Sara Z.E.Hughes works as AFSC's social media specialist. Sara is an artist, filmmaker and cultural worker who uses art for social change, a tool AFSC uses in our program work in many places including two recent traveling exhibits, Boycott: The Art of Economic Activism and All of Us or None: Responses and Resistance to Militarism. This piece explores several artists who effectively use different media to work for social justice.

Sara Zia is a curator of film, visual art and new media and for over a decade has produced film screenings and exhibits in the Philadelphia area. She has worked as a consultant with Independent Television Service (ITVS) and with individual independent filmmakers on their engagement and outreach campaigns.

Though this piece, an exploration of working within an anti-racist framework in all work against oppression, but particularly in the movement to end the occupaton of Palestinian territory, is a personal statement by Mike Merryman-Lotze, it does reflect AFSC's organizational position with regard to this issue. Update, Sept.

In this piece Sahar Vardi reflects in journal form on the recent stabbing of a young woman at a Gay Pride protest in Tel Aviv (the young woman has subsequently died) and the arson attack on a Palestinian home that left a toddler burned to death. Sahar is AFSC's Israel program coordinator based in Jerusalem. - Lucy

July 30^th

Mrs. Michiko Kodama is Assistant Secretary General of Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- & H- Bomb Sufferers' Organizations.)  She lives in Chiba, just north of Tokyo, were she is a leader of Nihon Hidankyo's Chiba branch.  She can also be seen in a film helping to launch the Japan Peace March, from Tokyo to Hiroshima last May.

Editor's note: On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima—the first time a nuclear weapon had ever been used for warfare. Just three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. More than 200,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radiation from the bombings continued to claim lives in the decades that followed, causing birth defects and other health issues among their children.