What to write for the first column of the New Year, a year that started with fresh horrors on top of the old ones? I was determined about one thing: it should be something positive, following the oft mentioned abolitionist Mariama Kaba’s instructions toward hope as a discipline, a practice. I wanted content that inspired hope, then, before landing on all the evil currently unleashed onto our world. I also wanted something close to my main interests of science, nature, art and politics. The latter two won out, with a little help from my friends.

Two of them seeded the idea: one gave me a book about artists and resistance under fascism, as a Hanukkah present. The other pointed out Mamdani’s inauguration as new Mayor of New York City. It contained a plethora of cultural references linked to artists and art that fight for a better future or strengthens the belief that all of us can be agents towards that goal.

I will focus today on the inauguration because it affects us here and now in our own cultural milieu. The general history of artists resisting fascism will take more time to learn about and digest, will return to it at some later point. Not that I understood all of the contemporary inauguration references either. I had to dig to make sense of some of them, derived from and directed at a younger generation that has been successfully awakened to participate in politics. Happy to share this new knowledge!

(Snapshots are from NYC some years back. The people make the city in all its glorious diversity.)

First, though, let’s look at some of the more familiar appearances during the inauguration. Actor and LGTBQ rights activist Javier Muñoz sang the national anthem. He is best known for starring and co-creating the role of “Alexander Hamilton” in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. That musical was, of course, about the American Revolution and Hamilton’s role in it, casting founding father roles with non-white actors. The creator and the producer of Hamilton recently canceled the show in reaction to the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center. It was scheduled to run between March 3 and April 26, 2026, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

 Mandy Patinkin sang “Over the Rainbow” along with a Staten Island elementary school chorus. It is a song of wanting and longing for a better future, written by a Jewish composer and a Jewish lyricist. Composer Harold Arlen was born in Buffalo, NY in 1905, to a Jewish cantor. Lyricist Yip Harburg (Isidore Hochberg) was born in 1896 on the Lower Eastside, to Yiddish speaking Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. Harburg was a close friend of Ira Gershwin since his schooldays and, according to his son, a “democratic socialist, [and] sworn challenger of all tyranny against the people”. He championed racial, sexual and gender equality as well as union politics, and was an ardent critic of high society and religion. Harburg’s song Brother, can you spare a dime is almost as familiar as Over the Rainbow. Both artists are definitely cultural touchstones for a demand for a more just world.

Lucy Dacus performed the labor anthem “Bread and Roses.”

I found the lyrics in the Jewish Women Archives, spelling out the 1911 poem by Jewish writer, editor and Jungian analyst James Oppenheim. It was based on a famous line by Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish Labor Union Leader.

Oppenheim was the founder and editor of The Seven Arts, a progressive magazine declaring “it was is not a magazine for artists, but an expression of artists for the community.” It published, among others,  Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Paul Rosenfeld.

For her part, Rose Schneiderman was instrumental in the fight for unions and parity for women. She worked and organized from the tender age of 13, became vice president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League and she helped organize the Uprising of the 20,000 for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1909. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and their conversations on labor issues led to Franklin Delano Roosevelent appointing Schneiderman in 1933 to the National Labor Advisory Board, where she fought to include domestic workers in social security and argued for wage parity for women workers.(Ref.) The Bread and Roses reference pertains to the need for subsistence (bread), but also the need for other support (roses,) including better schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women.

The theme of inclusivity and fighting for a better future was central to the inaugural poem Proof by Cornelius Eady, reciting his poem here. He dedicated it to all of his students currently particularly affected by the hatred and revulsion expressed by the administration for all that is deemed “DEI.” The poet ends with “proof” that our hopes can become reality if we pursue large goals unimpeded b lack of imagination.

Proof.

You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark, too large, too queer, too loud?
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat?

You have to imagine it.
Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then rolled their eyes?
Who tried to change your name to invisible?

You’ve got to imagine.
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it.
Who checked their watch and said, “Not now.”

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

New York City of invention, roiling town, refresher and renewer.
New York City of the real will.
The canyons whisper in a hundred tongues.

New York, where your lucky self waits for your arrival,
Where there is always soil for your root.

This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us,
the colors and the rhythms and the beats of us,
In the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are.

City of insistence.
City of resistance.

You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet,
A joy that wears down the rock of “no,”
Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear,
Up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine that space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit on its way.

This moment is our proof.

By Cornelius Eady.

And finally, a cultural reference by the new Mayor himself. Mamdani cited the rapper Jadakiss (of the trio LOX.) “We will, in the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss or J to the Muah, be “outside.”

What does that mean? I learned that the phrase “I’m outside,” “means having street credibility and being present in one’s community, often used to assert authenticity and connection to one’s roots. It became a cultural catchphrase representing a commitment to being engaged and visible in the real world.” (Ref.)

Being present in our community: how is that for a start to 2026, a resolution that focuses on us being in this together rather than alone. It certainly has helped a progressive candidate unafraid to confront the Goliath(s) of structural obstacles, racist individuals and institutions, malignant narcissists, billionaires guarding their turfs, and corrupt agencies he now has to run, to secure a position of power. How much he will be able to transform his proposals into reality will depend on how much support he can garner along the way. He faces formidable resistance against his plans that serve the interests of the many, rather than the profits of the few.

Here is Mamdani’s full speech after being sworn in as Mayor.

For me, the selections of these particular songs and poems signified two important points: people have lived through difficult times in this country, whether the plight of European (and other) immigrants, the starvation of farming families in the dustbowl, the workers without rights, the women as second class citizens, the non-White population exposed to Jim Crow. Hard times arch across history, not exempting the present. Importantly, though, these pieces of art speak to meaning or even victories born from activism – progress has happened, through labor and union movements, through the civil rights movement, through women liberation movements.

Yes, the powers that be ardently want to turn back the clock. But prior generations have modeled for us that we can fight for our rights and win. The vast coalition supporting the new Mayor of New York did well to remind us of that. Onwards!

Music is a Bread and Roses version sung by Joan Baez chosen for the video commentary on women’s existence.