The Perry Rosenstein Cultural Series
In honor of philanthropist and visionary Perry Rosenstein, whose Puffin Foundation has made so many ALBA programs possible, ALBA presents an interactive series of events, bringing together diverse progressive voices to enhance understanding and awareness of progressive traditions in America and beyond, and to put those traditions in the context of today’s troubling political and social climate.
Workshop Series
ALBA is pleased to announce a new initiative as part of the Perry Rosenstein Cultural Series: six expert-led interactive workshops about salient, fascinating, or controversial aspects of the Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades, and the U.S. volunteers who joined them. Modeled on our successful institutes for high school teachers, these workshops will be open to the general audience.
To ensure maximum interactivity, each 1.5-hour workshop will be capped at 20 participants, who will be asked to do a modest amount of reading or viewing beforehand (approximately two hours’ worth). The workshop will combine presentation with discussion. They’ll be conducted in English by two experts on the topic.
Workshop topics discussed thus far.
Hemingway, the Spanish Civil War, and the Lincoln Brigade
Posters of the Spanish Civil War
The Civil War & Spanish Immigrants
Women & the Spanish Civil War
Poetry & the Spanish Civil War
Spain, WWII, and the Holocaust
Stay tuned for future topics to be announced!
Film Series
An ALBA Film Screening + Q & A Session:
Invisible Heroes: African Americans in the Spanish Civil War
Part of the Perry Rosenstein Cultural Series
Check Out our Online Conversation about Invisible Heroes: African Americans in the Spanish Civil War, a documentary about the African Americans who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Broadcasted live on February 21st.
The Q &A panel included the film’s co-director Jordi Torrent, historian Robin D.G. Kelley, and former head of Tamiment Library Timothy V. Johnson. The panel was moderated by Lindsay Griffiths, graduate student at Princeton University
Remembering Perry Rosenstein
Perry Rosenstein, Founder and President of the Puffin Foundation, Ltd., passed away in Teaneck, NJ on April 3, 2020, after a brief struggle with the COVID-19 virus.
A successful self-made businessman who was born into a family of Polish immigrants and had grown up in poverty in the Coops cooperative in the Bronx, he remained passionate about assisting have-nots in all walks of society, but especially artists and arts organizations that were often excluded because of “race, gender or social philosophy.” It was in this context of arts—the creation of a major exhibition of Spanish Civil War posters “Shouts from the Wall”—that Perry first befriended ALBA in 1994 and became a partner in shaping our education and cultural programs.
Together with his wife, Gladys Miller Rosenstein, and son Neal Rosenstein, Perry graciously supported a wide range of ALBA’s activities—from the annual ALBA/Susman Lecture series to traveling exhibitions of Children’s Art in Wartime; from ALBA’s innovative Teaching Institutes focusing on anti-fascism to the prestigious ALBA/Puffin Prize for Human Rights Activism, which has honored Bryan Stevenson, Baltasar Garzón, and the Arizona-based organization No More Deaths, among others.
Perry’s Foundation, established in 1983, has also supported environmental organizations (notably the Teaneck, NJ Conservancy); the Puffin Activist Gallery at the Museum of the City of New York and exhibitions on the history of labor in New York and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Another area of Perry’s interest was progressive media outlets, such as the Type Media Center, Democracy Now, The Nation magazine, Jewish Currents, and In These Times.
What made Perry’s contributions unique was the range of his vision. He welcomed new ideas and new organizations, even as he cherished his left-wing background and heritage. He was one of a kind, a man with a broad outlook for the future and a strategy to accomplish it. His legacy will endure in the good work of his Foundation.
