I caught early chunks of Obama’s acceptance speech at the gym of my local JCC. Not surprisingly, the crowd that night was heavily Republican, and there were mutterings of concern: Is Obama truly committed to Israel? Is Obama too soft on terror? Is he simply another pie-in-the-sky liberal, full of fancy talk, elaborate plans and much hot air?

No one was concerned about Obama’s skin color.

We’re less than 145 years removed from slavery and only 40 removed from legal segregation, and we may very well elect a black man as president. No matter your political affiliation, chances are you understand it was an historic moment for America.

I left part way through Obama’s speech and drove to a Jewish community nursing home to make a late visit. While the nursing home is affiliated with the Jewish community, most of its residents are not Jewish. In order to accept federal, state and local funds, nursing homes cannot discriminate based on religious affiliation, color, country of origin, sexual preference, or gender. Years ago, the Jewish community opted to take government funds, a decision that eventually turned the facility’s resident base into a pretty fair representation of the local population, rather than a spot on representation of the Jewish community.

With this change came good and bad. The good is diversity. The bad is Christmas trees, Christian prayer services, nuns in the hallways, and an atmosphere that at one point, before some modicum of balance was struck, had Jewish residents feeling like an oppressed minority in their own home. During the peak of this, even the facility’s rabbis felt beleaguered.

I asked one if she had anyone who could help a resident light electric Shabbat candles. With tears in her eyes told me, “There isn’t anyone. There’s nothing Jewish here.” Another had his facility-wide Purim decorations ripped down by staff and replaced with St. Patrick’s Day ornamentation when the two holidays coincided on the calendar.

Not too long ago, a new resident – an elderly black woman whom I’ll call Jennie – was admitted. Suffering from a form of dementia, she’s often overcome with fear. She hears noises in the hall and thinks neighborhood thugs are breaking in to try to kill her. She thinks everyone is conspiring against her and that her food is poisoned. She can be loud and disruptive, breaking into tears and sobbing or putting on her best street bravado to ward off enemies that are not there.

As much as I try not to let myself judge an elderly, demented person by her actions – and especially by their skin color or religion – there are times when I catch myself thinking about how disruptive, non-Jewish residents should go to non-Jewish facilities.

A few months ago, I had a moment like that with Jennie. She sat in a lounge area, alternately threatening to “pop” imaginary intruders and breaking into tears. I told myself what I always do in encounters like these: Reverse the situation. How would I judge it if the disruptive demented person were Jewish and the nursing facility was not? Would I think it’s okay for that facility to remove the sick, elderly, disruptive Jew because he’s Jewish? Of course not. So why should the reverse be any different?

I sat beside Jennie and calmed her down by asking about her youth.  She told me that as a child, she had known freed slaves. She'd been born dirt poor and had faced intense discrimination. But she raised children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And she had built a successful business.

After a while she asked, “Where are we now? What’s the name of this place?”

I told her. She looked at me, startled, and then looked around her. “I used to work here,” she said, “in the kitchen, along time ago. But it looks different.”

I told her this was a different building in a different neighborhood than before. Then she told me about her friend the kosher butcher, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, whose shop once stood nearby the old building. “I used to buy all my meat from him when I first got married,” she explained.

I said that I had owned that store years later, and the same butcher had been my landlord and friend.

A few nights later, I found Jennie wandering in a hallway without her wheelchair or her wandering alarm. I had her hold onto a railing so she wouldn’t fall and I called for help. Then I asked Jennie why she was up so late, wandering around alone. “I’m a poor black woman,” she said. “If I don’t get up and get out of this house and find me some money, I’ll never go to college.” I asked her what she wanted to major in. “I want to be an engineer,” she replied.

When I arrived at the nursing home on the night of Obama’s speech, all the residents were asleep except Jennie. It was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, providentially coinciding with Obama’s. Obama’s speech had ended and a T.V. station was showing a documentary on the two. Jennie sat silent in her wheelchair in front of the TV, watching King and Obama. Gone were the disruptive behaviors, the paranoia, and the pain.

I stopped to say hello. King was on the screen.

“They shot him, didn't they?” she said.

“They did,” I told her.

She turned and looked at me. “And now a black man could be president?”

I said he very well could.

She turned back to the screen. “And now a black man could be president,” she said watching King. This time it wasn’t a question.

Barack Obama is not the Democratic nominee because of his skin color or despite it. He isn’t a token or a novelty. Barack Obama is the nominee because his was the strongest message and the best run campaign. This is the first time America has been truly colorblind.

I don't know if Barack Obama will win. He wasn’t my first choice among Democratic candidates – I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for come November. But there is one thing I am sure of: America is a better place because Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

The Passover/Exodus Narrative: a universal tale of freedomPassover is a time of asking questions, and I have a few. This year, though, the furor that surrounded Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his sermons that dared to suggest that this Christian nation may actually be earning God’s wrath and damnation for some of its behavior, reminded me of an issue I’d first encountered in South Africa: The idea that the Passover/Exodus narrative of the Hebrews’ flight from Pharaoh and slavery doesn’t belong exclusively to any tribe, but is a universal tale of freedom into which suffering people everywhere are able to insert themselves. And also that even if your forebears were victims of injustice, you’re quite capable of being a perpetrator of injustice.

I think the Rev. Wright furor offered many white Americans an introduction they found shocking to the reality that the black Church in America has always connected viscerally to the liberation narrative of the Biblical people of Israel, making that narrative their own as a source of succor for their own struggles and trials. Martin Luther King, remember, spoke of going to the top of the mountain and seeing the promised land, knowing that he might not make it there. In other words, casting himself as Moses. And it’s an ongoing, vibrant tradition that gives the African American church its special vitality.

The ability of oppressed people to find themselves in the Exodus narrative of liberation is, of course, precisely the point of that narrative. The problem in Egypt wasn’t simply that it was the Jews who lived in slavery; the problem was was slavery itself. And the antidote to slavery advocated in the Torah (the five Books of Moses) — human community constituted on the basis of law and justice rather than political authority claimed on divine grounds — is a universal one; it applies, absolutely equally, to everyone, and everyone is invited, as Moses did, to challenge authorities that offer anything less.

The God of Abraham, proclaimed as the one true god, is obviously everyone’s god; he’s not a tribal fetish; he’s been invoked precisely to challenge the sort of tribal fetish deities that the Egyptians had used to rationalize their system of oppression. So, the Passover/Exodus narrative has powerful resonance to all people of the Abrahamic faiths (and possibly others) who may find themselves confronting oppression.

But those who feel threatened by others' demands for justice -- oppressors who cloak their own abuses of others in pieties of Christian soldierhood or the Star of David as the brand icon of an occupation -- get very uncomfortable when they realize that others see them as inheritors, not of the righteousness of the Biblical Hebrews' flight to freedom, but of Pharaoh's attempts to suppress the Israelites.

But throughout the Old Testament, the Jewish prophets are warning the Israelites to take nothing for granted. The mantle of righteousness cannot be inherited genetically (surely, the God of Abraham is not a racist who judges people by their DNA) or claimed simply through vigorous prayer and observance of ritual; it must be earned in one’s conduct in relation to others. Thus Hillel’s famous definition of Judaism while standing on one foot: “That which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others; all the rest is commentary.” In other words, it is only via the decency of your behavior in the world that you can be a good Jew.

Jews who commit injustices against others would be unequivocally condemned by the Jewish prophets, just as those who drop bombs on others or sentence them to death are plainly deluded when they claim to be guided by the inspirational example of Jesus. That, I think, is the essence of what Reverend Wright was saying in those passages that caused so much controversy — that God would damn, not bless, an America that committed injustices. To which I’d add, in line with Rami Khouri’s profound challenge to Israeli journalists at the height of the last Lebanon war, an injustice committed under a flag bearing the Star of David would be fiercely condemned by the Biblical Jewish prophets.

It was easy to see how little our Jewish genetic lineage did to make us really Jewish in the South Africa of my youth, where every Passover, we sat around seder tables singing, in a barely understood Hebrew, of the days when we were slaves, while the black women who lived in our backyards under a domestic labor system not that far removed from slavery, carried in steaming tureens of matzoh ball soup and tzimmes. We may have convinced ourselves that our DNA entitled us to claim this story as our own, but it was abundantly clear that in the South African context, most Jews had thrown in their lot with Pharoah, while the Israelites were working in their kitchens.

The mantle of justice associated with the Torah prophets, it seemed to me later, was nobody’s birthright; it had to be earned.

As a young activist heading out into the townships every weekend to meetings where communities were planning to resist eviction or burying those who had fallen in the fight against the regime, I was intrigued to hear the preachers and ordinary people couch their own struggles firmly in the narratives of the Exodus.

But around my own seder tables, the descendants of Pharoah’s slaves paid scant attention to the plight of those in their kitchens. They were discussing real estate and accounting scams — and, of course, how long it might be before “the schwartzes” (yiddish for “blacks”) would rise up and spoil the party.

If Hillel was right (and I believe he was) that Judaism is less about rituals and the minutiae of halachic law than it is about the ethical treatment of others, I can safely say that I learned very little of Judaism in the more than 200 hours of family Seders I sat through in South Africa. In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, we always kept a chair empty and a glass full in case the Prophet Elijah showed up. Looking back, I shudder to think what he would have made of the spectacle had he actually accepted the invitation.

I suspect he’d have dragged us over the coals in language not unlike that used by Reverend Wright. A friend once told me that his father, an Anglican priest, believed that whereas Christians had to work their way into heaven, Jews were basically on the guest list; our entry to Paradise was assured, by virtue of the fact that we’d been born Jewish. I thought that was a remarkably silly idea. Not only that; it’s remarkably dangerous, too, because it rationalizes moral laziness and injustice and violence committed in the name of a false righteousness. Unfortunately, I suspect, my friend’s father’s belief that as Jews, we are genetic entitlement to God’s favor, is all too widespread. Passover, and the universal tale of oppression and freedom it celebrates, is a good opportunity to burst that bubble.

[Cross-posted from Rootless Cosmopolitan]

Less-than-inspired by the traditional Passover seder? Burnt out on the same old Four Questions? Searching for soup sans chicken, or a song to replace "Who Knows One"? Why not shake things up with an alternative or themed seder? Here are five ideas to get you started. Try one, or mix them up.

	Eco-Seder Buy all organic foods, from local venders, when possible. When you’re dealing with fresh veggies and kosher meat or fish you don’t have to worry about things being kosher for Passover, so you won’t spend insane amounts of money buying margarine made in Monsey or whatever. The Jew and the Carrot has a great list of Kosher Organic wines for your four cups. Plan on talking about freedom from oil dependency, and about the benefits of living a greener life. Remember, we were heading towards a land of milk and honey, not of formula and corn syrup. You can list ten plagues of waste, four sons who react differently to global warming, and four questions about how we can change our individual and collective behavior in the future. Birkenstocks optional.
	Freedom Seder There are still literally millions of slaves in the world. On a holiday when we celebrate our freedom as Jews, it makes sense to spend some time exploring the issue of contemporary slavery. Head to Not For Sale to get educated on the issue, learn about abolition activism, and donate money to free slaves. Stories of redemption told side by side, whether they involve crossing the Red Sea of using the Underground railroad, are always thought provoking, and you can brainstorm ways to get the larger community more involved in abolition advocacy and programming.
	Interfaith Seder If you can gather a mix of faiths at one table and talk about how each person views their personal slaveries and redemption (because remember, it’s as if you personally came out of Egypt), you’re bound to have an interesting evening. If you want some help guiding your seder, try the one at Interfaith Family. Ask each guest to bring a kosher for Passover interpretation of a classic dish from their community, and host a discussion about the ways that communities pigeonhole each other, and how interfaith dialogue can redeem us from self-imposed slavery. Open the door for a Unitarian, instead of Elijah. Be sure to have grape juice on hand for those who can’t drink wine, and ask everyone to teach a song at the end.
	Women’s Seder There are a number of feminist haggadahs and women’s seders available. If you want to start your own, invite your girlfriends for a night of female bonding over good wine and Miriam’s cup. Retell all the parts of the haggadah focusing on the female characters—the midwives, Shifra and Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Miriam. Put some Debbie Friedman on the stereo. Ask your guests to each bring a short story, essay, or poem to share by or about a Jewish woman they admire. Make sure to have plenty of oranges on hand for the seder plate.
	Veggie/Vegan Seder There’s nothing free or fair about the lives of animals raised for food. Passover is an opportunity to reflect on our own freedom, as well as the lack of freedom other living creatures face. Pick up some copies of Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb, which focuses on vegetarianism and animal rights. The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook includes a menu for a seder table. Better yet, the Vegetarian Pesach Cookbook features recipes specific to the holiday. Talk about what you can sacrifice in your own lives to replace and honor the symbolic, sacrificial lamb. Replace the egg on the traditional seder plate with a flower to represent life and Spring. Replace the shank bone on the traditional seder plate with a beet, as allowed in the Talmud. Use this quote from Einstein as a jumping off point for discussion: "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

Obama and Wright: BFFs?The solutions offered by conservative commentators to Barack Obama’s existential crisis have been conspicuous in their shallowness. Unlike Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Victor Davis Hanson is no fake scholar; Hanson has intellectual heft. Yet he proposed that "all Obama would have to do is apologize, quit the church, and begin talking about the issues."

How about admitting himself to rehab, or, even better, expiating on Oprah? (I read on the Los Angeles Times’ blog that Oprah, wise woman that she is, had long ago quit Trinity United Church of Christ for reasons that evaded Obama, her protégé.)

No, I give Obama credit. His reaction to the nation-wide reaction to Rev. Wright’s fulminating—everywhere on full display—was anything but shallow. It was, however, profoundly disturbing.

Obama began his “More Perfect Union” oration with perfunctory praise for the American founding, before moving on to the issue that looms largest for him and for Rev. Wright: the sin of slavery.

Accused of decontextualizing the message uttered by Obama’s mentor, rightist critics of the Rev. Wright have been subjected to a coruscating critique—Wright’s vile, vociferous, overwhelming hatred of whites did not, apparently, reflect the man’s mission.

I hereby accuse the man who may become president of reducing the greatest revolution in history—politically and philosophically—to the eternal Mark of Cain all whites must seemingly bear: slavery.

Obama situated his own mission firmly on the civil war and civil rights continuum—in this respect, he would be continuing “the long march of those who came before us.” This is not the universal philosophical route carved by the American Founders, the followers of the Lockean tradition of natural rights. Obama may be more gentrified than the vulgar Rev. Wright. However, by harking back to slavery, he has expressed the very particularism that is so disturbing about his mentor’s mindset.

Crime-related fears: A line no one should cross? Leveled at innocent white Americans, race is like stigmata. Lest modern-day whites fail to welt up and bleed at the mention of slavery, Obama, like other custodians of consensus in our culture, hammered home that he is “married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.” White Americans who’ve come out in droves for Obama deserve better.

So does Obama’s (white) grandma. He tells us he loves her with all his rather intense being. But he considers that she too is marred by racism for “once confessing her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”

It is a fear rooted in fact, but Obama conflates it with racism. FBI and Justice surveys repeatedly show that, as Patrick J. Buchanan has written, “violent interracial assault, rape and murder [are] to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.”

It is, moreover, not racist to consider aggregate group characteristics—provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches—in how one invests precious scarce resources, to wit, one’s life and property. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities.

Obama’s grandmother was no different. Had she failed to treat individual blacks on their merit, he’d be justified in labeling her a racist. More material, if Obama brands his own grandmother a racist for failing to suppress a visceral reaction borne of the reality of crime, one hates to think of how he’d view ordinary Americans who “transgress” in this manner.

In Obama’s America, you had better button up about the “color of crime.”

Cool hunter: Ferraro In this context, Obama’s indirect swipe at Geraldine Ferraro rates a mention. The former vice presidential candidate suggested that the Senator would not be where he is if he were white. Indulgently, Obama has taken this to mean that Ferraro implied his “candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action.” Wrong. Ferraro was pointing to the coolness of being black in America and the considerable leverage that identity affords those who cultivate it. What better proof of that than Obama’s cult like following? Obama’s “More Perfect Union” address perfectly demonstrates that he has embraced this politicized racial identity, because to do so is smart; because in America, black is beautiful.

Obama continued in this fashion to expound on the defining issue that distorts his perspective as it does Rev. Wright’s: the alleged “racial injustice in this country.” “[S]o many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today,” he intoned, “can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

My family tree was truncated by an event far more fatal than was slavery: the Holocaust. I do not carry this legacy with me. I blame only those who planned and executed the Final Solution, mostly long dead. Members of my family have never ascribed their misfortunes and misdeeds to that contemporary calamity. They’ve owned their failings. Ditto most Jews I know.

Speaking of whom, Obama further minimized Wright’s wickedness by postulating that many of us “have heard remarks from [our] pastors, priests, or rabbis with which [we] strongly disagreed.” I have never attended a synagogue in which the rabbi boiled with racial bile as does Rev. Wright. In fact, my favorite rabbi, my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, was an anti-apartheid activist.

Obama did concede that “the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial.” But since he stopped there, allowing only that some of Wright’s vitriol was “wrong, distorted and divisive,” let me dilate on what’s missing from Obama’s formulation: what Americans need to take away from Rev. Wright’s words is not this or the other political message. Some of the pastor’s statements have a core of truth; others are purely phantasmagoric. Wright’s words are not isolated expressions; they constitute a worldview, a belief system—a rank racist belief system.

Americans need to ponder this: How and why did Obama become spiritually enmeshed with an impious pastor who adheres to such a philosophy? Obama’s Speech From Slavery explains it all.

As an assimilated Negro, I find that black Jews just tickle my fancy. (Any Oprah/Sarah Silverman hybrids, call me!) I agree with the writer Julius Lester when he says, “What I find remarkable about Jews: They’re the only ethnic group that seems to care about blacks. At least Jews want to learn.”

I’ve certainly tried to learn a Jewish girl a thing or two on blacks, so I figured Julius Lester might have some words of wisdom for me. I first discovered Lester when I stumbled upon his must-read 1984 New York Times interview with James Baldwin (during which Baldwin exclaimed “Fuck Norman Mailer!” when Lester mentioned the author of “The White Negro”—sadly, the Times struck it from the record.) Besides being an academic and literary star—he's author of over 45 books and a decorated professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts—Lester also happens to be that most intriguing of exotic birds, a black Jew. He made a name for himself as a writer, radio commentator, and avowed atheist during the civil rights era, but converted to Judaism in 1982 after years of religious searching (Lovesong, his spiritual memoir, details this journey.)

At 68, Lester is still writing; next spring HarperCollins will publish his novel about lynching, told from the point of view of a 14-year-old white boy. I took to asking him some questions over e-mail.

 

 

THE BLACKER THE BERRY, THE JEWER THE JEW

I think the average black person is suspicious when the average Jewish guy distinguishes himself from the average white guy—at least in America. What do minorities like blacks or Hispanics have in common with American Jews, and what are their differences?

Not a huge fan of Normal Mailer: BaldwinIdentity has many faces, and one’s social identity may not correspond to one’s personal identity. There are Jews whose personal and/or religious identity is so forceful that they resent being identified as white, even though they look like “the average white guy.” Someone who identifies first as a Jew sees him or herself as living by a value structure that believes in justice and equality as opposed to a white guy whose value system is different. Perhaps blacks should not be so quick to dismiss a Jew who insists that he is not white, regardless of what he looks like.

Growing up in the forties and fifties, I always thought Jews were different from whites. Jews were people who empathized with blacks, who understood what it was like to be discriminated against. When I was doing radio on WBAI from 1968 to 1975, people would call me on the air and identify themselves as being “white and Jewish,” and that always confused me because, in my mind, Jews were different from white people.

None of this is to say that Jewish racism does not exist, because it does. And black racism exists, despite those who maintain that blacks cannot be racists because they are victims of racism.

It is increasingly difficult to generalize about blacks, Hispanics, and Jews because of increasing class differences within each group as well as generational differences. For example, blacks and Jews of my generation and older worked together in the labor movement and the civil rights movement. As fraught with tensions as black-Jewish relations became, that coalition meant something. The present generation of blacks and Jews do not see why it is expected that blacks and Jews will work together. The black-Jewish coalition means nothing to them, and I would not argue with that. The events of their lifetimes—Farrakhan, Israel, Arabs—mean very different things to each group.

Different from the rest of the country: Unique New York However, having said that, black-Jewish tensions have been more pronounced in New York than, for example, in the Midwest, where I found blacks and Jews working together on many issues with none of the suspicion and antagonism that can exist in New York. People too often think that the experiences of blacks and Jews in New York reflect the state of affairs between blacks and Jews across the country, but that is not the case. I know it’s difficult for New Yorkers to believe that their experiences do not represent the truth for everyone in America, but New York is unique.

Politically I think blacks and Jews made a huge mistake in the 1980s and 1990s by not reaching out to start working with Hispanic groups. Even twenty years ago, demographic projections suggested that Hispanics were going to become the largest minority group early in the 21^st century. That has happened earlier than anyone predicted. As Hispanics become an increasingly strong political group, the public discourse on whom and what constitutes a minority will change, and neither blacks nor Jews are prepared to deal with the shift. Blacks are in the process of losing their golden status as the largest minority group, and this loss is going to have an impact on black identity, which has been too focused for too long on being victims.

 

SLAVERY: OVER FOR 142 YEARS. THE HOLOCAUST: OVER FOR 62 YEARS. BEING A VICTIM: TIMELESS.

Is there a statute of limitations on historical tragedies? For how long is Auschwitz or Jim Crow Mississippi relevant to a young Jew or Negro in New York City?

Compassion fatigue: Remember the Maine? A very interesting question. I suppose one needs to ask if there is a statute of limitations on memory. There was the recent article in the Sunday Times about people who are tired of memorial services for the victims of 9/11—about “compassion fatigue”. The article referred to the numerous events that were once remembered by public ceremonies and are scarcely remembered now: the sinking of the USS Maine, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

One of the real problems facing America today is that since the 1960s, Americans no longer share the same historical memories, or we do not share those memories in the same ways.

In the summer of 1973 I taught summer school at a small college in Macon, Georgia. In one of my classes was a very beautiful blonde girl who invited me to drive up to someplace in north Georgia with her. I declined. I knew that northern Georgia was prime KKK territory and as much as I wanted to sleep with her, driving into Klan country was a price I was not willing to pay. When she asked me why I told her about the Klan’s prominence in northern Georgia, about segregation and the backs of buses, etc. She looked at me with her wide blue eyes like I was crazy said in her honeyed southern accent “None of that ever happened down here.”

Echoes of the past: Jim Crow Mississippi can't be forgotten Even though she was blonde, she was not dumb. She had come of age after the changes wrought by the civil rights movement and had grown up at a time when blacks sat anywhere on buses, when there were no white and colored water fountains in stores, when blacks and whites went to school together. I was floored by her response. I had no idea that history could be wiped out so completely in so short a time. This was 1973. The summer nine years before, I had been in Mississippi waking up every morning half-surprised that I hadn’t been killed during the night. After that day I didn’t know how to talk to her, (which was sad because she was really a beautiful girl) because her experience negated the history I had endured.

It is not enough that we remember only what happened to us. We should make the effort to remember that which happened to others, even others before we were born. So many U.S. states and cities have Native American names. The people are gone; all that remains is a word from their language, which is really a kind of tombstone. Massachusetts is a Native American word meaning “High Mountain Place.” Connecticut means “Long River Place.” It is my obligation to remember. The act of remembering connects us to each other. The life of the young black in New York grows from the lives and deaths of blacks in Mississippi who endured and struggled so that he would not have to endure and struggle in quite the same ways. The same goes for the young Jew.

Still relevant?: Building the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin Our lives do not begin with our births. Our lives exist on a continuum. Part of that continuum is that our lives today will become someone else’s past, and how we live our lives will, to some degree, give texture and context to the lives of people not yet born.

One of the things I love about being Jewish is that remembering is an integral part of being Jewish. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we sing melodies and say prayers that date back a thousand years and more. On Tisha B’Av we still mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem more than 2000 years ago. At Passover we remember the exodus from Egypt, which may or may not have happened, but something happened that was transformative.

It is my wish that the young black New Yorker will remember Auschwitz as well as Jim Crow Mississippi, and that the young Jewish New Yorker will remember Jim Crow Mississippi as well as Auschwitz. Remembering the sufferings of others makes us come closer to each other.

Seems to be being a black Jew might have some perks. For example you can’t be “out-victimized” by anyone, right? It also seems the particular black-Jew blend should have a nickname. Any suggestions?

If there are perks to being a black Jew, I missed out. And I must be dumber than I realized because it never occurred to me that no one could out-victimize me. I never thought of being black or Jewish as being a victim, which just goes to demonstrate how much out of touch I am with the times I live in.

As for nicknames, oy vey! Virginia Hamilton wrote a novel called Bluish about a kid who was black and Jewish, but “bluish” sounds more like an alien in a bad Sci-Fi movie. The police chief (or maybe he’s former police chief now) of Charleston, South Carolina is (was) a black man named Reuben Greenberg, and he is Jewish. He said he was working on a recipe for fried chicken soup. That’s as close to black-Jewish humor as I’ve seen.

 

THE JULIUS LESTER GUIDE TO BLOGGING WHILE BLACK, JEWISH, AND 68 YEARS OLD

You’re a blogger at 68, when many people your age are still trying to get on to the Internet. Do you think it's important to stay engaged with the youth generation? Do you think blogs are a good medium for bridging generational gaps?

The non-linear world: Can you blog and walk at the same time? There are probably more people my age online than is recognized. I think it is important to stay engaged with the youth generation to the degree that is possible. I taught at the University of Massachusetts for 32 years, retiring at the end of 2003. I retired in part because I couldn’t continue to bridge the generational difference between my students and me. Yes, I blog but Facebook, YouTube, and other such enterprises are beyond me. At age 68, I keep having to decide: Given however much time I have left, how do I want to use it? One of my children is on Facebook and I enjoy logging in and seeing what she’s up to, but I don’t have the time or energy to create a Facebook site for myself.

One difference that my daughter and I talk about is that I grew up in a “linear world,” i.e. the world of print, and also a world in which you did one thing at a time. She has grown up in a world of simultaneity, a world in which one does several things simultaneously. It took me a while to understand that I can be talking to a friend in France on Skype and at the same time being sending that friend an attachment relating to what we’re talking about. And there’re probably four other things I could be doing at the same time. I grew up taking piano lessons; my daughter grew up with Garageband. A big difference.

I want to stay engaged with younger generations but recognize that I can only do so to a limited extent. Aging has its own interesting challenges and rewards. One is relief that I won’t be young again; another is the ability to look back to when I was young and what my dreams were and being able to say that I have achieved what I set out to achieve and more, that I didn’t sell out, that I made my dreams become reality. I would not trade being 68 for anything.

Are there any classic writers that would have thrived in this new media environment?

The Perez Hilton of Dublin: Joyce (drawn in text) This is a very interesting question. The writer who first comes to mind is Malcolm Lowery. I don’t remember the name of the novel, but one of his novels has a separate text running in the margin next to the main text. I wrote a short story (“The Child,” published in Join In: Multiethnic Short Stories) and a novella (“Catskill Morning,” published in Two Love Stories) in which I attempted to tell two stories—one in the margin, the other the main text. And I think James Joyce would have excelled in this new environment. To be able to add visuals to stream of consciousness feels like a natural for him. Although he’s not a writer, certainly Picasso would have thrived on the kind of art that is possible now, which can combine text, visuals, and sound.

I went with Baldwin one day to help him buy an electric typewriter. It frightened him so, I don’t think he ever used it.

What blogs do you read? You mentioned seeing me on Gawker.

I read Gawker, Jezebel, The Assimilated Negro, and several blogs devoted to women’s fashions. I love women’s fashions and subscribe to Vogue, Paris Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W, and a couple of others. Both Gawker and Jezebel are funny as hell. The contributors on both have raised cynicism to a height that has its own peculiar beauty. However, Gawker needs to lighten up on the cracks about old people.

Jewish liturgy is all about redemption. The number of times we ask to be redeemed in shachrit alone is overwhelming enough that I have a hard time conjuring up what redemption would entail on any practical level. My only real indicator in terms of the realities of redemption comes from an oft-forgotten mitzvah, pidyon shvuyim, ransoming/redeeming the captive.

For information about the basis and complexities of pidyon shvuyim I direct you to a great discussion of this positive commandment over at MyJewishLearning. Here’s a brief rundown:

Jews are commanded to pay the ransom necessary to free any and all Jewish slaves or prisoners. There doesn’t seem to be many loopholes available, but the Talmud (Gittin 45a) comes in and makes two possible restrictions.
We’re not supposed to redeem captives for more than they’re worth, or help them escape, because of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). The explanations given are that

1) we don’t want to put a financial burden on the community, and

2) we also don’t want to encourage the captors to take more captives in order to get more money.
Redemption: Isn't there a song about it, or something?
All of this has incredibly frustrating and fascinating implications in a world where Israeli soldiers have been captured and held for more than a year by Palestinian groups. The struggle to compromise halacha, the safety of the soldiers, and the safety of Israel is extremely difficult, and rabbis have been grappling with it for decades. The level of frustration, rises, of course, during a week when captives seem tantalizingly close to redemption. I can’t help picturing Gilad Shalit doing the interview circuit the way that Alan Johnston did yesterday. And what about the other two soldiers captured in Lebanon? How much are they worth, and what can we do to free them?

It’s nice to think of redeeming captives as a warm fuzzy mitzvah that everyone can get next to, but as we saw this week, sometimes freeing people isn’t helpful or good—it’s corrupt. I’m speaking, of course, of Scooter Libby’s commuted prison sentence.  The questions that this kind of situation brings up are important. Are we obligated to free Jewish captives even if they’re imprisoned for really good reason? What if we think they did something wrong, but the punishment is too harsh? That, of course, was Bush’s argument.

Where do our loyalties lie, and where SHOULD they lie? Am I supposed to sneak Jack Abramoff out of prison, but leave the West Memphis 3 and Kevin Cooper to rot in jail since they’re not Jewish? What about the millions of actual slaves all around the world? Do I have an obligation to them?

Actually, that last question is the only one I don’t struggle with much. I think I do have an obligation to redeem today’s slaves. (And yes, I know that people like to talk about how those of us with cushy lives in the Western hemisphere are slaves to technology and capitalism, but I’m talking about a more literal slavery here. Like, with chains and actual prices on peoples’ heads.) If you want to help, I recommend heading over to the Not For Sale website, where you can donate money, get educated on the problem and how widespread it is, and join the movement of others dedicated to ending human slavery in this generation.

In the face of all of the craziness surrounding Shalit, Johnston, Bush, Libby, and everyone else struggling with justice and captivity, it’s nice to have something I can do that will definitely make a difference. Redemption is suddenly real.

A millionaire couple on Long Island who run a perfume business out of their home have been charged with "slavery" for keeping two female Indonesian workers under lock and key in Garden City:

The women, prosecutors said, were subjected to beatings, had scalding water thrown on them and were forced to repeatedly climb stairs as punishment for perceived misdeeds. In one case, prosecutors said, one of the women was forced to eat 25 hot chili peppers at one time.

Dude, Calvin Klein'd have only made you eat 10 (and maybe get your 12 year-old son to do a little seminude "Obsession" modeling.)