Burt Cohen
33 episodes listed below
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Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Bert Cohen connects political argument to the everyday mechanics of work, rights, immigration, and organized dissent.
Bert Cohen starts with a position, then turns it into an interview about how political ideas shape ordinary life. Conversations move from shorter workweeks and union organizing to constitutional rights, immigration, the role of luck, and anti-war civil disobedience.
Bert Cohen makes a 32-hour week sound like a fight over who gets your time.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear case against treating kids like adults, built on youth testimony, family advocacy, and prison reform.
Freer Kids and Safer Streets revisits the push to treat young offenders as adults and asks a blunt question: has harsher punishment made anyone safer?
A sharp look at philanthropy as power, with feminism at the center.
Philanthropy is treated here less as a benevolent ideal than as a place where power gets negotiated. The conversation links women in power, migration, war, democracy, and the institutions that shape policy, and it keeps a measured public-affairs cadence that suits the subject.
A patient history of Greensboro that links labor fear, racist violence, and the persistence of political failure.
The episode treats the 1979 Greensboro Massacre as more than a local atrocity. It uses the killings to trace how white supremacist violence, fear of unions, and the failure to stop political violence keep turning up in American life.
A hard look at why police accountability can remain so difficult to secure.
Qualified immunity anchors this conversation, using a single legal doctrine to show how police can avoid consequences after harm. Bert Cohen opens the topic, and Joanna Schwartz lays out the Fourth Amendment, the police-officer standard of reasonableness, and the distance…
A steady defense of housing and dignity.
Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis and Bert Cohen make a clear moral case against treating homelessness as a personal failing, and they tie that argument to faith traditions without losing the practical side of it.
A serious case for restorative justice, with clear attention to public safety, youth, and the limits of mandatory sentencing.
"Restorative Justice Works Where Retribution Fails" takes a hard look at whether harsher punishment and mass incarceration have actually made communities safer or better off.
Land reform, housing, and democracy are treated as one argument, not three.
This episode treats land reform as a democracy issue first, and a development issue second. Bert Cohen starts with the unnatural straight lines across Africa, traces them back to European conquest and partition, then brings the argument home to the fading middle class and the…
A case for shorter weeks that links labor history, burnout, productivity culture, and the politics of time.
Bert Cohen makes a clear argument for 32 hours of work for 40 hours of pay by looking back to the hard-won eight-hour day and the bloodshed and public pressure that helped secure it.
Liberty argued from first principles.
Policy arguments with civic consequences.
Firearms talk from range to rights.
Italian politics, caught in the act.
Bert Cohen interviews Mark Robert Rank, leading poverty researcher, about how luck and chance shape American lives more than hard work or self-reliance.
Bert Cohen opens with a blunt question.
Bert Cohen presents the Warren Court as a brief moment when the Supreme Court was widely viewed as a real guardian of equal justice.
Bert Cohen links Greensboro to a longer American history of racism and hate.
Keeping Democracy Alive podcast featuring Brad Wolf discussing his new book A Ministry of Risk: Philip Berrigan's Writings on Peace and Nonviolence.
Labor columnist Sarah Jaffe discusses the rising movement for 32-hour work weeks at current 40-hour pay as a solution to automation job loss, worker burnout, and inequality.
Bert Cohen and Reverend Dr.
Christine Ahn argues in Justice Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show that U.S.
Police immunity is the target.
Jason Springs, professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, argues that U.S.
Keeping Democracy Alive Episode features Institute for Policy Studies' Sam Pizzagatti discussing wealth inequality and the success of Massachusetts's Fair Share Amendment.
Bert Cohen and historian Joe Goldie center this episode on the FAO, its motto "Fiat Panis," and the postwar idea that land reform could reduce famine and inequality.
Burt Cohen opens with a report by Mother Jones writer Julianne McShane showing that abortion numbers increased after Dobbs, with the Society of Family Planning’s WeCount data putting 2023 at about 86,000 abortions per month versus 82,000 in 2022.
Union support is rising, but actual understanding of what unions do is dropping.
Bert Cohen and historian Avi Chomsky frame this Keeping Democracy Alive conversation around “modern version of colonialism,” fossil fuels, and the Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.
YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) is a movement that argues housing crises require building more housing, not just subsidizing demand.
Burt Cohen frames this Justice Archives episode around a claim that imperialism can happen at home, not only abroad, and connects that idea to the Trump administration, Project 2025, and mass incarceration.
Bert Cohen opens on the border and the tense atmosphere around immigration.
Victoria Law discusses Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration, a forthcoming Haymarket book built from reporting on prisons and jails during COVID-19.
Bert Cohen and Robert Litzite use “Keeping Democracy Alive” to ask what it means to be Jewish in America while Israel is bombing Gaza and the West Bank.
Burt Cohen interviews University of Kentucky law professor Josh Douglas about The Court Versus the Voters and its nine Supreme Court cases involving voting rights.
Bert Cohen opens by arguing that pardons matter to democracy, even if they do not seem to carry much obvious political power.
Bert Cohen opens by saying any answer to Israel-Palestine has to come from the people who live there.
Lawrence Wittner argues that a global minimum wage is a realistic solution to prevent the 'race to the bottom' in labor exploitation and address unprecedented wealth inequality.