In early March, around 300 people gathered at an artistic sanctuary in Berkeley, sang revolutionary songs and chants, and celebrated the life of a northern California legend and political activist, Barbara Lubin. For more than four decades, until her death at 84, the energetic Philadelphia native was a liberal firebrand who led the fight on rent control, championed climate issues, and rallied for the educational rights of disabled children, like her son, Charlie. Along the way, she enlisted a long list of luminaries from Hollywood, folk music, academia, and literature, including Edward Said, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker.
No issue, though, enraged Lubin more than the fate of the Palestinians. As a mother and a Jew, she would say, it was her responsibility to expose the crimes of the state of Israel. “Fuck Zionism,” she told an interviewer once. In 1988, she built a charity, the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), to send aid to the Palestinian territories.
MECA became a mainstay among other radical Bay Area groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which were founded in Berkeley in the 1990s. “These brave formations have shown the country that we can proudly stand up for an end to the genocide in Gaza and loudly call for a free Palestine,” Angela Davis, the communist philosopher and cultural icon, said at Lubin’s memorial. “So there’s not nearly enough time to praise Barbara and her organizing and her community building.”
Since MECA’s launch, the charity says it has channeled more than $50 million into schools, medical clinics, playgrounds, and libraries in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin and her staff led regular delegations to the West Bank and Gaza and sponsored political rallies and cultural events to promote solidarity with Palestinians, including immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on southern Israel.
