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Bob Dylan is pictured in New York City in 1965.
The film would have benefited from showing what was happening, both in Greenwich Village and around the country, that led Bob Dylan to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems.
Along with many of my generation (that ridiculous word “boomers”) I both looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The writing was crisp, the scenery was great, the acting was tremendous, and with a couple of exceptions (I’ll get into that) the scenes were all right on target. He even threw in several Easter Eggs for those of us with a bit too much obsessive knowledge of Bob Dylan’s history–like seeing Al Kooper, who had never played keyboards, sit down at the organ in the studio and pick out what became an iconic riff in “Like a Rolling Stone.” A pleasing, exciting romp through an incredible, unequaled moment when, as Dylan so succinctly put it, the times were most definitely changing.
So why, as the credits rolled to a blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that I swore was Dylan’s version—Timothée Chalamet really was that good–was I not fulfilled? Why did it feel akin to eating a pastrami sandwich on white bread? And my wife Maryann, who at a decade younger than me didn’t experience those years as I had, left with the same feeling. What was missing?
And then it hit. Context.
As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever.
Where did those early songs come from? Did they just pop into Dylan’s head from nowhere? What was happening, both in Greenwich Village and more significantly around the country, that led him to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems? When, as depicted in the film, Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the very first time, his young audience instantly latched on to it and went nuts, loudly and joyously singing along. Why? Was he telling them something they didn’t already know? Or was he giving voice to their lives as they were living them at that moment?
Okay, this may seem obvious. After all, everyone “knows” that the 60s were a time of youthful rebellion and upheaval. So what else is new? Does a film about Dylan really need to spell that out? And as far as the politics so many of his songs were infused with, isn’t it enough that the film depicted him singing at the 1963 March on Washington?
I would contend that it’s not nearly enough, because it doesn’t get close to what drove Dylan to write songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Death of Emmet Till,” to name just a few. No, I’m not arguing that the film should have been a history lesson about the 60s, but I believe it would have better served both Dylan and the audience had it set the stage more clearly with what was explosively emerging in the dawn of that decade, because in fact this is not so obvious, especially to younger audiences.
To get that sense, I went back to Suze Rotolo’s wonderful memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo, was Dylan’s girlfriend from shortly after he arrived in New York. In the film she is given the name Sylvie Russo (interestingly at Dylan’s insistence, to protect her privacy. She died in 2011). Their relationship, which lasted four years, is beautifully depicted in the film, including the fact that, despite his growing relationship with Joan Baez, he never stopped loving her. And the film does briefly allude to her political influence on his writing. But there are two key points in her memoir that are sorely missing in the film, I think to its detriment.
The first is the nature of the Greenwich Village that Dylan walked into in that winter of 1961. Rotolo goes into vivid detail about the cultural and political cauldron bubbling up there. Here is her description of a typical Sunday in Washington Square Park:
The atmosphere… was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain, and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trotskyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers… Everything overlapped nicely.
Just a 30 second walk in the park through Dylan’s eyes would have added an element that was missing.
And that was just the start. Along with the folk clubs that were depicted in the film, there was the burgeoning avant garde theater and film scenes. Clubs featured jazz and the beat poets. Musicians, not just folk, were drawn there from all across the country. Every night, folks would gather in various apartments to share songs and debate philosophy and politics. All of this, Rotolo makes clear, Dylan dove into and hungrily absorbed everything around him. He was not alone. He was being influenced by others, and he in turn influenced them. As he himself wrote, revolution was in the air.
A vivid example of this is one of his most political songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” He wrote it after attending a particularly striking and powerful version of the song “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In that song, the maid Jenny sings about her fantasy of leading a pirate ship into harbor to wreak revenge on the bourgeoise “gentlemen” who treat her like a piece of dirt. Dylan turned that concept into a truly uplifting depiction of revolution:
Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered.
This does bring up one particular objection I have to the film. In it, the only time we hear that song is when he is singing it under duress at a fundraising party. It’s clear that by now he hates having to perform it and all of his songs up to that point, and the scene marks his break with the past and headlong dive into the future. The scene itself is an accurate depiction of Dylan’s growing rebellion against both the rigid strictures of the folk music world and the political messages they now expected him to include in every song. But without a strong sense of why he wrote it in the first place, we’re left with an incomplete picture of what was driving him all along.
And that brings up the question of how well, or weakly, the film depicts the times he was in the midst of and responding to. Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the fear that dominated every aspect of American life in the 1950s—the ubiquitous shadows of an impending nuclear war, combined with the grinding repression of the “Red scare” witch hunts, were everywhere. Hundreds were persecuted and jailed, with Pete Seeger on the top of the list. That the film opens with Seeger’s sentencing is to its credit. The intensity and ubiquity of that repression was a huge part of what those who flocked to Greenwich Village were rebelling against, often at great cost. Dylan nailed the paranoia permeating society hilariously with his “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on the Freewheelin’ album.
But what was increasingly taking center stage in the early 1960s, and deeply influencing Dylan, was the civil rights movement. All too often, and unfortunately in this film as well, that movement is squashed down to the March on Washington and maybe one or two other big events. But none of that gives a sense of how dramatic, dangerous, and explosive events from 1960 to 1964 were in a South where lynchings were still commonplace.
Take a look at just a few of those events:
Imagine how all of those things hit young people straining against the heavy 50s repression still hanging over their heads, and you get a sense of how wildly liberating Dylan’s songs were.
My point here is not that this film is in any way required to “educate” the audience about all this, but the problem is this—it’s one thing to know the facts, and it’s something altogether different to feel their impact at the time and in the historical context they happened. It’s that feeling that is crucial for really understanding (getting a feel for, so to speak) what was driving young people, and especially Dylan, to reach with all their hearts and souls for a new society.
That is why he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and that is why it became an anthem. How much stronger A Complete Unknown would have been had the filmmakers found the ways to channel that feeling.
To get why this matters you only have to take a cursory look at our world today. As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever. There is and will only ever be one Bob Dylan, but to quote Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.
The upshot? Go see A Complete Unknown, then take a deep dive into the decade that created Dylan. Lots to learn there.
PS: The film perpetuates the myth that Pete Seeger was furious at Dylan for insisting on doing his electrified set at the 1965 Newport Film Festival and looked for an axe to chop of the electrified sound. As Seeger himself has said multiple times, he had no problem with what Dylan was doing, and loved the songs he played, especially “Maggie’s Farm.” But the quality of the sound system he was using was so terrible that it created distortion and made it virtually impossible to hear the music, and that was what he was furious about. Quite a difference.
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Along with many of my generation (that ridiculous word “boomers”) I both looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The writing was crisp, the scenery was great, the acting was tremendous, and with a couple of exceptions (I’ll get into that) the scenes were all right on target. He even threw in several Easter Eggs for those of us with a bit too much obsessive knowledge of Bob Dylan’s history–like seeing Al Kooper, who had never played keyboards, sit down at the organ in the studio and pick out what became an iconic riff in “Like a Rolling Stone.” A pleasing, exciting romp through an incredible, unequaled moment when, as Dylan so succinctly put it, the times were most definitely changing.
So why, as the credits rolled to a blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that I swore was Dylan’s version—Timothée Chalamet really was that good–was I not fulfilled? Why did it feel akin to eating a pastrami sandwich on white bread? And my wife Maryann, who at a decade younger than me didn’t experience those years as I had, left with the same feeling. What was missing?
And then it hit. Context.
As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever.
Where did those early songs come from? Did they just pop into Dylan’s head from nowhere? What was happening, both in Greenwich Village and more significantly around the country, that led him to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems? When, as depicted in the film, Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the very first time, his young audience instantly latched on to it and went nuts, loudly and joyously singing along. Why? Was he telling them something they didn’t already know? Or was he giving voice to their lives as they were living them at that moment?
Okay, this may seem obvious. After all, everyone “knows” that the 60s were a time of youthful rebellion and upheaval. So what else is new? Does a film about Dylan really need to spell that out? And as far as the politics so many of his songs were infused with, isn’t it enough that the film depicted him singing at the 1963 March on Washington?
I would contend that it’s not nearly enough, because it doesn’t get close to what drove Dylan to write songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Death of Emmet Till,” to name just a few. No, I’m not arguing that the film should have been a history lesson about the 60s, but I believe it would have better served both Dylan and the audience had it set the stage more clearly with what was explosively emerging in the dawn of that decade, because in fact this is not so obvious, especially to younger audiences.
To get that sense, I went back to Suze Rotolo’s wonderful memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo, was Dylan’s girlfriend from shortly after he arrived in New York. In the film she is given the name Sylvie Russo (interestingly at Dylan’s insistence, to protect her privacy. She died in 2011). Their relationship, which lasted four years, is beautifully depicted in the film, including the fact that, despite his growing relationship with Joan Baez, he never stopped loving her. And the film does briefly allude to her political influence on his writing. But there are two key points in her memoir that are sorely missing in the film, I think to its detriment.
The first is the nature of the Greenwich Village that Dylan walked into in that winter of 1961. Rotolo goes into vivid detail about the cultural and political cauldron bubbling up there. Here is her description of a typical Sunday in Washington Square Park:
The atmosphere… was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain, and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trotskyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers… Everything overlapped nicely.
Just a 30 second walk in the park through Dylan’s eyes would have added an element that was missing.
And that was just the start. Along with the folk clubs that were depicted in the film, there was the burgeoning avant garde theater and film scenes. Clubs featured jazz and the beat poets. Musicians, not just folk, were drawn there from all across the country. Every night, folks would gather in various apartments to share songs and debate philosophy and politics. All of this, Rotolo makes clear, Dylan dove into and hungrily absorbed everything around him. He was not alone. He was being influenced by others, and he in turn influenced them. As he himself wrote, revolution was in the air.
A vivid example of this is one of his most political songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” He wrote it after attending a particularly striking and powerful version of the song “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In that song, the maid Jenny sings about her fantasy of leading a pirate ship into harbor to wreak revenge on the bourgeoise “gentlemen” who treat her like a piece of dirt. Dylan turned that concept into a truly uplifting depiction of revolution:
Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered.
This does bring up one particular objection I have to the film. In it, the only time we hear that song is when he is singing it under duress at a fundraising party. It’s clear that by now he hates having to perform it and all of his songs up to that point, and the scene marks his break with the past and headlong dive into the future. The scene itself is an accurate depiction of Dylan’s growing rebellion against both the rigid strictures of the folk music world and the political messages they now expected him to include in every song. But without a strong sense of why he wrote it in the first place, we’re left with an incomplete picture of what was driving him all along.
And that brings up the question of how well, or weakly, the film depicts the times he was in the midst of and responding to. Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the fear that dominated every aspect of American life in the 1950s—the ubiquitous shadows of an impending nuclear war, combined with the grinding repression of the “Red scare” witch hunts, were everywhere. Hundreds were persecuted and jailed, with Pete Seeger on the top of the list. That the film opens with Seeger’s sentencing is to its credit. The intensity and ubiquity of that repression was a huge part of what those who flocked to Greenwich Village were rebelling against, often at great cost. Dylan nailed the paranoia permeating society hilariously with his “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on the Freewheelin’ album.
But what was increasingly taking center stage in the early 1960s, and deeply influencing Dylan, was the civil rights movement. All too often, and unfortunately in this film as well, that movement is squashed down to the March on Washington and maybe one or two other big events. But none of that gives a sense of how dramatic, dangerous, and explosive events from 1960 to 1964 were in a South where lynchings were still commonplace.
Take a look at just a few of those events:
Imagine how all of those things hit young people straining against the heavy 50s repression still hanging over their heads, and you get a sense of how wildly liberating Dylan’s songs were.
My point here is not that this film is in any way required to “educate” the audience about all this, but the problem is this—it’s one thing to know the facts, and it’s something altogether different to feel their impact at the time and in the historical context they happened. It’s that feeling that is crucial for really understanding (getting a feel for, so to speak) what was driving young people, and especially Dylan, to reach with all their hearts and souls for a new society.
That is why he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and that is why it became an anthem. How much stronger A Complete Unknown would have been had the filmmakers found the ways to channel that feeling.
To get why this matters you only have to take a cursory look at our world today. As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever. There is and will only ever be one Bob Dylan, but to quote Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.
The upshot? Go see A Complete Unknown, then take a deep dive into the decade that created Dylan. Lots to learn there.
PS: The film perpetuates the myth that Pete Seeger was furious at Dylan for insisting on doing his electrified set at the 1965 Newport Film Festival and looked for an axe to chop of the electrified sound. As Seeger himself has said multiple times, he had no problem with what Dylan was doing, and loved the songs he played, especially “Maggie’s Farm.” But the quality of the sound system he was using was so terrible that it created distortion and made it virtually impossible to hear the music, and that was what he was furious about. Quite a difference.
Along with many of my generation (that ridiculous word “boomers”) I both looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The writing was crisp, the scenery was great, the acting was tremendous, and with a couple of exceptions (I’ll get into that) the scenes were all right on target. He even threw in several Easter Eggs for those of us with a bit too much obsessive knowledge of Bob Dylan’s history–like seeing Al Kooper, who had never played keyboards, sit down at the organ in the studio and pick out what became an iconic riff in “Like a Rolling Stone.” A pleasing, exciting romp through an incredible, unequaled moment when, as Dylan so succinctly put it, the times were most definitely changing.
So why, as the credits rolled to a blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that I swore was Dylan’s version—Timothée Chalamet really was that good–was I not fulfilled? Why did it feel akin to eating a pastrami sandwich on white bread? And my wife Maryann, who at a decade younger than me didn’t experience those years as I had, left with the same feeling. What was missing?
And then it hit. Context.
As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever.
Where did those early songs come from? Did they just pop into Dylan’s head from nowhere? What was happening, both in Greenwich Village and more significantly around the country, that led him to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems? When, as depicted in the film, Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the very first time, his young audience instantly latched on to it and went nuts, loudly and joyously singing along. Why? Was he telling them something they didn’t already know? Or was he giving voice to their lives as they were living them at that moment?
Okay, this may seem obvious. After all, everyone “knows” that the 60s were a time of youthful rebellion and upheaval. So what else is new? Does a film about Dylan really need to spell that out? And as far as the politics so many of his songs were infused with, isn’t it enough that the film depicted him singing at the 1963 March on Washington?
I would contend that it’s not nearly enough, because it doesn’t get close to what drove Dylan to write songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Death of Emmet Till,” to name just a few. No, I’m not arguing that the film should have been a history lesson about the 60s, but I believe it would have better served both Dylan and the audience had it set the stage more clearly with what was explosively emerging in the dawn of that decade, because in fact this is not so obvious, especially to younger audiences.
To get that sense, I went back to Suze Rotolo’s wonderful memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo, was Dylan’s girlfriend from shortly after he arrived in New York. In the film she is given the name Sylvie Russo (interestingly at Dylan’s insistence, to protect her privacy. She died in 2011). Their relationship, which lasted four years, is beautifully depicted in the film, including the fact that, despite his growing relationship with Joan Baez, he never stopped loving her. And the film does briefly allude to her political influence on his writing. But there are two key points in her memoir that are sorely missing in the film, I think to its detriment.
The first is the nature of the Greenwich Village that Dylan walked into in that winter of 1961. Rotolo goes into vivid detail about the cultural and political cauldron bubbling up there. Here is her description of a typical Sunday in Washington Square Park:
The atmosphere… was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain, and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trotskyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers… Everything overlapped nicely.
Just a 30 second walk in the park through Dylan’s eyes would have added an element that was missing.
And that was just the start. Along with the folk clubs that were depicted in the film, there was the burgeoning avant garde theater and film scenes. Clubs featured jazz and the beat poets. Musicians, not just folk, were drawn there from all across the country. Every night, folks would gather in various apartments to share songs and debate philosophy and politics. All of this, Rotolo makes clear, Dylan dove into and hungrily absorbed everything around him. He was not alone. He was being influenced by others, and he in turn influenced them. As he himself wrote, revolution was in the air.
A vivid example of this is one of his most political songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” He wrote it after attending a particularly striking and powerful version of the song “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In that song, the maid Jenny sings about her fantasy of leading a pirate ship into harbor to wreak revenge on the bourgeoise “gentlemen” who treat her like a piece of dirt. Dylan turned that concept into a truly uplifting depiction of revolution:
Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered.
This does bring up one particular objection I have to the film. In it, the only time we hear that song is when he is singing it under duress at a fundraising party. It’s clear that by now he hates having to perform it and all of his songs up to that point, and the scene marks his break with the past and headlong dive into the future. The scene itself is an accurate depiction of Dylan’s growing rebellion against both the rigid strictures of the folk music world and the political messages they now expected him to include in every song. But without a strong sense of why he wrote it in the first place, we’re left with an incomplete picture of what was driving him all along.
And that brings up the question of how well, or weakly, the film depicts the times he was in the midst of and responding to. Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the fear that dominated every aspect of American life in the 1950s—the ubiquitous shadows of an impending nuclear war, combined with the grinding repression of the “Red scare” witch hunts, were everywhere. Hundreds were persecuted and jailed, with Pete Seeger on the top of the list. That the film opens with Seeger’s sentencing is to its credit. The intensity and ubiquity of that repression was a huge part of what those who flocked to Greenwich Village were rebelling against, often at great cost. Dylan nailed the paranoia permeating society hilariously with his “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on the Freewheelin’ album.
But what was increasingly taking center stage in the early 1960s, and deeply influencing Dylan, was the civil rights movement. All too often, and unfortunately in this film as well, that movement is squashed down to the March on Washington and maybe one or two other big events. But none of that gives a sense of how dramatic, dangerous, and explosive events from 1960 to 1964 were in a South where lynchings were still commonplace.
Take a look at just a few of those events:
Imagine how all of those things hit young people straining against the heavy 50s repression still hanging over their heads, and you get a sense of how wildly liberating Dylan’s songs were.
My point here is not that this film is in any way required to “educate” the audience about all this, but the problem is this—it’s one thing to know the facts, and it’s something altogether different to feel their impact at the time and in the historical context they happened. It’s that feeling that is crucial for really understanding (getting a feel for, so to speak) what was driving young people, and especially Dylan, to reach with all their hearts and souls for a new society.
That is why he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and that is why it became an anthem. How much stronger A Complete Unknown would have been had the filmmakers found the ways to channel that feeling.
To get why this matters you only have to take a cursory look at our world today. As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever. There is and will only ever be one Bob Dylan, but to quote Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.
The upshot? Go see A Complete Unknown, then take a deep dive into the decade that created Dylan. Lots to learn there.
PS: The film perpetuates the myth that Pete Seeger was furious at Dylan for insisting on doing his electrified set at the 1965 Newport Film Festival and looked for an axe to chop of the electrified sound. As Seeger himself has said multiple times, he had no problem with what Dylan was doing, and loved the songs he played, especially “Maggie’s Farm.” But the quality of the sound system he was using was so terrible that it created distortion and made it virtually impossible to hear the music, and that was what he was furious about. Quite a difference.
"Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions," one activist said.
As smoke from Canadian wildfires triggered an air quality alert for New York City and Long Island on Sunday, activists with Climate Defiance disrupted a speech by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in the Hamptons.
The disruption came four days after reports emerged that Zeldin's EPA was set to repeal the 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gas emissions "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." It is this finding that has given the EPA the authority to regulate climate emissions under the Clean Air Act.
"We are in a climate crisis largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels," the first activist to disrupt the speech said, according to video footage shared by Climate Defiance. "And Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions."
Zeldin's speech took place at the Global Breakfast Forum, held at The Hamptons Synagogue.
"What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
Several of the young Jewish activists who disrupted the speech referenced their faith.
"The Torah commands us to be stewards of the Earth, not the oil industry," one activist said.
The audience largely responded with boos and jeers, and one attacked two of the activists with a chair, according to Climate Defiance video footage.
However, the Climate Defiance activists emphasized that Zeldin and the pro-fossil fuel Trump administration were the forces that would ultimately disrupt life and community in the Hamptons.
"History is going to remember you as a monster," one yelled out to Zeldin.
Another said: "Lee Zeldin, you have taken half of a million dollars from fossil fuels. What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
The disrupters also referenced Project 2025 and the broader Trump administration. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, Zeldin's EPA has achieved 57% of the Heritage Foundation road map's objectives.
"Lee Zeldin is carrying out the plans of Project 2025 and fossil fuels to a T," one said. "Your orange overlord does not care about any of you. All of you will be suffering from the rising seas and the worsening climate crisis."
A member of Extinction Rebellion NYC, who assisted with the protest, said in a statement: "Heritage has long been helmed by fossil fuel interests like Koch Industries, which has done some of the heaviest lifting to make sure nothing is done on climate change in the U.S. The majority of these wishes have been executed by Zeldin himself, and through Trump, who asked for $1 billion from oil companies in a dinner at Mar-a-Lago during his campaign. His Big, Beautiful Bill is a wish list directly penned in Project 2025. And when we hit 4°C of warming this century, we will know the true cost of these deadly practices."
Protesters also referenced the repeal of the endangerment finding, climate-fueled extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the smoke pollution clouding the region as Zeldin spoke.
"There is smoke in the air for another summer," one said. "This is only going to get worse and worse."
Both New York City Emergency Management and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued Air Quality Health Advisories through 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Sunday as smoke poured into the region from Canadian wildfires. Air quality was listed as "unhealthy for sensitive groups," and at 11:00 am Eastern Time on Sunday, New York City had the eighth worst air quality of any city on Earth.
The smoke recalled the thick orange haze that blanketed New York and other parts of the Northeast during the record-breaking Canadian wildfire season of 2023. The climate crisis makes wildfires more frequent and extreme.
"There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones," one advocate said.
The Israeli military began instituting tactical pauses in its assault on certain sections of Gaza on Sunday, as part of a plan to allow what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as "minimal humanitarian supplies" to enter the besieged enclave.
Several humanitarian organizations and political leaders described the Israeli approach as vastly insufficient at best and a dangerous distraction at worst, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die of starvation that experts say has been deliberately imposed on them by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
"Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Sunday. "What's needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent cease-fire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture."
Israel announced a plan to institute a daily 10-hour "tactical pause" in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm local time in the populated Gaza localities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Muwasi, as The Associated Press explained.
"These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
However, on Sunday—the first day of the supposed pause—Israeli attacks killed a total of 62 people, Al Jazeera reported, including 34 who were seeking humanitarian relief. Another six people died of hunger, bringing the total death toll from starvation and malnutrition to 133, including 87 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
"The Israeli government's so-called 'tactical pauses' are a cruel and transparent farce," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Sunday. "There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones. These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, called the pause "essential, but long overdue."
"This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza," Lammy said, as The Guardian reported. "We need a cease-fire that can end the war, for hostages to be released, and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered."
The United Nations' World Food Program posted on social media that it welcomed the news of the pause, as well as the creation of more humanitarian corridors for aid, and that it had enough food supplies either in or en route to the area to feed the entire population of Gaza for nearly three months.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will."
Since the border crossings opened on May 27 following nearly three months of total siege, WFP has only been able to bring in 22,000 tons of food aid, about a third of the over 62,000 tons of food aid needed to feed the population of Gaza each month.
While it welcomed the pause, WFP did add that "an agreed cease-fire is the only way for humanitarian assistance to reach the entire civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly, and safe manner—wherever they are across the Gaza Strip."
Joe English, emergency communications specialist for UNICEF, emphasized that the limited pauses proposed by Israel were not the ideal conditions for treating serious malnutrition.
"This is a short turnaround in terms of the notice that we have, and so we cannot work miracles," English told CNN.
English explained that, while UNICEF can treat malnutrition, children who are malnourished require a course of treatments over an extended period of time in order to fully recover, something only truly possible with a cease-fire, which would allow the U.N. to reestablish the 400 aid distribution points it had set up across Gaza before the last cease-fire ended in March.
"We have to be able to reach people and also to reach people where they are," he said. "We can't be expecting people to continue to traverse many miles, often on foot, through militarized areas, to get access to aid."
In addition to bringing in food aid through trucks, Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all began air-dropping aid over the weekend. However, this method has been widely criticized by humanitarian experts as ineffective and even dangerous.
"The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke," U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on social media on Saturday.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates, and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need," Lazzarini wrote.
Palestinians in Gaza also complained about the air drops.
"From 6:00 am until now we didn't eat or drink. We didn't get aid from the trucks. After that, they said that planes will airdrop aid, so we waited for that as well," Massad Ghaban told Reuters. "The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
In a reminder of what is at stake in effectively delivering aid to Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Sunday that "malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July."
WHO continued:
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July—including 24 children under 5, a child over 5, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.
WHO said that the search for lifesaving aid was itself deadly: "Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditions. Since 27 May, more than 1,060 people have been killed and 7,200 injured while trying to access food."
Israeli solders have reported that they had been ordered to fire on Palestinian civilians seeking aid.
In the face of Israel's atrocities, CAIR's Mitchell called for decisive action: "No more statements. Our government, Western nations, and Arab Muslim nations must act immediately to end the genocide, allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza, secure the release of all captives and political prisoners, and hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes. Every moment of inaction contributes to the unimaginable suffering of everyone in Gaza."
"All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful," one organizer said.
Tens of thousands of people in more than 225 towns and cities across the U.S. came out on Saturday as part of the Families First National Day of Action to protest Trump administration and Republican policies that defund the safety net while funneling unprecedented amounts of cash toward immigration enforcement.
The day of action came around three weeks after the U.S. House passed and President Donald Trump signed a budget bill that would strip 17 million of Americans of their health insurance and 2 million of their food aid while making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history.
"Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we are just days away from the 60th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare at the end of this month. These policies represent a promise we made to each other: that no matter the ups and downs of life, our ability to take care of our families, from one generation to the next, should be supported," Ai-jen Poo, executive director of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Common Dreams on Sunday.
"But a big ugly budget bill just passed," Poo continued, "that breaks that promise by making historic cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, by using our tax dollars to stoke fear and rip families apart simply due to their immigration status. This is not what families want, and those who passed it must know that the vast majority of us want our tax dollars to go to healthcare and food, a safety net for families, supporting public funds for families, health, food, and the economic security for all of us, not billionaires."
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country."
Families First is a coalition made up of over 75 organizations including Caring Across Generations, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn, Community Change Action, MomsRising, Planned Parenthood, People's Action Institute, Family Values @ Work, Families Over Billionaires, Fair Share America, Working Families Power, and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Federation of Teachers; and the National Education Association.
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country, hosting over 225 events where we peacefully protested, to show the intergenerational face of those of us prepared to hold the ones who passed this bill accountable every day, and to take action. From spelling out the word 'familia' on the beach in California, taking a Medicaid Motorcade through the state of Indiana, to a rally in D.C. on the National Mall at the seat of power," Poo said.
Here are some highlights from Saturday's day of action.
On the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol building, organizers capped a 60-hour vigil opposing Medicaid cuts with a rally at 12:00 pm ET.
Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change, spoke at the rally on the important role that Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) played in her life.
"I'm here both as an advocate and organizer and as someone who has lived the realities we're fighting to change, as a person who has been directly shaped by the programs that are currently under attack," Wells said. "I was a Medicaid kid, I was a SNAP kid. These programs kept me and my mom and my brother healthy, alive, and moving forward when we had nothing to fall back on."
Families gathered in Newark's Military Park to protest the budget cuts.
"Congress is helping the rich get richer while cutting healthcare, education, and support for working families," New Jersey Citizen Action wrote on social media. "We're making sure everyone knows who's responsible. We're fighting for a country where every child is cared for, no one goes hungry, and we all have access to the healthcare we need to live."
The Indiana Rural Summit planned a "Motorcade for Medicaid" to drive by rural hospitals across the state.
"We're using the event as a touchpoint to demonstrate the importance and value of local hospitals that are at risk of closing because they have historically relied on Medicaid for financial viability," organizer Michelle Higgs told The Republic. "We want to amplify the voices of those who are impacted, whether they're disabled, have a chronic illness, or are elderly."
Union members took to the streets from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington.
SEIU members marched in cities including Tampa; Orlando; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Allentown, Pennsylvania; New York City, Boston; and Las Vegas. Meanwhile, hundreds of union workers protested in downtown Seattle.
In Connecticut, SEIU members marched to the Brennan Rogers Magnet School, which closed due to a state funding shortfall.
"Cleaners, healthcare workers, construction workers, we are the ones that make this country run and we ask for no special privileges in return. but we are under attack," Ciro Gutierrez, a 32BJSEIU Connecticut commercial member, said.
Reflecting on the day of action, Poo concluded: "All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful. When we share our stories, we break through. When we stand side by side—from small towns to big cities—we can't be ignored. And we won't be divided."