Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Bill Zoda.  He was born in Trenton and grew up in an Italian American neighborhood there.  His family left when he was about ten years old and they moved to Atlantic County.  Bill graduated from Absegami High School in 1998.  His father was a special education teacher for the Atlantic City public schools, later becoming a school psychologist.  His mother was a part-time housewife and a part-time medical assistant in a dermatologist office.  He has a younger one sister who later attended Richard Stockton University.  After graduating from Rowan University in 2002 with a history degree, he took a job in construction industry as there was a boom at that time.  He also began taking graduate classes at Rutgers University in Camden, finishing his Master’s degree in 2007.  His thesis focused on human rights and United States foreign policy in South America between 1964 and 1976.  He benefitted from the declassification of many documents during this period.  After finishing his Master’s degree, a friend and union organizer encouraged him to investigate labor organizing as a career.  He then took a job as a full-time union representative for the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP).  He worked there for 15 years, highlighted by a month-long strike at Temple University Hospital in 2010 that received much news coverage and succeeded in protecting the existing rights of the Union’s 1500 represented employees.  

In 2017, he took a sabbatical and joined the Kurdish-led People’s Defense Forces in Syria, where he saw action in the Battle of Raqqa.  This decision arose out of a talk that he had heard when he was at Rowan by a Kurdish activist named Kani Xulam.  He had remained in contact with him over the many years after graduating.  He had been following the Arab Spring and had visited Egypt twice. Once the Syrian Civil War began, he followed events there closely and became a strong supporter of the long-oppressed Kurdish revolutionaries in Syria.  They sought to establish a progressive, autonomous free region in northern Syria.  When the Kurdish leaders of this movement called for international volunteers to help them defend their territory from attacks by the Islamic State, Bill felt that he needed to respond.  He left his family, including his eight-year-old son, intending to spend six months in support of this movement.  By the time he arrived, the United States air support had helped turn the tide against the Islamic State, and they soon retreated to Raqqa.  Bill was part of the battle to push the Islamic State out of Raqqa.  He remembers that four international volunteer fighters were killed in action in the first week of the battle.  The Kurdish officers in charge of his unit then became worried and sent the internationals to a less dangerous part of the battlefield.  After doing little for a couple of weeks, they then ended up joining a different unit and returned to the front.  Their new unit’s military training led them to be cautious, and they made slow progress while suffering no further killed in action, though they did continue to suffer non-lethal injuries.  This unit had a charismatic leader with great language skills.  Bill’s unit was English-speaking, as it was at least the second language of the other volunteers.  Bill’s primary role was to drive and to cook for the unit.  He remembers this period of his life vividly.  There was constant artillery fire, air strikes, and incoming small arms fire.  All of those who were there, no matter their reasons for volunteering, got along well.  After a month of fighting at the front in Raqqa, the unit retreated to a base in the south.  There, the volunteers began receiving military training.  Suicide bombers infiltrated the base two days before he arrived and killed several people.  It was pure chance that Bill survived and others died during this attack.  Meanwhile, one of the places that he had been earlier was hit by an ISIS attack, which led to the deaths of many people, including a Kurdish British media coordinator with whom Bill had grown close through late night political conversations.  While Bill was just about to leave, the Iraqi government attacked the Kurdish settlements in northern Iraq.  This delayed his departure, but a truce allowed him to leave and return to Philadelphia.  Upon his return, he has continued to support the autonomous region of Syria as much as he can.

He returned his job with PASNAP, and the Union promoted him to Field Director in 2019.  This led him to be involved in activities, including more strikes, throughout the state of Pennsylvania.  The pandemic that began in 2020 obviously put much pressure on nurses and other medical professionals.  The state of Pennsylvania, unlike neighboring states such as New York, responded slowly to the situation.  PASNAP responded by protesting and forced the Governor to issue orders that provided some relief and protection not only to PASNAP’s union membership but to all similar workers in the state.  Bill was then promoted to co-Executive Director of PASNAP.  He worked in that position for a year, but he then realized that this new position required too much of him as he was a new father.  He then took his current position as a union representative with the News Guild of New York, a job that fits better with his family life.

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I was not the best student in high school, and I did not get into Rutgers New Brunswick. I did get accepted at Rowan University.  I had only applied to in-state schools because of cost.  I began at Rowan with a plan to go to medical school, but I struggled in my mathematics and science classes.  Meanwhile, I was increasingly interested in politics and had become involved with the Green Party.  In my third or fourth semester, I switched to the history major.

At the same time, I had become involved with chapters of the Green Party all throughout New Jersey.  After the 2000 election was over, many of us in these chapters decided that we wanted to keep meeting and working together but focused more on ideas and issues that politics per se.  We formed the Progressive Student Alliance, and we had chapters all over New Jersey at the state colleges.  We put on events around human rights and issues of global justice.  We were loosely attached to the anti-globalization movement.  I remember that we organized several teach-ins on Rowan’s campus, one led by Gary Hunter, another by Herbert Douglass of the Law & Justice Department.  In my senior year, the 9/11 attacks happened.  I remember that so many people came to our regularly scheduled meeting after 9/11 that we had to move the meeting outside.  This was eye-opening to me, as it was clear that there were many people who wanted to discuss what was happening.  I remember that we just let everyone speak and share.  After this, the actions of PSA pivoted and shifted to protesting the buildup to the invasion of Iraq.  We tried to show how the attacks on 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were not connected.  I remember that the Rutgers-Camden PSA did a “die-in” to protest the war.  We received much push-back during this time, but we were proven right later when there were no weapons of mass destruction.  I believe that the rise of the Islamic State, certainly in Iraq, would likely not have taken place without the invasion.  I still keep in touch with many of those of us who were involved with the Rowan PSA chapter, including fellow Rowan history major, Kevin Watkins.

One of the classes that I remember at Rowan was your United States Labor History class, Dr. Carrigan.  I really enjoyed that experience, and I often thought of that class later when I became a union organizer.

I also took a class on Comparative Race Relations with Gary Hunter.  Not only did I get much out of that class, it led me to invite Dr. Hunter to be part of a 2002 program on United States foreign relations that was sponsored by the PSA.  Dr. Hunter gave a lecture on Africa and United States foreign policy.  The other two speakers include Ricardo Ibenez of Amnesty International who spoke about Latin America and Jim Davis of Rutgers University who spoke about the Middle East in light of his recent trip to the West Bank.  Interestingly, I later followed Jim Davis’s example and visited the West Bank in 2005 to engage in non-violent solidarity work against the occupation.

I took multiple classes with Dr. Corinne Blake on Middle Eastern history.  I remember her class on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and I think I wrote a paper that probably cited Noam Chomsky too much!  Her classes were very informative, and they dovetailed with my growing interest in the Middle East. 

Dr. Heinzen was brilliant.  I enjoyed his classes on Russian and modern European history. He was very engaging.  I recently joined one of his Zoom events that was discussing the war in Ukraine, an event which I followed closely in the news.  Sadly, two of the individuals had fought with the Kurds in Syria had recently been captured by Russian forces.  They were later released in a prisoner exchange.  One individual, who I knew from my time in Syria, Finbar Cafferkey, was recently killed in Bakmut.  Like me, has was also a progressive organizer.

As important as the history faculty were to me, there were two faculty outside of the Department that were even more influential.  One of them was Khaled Amer of the Mathematics department.  A native-born Egyptian, he had been involved with the leftist student movement in Cairo in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  He had left Egypt for graduate school in Canada.  Sometime in the 1980s, I believe, he was then hired by Glassboro State to teach mathematics.  In 2000, I met him at one of the events for the Green Party.  When the Student Government Association became officially chartered, he became our faculty advisor.  I learned much from him in long conversations about politics.  He later also helped me study for the mathematics section of the Graduate Record Exam.  The other professor who mattered to me greatly was Herbert Douglas of the Law & Justice Department.  He had a long history of activism in his background, including time as President of a local chapter of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People.  He came to one of our early PSA events.  He brought great historical perspective on race and racism to our PSA meetings and to me personally.  I ended up sitting in on his classes.  He was also a powerful orator and speaker.  Students from his classes regularly came to PSA meetings, having been influenced by his moving discussion of the importance of activism and protest.  He had many connections on campus, especially to African American student groups and to other faculty members on campus. 

My time at Rowan really built the foundation of the person that I became.  After I left the pre-med track and became a history major, I truly found myself.  Not only did I enjoy and get more out of my classes, I began to unite my interests in politics, activism, and foreign affairs.  I wish that I had spent a bit more time on my academic work and improving my writing, but I got so much out of my time at Rowan from my work outside of the classroom.  This included not only many long conversations with fellow students (especially as Kevin Watkins, Brian Nelson, and Mike Hrunuski) and faculty members (such as Gary Hunter, Herbert Douglas, and Khaled Amer), but I also had many life-changing interactions with visiting speakers that we brought to campus as a result of my work with the PSA.  Jim Davis was a very important mentor and friend that I met during my time at Rowan.  As a veteran, he had helped found the Iraq Veterans Against the War, and he helped show me how to do activism and solidarity work.  Another important example was Jerry Silberman, whom I met doing work on behalf of Palestine and who later spoke on campus.  We stayed in touch, and he later helped me get my first job in the field of labor organizing. Moreover, he helped me understand how labor organizing was very different from student organizing.  I worked closely with him for many years, including working together on several strikes. 

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/