Conversations from the Cullman Center, LIVE from NYPL: Dirty Work: Eyal Press with Graciela Mochkofsky

What is the toll of essential work? Eyal Press reports from the front lines of “dirty work”—the work society considers essential but morally compromised.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn unprecedented attention to essential workers, and to the health and safety risks to which workers in prisons and slaughterhouses are exposed.  In Dirty Work, Eyal Press examines a less familiar set of occupational hazards for the people who perform society’s most ethically troubling jobs: psychological and emotional hardships such as stigma, shame, PTSD, and moral injury. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income workers, undocumented immigrants, women, and people of color. In this new book, Press reveals fundamental truths about the moral dimensions of work and the hidden costs of inequality in America.

Eyal Press researched and wrote Dirty Work during his 2017–2018 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He discusses his book with award-winning journalist Graciela Mochkofsky.

Produced in partnership with The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

The program will be streamed live on this page. If you encounter any issues, please join us on NYPL's YouTube channel.

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Eyal Press suggests these titles for further reading:

• Marking Time by Nicole Fleetwood — NYPL Catalog ; Bookshare
• Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold — NYPL Catalog ; NYPL Talking Books ; Bookshare
• Hidden Injuries of Class by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb — NYPL Research and Reference
• The Good Hand by Michael Patrick F. Smith — NYPL Catalog ; Bookshare

Eyal Press is an author and journalist based in New York. The recipient of a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, and a Puffin Foundation fellowship at Type Media Center, he is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and numerous other publications. He is the author of Beautiful Souls and Absolute Convictions.

Graciela Mochkofsky is director of the Bilingual Journalism Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. A native of Argentina, she is a winner of the 2018 Maria Moors Cabot prize for outstanding reporting across Latin America and the Caribbean. She has served as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, a Prins Foundation fellow at the Center for Jewish History, a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. She was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2013-2014, where she worked on her forthcoming book The Prophet of the Andes, about a Peruvian Catholic community that converted to Orthodox Judaism and emigrated to the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The book will be published in English by Knopf.

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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.

LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the support of Library patrons and friends, as well as by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.