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Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project. 

Recent Articles

ANOTHER YEAR OF THE WOMAN?

Dana GoldsteinMar 27, 2007
ANOTHER YEAR OF THE WOMAN? Senators Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer and representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler will reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress today, and will announce hearings on women�s equality in the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Conservative online media is already up in arms , lamenting the funding the ERA would likely provide, for the first time, to poor women on Medicaid who need to access abortion. Yes, the ERA would help progressives fight for women�s bodily rights. But it is also a crucial legal protection -- one first introduced in Congress in 1923 -- necessary to end workplace discrimination against women, fight wage inequality, and stop obviously sexist corporate practices, such as insurance companies covering the cost of Viagra, but not birth control pills . I remember Maloney speaking at a young women�s leadership event last summer and lamenting the Democratic Party�s...

PRO-CHOICE CATHOLICS, ANTI-AIPAC JEWS.

Dana GoldsteinMar 23, 2007
PRO-CHOICE CATHOLICS, ANTI-AIPAC JEWS. Our own Ann Friedman has written an In These Times tribute to Frances Kissling , former president of Catholics for a Free Choice . Kissling, who was once a nun for six months, is a national progressive leader on abortion rights, access to contraception, LGBT rights, and stem cell research. She�s also a favorite target of extreme right-wing Catholics like Bill Donahue , whose Catholic League instigated the Edwards blogger ruckus last month. When Kissling stepped down, Donahue tarred her as anti-Catholic, saying , �I hope she takes her tapestries of Tibetan Buddhist deities with her when she exits her office, as well as any New Age paraphernalia she may have acquired over the years.� But as Ann reports, �For 25 years, Kissling has pointed out that criticizing church doctrine and agitating for reform is not anti-Catholic.� Indeed, polls show that Catholics are more accepting of premarital sex, homosexuality, and birth control than Protestants, and...

A LIBERAL CASE FOR PORK?

Dana GoldsteinMar 20, 2007
A LIBERAL CASE FOR PORK? In September, TNR �s Brad Plumer argued � the liberal case for pork .� Call it vote buying if you will, but today, The Washington Post reports that House Democrats are tempting Iraq fence-sitters by adding $21 billion in domestic appropriations to the $124 billion war bill that sets an August 2008 deadline for pulling American troops out of Iraq. Waiting another year-and-a-half to remove our troops from harm�s way is less than ideal for many progressives, but Pelosi is waging a bare-knuckled fight just to get a veto-proof majority to support this bill. It puts Louisiana Republicans in the awkward position, for example, of either supporting redeployment or voting against tens of billion dollars in funding for Hurricane Katrina relief and flood prevention. The Post reports: For Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), there is $25 million for spinach growers hurt by last year's E. coli scare. For three conservative Democrats in Georgia, there is $75 million for peanut storage...

EXBURBAN DREAMS DEFERRED

Dana GoldsteinMar 16, 2007
EXBURBAN DREAMS DEFERRED . Over the past few years, stories of far-flung suburbs decimated by foreclosures have become newspaper staples. With resort-like names such as � Pocono Mountains � (in Pennsylvania, a 5-hour commute from New York City) and �Villages of Avalon� (in Riverside County, Calif., over an hour from downtown L.A.), it turns out that for many young families, these communities really are little more than a fantasy. The American romance with house-owning has long eclipsed concerns about the negative impact exurban lifestyles have on our larger society: more gas guzzling, loss of green space, and ethnic homogeneity, just to name a few. But over the past decade -- in part due to federal policies that boast of increasing minority home-ownership rates, but in practice enrich developers and banks -- mortgage foreclosures and homeowner vacancies have reached record highs . The story is always the same: clever marketing campaigns prey on families in blighted neighborhoods,...

ALINSKY 101.

Dana GoldsteinMar 14, 2007
ALINSKY 101. When Hillary Clinton graduated Wellesley in 1969, she turned down a job offer with community organizer and University of Chicago sociologist Saul Alinsky and headed to Yale Law School. In 1985, Barack Obama deferred law school to work with an Alinsky-inspired group on Chicago's South Side, partnering with black churches to advocate for better housing, job training, and other services for people in poverty. As Garance has noted , Ryan Lizza 's TNR piece on Obama's organizing days is a must read. So is this MSNBC story on Clinton's undergraduate thesis about Alinsky. Reporter Bill Dedman actually reads the much-mythologized thesis, which critiques Alinsky's methodologies as too focused on small-scale change within communities already decimated by systemic problems of segregation and poverty. (Incidentally, right-wingers have suggested Clinton's thesis, which at her request was kept under lock and key by Wellesley during her husband's administration, might contain proof of...

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