feedback, and the work is better for it. I’ve gone to see very famous straight, commercial writers read and nobody cares. It’s just entertainment, and I’ve never had that. I’ve always had a very dialogic thing and now here we are, I have my twenty-first book. So, it’s been a way of life, right? And that’s where I got my life. It’s from the community.
You describe Judaism as a dialogic religion.
It’s supposed to be. Zionism has changed that.
The hegemony of Israel relies on a homogenization of what Judaism might be.
Right, like I talk in the book about how I was accused of anti-Semitism by CUNY in 2016, which now I realize was ahead of the curve. But how can a Jewish person be anti-Semitic if it’s a dialogic religion with all these different points of view? It’s insane.
I was thinking about how this book and your larger body of work feels to me like an ethical project. It’s in many ways an education on how to engage and understand people different from yourself.
It’s funny because it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a cri de coeur. I’m so used to writing now, it just comes out. It’s so physical. I don’t have much intention and then these things appear and I realize what I’m really struggling with.
When I was very young, I had a relationship with this avant-garde filmmaker named Abigail Child. She was much older than me, and she was very educated in the arts, and I had almost no arts education. And she turned me on to everything, experimental film and John Zorn, and that has freed me all these years to do this kind of juxtaposition. Formal juxtaposition, where you can put together pieces that are written differently, and yet there’s a cumulative—I hope—experience of reading. Because at one point, a book like this, certain editors would have wanted me to unify the tone, but then it would have lost a lot of meaning.
It’s a very ecumenical approach to style and genre and it’s successful because it doesn’t feel overthought. It’s more like, “This is what’s happening, and this is how I’m making sense of it in this moment,” and that makes it connect.
I’m very direct and relational. These kinds of books are not for everybody, and in a way, that’s good, because when you write something that’s for everybody, you lose your soul a little bit.
The book contains your New York magazine piece written very shortly after October 7.
October 16.
I remember very clearly reading that piece and struggling with how Artforum would respond in that moment. And I thought to myself, New Yorkmagazine just published this incredible piece by Sarah, it’s incumbent on every magazine to be doing something.
They also solicited it.
That’s incredible.
Based on a tweet. And that’s actually how I got this book published was that Niki Papadopoulos, who is my editor, read that and all these other doors were slamming shut. And she called me, and we had this long breakfast. There’s one point where I say, if the censorship was so strong, you wouldn’t be reading this book. So people shouldn’t think that if you tell the truth, every door is going to close.
It might open new ones. But I would just add that that piece was critical to me thinking about how to frame my own actions.
Oh, good, thank you for saying that.
Everything is connected in a chain, and you might not even know that something you did has this other effect.
I do want to say the name of the editor, Gazelle Emami. She’s the person who solicited it based on a tweet. So, it’s just having one person with integrity, whether it’s you, or her, you know, that gets this word in. Can we talk about Artforum?
Sure.
I write in my book about getting together with a friend of mine, who is this great guy, and he’s telling me he’s going to publish this article in Artforum, and I’m like, “Why are you doing that?” And he says, “Is the boycott still on?” We’ve got to tell people that the boycott is still on.
It’s an interesting case study in terms of where solidarity falls apart around people who otherwise seem committed to certain politics. I have a very close friend who wrote for the magazine in December. She just opened the door for all these other people. And she’s a very smart political thinker. What happened?
This gets back to the whole McCarthyite thing. If people know there’s a boycott and they still decide to publish, that’s a very negative decision.
Something else I love in the book is that you’re clear that effective solidarity is about creativity. Which comes from (a): People feeling like they have agency within a movement, and (b): People being able to get specific with the current conditions, being able to look, identify, and learn how to respond.
And also being realistic, like the section in the book describing the abortion underground in post-Franco Spain. A group of us were able to get these women to France to have abortions when it was illegal in their country, and then they had this fascist mentality when they got home and wouldn’t help anybody else. So, was our project a failure? And you just say, Well, all these women got abortions, so it’s not a failure, but it’s not what we would have wished for. And you live with that.
But how often do you get exactly what you wish for?
Never. That’s the thing.
That section is important because you show that each action or movement has different standards of success. With Palestine, there is a concrete goal, success would look like a Palestinian state.
. . . or Palestinian autonomy, or one state.
Whereas with ACT UP it’s about stopping a global disease.
And now with the dissolution of USAID, twenty million people with HIV just got cut off from their meds. So we’re having a global AIDS crisis again. The guys from TAG [Treatment Action Group] and the PEPFAR [the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] built those programs. They come out of the AIDS activist movement. Some of these people are still alive and now they’re watching everything just . . . uuuugh.
And there will be an untold number of deaths, just from this one gesture.
Yeah, but it’s also weird how we’re lamenting the decline of these things that we always knew were terrible: the FBI, Harvard, the American theater, or USAID—which included CIA elements. In a way it’s an incredible opportunity to fantasize and articulate how we would like to have a higher education system, for example, or a health care delivery system, or, you know, a retirement program that’s not insufficient.
Rather than grabbing for the things that we’re losing and which we were never happy with. We would do better to start planning what we want. That’s what solidarity helps with, imagining the we that deserves better.
Right, what do we want?
Where do you feel like it’s useful to put your energies, in this time, knowing the stakes?
Well, I’m about to do a twenty-city book tour. And the way we’ve organized it is that we’ve asked each bookstore to bring an interlocutor who is a local person. So I’m hoping that there will be a lot of different kinds of conversations. I give as much money as I can. Palestine Legal, I think, is an absolutely incredible organization. I belong to Jewish Voice for Peace. And I don’t censor myself. There are times when I feel afraid, but I think it’s stupid. Because the operating mechanism of oppression is fear, right?
Fear and depression. The sense of futility, which is related to depression, and which is about feeling like you don’t have agency.
I think that this feeling of not having agency is also related to the myth of the movie hero, the idea that you have to take it on yourself, that if you alone can’t change it all, if you can’t be the hero, then you failed. It’s a misunderstanding of how change happens.
And then there are also examples like our mutual friend Nan Goldin, who’s like, “I’m an addict in recovery, I’m smoking, I have this voice [smoker’s voice], and I’m going to stand up and tell the Germans what for.” I mean, she’s been unbelievable. She has been so great, and I don’t see other artists doing that at all. They’re going the other direction. Her integrity is just radiant.
Nan is a very specific figure. I’m constantly thinking, “Who made you, how did you get this way?”
She has a sense of right and wrong . . .
She has a sense of right and wrong.
. . . and she follows it.
Nan is an exceptional case because she’s just one of those charismatic historic figures and she’s also making it clear that she’s not doing this alone, she’s holding stuff for the group. She knew that she had to build an organization, P.A.I.N. [Prescription Addiction Intervention Now], and that there was a history of people before her. And this helped her prepare for her latest activism around Palestine, and her incredible speech at her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It’s not like she emerged sui generis. It was part of a chain, and she knows how to use her particular position to amplify a politics.
And I think your book does this so well—all your books do this—it’s about knowing how to see what’s actually happening. Knowing how to see the shape of things and when you can do something is a skill we should all learn in school.
But you can’t, because the school is also an oppressive structure. But yeah, it’s funny, there’s a point in the Alice Neel chapter where I compare her and Nan, and I was surprised that no one’s done that before because it seems so obvious.
When you said that I was like, of course, this commitment each artist has to depicting their world, to recognizing people as they are, whether through painting or photography, is this fundamental—you don’t even have to call it political, it’s just an ethical gesture. It’s a way of relating that . . .
It’s characterological. It’s organic to these people.
And that’s what you say in Let the Record Show [A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993], when you ask, “Why are these the people who took action?”
What do they have in common?
And you’re like, at the end of the day it’s just characterological.
It’s not experiential. I had to learn that. That took eight years.
Which is also related to this great phrase you have from Richard Wright about Carson McCullers, about her capacity to portray both white and Black characters in their full humanity: it’s “an attitude toward life.”
An attitude toward life.
And you have that, too—you do that in your novels, you do that in the way you’re writing and in the way you profile certain people. The fact that your history of ACT UP is interviews with everybody, letting all these people talk.
That’s what makes the movement. The rank and file. Not the leaders.
You’re unflinching in witnessing people, their flaws, what they are bringing.
Because that’s the only way to get anywhere true.
David Velasco is a writer based in New York.