At Edward R. Murrow High School, in Midwood, Van Auken was a theatre kid, though not just a performer; she was also part of the stage crew. \u201cI think I just liked collaboration,\u201d she said. Her junior year, she and her younger brother participated in an evening of one-act plays; when they called home beforehand, their mother sounded upset but wouldn\u2019t say why. \u201cAll day long we thought somebody had died,\u201d Van Auken recalled. After the show, they found their parents in a school hallway, and learned that the family had been evicted. Van Auken was shocked; she\u2019d had no real sense of their financial precarity. (Her father was an engineer, and her mother had for a time been a secretary in the same office.) \u201cOn the spectrum of folks who are evicted from their homes, we were on the luckier end,\u201d she said. \u201cMy parents had friends with resources; we were never unhoused.\u201d<\/p>\n
Van Auken also felt lucky to be at Murrow\u2014staff there were supportive and helped her to find grants and loans for college. Murrow\u2019s founding principal, Saul Bruckner, was a legendary figure at the institution that he led for thirty years. A magnet school focussed on the arts, Murrow was a place that prized freedom over order and was premised on a fundamental respect for its students. In her speech accepting the O.M.E. job, Van Auken cited Bruckner\u2019s profound influence; he had, she told the crowd, \u201ctaught generations of students that they mattered and that participation wasn\u2019t reserved for someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, in her own life, sustained political engagement was slow to cohere. Back in Brooklyn after college at Emerson, she was appalled by the march toward war that followed 9\/11. She went to protests and took the LSAT, but felt discouraged by the relative toothlessness of international human-rights law. Instead, in 2005, Van Auken took a job as a casting assistant at the Blue Man Group. It was a role that combined administrative tasks with the delicate business of assessing others\u2019 abilities. Tim Aumiller, who worked with her there on and off for more than a decade, remembers her treating performers during auditions in a manner both genuinely respectful and \u201cdeftly diplomatic.\u201d She got more comfortable with public speaking as she found herself obliged to address callback crowds of aspiring Blue Men. Also, she was extremely organized. \u201cShe was the first person who taught me Google Sheets,\u201d Aumiller told me.<\/p>\n
The 2008 recession brought layoffs to the Blue Man Group, and casting was among the first departments cut. Barack Obama, meanwhile, was running a Presidential campaign poised to channel the anger of the Bush years into a movement. Van Auken was interested in the candidate, but, even more than that, in the public energy coalescing around him. Through a friend, she got a paid job as a volunteer co\u00f6rdinator at a field office in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. \u201cThat campaign had a real, multiracial, working-class movement supporting it,\u201d Van Auken said. \u201cAnd it was mostly middle-aged women running everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
She learned about the mechanics of canvassing\u2014how a campaign door-knocks its way toward a \u201cwin number,\u201d the estimated count of likely voters required for a victory\u2014and about the philosophy of Marshall Ganz, the veteran social-movements, civil-rights, and labor organizer who established the Obama campaign\u2019s field strategy. Ganz\u2019s approach hinged on the power of individual voters and volunteers. \u201cTreating people like smart people who have agency, who can be there or not,\u201d Van Auken said. \u201cAsking people to step up and lead, so it\u2019s not about me, it\u2019s not about one person being a leader\u2014this is all Marshall Ganz. He has this wonderful definition of leadership: you have to step into a moment of uncertainty and inspire other people to action toward a new possibility.\u201d She returned to work at the Blue Man Group between campaigns, but, by then, she said, \u201cI was hooked on organizing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Van Auken\u2019s biography hits a series of beats common in histories of left-wing awakening in the twenty-first century. September 11th and the wars that followed were the occasion for disillusionment with the Democratic establishment; Obama\u2019s first Presidential campaign offered a glimpse of an alternative, followed by further disillusionment. When Occupy Wall Street took off, Van Auken went to dozens of meetings but grew frustrated by the movement\u2019s lack of structure. (\u201cI mostly learned what not to do by trying to get involved with Occupy,\u201d she told the Danish scholar Fabian Holt, in an interview for his 2025 book \u201cOrganize or Burn<\/a>.\u201d) She worked on a handful of causes in the years after 2008, but nothing pulled her in as the Obama campaign had until Bernie Sanders\u2019s first Presidential run. The way he talked about the country\u2019s problems energized her, and she could tell it was energizing other people, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Edward R. Murrow High School, in Midwood, Van Auken was a theatre kid, though not just a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[609,9,24,11,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-184061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-government","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}