Characters of the Village

Michael Zweig, Professor and Organizer for Social Justice

By Joy and Brian Pape

Michael Zweig wrote an article in the June 2025 Village View entitled Beacons Shine the Light. Every Thursday at 7 pm he stands with fellow “beacons” in the Shine the Light initiative, holding up signs about economic and social justice while building a community of resistance to the array of fascist initiatives growing in this country. Village View wanted to learn more about him.

What should our community to know about you?
I am the first person in my family born in the US. My parents came to America with my brother in their arms in late 1938, fleeing Vienna then in the grip of the Nazis. I was born and grew up in Detroit when it was a vibrant industrial city.

My father was a structural engineer who worked at a large architectural firm in Detroit that specialized in the design of large industrial facilities. He solved many engineering problems and wrote over 40 articles published in technical journals explaining the thinking that went into solving problems. This combination of practical and theoretical capacity deeply influenced my own work, mostly by osmosis rather than explicit instruction.

My mother was an early-childhood educator in the Montessori tradition, who guided my moral development in the most loving ways.

I went to school with the children of factory workers and professional people until high school when my parents moved to suburban Bloomfield Township. There I encountered the families of high-level executives and managers in the auto industry. I passed “Engine Charlie” Wilson’s estate on the way to school. He was the CEO of General Motors and secretary of defense under President Eisenhower. Experiencing first-hand the difference in the lives and attitudes of the people I went to school with in Detroit from those in Bloomfield Hills impressed me deeply and lay the foundation for my interest in class dynamics in our capitalist system.

What brought you to the Village?
I lived in Washington Heights for 20 years before moving to West 10th Street in 1995. Everything that interests me is in walking distance from my building – movies, theater, music, restaurants, architecture, parks, the rivers, interesting people. Now I am inescapably part of the scene. I am also president of the board of my co-op building. I stand every Thursday evening at the Ruth Wittenberg Triangle with fellow “beacons” in the Shine the Light initiative, holding up signs of resistance to the array of fascist initiatives growing in this country.

Tell us about your work.
In 2016 I retired from the State University of New York at Stony Brook after nearly 50 years. I was a professor of economics and founding director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life. I also received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. What is now called Stony Brook University has dropped the SUNY part of the name. This hides the fact that the education and research advances coming from these schools are products of public service. Refusing to identify SUNY schools as state institutions robs people of awareness of the importance of the public sector in their lives and greases the skids of the privatization of everything, now in full swing. It really gets me mad.

What is your favorite thing about your work?
Being an academic has allowed me to teach and to do the research necessary to write many articles and five books that reflect the learning I have been able to muster about the issues I’ve confronted in my social activism. That activism dates back to the founding of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) in the 1960s, working for the CIA in 1962 at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, participating in the Maoist movement of the 1970s, and helping to organize United University Professions/AFT Local 2190 (the union representing the faculty and professional staff throughout SUNY). I was also involved community organizing on the North Fork to secure the survival of agriculture and open space, helping to organize and lead U.S. Labor Against the War in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and organizing with the Poor People’s Campaign in New York state. My latest book is Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism, from PM Press, which builds on a couple of my earlier books: Religion and Economic Justice and The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret.

I love to teach, mainly because ignorance is so very destructive, so if I know something I am happy to share it with others. It gives me great pleasure to put people together who should know one another, so I got a lot of satisfaction from organizing conferences that explore the lives of working class people, that bring together scholars and practitioners from around the country and across the planet in order to share insights and information.

Tell us about your passion.
When I was 13 years old, Emmet Till was murdered in Mississippi. He was 14. I had been raised in a family that talked about the Holocaust and many friends and members of my family had been tortured and murdered by the Nazis. I knew my parents had come to America to escape such atrocities. But when I saw the pictures of Till’s open casket, I knew in a flash that such things could happen here, too. I felt an association between my family and Till’s that sparked the passion I have to confront racism and white supremacy, and the system that promotes and thrives on them.

Favorite things in the Village?
Gene’s on 11th St. The dim sum place on Fourth Avenue and 10th St.  Bar Six on Sixth Ave. below 13th St.  I’m sorry that we lost the Good Stuff diner on 14th St. during Covid.  The Jefferson Market Library. Washington Square Park.  

Tell us you parting words.
The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice by itself. We all need to get out there and bend that arc, with as much energy, imagination, learning, community, and joy as we can muster.

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Check out Zweig’s work at blog.pmpress.org/authors-artists-comrades/michael-zweig