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Holidays Shmolidays (Merry Christmas)

This is good stuff for non-Jews (as well as Jews) to read. Aron states precisely why I, too, would much rather people just come out and say "Merry Christmas," instead of the supposedly ecumenical "Happy Holidays." The so-called war on Christmas is an utterly stupid concept, except for what it reveals about the right wingers' imagination of Jews. Feh to O'Reilly and a Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends.

Personally, I too am annoyed by the PCness of the "happy holidays" greeting. Growing up as an Orthodox Jewish kid with Eastern European parents and grandparents, Christmas had a rather ominous feel to it. That was a result of the memories passed down to me of Christmas as one of the Polish pogrom seasons, where my grandparents had to live in fear of rape and murder. Despite New York's reputation, rape and murder by rampaging goyim is not a real concern for the Jews of this great city. But the site of Christmas trees nonetheless evoked a quesy feeling in me when I was a child.

That feeling along with a sense of inferiority as a minority, induced American Jews to pump up the rather minor holiday of Hanukka into something far more important than it is. A Holy Day in the Jewish calendar - a hag - is a pilgrimage specifically to the site of the Temple in Jerusalem (in an ecumenical spirit, I remind my readers that the Muslim haj is really the same word, except the pilgramage is to Mecca). Hanukka is not a pilgrimage holiday ordained in the Bible but a holiday instituted by the Hasmonean kings, whom the Rabbis despised.

Hannuka barely gets mentioned at all in the Talmud. The source of our knowledge about the holiday is the Book of the Maccabees. Unlike the Book of Esther and its associated holiday of Purim, Maccabees was left out of the official Biblical canon - the Rabbis of the Talmud no doubt would have preferred it never got written in the first place. The Rabbis' antagonism was rooted in the fact that the descendants of Judah the Maccabee, the Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel until the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE, were in fact blood thirsty tyrants of the worst sort, who, ironically, advocated close ties to Rome and were intimately associated with the wealthy elite Sadducee establishment.

Side note: Rabbinical Judaism in its roots was an anti-establishment working class movement. Jesus probably was a leader of one of the more radical fringe groups within the overall revolutionary rabbinical movement. It was the wealthy Sadducee toadies who betrayed Jesus to their Roman masters.

Fast forward to modern day US of A, where assimilationist toadies emulating their Sadducee forbears in wanting to please their capitalist masters, had to find an equivalent Jewish shopping holiday to Christmas. Hannuka is the perfect fit in more ways than one. And they even one-upped the goyish capitalists by instituting eight days of gifts.

Considering the abysmal record of the Hasmoneans and the Sadducees, it is even more ironic that Hannuka and the Maccabees were seen as models by Zionists as a fore-runner to modern day Jewish nationalism. Hannuka is hardly as important in Israel as it is in the US, but it still is accorded far more importance than it should be....

So if you wish me a happy holiday it would take me a few minutes to even know what you are talking. The main Jewish holiday season is not December but September and October. We Jews have plenty (probably too many) holidays of our own and I for one am quite happy to concede this time of year exclusively to my Christian friends. So to all of you, Merry Christmas.

P.S. ... right-wing politics in America has long been associated with xenophobia and hatred of Jews. Intellectuals, liberals, gays, New Yorkers, Hollywood and the like, all of whom the right-wing hate so much, are used by them as code words for Jews. The neo-cons, Likudnicks and other Jews, who ally themselves with these right-wing creeps, are like their Sadducee counter-parts, stupidly aligning themselves with their true enemy. As for Bill O'Reilly, no happy holiday greetings from me to him. My fervent holiday wish for Mr. O'Reilly is that he get trapped in a store playing Christmas jingles non-stop for a full year. The horror, the horror!

I was reading Aron's blog before I even got into blogs and blogging. I rarely write about Israel/Palestine stuff here, but if you want to know where I'm at with those issues, I usually agree with Aron.

Identity Is Complicated

Rokhl Kafrissen recently published an awesome statement on contemporary Jewish American identity (via Mark Rubin). This is the sort of thing that I wish I'd written, because it comes so close to my own views. Here's points 3 and 4, out of 6, central to the manifesto:

3. Jewish religion cannot be divorced from Jewish culture.

To do so yields the current demographic and spiritual crisis now facing the American Jewish community.

Jewish philanthropists like Michael Steinhardt want to revive the non-Orthodox Jewish community by replacing “victimhood” with “joy.” (See his Jerusalem Post opinion piece in February of this year.) I think we all know that you can read “Europe” for victimhood and “Israel” for joy. Didn’t that attitude get us in this mess? Turn a shul into a temple, a khazn into a cantor and Jewish music into Debbie Friedman — well, you better lock the doors cuz the inmates will be breaking out. Witness our so-called youth crisis. American Jewish culture has turned Camembert into CheezWhiz: It is boring and every young Jew knows it.

Real Jewish Culture is the product of hundreds, thousands of years of joy and pain; it’s the expression of the realities of halokhe [Jewish law] lived in a hostile world. It’s the result of every Jew’s struggle between tradition and modernity. Most importantly, Real Jewish Culture is our connection to those who came before us, and without access to it, well, that bagel in your hand is not a symbol of anything, just a bunch of empty calories masquerading as breakfast.

4. I am not an Israeli.

About two thousand American Jews make aliyah [emmigrate to Israel] every year. Out of a total Jewish population of 5,200,000, this comes out to about .04% of American Jews each year who will choose to live in Israel. I am an American and, like 99.96 percent of my fellow American Jews, I will never become an Israeli. I care deeply about the State of Israel, most of all because my fate is linked to that of every other Jew. But where does the spirit of klal yisroel end and the unquestioning acceptance of Zionism begin?

Open a magazine like Moment and you’d think every Jew in America had already put down a security deposit on an apartment in Jerusalem. Moment bills itself as “Jewish culture, politics, and religion.” Three of four cover stories in a recent issue were Israel-related, with more inside — and this was the music issue! Now, I would understand if this were a newspaper for a small Jewish community somewhere in the world. I doubt that the Jewish community of Honduras has enough news to fill twelve issues of a monthly magazine. But we don’t live in Honduras. We live in the other Jewish state, a country with a Jewish population roughly equal to that of the Jewish state. And let me tell you, we’ve got enough news here to fill up every single Jewish newspaper, magazine, newsletter, leaflet and ’zine.

Mark Rubin, who alerted me to Rokhl's manifesto, doesn't think non-Jews need read it, that it's more for us Jews to talk about amongst ourselves. While the subject matter is an internal conversation, I encourage everyone to read the whole thing. My own experience is that most non-Jews don't know much about American Jewish cultural issues and experiences, beyond the stereotypes and the canned, Jewish institutional PR.

I would just add to Rokhl's assertions about secular and religious Jewish culture(s), that a secular Jewish world-view can also include not just knowledge but practice of Judaism. While Jewish law excludes those who profess belief in Christian or polytheistic religions from Jewish religious participation, there is no requirement that one demonstrate a positive belief in God. It's been my experience that many practicing Jews have changeable ideas and beliefs about theology while remaining consistent participants in the religious community. I don't know how many would go as far as I do to say their world view is closest to secular and agnostic while maintaining a somewhat traditional Jewish religious practice—though I know my mother would as would my great-uncle, my maternal grandfather's brother, who, at age 95, is the minyan facilitator for the daily services at his synagogue in Florida. You have not heard leyning (chanting) from the Torah until you've heard him.

The summer of 2002, my first cousin, who is an Orthodox Jew, invited me to lead the davenning (praying) for his auf ruf, an east European Jewish celebration at morning prayer services in the week before one's wedding. This was a particularly special occasion because my cousin decided to have the auf ruf in my maternal grandfather's synagogue, Young Israel on East Broadway, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.* The Young Israel on East Broadway is a very traditional, Orthodox synagogue, which my grandparents were members of from around time it was founded, until they died six weeks apart, in November and December 2002, respectively, both at age ninety-nine.

I was a little nervous to accept the honor, since I don't regularly attend services in such Orthodox congregations, where the ritual life is very tightly choreographed and fast paced, without a lot of time spent explaining and instructing. Still, there was no way to say no, especially knowing my grandfather would be there (my grandmother was not well enough to attend).

At one point, during the breakfast that followed services (bagels, lox, herring, fruit, etc.), my uncle, whose son was getting married, pulled me aside to report that during services my grandfather turned to him and said, "who would have thought that Paul Greenberg's son could daven like this."

My father, a founder of New Jewish Agenda, who identified not as a Zionist but as a Jewish nationalist supporter of Jewish and Palestinian self-determination in the middle east, was a secular radical in the Jewish socialist tradition, for the first half of his life. As he reached his 40s, he started to become increasingly religious in his outlook, though he never learned to read Hebrew or the ritual skills he and my mother decided I should learn in my eight years of Jewish parochial school.

Notes
*If you click on the Young Israel link, above, you can also see an arial shot of the apartment buildings where my grandparents lived through all the years that I was alive to know them. They lived at 383 Grand Street, in what are known as the Seward Park Cooperatives. In the area marked "Seward Park," between Essex and Clinton, there are two buildings. 383 Grand Street is the one closer to Essex and to Grand.

FEMA and Red Cross Cooperate In Keeping Food and Water Out Of NOLA

Last weekend began news reports that the Red Cross still had not entered New Orleans and that this was because Louisiana state officals were barring entry to the relief organization. While it is true that the Red Cross is not delivering aid to people inside New Orleans, Media Matters documents that responsibility for this genocidal policy lies entirely with FEMA and the Red Cross itself. Furthermore, Media Matters has shown that Red Cross officials have been colluding with the Bush administration in misdirecting blame to the state and local officials in Louisiana.

Media Matters reports:

Both the federal Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) December 2004 National Response Plan (NRP) and the Red Cross' charter clearly place the Red Cross under the purview of FEMA. Further, the response plan stipulates that federal agencies should strive for full coordination with state officials but not allow such coordination to "impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources."

According to the federal charter of the American Red Cross, the organization has "the legal status of 'a federal instrumentality' " with "responsibilities delegated to it by the Federal government." Listed among these responsibilities is "to maintain a system of domestic and international disaster relief, including mandated responsibilities under the Federal Response Plan coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)."

The NRP represents the most recently approved "federal response plan." It confirms that the Red Cross falls under the purview of the federal government:

This plan is applicable to all Federal departments and agencies that may be requested to provide assistance or conduct operations in the context of actual or potential Incidents of National Significance. This includes the American Red Cross, which functions as an Emergency Support Function (ESF) primary organization in coordinating the use of mass care resources in a Presidentially declared disaster or emergency.

[...]

Departments and agencies at all levels of government and certain NGOs, such as the American Red Cross, may be required to deploy to Incidents of National Significance on short notice to provide timely and effective mutual aid and/or intergovernmental assistance.

On September 2, in the early days of the Katrina aftermath, Red Cross president and CEO Marsha J. "Marty" Evans stated on the Larry King Show that her organization was staying out of New Orleans for the safety of its workers and to avoid giving NOLA residents any incentive to stay.

We're prepared as soon as they can be evacuated, we're prepared to receive them in Texas, in other states, but it was not safe to be in the city, and it's not been safe to go back into the city. They were also concerned that if we located, relocated back into the city, people wouldn't leave, and they've got to leave.

Marian Douglas, who is not in any sympathy with the Bush administration's handling of Katrina and its aftermath, emphasized the safety issue, from her extensive experience with humanitarian action:

The situation is a mess, but, having worked in Kosovo, Haiti, Bosnia and other places, there could be unbelievable complications sending
Red Cross volunteers - most of whom are not really trained or equipped for this type or scale of disaster - into this situation.

They would really be sending such people into harm's way, especially with the flooding/standing water; no electricity anywhere; NO COMMUNICATIONS, the list goes on.

Many of the volunteers easily could end up victims. They would also be taking up valuable space. The US does not have a civilian corps trained for this kind of situation. I could be wrong but that is my take. I think we're used to seeing images of relief workers helping people in the midst of ruins, but AFTER the danger - or most of it - has passed. This crisis is in active mode.

Back in early September, I thought the second half of the Red Cross rationale—helping starving and thirsty hurricane victims would only encourage them to stay—was gratuitous, Republican, victim-blaming b-s. Now, however, it seems that Evans was hedging her bets to make sure there would be "good" reason to stay out of NOLA, even as conditions changed. As time went on, Evans elaborated and amplified concerns about interfering with evacuation, framing them as concerns of LEMA and the state's National Guard. As we have seen, above, not only was the Red Cross not under any jurisdiction of the state authorities, the December 2004 National Response Plan "stipulates that federal agencies should strive for full coordination with state officials but not allow such coordination to 'impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources.'" By September 8, Evans was emphasizing that state authorities were denying the Red Cross entry because

the thinking was that, if we were to come in, that, one, it would impede the evacuation. They were trying to get everybody out. And, secondly, that it could possibly suggest that it was going to be OK to stay.

Media Matters elaborates that while it has

no evidence that Evans or the Red Cross was working with the White House to project a uniform message, Evans's rhetorical shift is consistent with the Bush administration's efforts to to blame and impute the motives of Blanco and other state and local officials. As Fox News general assignment reporter Major Garrett noted, because of the close relationship between FEMA and the Red Cross, the Red Cross has a direct interest in how FEMA looks to the media and the public: "When FEMA is tarred and feathered, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are tarred and feathered."

Correction

On Friday, I posted a first hand account of a woman who volunteered her services as a counselor for survivors of Katrina. As noted by a Samantha Joy in the comments and by J Flenn, who emailed me last night, authorship of this piece was widely misattributed to Anne Gevarsi. The true author is Shari Julian. Like Smantha, J Flenn contacted Anne Gevarsi and received the following statement, which Samantha also received and posted in the comments today:

Since Shari Julian was on Dateline Friday, I feel that I can tell you that she is my friend who donated her time working with refugees. I am NOT a psychologist, and I don’t want her ideas misrepresented as mine; PLEASE pass this on. I know that Shari will be delighted with your response to her. I do not want any of the Princes of Spin to use this mix-up against her or against me. I agreed to pass on her reflections since I have an extensive email list. Somehow, my name became associated as the psychologist. I am an English professor, so please contact Dr. Julian at the addresses in the cc line.

J Flenn also heard directly from Shari Julian, who wrote that she is:

...a Licensed Professional Counselor with a bunch of post-doctorates not a psychologist. Counseling is actually a better preparation than psychology for this work since it works with populations without pre-existing psychopathology but rather situational abreactions. I have a lot of experience with victims of mass trauma and with crime. I am an assistant professor in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UTA. ...

Staying On Subject

Bruised, derided, cursed, defiled,
she beheld her tender Child
All with scourges rent:

For the sins of His own nation,
saw Him hang in desolation,
Till His spirit forth He sent.

--Stabat Mater

studyholic,

Sorry it's taken me a little while to respond to your second comment. But maybe it's a good thing that some time has passed and there is more information about the statement we've been discussing. It has also given me a chance to think some more and talk some of this over with a couple of friends.

As far as the "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel" statement goes, either

a) Cindy Sheehan didn't say it, or
b) she wants to distance herself from any such statement

"[T]hat doesn't even sound like me," she said to Anderson Cooper. It does not sound like her now, anyway, and I affirm what she is doing now. If she did say it, I think I would have advised her to distance herself from the statement a little differently, but she did solidly disown it. I have to agree with you when you say, "People can change and people make mistakes."

A friend of mine reminded me of a Jewish ethical principle that was very important to my father—dan b'kaf z'chut, judging others (and yourself) in the scale of merit.

Our Rabbis taught: A person should always regard himself as though he were half guilty and half meritorious. If one performs one good deed, happy is he for weighing himself down in the scale of merit. If one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself down in the scale of guilt, for it is said, “But one sinner destroys much good” (Ecclesiastes 9.18). On account of a single sin which he commits much good is lost to him.
 
R. Eleazar son of R. Simeon said: “Because the world is judged by its majority, and an individual too is judged by the majority of deeds, good or bad, if he performs one good deed, happy is he for turning the scale both for himself and for the whole world on the side of merit; if one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself and the whole world in the scale of guilt, for it is said, ‘But one sinner.’ – on account of the single sin which this man commits he and the whole world lose much good.' ” (Talmud, Kiddushin 40a)

In the end we are judged by the sum total of our actions, and right now Cindy Sheehan's message is unambiguous and morally compelling.

I think my friend DK is correct that currently the world sees Cindy Sheehan as a living Stabat Mater—making it rather difficult to think clearly about anything negative that might be attributed to her. It is therefore a good thing that we can look at the remark in question by itself, uncolored by any ideas of what Cindy may have meant by it.

So let's go back to the statement: "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Speaking to you as a Jewish person who is opposed to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and who supports the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to political self-determination, I am saying the statement trades in—or, at the very least, invites—antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of US foreign policy.

Perhaps to support this claim, I should elaborate on the history of the antisemitic tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion and link to current examples of the kind of thing I think the statement comes from and encourages more of. Perhaps you would want to debate whether assertions that the war in Iraq is a war for Israel are antisemitic. However, I do not think I need to debate the rights of others to criticize Israel. Asking me to do that inappropriately changes the subject.

Consider this scenario. It's December 2002. Trent Lott has recently spoken at the birthday and retirement party for Senator Strom Thurmond, saying, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." You bump into an African American friend who asks you if you've heard about the Lott statement and immediately starts cursing him out for being a racist.

In an effort to be fair minded you tell your friend, "Hey, Lott's entitled to criticize the American electorate. After all, it is true that Mississippi has a terrible economy and its schools are a mess. I think Lott just means that Thrumond's a Southerner who understands the problems of the South and is uniquely qualified to address them."

Your friend storms off, really pissed. To her, it doesn't matter what Thurmond may understand about the special needs of Mississippi or anywhere else in the South. To her any praise of Thrumond's agenda is praise of states' rights, segregation, Jim Crow. But if you didn't already know the history, you needed to have asked her why she thinks supporting Thurmond is inherently racist, above all else. If you'd asked that question, instead of launching into a defense of Lott's right, on principle, to be critical of the American electorate, your friend might have rattled off from memory the quote from Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign speeech:

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches.

I know the analogy isn't perfect. But I hope it makes the point.

(Special thanks to hf and to b.)

~
Painting: Mater Dolorosa by Spanish artist Luis de Morales (Public Domain, via Wikipedia).
Photo: Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, Texas (Lonestar Iconoclast)

Oooo, my good friend Kaspit has started a blog . . .

My brilliant and zany friend now has a blog called Kaspit! Kaspit isn't my friend's real name, of course. Kaspit (by my friend's coinage?) is the Hebrew word for Quicksilver. Kaspit's blog is about Jewish law, comic books and public policy, among other things. You may have seen other blogs on classical rabbinic literature, but I doubt you've seen anything quite like this . . .

Here's a little from Kaspit's inaugural Daf yomi commendiary:

Let us try a Daf Yomi commendiary.1 A running commentary on the daf yomi. Daf yomi is the "daily page" of the Babylonian Talmud read by many Jews in synch with a 7+ year cycle. This reading is a "spiritual exercise" and, for some of us, the reading may veer off-schedule and out-of-synch. In this commendiary, let's bring the textual into the material.

Why Quicksilver? Quicksilver is a living marvel, a mythic protagonist but also an antagonist, a pollutant when "out of place". (M. Douglas) Has it healing properties? Good as gold, or at least as silver. But quicksilver may be more susceptible to impurities like any liquid. It is hydrargyrum, silver water, silverfish. D/b/a mercury, Mercurial, toxic speech, poison. Do not incinerate: flesh and organs are vulnerable to trace amounts of quicksilver, Hg. So always again we ought to divine and interpret the traces, as when quicksilver slips through our flesh and texts, and we have to chase after both the Mercury and the Hermes.

Reading Talmud between the Greek and the Roman, the philosophical and the material, between their Hermes and Mercurius. Yes, it’s an endless hermeneutical Job to fall into both the textual and the toxical depths. A hermercurial critique.

Hermes, a wing-footed, mad-hatted herald, a cunning and clever sort, who also happens to be the god of Commerce and of Science. Yes, and he’s leading us all the way down to Hades. Thus the Greeks.

Mercury, god of merchandising. The sages do know Mercurius, the Roman God of wayfarers, merchants2 , commerce, mercantilism, free trade zones and Capitalism. The sages “apparently considered [Mercurius] almost synonymous with idolatry.” (Per I.G. of EJ) When the sages fulminate about Mercury, might their texts3 be tackling bigger targets?

(Read the whole thing.)

This one is going to be fun . . .

Jonathan On Passover (From The Comments)

[Jonathan's comments frequently deserve more air than they get in the comment fields of my posts. --BG]

Passover makes me think of the black slave experience in contemporary Sudan. Thursday evening I met a terrific man named Simon Deng who works for a group called iAbolish [www.iabolish.com] (I actually introduced Mr. Deng before he spoke to the Amnesty International club here on campus). Mr. Deng (a former enslaved child in Sudan) spoke to me about Arab slavers who are still killing and enslaving black Africans today. This is form of genocide in the lush jungles of Southern Sudan is equally as disgusting as the problems of mass murder in the desert of Darfur. Mr. Deng was taken as a boy from his village of Tonga in Southern Sudan and brutally enslaved and scarred on all levels before he escaped with the aid of an international buy-back force of anti-slavers.

I have often thought of what it means to be a independent American voter who rejects all parties (and therefore often cannot vote in primaries and other such twisted affairs) and a socialist (for lack of a better word) but the more I learn about the virulent permutations of capitalism, the more I strengthen my intellectual and sociopolitical resolve.

THAT is why your posts on the election fraud are so important to me because that willful debacle equals $-fiending. Many of the guns used to gather slaves in Southern Sudan are German-made and this equals $-fiending. The UN fails to intervene in Sudanese slavery because of pressure by the Arab oil magnets and this equals $-fiending. Condi Rice is pet of power who goes inside the big house, unleashed, when she is called and that is an example of $-fiending too. But I digress, forgive me.

Passover made me think of this world problem.

I am with you in recognition of this crucial, crucial time of Jewish observance.

It's Almost Passover (Rerun)

[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since then, and the post resonates differently—at least for me—with more life lived and more writing and research behind me. Chag samei'ach (happy holiday). --BG

As usual, while I'm here at my mom's house, I'm sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. This time I'm looking through some of the documents from Dad's work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master's thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad's involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and there's a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I'm going to post a little from what I've been reading while I'm here on my Passover visit.

As I study my father's political life I've been interested in the diversity of his involvements and how they were related in his mind. In his resumé that I posted you can see that in the space of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he moved from organized labor, to the disarmament movement, to the Civil Rights Movement. Then he was doing state legislative work for the Liberal Party in the mid to late 1960s. An then the PR campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One document that I found among the papers relating to the campaign to use PR in the NY City Council elections is a fact sheet, dated 1969 and titled "Proportional Representation (P.R.): A Proposal For Complete Representation In The New York City Council." In this 6 page pamphlet, which I presume my father wrote, there's a section called "P.R. And Civil Rights:"

P. R. is of special importance and usefulness for the advancement of civil rights. In the present transition to full and equal citizenship, in fact as well as in law, it means a great deal to the whole community, as well as to the people directly concerned, for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to be able to use their voice in government. This they can usually do, in district elections, only when they stay hived in "ghettoes" like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the dispersal of ghettoes to secure the integration of the community has been a major objective of the civil rights movement.

P.R. will make it possible for a minority candidate to live anywhere and get votes from anywhere in his borough, and if his supporters poll a sufficient minority of the borough's votes - e.g. something approaching a tenth in a ten member borough - he will be elected. Furthermore, P. R. Gives every voter a preferential vote so that if it cannot help elect his first choice, it can be used at full value for his second choice, or if necessary, his third or fourth. Thus nearly ever Black or Puerto Rican voter can help to elect either a trusted Black or Puerto Rican leader or some other candidate who understands his special problems. The last Council election gave us only 2 Black Councilmen out of 37 and one Puerto Rican.

Of course most voters who do not have the special problems of the ethnic minorities will not vote on ethnic lines, other considerations being of more interest to them, and they can all get representation on whatever basis they think best.

The amounts of support given to candidates of different parties are not likely to be greatly changed - they were not when we had P.R. before - for most voters could elect within their own parties candidates who appealed to them on other grounds as well. But if the parties did not offer candidates with a real appeal to the ethnic minorities, those minorities could elect independent candidates of their own who did appeal to them. (3)

This passage captures three important elements of my father's political interests. First, he believed deeply in the value of political process. Second, in PR, as well as in the disarmament movement, we see him drawn to political work that has the potential for broad appeal across various ideological lines. Third, and this follows from the first two observations, my father's political work was always driven by an idealistic yearning for radical social transformation. This was true when he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, USA in the late 40s. But it was also true after he broke with Communism and threw off the mantle of the revolution. For my father, being a Democratic Socialist meant working within the inherently conservative structures of existing political institutions and systems to bring about Utopia.

Another huge topic which I am nowhere near ready to approach is how my father came to Judaism from his life as a radical, secular Jewish Socialist. This journey of his began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time I was growing up here, in Delmar, my dad's sense of himself as a religious man was fully formed. In the 80s and 90s, he loved quoting from a book by Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. The book demonstrates that the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Torah has been the model for the four modern revolutions, the French, English, American and Russian. Walzer refers to Egypt by its Hebrew name, Mitzrayim, a word which literally means narrow place. I can't find Dad's copy of the book in the house right now, so I don't know if the quotation is accurate, but the way he always said it was that at the end of the book Walzer asks, "so what does all this mean?. . . Wherever you are it's probably Mitzrayim and you dream of a promised land. . . . and how do you get there? Organize . . ."

Nonviolence Won The Battles, Not The War

The Jewish community I've been part of for the last ten years is called Havurat Shalom. All services at the Havurah are lay-led by the members. Each year, I usually lead one of the big services on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. This year I led Shacharit, the morning service, which is quite long. Havurat Shalom, which was founded in 1968, was central in creating a Jewish religious counter-culture. One of the things Havurat Shalom and other places brought to alternative Judaism was the idea that Jewish observances should be relevant to the experiences of the participants. One way that folks do this is by relating meaningful, non-Jewish sources to Judaism. In the last couple of years, one thing I've been doing along these lines is relating things I've learned about Civil Rights Movement history to the themes of the Jewish High Holiday season. Below is something I wrote for the service I led yesterday.

            ***         ***         *** Last year, when I was leading a service on Yom Kippur I looked for spiritual messages in some of the powerful moments when the moral authority of nonviolent resistance overcame violent and aggressive evil. For example, I looked at one of the amazing stories from the SCLC’s campaign in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Dr. King describes a moment when Police Commissioner Bull Connor had ordered his men to open fire hoses on a large group of protesters. As King tells it,

Bull Connor’s men, their deadly hoses poised for action, stood facing the marchers. The marchers, many of them on their knees, stared back, unafraid and unmoving. Slowly the Negroes stood up and began to advance. Connor’s men, as though hypnotized, fell back, their hoses sagging uselessly in their hands while several hundred Negroes marched past them, without further interference, and held their prayer meeting as planned. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 71)

Stories like this one are important; they communicate the real power of this movement and give us a visceral reminder of its importance in our nation’s history. But I also worry about stories like this that give the Civil Rights Movement such mythic dimensions. I worry that many people have come to believe that the successes of the Civil Rights Movement are due only to the moral convictions and the heroic fortitude of the protesters. The protests, however, had a very specific, crafted intent, "the surfacing of tensions already present," in the words of Dr. King.

To cure injustices, you must expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion. regardless of whatever tensions that exposure generates. Injustices to the Negro must be brought out into the open where they cannot be evaded . . . to precipitate a crisis situation that must open the door to negotiation . . . [so that] the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause." (quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: MLK, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 228)

What is more, the surfacing of tensions already present was sometimes of greater importance than the purity of means we usually suppose. In the last phase of the Birmingham protests in May of 1963, the SCLC conducted protests where the assumption was that onlookers who were not participating would most likely incite the Birmingham Police to violence. Wyatt Tee Walker, the SCLC’s Executive Director at the time, made no excuses for these tactics when he talked about them later: “I didn’t believe in provocation—unless the stakes were right.” Or as Andrew Young, another close advisor to Dr. King, put it: “The movement was really about getting publicity for injustice . . . the injustice was there under the surface and as long as it stayed below the surface, nobody was concerned about it. You had to bring it out into the open.” (264)

This is not meant as an exposé of the SCLC but rather as a way to see that even in situations that are generally understood as hallmark successes of the Movement, nonviolent resistance may not have been enough to overcome the repressive violence of Southern racism.

In an earlier struggle, led primarily by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, there was some unplanned violence on the part of protesters. James Forman, who was SNCC’s Executive Secretary, tells of a move by SNCC and local leaders in Albany to defy a federal injunction against protest marches:

We began working with Reverend Wells, a grass-roots preacher who had been helpful to us in the past. We discussed the injunction question with him; he agreed and began preaching to the people. The result was a night march, led by Reverend Wells after a stirring address. Over one hundred people filed out from the church, moved by the experience of that night. They were arrested and violence broke out. The black youth of Albany began to stone some whites. The police marched in formation through the black community and some of them were stoned.

The next day Dr. King issued a statement on his own. . . . When I arrived at his house the next morning, the press had already been called. I saw the statement, repudiating the local blacks and asked him not to do this. The whites were responsible for the violence and people were only reacting to a long history of violence and repression. But my arguments had no effect. . . .

[T]he statement was issued and Dr. King’s reputation for nonviolence was upheld. (James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 275)

In this story, Dr. King felt he had to uphold his reputation for nonviolence rather than make a statement that acknowledged the frustrations of local community members who lived day to day with repressive violence from whites.

At a pragmatic level, King’s ability to raise money for his organization depended on his nonviolent reputation, and he was under great pressure from President Kennedy and from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to project an image of African American resistance that was wholly nonviolent.

It may sound like I’m making a case against nonviolent resistance, but I’m not. My point is that there were times when the need—which may have been unavoidable—to express commitment to nonviolence hid from view just how bad our problems with racism were. I believe that the persistence of the narrative of a nonviolent overcoming of violent repression has kept our country from facing the depths of the problem as it existed 40 years ago and the depths of the problem as it exists today.

Teshuvah is the process of turning and returning in order to make things right. In response to our collective and individual failures, we have to ask: What tactics have been working? How far have they gotten us? In getting this far what have we failed to see? What work is there still to do? Why are we so attached to our current ways of doing things if they are not getting us where we need to go? What new tactics must we devise?