An Evening with Jeremy Varon & L.A. Kauffman
Join us for a Reading and Discussion of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War by Jeremy Varon
Thursday, December 11, 2025
6:00 PM 7:00 PM
Blue Heron Books
1209 New York 213
High Falls, NY, 12440
Just after 9/11, President George W. Bush climbed the rubble where the World Trade Center had stood. Surrounded by shouts of anger, he said, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” With these words, Bush ushered in the War on Terror. Quickly, a global protest movement mobilized against it, reshaping the political, moral, and media landscape. Jeremy Varon’s Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War is the definitive history of that movement. Millions of Americans participated in thousands of acts of protest, from demonstrations to civil disobedience to peace encampments in Iraq. On February 15, 2003, up to 30 million people worldwide took to the streets in the largest protest in human history. But this enormous outcry was not enough to stop the US invasion of Iraq. Varon explores the limits to the movement’s power but also shows how it worked to make opposition to the Iraq War a part of public debate, hastening its end and limiting the broader War on Terror. In the book, you’ll meet the families of the 9/11 victims, Iraq War veterans, and Gold Star families who spoke out against war.
Jeremy Varon is a Professor of History at the New School in New York City and a longtime resident of Stone Ridge, where he spends half the year (more if he could!). He is also a peace and human rights activist. He was a lead member of Witness Against Torture, and went with the group in 2015 to Guantanamo, Cuba to protest the U.S. torture prison. He is the author of two other books, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (2004) and The New Life: The Jewish Students of Postwar Germany (2014).
L.A. Kauffman is a veteran peace and justice organizer and movement historian, who led the grassroots mobilizing efforts for the the massive Iraq antiwar protests of the 2000s. A widely published writer, she is the author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism and How to Read a Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
"Varon's history of the 21st century’s first major antiwar mobilization, a mass movement almost entirely ignored by the corporate media, eloquently captures the depth, creativity, and commitment with which peacemakers around the world confronted the so-called Global War on Terror. While official propaganda and a parade of retired generals on cable news boosted endless, a vibrant peace movement grew. Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War is a deep and essential account of the global antiwar movement, and a timely reminder in this era of rising authoritarianism that there is a force more powerful, that of organized people committed to peace." —Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
“This book is more than an exposé of a criminal war; it is a necessary warning for all those who struggle for a more peaceful world today and tomorrow.” —Tom Morello, guitarist, songwriter, and political activist
“Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War is an engaging and illuminating examination of both the unfolding of the post-9/11 War on Terror and activists’ varied efforts to build a movement to oppose, forestall, and undermine Bush’s wars. In this two-pronged exploration, Varon reminds us that resistance and organizing matter—and can be powerful and uplifting—even if they do not fully succeed.” —Allyson P. Brantley, author of Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors & Remade American Consumer Activism