Three decades ago, when Liba Bukalov emigrated from Ukraine, she spoke of the anti-Semitism that caused her to flee for a better life in New York. Raised in a household that prized mathematics, she became an award-winning public school math teacher who co-authored two textbooks, is a four-time recipient of the Math for America Master Teacher fellowship and is a volunteer at the nonprofit Tutoring Without Borders.

If you’ve seen local demonstrations organized by progressive groups, you may have seen volunteers with bright caps and shorts in such crowds. They are members of the National Lawyers Guild who defend protesters against alleged police misconduct, taking videos and notes. Their members come from many law schools and certainly the CUNY School of Law is among them, as its mission is devoted towards “law in the service of human needs.”

In the decade following the collapse of communism in Romania, the city of Cluj had a nationalist mayor who painted park benches in the national colors and signs written only in Romanian. Such tactics were designed to make the city’s ethnic Hungarians feel like outsiders, suffering discrimination and humiliation in their native city. Author Edith Pollak can relate to this experience of alienation.