Jeremy Varon, Author at Public Seminar

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

Europe & Central Asia

People’s War and Nuclear Fear: The Anti-War Left and Ukraine

A response to James Carroll’s reckoning with peace activism

October 26, 2022 • by Jeremy Varon

America was duty-bound to save Ukrainian lives, if at the expense of Ukraine’s sovereignty. But there is an uncomfortable arrogance to this argument, framed as tough love. Perhaps the Ukrainians themselves should determine what’s worth fighting and dying for, not the U.S....

People’s War and Nuclear Fear: The Anti-War Left and Ukraine

Politics

Obama Said He’d Close Guantánamo — These Activists Are Pushing Biden to Finish the Job

What should have been an end to the Guantánamo saga in 2012, was only the beginning of more grueling work for this anti-torture coalition

April 1, 2021 • by Jeremy Varon

_____ I remember, as if in a distant dream, repeating through sobs of joy and exhaustion, “It’s over. It’s over.” On live TV President Obama had just signed, as his first official act in January 2009, an executive order mandating the closure of the prison at Guantánamo. To Obama’s right stood ...

Obama Said He’d Close Guantánamo — These Activists Are Pushing Biden to Finish the Job

Activism

The “Buffalo Protestor”

On Martin Gugino, friend and fellow activist

June 9, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

I too reacted with horror at seeing the video of a 75-year-old man bleeding from the head after being shoved to the ground by Buffalo police. My stomach turned tighter when I realized, “Wait, I know that guy.” And now the president has tweeted about him, spinning the grotesque falsehood ...

Activism

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

Now everywhere quoted, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” serves as a thoughtful shorthand for understanding the jagged edge of today’s unrest. But even in Dr. King’s time, it was not particularly radical wisdom. In 1967, the Kerner Commission was tasked by ...

Middle East & North Africa

Saying No to a Stupid War

Americans must say no to war, using every tool at our command

January 7, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

These crude axioms drive the euphoria felt by a vocal portion of the American public at the killing of Iranian Quds commander Qassem Soleimani. That Trump ordered the strike adds to its luster. To members of his cult the murder proves Trump a master of manly resolve, besting his feckless predecessors. He has set and ...

Feature

1968 in the Time of the Plague

The morphing meaning of a remarkable year

December 19, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

As a scholar of the 1960s, I had looked forward for several years to 2018 with both excitement and misgivings. 2018 would be, at last, the Big One: the 50th anniversary of 1968, widely anointed the most remarkable year in a remarkable era. The limelight beckoned for the spirited sub-field of ...

Feature

What Will it Take to Save the Children of Yemen?

A march of backpacks against bombs

November 29, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

I sifted through the children’s backpacks laid at the Isaiah Wall, across from the United Nations, looking for one labeled with the name of an 11 year-old boy. That’s the age of my son, and carrying it would help me feel closer to the lives we were mourning. I found ...

What Will it Take to Save the Children of Yemen?

Feature

“Bloody Gina,” the CIA, and the Senate

Why Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing was a democratic farce

May 15, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

Growing up near Washington, D.C., I developed a child’s awe at the city’s great temples of democracy: its monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson; the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence is housed; the Capitol Rotunda; and even the modern, workaday offices of Congress where the people’s business is done. ...

Feature

The Sound of a Thunder

Weatherman and the Music of Late-Life Regrets

October 3, 2017 • by Jeremy Varon

Meteorological images of all sorts -- with their implications of inevitability -- found their way into the narratives about the group. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather,” plucked from Creedence Clearwater Revival went a 1969 headline in the Underground Press about the group. And in a late 1970 communiqué called “New ...

Feature

GTMO Is Open for Business

Be Afraid!

February 15, 2017 • by Jeremy Varon

On February 13, Republican Senators begged Trump in a joint letter to issue the order. Exceeding even its harsh terms, their letter called for the suspension of GTMO’s Periodic Review Boards (PRBs). First convened in 2013, the PRBs have cleared for release dozens of prisoners hitherto destined for indefinite detention ...

Education

Social Resistance

May We Rise

December 11, 2016 • by Jeremy Varon

I begin with the satisfaction of saying in public what so many of us have said in private: What a fucking nightmare! Like millions of others, my household on election night was one of inconsolable grief and rage. Within the seas of pain were especially heartbreaking scenes: immigrant and Muslim ...