An Upper West Sider’s Life of Activism: From Vietnam to Trump

By Andrea Sachs

The New York Times once described a slacktivist (“slacker” and “activist” combined) as a person who wants to do something beneficial “without getting up from their chair.” Examples include wearing a political pin, signing an online petition, or retweeting a post about a social issue – then patting yourself on the back for your commitment to the cause.

Then there is Arlene Geiger, who lives at the other end of the activism spectrum.

Geiger, who has lived on the Upper West Side for 55 years, has literally gone to thousands of marches, rallies, sit-ins, and protests across the country for progressive causes. Her political activism, which began in the early 1970s against the Vietnam War, has greatly accelerated since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. 

There is nothing in Geiger’s manner that signals the militancy of her politics. But to those of a certain age, her comfortable Bohemian clothes give off a hint of the rebellious counterculture of the 1970s. Was she a hippie back then?

“I was, and I wasn’t, because I was much more political than hippies,” she told West Side Rag. “I dressed that way. I loved the aesthetics. I still dress the same way. But a good deal of the hippie thing was checking out. And I wasn’t into checking out and living, just spacing out. So I didn’t find that appealing.”

Geiger’s life has been one of full-steam-ahead involvement. She is the founder and leader of the Upper West Side Action Group, which is also a chapter of two large national activist organizations, Indivisible and Swing Left. She has had no trouble recruiting people on the left-leaning UWS since Trump’s first election. “It was overwhelming, the number of people who signed up then,” she recalled. “I was oversubscribed. People were scared” 

Jennifer Herring, a retired nonprofit executive who has lived on the UWS since 1980, was one of those people.

Still an active member of the group, Herring says of Geiger: “She has been in the progressive organizing space for decades. She is connected with progressive organizers across the country and forges her strategies for the actions our group will take based on the knowledge she gains through their weekly conversations. Arlene is intelligent, effective, organized, relentless, and gives me a way to make a difference.”

The political activities undertaken by members of Geiger’s group run the gamut, including canvassing and speaking with voters in swing districts, helping to organize mobilizations like Hands Off and No Kings (recent campaigns to oppose Trump administration policies), and supporting progressive candidates such as Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. 

Geiger grew up in Fairlawn, New Jersey, in a working-class family that was politically diverse. “My father was very, very conservative. He was a Democrat only because we’re Jewish, and in that generation, that’s what you had to be,” she recalled. “My mother, on the other hand, was fairly progressive. She felt very strongly about respect and the rights of Blacks and some sense of social justice.”

“I didn’t like my home life very much, so I worked, and then I got married early, mostly to get out of the house,” Geiger said.

She left that marriage in less than two years and never remarried. Rather than going to college, she worked at a variety of jobs in the city, such as payroll clerk at an advertising agency and dispatcher at a temp agency. In the late 1960s, when Columbia University was engulfed in political turmoil, Geiger got a position as a job interviewer. She encountered Quakers there who were protesting the Vietnam War and was drawn to them.

That was the beginning of a lifetime of activism.

Subsequently, Geiger went to City College at 27 and later to graduate school at the New School, becoming an economist. She then spent 30 years teaching public-sector and international economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. During those years, she worked on behalf of innumerable causes, notably fair housing.

Geiger retired in 2017 and has been protesting the Trump administration’s policies full-time ever since. In her view, Trump poses an existential threat to America. “At this point, I think we could have a full-blown fascist country if we and others like us across the country do not mobilize in larger and larger numbers,” she said. 

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