Abraham Osheroff

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Abraham Osheroff
Known for Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Abraham Osheroff (October 24, 1915 – April 6, 2008) was an American social activist, war veteran, documentary filmmaker, and lecturer.

[edit] Biography

Born into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he spoke Yiddish before English.

In the early 1930s, he began political work. In 1931, during the Great Depression, the police arrested him for moving the furniture of evicted families back into their houses. A policeman, who was a member of the American Nazi Bund, beat up Osheroff while he was incarcerated and called him a "Goddamn Jew." Around this time he joined the Communist Party. In 1935, aged 20, he was organizing miners' unions on behalf of the party and raising aid for striking workers.

When the Spanish Civil War came in 1936, Abe felt no real compulsion to go and fight, until he saw the bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe. This convinced him to fight, as he believed no one should be allowed to inflict such suffering on others and get away with it. He joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was wounded at the Battle Of Belchite (1937).

When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the US Army to fight the Nazis in Europe.

After the war, he taught at the Jefferson School Of Social Science in New York, a Marxist adult school with ties to the Communist Party. He left in 1951, under persecution from the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

He left the Communist Party in 1956, in response to the revelation of Stalin's purges. After splitting from many of his best friends in the party, he threw his efforts into the Civil Rights Movement building a community center in 1965, in Holmes County, Mississippi, where he was threatened by the police because he was working with Negroes. (The police were allied with Ku Klux Klan elements.)

In 1974 he completed the documentary Dreams and Nightmares, on the Spanish military bases sold to Franco's dictatorship by Nixon, which shocked many, as at the time Nixon was still a popular president. Dreams & Nightmares won the top award at a documentary film festival in Leipzig, then in East Germany.

In 1985, he organised a village building brigade in America to travel to Nicaragua to aid the Sandinistas. Later, he was highly active in movements opposing the Gulf War and Iraq War, and he drove the Peace Mobile.

In March 2008, Osheroff was taken by friends to San Francisco for the unveiling of the United States's first monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He was determined to go, and it took great effort to get him there. But Osheroff was the guest of honor, one of the last survivors of the Brigade. Osheroff used to say, "I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing." After more than seven decades of deep involvement with what he called "radical humanism," Osheroff died on April 6, 2008.

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