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He won the right to services like school and health care for people illegally crossing the border into the U.S. He also fought the Trump administration's family separation policy.
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Student protests calling for university divestment from Israel and the U.S. arms industry have rocked campuses from coast to coast. The nonviolent protests, which have been characterized as "antisemitic" for their criticism of Israel, have been met with an intensifying police crackdown as university administrators threaten academic discipline and arrests. On Wednesday, local and state troopers violently arrested dozens at the University of Texas at Austin. Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University in New York City, the site of a high-profile student encampment and one of the first to be met with police action, where he called on university president Minouche Shafik to resign. We hear from two Jewish students involved in protests at their schools. Joshua Sklar, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and an organizer with Jewish Voice of Peace Austin, says concern over campus antisemitism is insincere, and that, in fact, "The people who are being targeted are Muslim students, Arab students, and especially Palestinian students." Sklar and Sarah King, a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest who was arrested at the campus's Gaza Solidarity Encampment, also point out that a large percentage of protesters are Jewish anti-Zionists concerned about their safety from state repression. "The threat is really coming from Columbia University, which has set the police on hundreds of its students who are entrusted to its care," says King.
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 Marc J. FranklinThe last Uncle Vanya to cause a stir in New York was far more modest in physical size than the Broadway production opening tonight at Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont Theater (to June 16), yet left a more emphatic impression. It took place in a Flatiron loft, with the audience seated in two rows running the length of the property's living room, with its brilliant actors—including Bill Irwin, Marin Ireland, David Cromer, and Will Brill (now starring in the season's deserved biggest hit, Stereophonic)—performing inches from audience members' feet. As hearts broke, guns appeared, and so many feelings went unsaid, all felt viscerally immediate and clear.
The much-anticipated LCT production—the Hollywood star Steve Carell's Broadway debut—is, first of all, such an odd duck to look at. The Beaumont stage is Lincoln Center's biggest, but what fills it here? Not much, and not much logically and engagingly. A picnic table. Random tables, chairs (kind of looks mid-century modern). The actors are in modern dress, and drift and shimmy all over the expanse—the floor looks like the cross section of tree. They sometimes seem to get lost, and so—despite some standout performances—unfortunately do we.
This production of Vanya, directed by Lila Neugebauer, has been adapted by Heidi Schreck, the playwright and performer of the exquisite
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