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A People’s History of Robin Hood

Source: Yes Magazine

For hundreds of years, he’s fought tax injustice, tyranny, and the seizure of the commons. Why we still need him today.

In the late 1950s, a handful of peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a major U.S. university campus by carrying signs and wearing green buttons. Back when The Adventures of Robin Hood was a giant hit on television, most everybody knew that green was Robin Hood’s color and that Robin could not side with the king’s soldiers or future soldiers of any empire. Five decades later, the lead protagonist of a cult favorite American cable show, Leverage, announces at the beginning of each episode: “The rich and the powerful take what they want; we steal it back for you.” read more

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Old Days of the Radical Jews: How American Yiddish Theater Survived Through Satire

The world of Yiddish theater in its glory days on Second Avenue in Manhattan of the 1910s-1940s seems like one more leftwing Jewish tale of another faraway universe. However, the productions have not ceased entirely and various forms of translations bring the theater to new audiences. What we've lost more than anything is the vernacular qualities, the ways in which this theater drew upon various forms of entertainment and edification from the shtetl to the immigrant ghetto, and how fully it engaged an excited and sometimes infuriated Jewish public.