DAVID PLAKKE
Boo Reiners and Elena Skye.
Hoboken’s Eliot Katz will host a benefit with music and poetry for New Jersey Peace Action — a chapter of the grassroots peace advocacy group Peace Action — at Hoboken’s 503 Social Club, June 13 at 7 p.m.
Performers will include the musicians Elena Skye and Boo Reiners of the Demolition String Band, Karyn Kuhl and Adam Bernstein, and poets Danny Shot, Vivian Demuth and Joel Lewis. In addition to hosting, Katz will also read.
“With all the things going on in the world right now, especially with the horrors of war going on in Ukraine and Gaza, I’m grateful we can do something for an organization like NJ Peace Action,” said Skye.
“Boo and I have done a lot of tribute nights for Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who both used their music to organize on a grassroots level for causes they believed in, and to uplift people in times of struggle. So doing a benefit like this makes a lot of sense to us.”
For tickets, visit tinyurl.com/MusicandPoetryNJPeaceAction.
VIVIAN DEMUTH
ELIOT KATZ
Peace Action, formerly known as SANE/FREEZE, has been advocating for more than 60 years for a world free of nuclear weapons and to reduce “the exorbitant U.S. military budget to leave more funding for social and environmental needs,” according to a press release.
The press release adds that “during the recent war in Gaza, NJ Peace Action has helped to organize rallies across the state to call for a long-term ceasefire and a de-escalation of the violence in Israel and Gaza. Peace Action has also criticized the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Katz, a member of NJ Peace Action and a poet, has worked on projects over the years with Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and others. He is the child of a Holocaust survivor — his mother’s Hungarian parents and five of her seven brothers and sisters were murdered in Auschwitz — and his poem “Liberation Recalled” tells the story of his mother’s concentration camp experiences.
Here is a video of Katz reading at a March event at the Hoboken Historical Museum that was titled “Memory Gardens” and paid tribute to Allen Ginsberg; it was hosted by Danny Shot, the museum’s poet-in-residence. Katz’s segment begins at the 59-minute mark.
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