Steve Schwartzberg is a scholar, teacher, and activist whose politics are rooted in the belief that genuine self-government flows from love, belonging, and deep knowledge of the sacredness of all life.
As this biographical sketch makes clear, his politics developed both from scholarship and from lived experience—from joy and sorrow, mistakes and learning—into a vision for a politics grounded not in domination, but in kinship with all life and respect and love for all beings.
“We do not seek to build the beloved community as if it were something absent, something that human hands must somehow construct from nothing,” he declares: “The beloved community—the sacred web of all beings—always already exists. It is woven into the very fabric of creation. Our task is not to invent it, but to re-member it: to restore our awareness, heal our relations, and align our lives with the balance, harmony, and abundance that the Earth and Her cosmic society continually offer. Politics, rightly understood, is antithetical to domination and rests on the practices of belonging. It is the humble and joyous work of restoring what was never truly lost—only forgotten.”
Steve was born and raised in Chicago. He attended the city’s public schools until he left for college. His roots in this Congressional District are deep. After elementary school at Oscar Mayer, he entered an experimental magnet high school, the Chicago Public High School for Metropolitan Studies (Metro), where if one was interested in marine biology one could take classes at the Shedd Aquarium, or, in art, then take classes at the Art Institute, or in theater take classes at Second City, etc.
While in high school, in the late 1970s, Steve joined the Young People’s Socialist League (the “Yipsel”), the youth section of the Social Democrats, USA, whose national chairman was the civil rights organizer, Bayard Rustin. “Bayard was the single greatest influence on my political outlook,” Steve says: “his faith in the cause of human dignity became my faith.”
As Bayard once put it: “My activism did not spring from my being gay, or for that matter, from my being black. Rather it is rooted, fundamentally, in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. These values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal. Adhering to those values has meant making a stand against injustice, to the best of my ability, whenever and wherever it occurs.”
Reflecting the population of the city as a whole from whom students were drawn by lottery, the student body at Metro was predominantly African American and the teaching and administrative staff were led by people of color. There was some ethnic diversity maintained by quota (of which Steve was a direct beneficiary). “The philosophy of the school,” he recalls, “is that the city was our classroom and that we were all to embrace its opportunities for learning in a spirit of fellowship. It was my first vision of academic excellence and the school remains, after a BA from Reed College, an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a PhD in history from Yale University, in many ways the best educational institution with which I have been associated—certainly the one most successfully combining joy and the pursuit of liberation with instruction.
Everyone at Metro, as a mark of both respect and love, was on a first-name basis. When i returned for an all-years high school reunion in 2010—for a school that had only existed between 1970 and 1991—I was all puffed up with my degrees and had ‘Dr. Schwartzberg’ on my name tag. Nate Blackman, the principal, took me in with a glance and said warmly: ‘Hi Steve!’ which immediately reminded me that equality and right relations are what really matter in life. I don’t know how I could ever have been so over-educated as to forget that basic truth but I have remembered it since.”
The most important intellectual influence on Steve during his four years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, was a class he took from the social theorist Edward Shils on the political sociology of Max Weber. “Shils had taught at the University of Chicago for nearly half a century before he came to Reed and the power of his example persuaded me to pursue an academic career,” Steve notes.
Shils’ generosity is well conveyed by another of his students, Liah Greenfeld, who arrived on his doorstep in graduate school one day to be greeted as follows: “Mrs. Greenfeld, I disagree with everything you write. If I did not, I would have to reject my own conclusions of the past ten years. But I think that what you have to say is very important, and I want you to write and publish an essay on this subject.” She reports that Shils then guided her through three drafts of her essay, polishing and strengthening an argument designed to prove that he was wrong. As she comments, “I was already then struck by the exceptional generosity of spirit, and selflessness, exhibited in this reaction. I understand now that it also reflected his dedication to the thing beyond him, the ideal that he served and a particular tradition of inquiry which was to achieve the knowledge of this ideal. He welcomed every honest effort to carry on this tradition. What mattered for him was not whether he was right or wrong, but the Truth.”
While in college, Steve experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms. “I went to Hell. I passed out without knowing that I had passed out. I was fully aware in a world of constantly changing images, some of them drawn from newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps that I had seen as a child in Hebrew School. I would be talking with someone, reach out to touch them, and they would dissolve. When my girlfriend finally managed to shake me awake I was afraid to touch her lest she disappear. My gratitude at being able to turn on and off a radio knew no bounds. The experience changed and mellowed me. I said at the time, and still feel, that I would not wish what I went through on my worst enemy. Moreover, I remain incredibly grateful for the created world. The experience may also have contributed to a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder.”
Steve’s academic work has centered on deepening our understanding of both the good and the harm that America has done in the world so that we can do better in the future. One of the most important contributions the United States has ever made to the cause of democracy and social justice in another country was its support for the postwar land reform in Japan. Rather than seek revenge on the people whose state had attacked us, we sought to make allies of the Japanese people as against the militarist Japanese government that had betrayed them as well as the people of the United States. Steve’s article on the subject—“The ‘Soft Peace Boys’: Presurrender Planning and Japanese Land Reform”—is available online for free download. See also the implications Steve has drawn from this for, “A ‘Soft Peace’ for Gaza.”
American assistance to other peoples in their pursuit of democracy has often come through what Steve has called “civil interventions”—nonviolent efforts to decisively affect regime maintenance or regime change in another country that are informed by a commitment to democratic solidarity. In a book on the subject, Steve examined successful American civil interventions in Cuba in 1944, Brazil in 1945, Venezuela in 1946, Ecuador in 1947, and Costa Rica in 1948, as well as a civil intervention that ultimately proved counterproductive in Argentina in 1945-1946. Like all other successes in human affairs, the victories here, if they were to be sustained, had to be fought for continually and, unfortunately, only in Costa Rica did democracy survive intact from the 1940s to the present. Steve’s book—Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years—is available for purchase online. His article on the involvement of the United States in Venezuela, especially its democratic opening from 1945 to 1948, is available for free download–“Rómulo Betancourt: From a Communist Anti-Imperialist to a Social Democrat with U.S. Support.”
One of Steve’s colleagues in the Social Democrats, USA, Tom Kahn, once observed that those who set out to change the world must expect the likelihood that the world will return the favor. Believing that the civility he had studied in American policy during the Truman years was somehow a permanent aspect of the democratic culture of the United States—rather than mostly a residual of the New Deal—Steve hoped that the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s would proceed along the lines of the American occupation of Japan. This was a grotesquely misplaced hope that failed to take account of the deterioration in the civility of American foreign policy that took place over the course of the postwar years following, especially, the CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, and the War in Vietnam in the 1960s. In practice, the incivility of the occupation of Iraq was a disaster for both the people of Iraq and the American people. Whether civility can be cultivated again in American foreign policy—particularly in the Sino-American relationship, the most important bilateral relationship in the world—is a current research interest of Steve’s and a theme in the course on “Ethics and World Politics” that he has sometimes taught at DePaul University in recent years as well as the subject of a recent substack post on the broader context of Sino-American relations, Drunk with Western Doctrine.
After teaching at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for a couple of years in the 1990s, Steve returned to Yale to become the director of undergraduate studies for international studies in 1998. To his horror a student in the international studies major was murdered and he came to suspect a colleague of the crime. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he was grossly unfair to this colleague and made his suspicions public knowledge. Although Yale renewed his contract for an additional year, it did not renew it for a third year. Unemployed, Steve struggled with clinical depression and, at a particularly desperate juncture, tossed himself in front of a subway train. “I felt God’s love for me in the miracle of being alive immediately after the train hit,” he reports: “I lost my hand, but have hardly felt depressed since.” He wound up at the Austen Riggs Center, a unique open-setting mental hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where patients are free to come and go as they please. “There was an Episcopal church across the street from me and I just sort of knew that was more than a coincidence,” Steve says of his decision to be baptized there.
While considering himself a Christian (as well as considering himself Jewish), Steve’s religious views have broadened considerably in recent years. “I have become convinced that any ‘universalism’ that fails to take full account of Indigenous ontologies and experiences is so inadequate as to be false, regardless of whether that false universalism is secular or religious.”
Steve describes himself as fairly deeply influenced by the New Confucianism associated with Tu Weiming, and the Zen Buddhist thinking associated with the Rev. angel Kyodo williams, as well as with the Native ontologies conveyed in the thinking of figures such as Vine Deloria, Jr. (Dakota), John Trudell (Dakota), and Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota).
Returning to Chicago in 2008, Steve became active in Church of Our Saviour, Lincoln Park’s Episcopal church, becoming its building and office manager from 2010-2017. Doubling down on his religious and political commitments and activities, especially in the wake of the November 2016 election, he also became a parishioner at St. Pauls, a UCC church in Lincoln Park. In the spring of 2017, he was elected president of the Chicago Literary Club for its 144th season. He has since joined the Lighthouse Church of Chicago as well.
After having written about history and politics for years as an academic, Steve decided to become more directly involved himself in early 2016 by knocking on doors for Bernie Sanders in Iowa and Wisconsin. Though convinced that Hillary Clinton was vastly preferable to Donald Trump, Steve was deeply disappointed in her campaign, beginning with her acceptance speech to the Democratic Convention in July 2016 which he heard as being deeply condescending to the working class, long on vague and vapid promises, and short on practical measures.
”Democrats are the party of working people,” Hillary Clinton claimed at one point in that speech. But her next line—directed specifically to the working class—revealed her out-of-touch and patronizing attitude: “we haven’t done a good enough job showing that we get what you’re going through, and that we’re going to do something about it.”
That was, Steve suggests, “a major part of how a vastly better qualified woman was defeated by a mediocre male alternative whose only real skill was—and is—as a snake-oil salesman.”
Determined to double down on opposition to the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism and, especially, its refusal to endorse Medicare for All, Steve ran for Congress in the Democratic primary in 2018—championing Bernie Sanders’ positions on the issues—and receiving four percent of the vote.
In the aftermath of defeat, he was given a copy of Marianne Williamson’s book, Tears to Triumph, and, impressed with her arguments against the emotionally numbing character of psych medicines, decided to stop taking his own. Overwhelmed by emotions that he could not regulate, he pursued a woman that he knew from church, repeatedly asking her to marry him. “I deeply regret not respecting her boundaries,” he now says.
She obtained a no contact order and, after he sent her two additional emails, Steve found himself arrested and in jail awaiting trial. “My first night in jail, I was attacked and got into a fight. Fortunately, I managed to get the stump of my arm—which still has a lot of strength in it—under the chin of my attacker, push his head against the wall, and begin to run him along the wall to the corner (which would have been bad for him) when the door opened and the guards burst in.”
“For fighting,” Steve writes, “and presumably for my own protection, I was placed in solitary confinement in a small box of a cell that I was allowed out of one hour in twenty-four during which time I was mostly chained to a chair in the hall. This felt like a form of psychological torture. I endured it for four months.”
Found not guilty on a technicality, Steve sent an email to the lawyer of the woman he had pestered, to try to “explain” the situation. That email was treated as grounds for new charges as an effort to make contact through a third party; charges which Steve decided not to fight, and he was put on supervision for a year and a half.
Starting to rebuild, in the spring of 2019, Steve returned to Lincoln Park from Ravenswood to concentrate on improving a book manuscript that he had begun around 2008. This was a period in his life when he became more familiar with Native scholars and activists and their writings. He was particularly impressed with John Trudell who foresaw in 1980 that “There is a new Indian this time” and that “The new Indian is white”—who foresaw, in other words, that economic and governmental power was going to be deployed against those who had believed what they were told about their political freedoms as Americans in something like the ways that power had been deployed against the peoples of the Native Nations for centuries (in other words in violation of “the rule of law”).
Here is Trudell in his own words:
“We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all the natural world has a right to existence. We are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off. We are the people. We have the potential for power. We must not fool ourselves. We must not mislead ourselves. It takes more than good intentions. It takes commitment. It means that at some point in our lives we are going to have to decide that we have a way of life that we follow, and we are going to live that way of life, even when our enemies totally surround us, even when our enemies act against us with brutality and harshness, with lies and bribes. We are going to have to stand up to brutality and harshness, lies and bribes. We are going to have to stand with our way of life.”
This commitment to standing with our way of life—standing with honesty and gentleness—informs Steve’s scholarship and teaching, it informs his congressional campaign, and it informed the perspective from which Steve completed his book—Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal—which was published in the spring of 2023 to considerable praise. Some of the favorable comments his work has received are presented at the conclusion of this biographical sketch.
The journey described here—through joy and sorrow, triumph and defeat, wisdom and stupidity—has led Steve to a vision that is not theoretical. It is a vision born of experience, forged in vulnerability, and nourished by a global knowledge of the sacredness of all life rooted in many serious traditions and by the call of the Earth herself. “Only if we begin our public policy from a position of natural spiritual truth—a position of respect, love, and gratitude towards all life—will recovery for our society, and right relations with all our relations, be possible,” Steve insists. “I am,” he says, “deeply appreciative of all those who have walked this path with me and I hope that those who hear or read my words in this campaign will consider them an invitation to join in a movement rather than simply in a campaign. As Bernie Sanders says: ‘Not me, Us!’”
“This compelling study unravels how nearly two centuries ago, the Supreme Court developed doctrines of Christian discovery that superseded the laws of the time, including existing American law, and laid the foundation for genocidal crimes and what is now considered the legal basis for administering the Indigenous peoples who remain.” —Noam Chomsky
“Arguments Over Genocide will reward attentive readers whether they are new to the field of U.S. policy toward the Cherokee and other Indigenous Nations, or have studied it for decades… [it] will surprise and inform even people who have spent their lives studying these issues.”—Thurman “Lee” Hester, Jr., author of Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty.
“I am surprised as I write this: the most compelling new work of theology I have read in years is embedded in a historian’s exploration of 19th century legal debates. Worthy of its alarming title, Arguments Over Genocide is an urgent book that every clergyperson and seminarian should read.”—Matt Fitzgerald, Senior Pastor, St. Pauls, United Church of Christ, Chicago.
“As critics lay supine, the Supreme Court under John Marshall crafted the ‘Marshall Trilogy’… Examining Marshall’s premises, Schwartzberg demolishes them, one by one, demonstrating their honeyed lethality and urging a principled revision of American jurisprudence.”—Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of History, University of Toledo, and the author of The Gantowisas: Iroquoian Women.
“This is a bracing, learned, and eloquent study of words and actions that mattered — that still matter — and the relationship between them. I learned much.”—David Waldstreicher, Professor of History, City University of New York, and the author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey through American Slavery and Independence.
“This book is more than a mere scholarly exploration. It is a gift. Hopefully, it is part of a roadmap forward.” —Randy Kritkausky author of Without Reservation: Awakening to Native American Spirituality and the Wisdom of Our Ancestors.
“Arguments Over Genocide [provides] a global spiritual philosophy to show that there is a way toward freeing the world from ideas and structures of domination that have constituted the past 500 years of law, economics, and morality.”—Peter d’Errico, Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the author of Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples.
“In the end, Schwartzberg’s argument is an important one for our country to grapple with.” —Chris Hammer, The Christian Century, November 2024
https://www.youtu.be/w1rnY8Oiepo?si=rnCWZ0Q88LqOljqs
1 May 2025
© Steven J. Schwartzberg 2025