We warmly invite you to Women Cross DMZ’s gathering of closest supporters and friends on October 23, from 6-8pm. Cathi Choi (Women Cross DMZ, Executive Director) and Ji-Yeon Yuh (WCDMZ, Board Chair & Northwestern University, Professor) will share our vision for the road ahead and how WCDMZ is defending democracy by challenging militarism at home and abroad. Please join us!

As we find ourselves in a time of increasingly complex conditions as a global community, two things are clear to us: Women Cross DMZ’s mission and work will play a critical role in fostering peace, and at the foundation of it all, we need each other.

At home and abroad, U.S. militarism and state violence are eroding our collective safety. In Georgia, armed federal agents detained over 300 South Koreans at a Hyundai plant, marking the largest single-site immigration raid in history. Last month, Trump signed over $150 billion to ICE, making it the largest police force in the country. This was done on top of a nearly $1 trillion military budget, which has funded 75 years of ongoing war in Korea. MAGA ideology continues to proliferate throughout South Korea.

As Korean-American feminist peacemakers, we know that U.S. forever wars abroad fuels militarism at home. We must be ever more strategic and resourceful to protect our communities and our planet. Our decade of work has prepared us to be strategic and innovative as we build this movement for feminist peace with you.

Light refreshments and hors d'ouevres will be served.

Speakers:

Cathi Choi (she/her) is the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of activists mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure feminist leadership in peacebuilding. She co-coordinates the Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network, launched in 2019 to organize communities in calling for demilitarization and lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. She obtained a JD from Harvard Law School. Previously, she worked at a civil rights law firm in Los Angeles, and clerked for Judge Denny Chin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Prior to attending law school, she completed the Dual Degree International History Program at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and obtained her BA from Columbia University. She is the Program Committee Co-Chair for GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals generating progressive, critical, intersectional, and intergenerational discourses, community alliances, and free educational programs. Her writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy In Focus, In These Times, Journal of Policy History, the Asian Pacific American Law Journal, Yes! Magazine, The Hill, and The National Interest. She has appeared on KPFK, NK News, Radio Korea, and WBAI Radio.

Ji-Yeon Yuh is the Board Chair of Women Cross DMZ and a founding faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University, where she teaches Asian American history, Asian diasporas, race and gender, and oral history. Her book, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, was the first substantive work to examine the consequences for migration and diaspora of U.S. militarism in Korea. Her current projects include a digital oral history repository focused on Asian diasporas, an oral history project on the Midwest as an Asian American space, a book on Korean diaspora in China, Japan, and the United States, and a study of reunification and Korea peace activism in the Korean diaspora. She has been a consultant for numerous public history, media, and education projects, including Still Presents Pasts, an exhibit on Korean Americans and the Korean War, Crossing East, a radio documentary on Asian Americans, and Pollyanna’s forthcoming high school racial literacy curriculum. She is a longtime advocate for Korea peace and reunification and is a co-founder and former steering committee member of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. She currently serves on the board of the Korea Policy Institute. She is a co-founder and board president of the Korean Performing Arts Institute of Chicago and a former board president of KAN-WIN, an Asian American women’s anti-gender-violence organization. She is a native of Seoul and Chicago, a fan of pungmul, a taekwondo black belt, a science fiction reader, and the mother of three children.

Peace in Action: Challenging Militarism, Defending Democracy

By Women Cross DMZ

Peace in Action: Challenging Militarism, Defending Democracy

An Evening with Women Cross DMZ