Prologue: Several of my comments in diaries and stories over the last couple of days have been jagged, jangling, barbed, and nasty. I’m angry. I’m sorry.
My History, My Family, My People
My direct and extended family has been fully engaged in the struggle for racial, sexual, and gender justice in this country for the 100 years that we have been American Jews. My child is now engaged in that same struggle (gun control, LGBTQ rights and recognition, minority rights and recognition, restorative justice in schools, and more), and has been since before she was a teenager.
The post-war years
In the late 40's and early 50's, my grandparents and enormous numbers of their immediate and extended family members, in association with the Civil Rights Congress (think Bella Abzug), got on buses, drove to DC, and then chained themselves to the Lincoln Memorial in opposition to the planned execution of Willie McGee. Similar actions around the Martinsville 7 and Rosa Lee Ingram cases were a focus of a very significant chunk of their lives, and cost them dearly for many, many years.
(Side note - the major initiatives of the CRC were: Anti-lynching, removal of Confederate monuments from the public sphere, anti-Korean War, anti-HUAC, and activism for Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and against police violence…. the more things change, eh?)
The fifties: My grandmother was interrogated by HUAC as a result of her activism (with WILPF) in opposition to nuclear testing and her lobbying of US, Chinese, and Soviet governments in Geneva in the 1950's.
My grandfather was “soft-blacklisted” and, despite his enormous education and incredible mind, was not welcome in the hallowed halls of elite academe, instead, he (quite happily and willingly) worked as a teacher of history and sociology, politics and organizing as an untenured instructor in the NYCity community college system, serving and working alongside minorities and the poor. His colleagues were among my first direct, personal, and amazing introduction to the vast and diverse fabric of the people of this country.
The sixties: My parents were deeply involved in CORE and SNCC between 1964 and 1968, with all that those times entailed. They were among those ejected from those organizations in the late '60s.
When my parents and many other young, radical, passionately dedicated Jews were ejected from SNCC and CORE, and told to "go organize among your own people" ... they went. They moved up to rural New England along with an enormous number of other Left-Wing Jews we now call "Hippies."
They were not welcome in organizations they helped build to national prominence, they were shunned by their now more conservative parents who did not understand the radical lifestyle and passions of their now-grown children, they were hounded by the Federal authorities, and they weren’t particularly welcome (to say the least) in the back woods of New England.
Exiles, not on Main Street (not even close): Those city kids at age 22-24, intellectual Jewish kids from poor backgrounds, who grew up in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, on the Lower East Side went to white, rural America, and built new lives in the hard cold. They learned to farm and cut wood, preserve food and weave, build houses and make everything they used. They learned to talk with the deeply suspicious, insular, bigoted, and hard-nosed Yankees of the north woods. They suffered violence, they suffered bigotry and discrimination, bullying and ostracism. People had their work ruined, their belongings stolen, their houses burned, and in some cases their lives threatened or taken.
They brought with them the lessons learned desegregating schools and stores and institutions from Alabama to Boston, from Chicago to Virginia. They brought with them the pain and horror and tragedy of their brothers and sisters and allies and friends, murdered in the swamps of Mississippi, beaten bloody on the roads of Alabama, stomped and beaten by the cops, the feds, and the National Guard in NY, LA, Trenton, Newark, Chicago, and on college campuses like Kent State and Berkeley and Columbia ... all that blood and all those tears shed alongside and in brotherhood and sisterhood with the people for whom they willingly gave everything they had, fighting for justice. For equality. For representation. For the right to vote. For the right to stand up. For peace, and for justice.
And when they got to the Cold North, they were met with hostility and hatred and violence... and they worked. They forged ties with the locals, created the Co-op movement, created the Natural Food and Organic Food movement, Fedco Seeds, MOFGA, NORML, Seeds of Peace, and more.
Rebuilding and recovering, with an eye to make change: Over the intervening years, Maine and Vermont in particular have come to the forefront (with many hiccups and reversals, of course) in the progressive movement for sustainability, justice, peace, and equality.
We have sent some of the most reliably forward-thinking politicians to congress and the senate.…
… well, except for some like Susan Collins and Paul LePage. Sorry… nobody’s perfect…
… but take a look people like Paul LePage, and think about the people we had to deal with, think about what it was like to be a radical proponent of justice, peace, equal rights and civil rights in a place run by and populated by people the likes of Paul Lepage.
We have pioneered the use of ranked choice voting. We helped build and grow the networks of local health clinics, rural and urban, and we helped sustain the Family Planning and Planned Parenthood network.
I learned at my parents' feet, raised on a diet of Paul Robeson and Alex Haley, Malcolm X and Doctor King, Bella Abzug and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, Rustin and Randolph, WEB Dubois and CLR James. My best friends and my (small and isolated, bullied and scorned) circle of friends and connections of the same ethnic and political lineage ... we learned.
We watched from afar, perched in our northeastern snowbound refuge/exile ... we learned the pain of exile from our parents, who watched it all fall down. Who saw Reagan elected, and watched him destroy everything in his path. Who voted for Clinton (twice) and watch him finish the process. Who voted for Gore and Kerry, to no avail. Who wept when Obama was elected, and raged when he both chose to and was forced by circumstance to “take the middle path”…
Returning: Well… we came back. My generation of “hippy kids” (an enormous number of us are Jewish) re-entered the world.
And here we are, and we’re getting very, very active. We are union leaders. We are shop-floor leaders. We are professors. We are line-workers, social-workers, teachers. And we have an agenda. And we built a movement. Our kids are engaged in that movement, if anything with more passion and more grace than what we are capable of.
And maybe the person who wound up, mostly by accident, as our most visible figurehead is gruff and stubborn and fixated… maybe he’s kind of obnoxious, and kind of shouty, and pretty weird about some things that make a lot of folks uncomfortable… well… you should meet the folks I grew up with. Bernie’s pretty mild. Nine months of winter in a house with no plumbing, no insulation, and only last summers smoked meat, salted fish, and home-canned beans will do that to a person. Surviving on basically nothing between 1968 and 1978… and on 7 grand a year or less between 1978 and 1984 has… consequences. Especially when you’re a kid, or when you have kids.
Maybe the passion in our hearts is overflowing, and our loudest “spokespeople” say some stupid or ignorant shit, and maybe we're not "in tune" with how we're supposed to act or speak, and maybe we don't fit in.
But here we are.
And maybe we'll fight about how, and shout when we should sing, and stomp when we should dance, and maybe our isolation led to backward thinking and awkward ways ... but our rough edges and wrong-headedness are the consequence of a long, long time in the wilderness. And our anger is a consequence of being told to get lost, and of being alone. And our criticism comes of watching how it all fell apart, and being able to do nothing about it.
Our grandparents fought and died with you. Our parents bled and were shot down like dogs with you.
You have every right to criticize... but you will not erase. You will not debase. You will not slander their memories. You will not sneer at their sacrifice, or ours, for you demanded it of us, and we did what was demanded. And make no mistake: a lot of the commentary and criticisms I read, that are directed at me personally and directed at “the progressive movement” in general are nasty, unfair, sneering dismissal. Go reread, put yourself in my shoes, as I try to put myself in yours.
Moving forward, in unity… but no bullshit, and no excuses: When it comes to political preferences and choices of who to support, there will be differences and they are very real differences. There will be ruffled feathers and hurt feelings. We will disagree.
That argument will continue, and we may ultimately choose to support different political figureheads to put forward in an attempt to recapture and redirect this insane country.
When it comes down to the final choice of figurehead, my favorite may not be the choice of the majority… it has happened before and it will happen again.
No matter. I will still stand beside you when the time comes. My friends, my family, my people… we understand how it works. We’ll fall in line, because, like when we were told to go… we went.
And so, if the person who wound up as a figurehead for so many like me is not the choice of the majority, I will choose to stand with that majority when the time comes, as I always have. As my parents always have. As my grandparents always did.
But that hasn’t happened yet, so don’t expect me or mine to fall in line just now, thanks very much.
We will grumble and complain (I certainly do my fair share of it). We will fight and argue, and stomp our feet and ruffle feathers, and poke holes in your arguments and shout to the heavens about the clay feet of the figures you try to elevate. So be it.
But I beg of you, reconsider the spite, reconsider the existential and core anger. It feels too much like hatred. Think for a moment, as you share with us your pain and the history of that pain — pain that is deep, strong, and all too real:
An enormously outsized proportion of the non-black, non-brown people involved in the US Civil Rights struggles from the 20's through today were and are Jewish.
- They were beaten bloody in the struggles of the 20’s and 30’s,
- turned back from US borders and viewed with suspicion inside US borders as their entire families were exterminated in the 40’s,
- blacklisted and interrogated in the 50’s.
- Murdered and gassed in the late sixties,
- and then singled out and deliberately and publicly excluded from and expelled from the organizations they put an enormous amount of their life and energy into.
- Many, many of them were simultaneously shunned by former allies, shunned by their parents, and hounded by the government.
They fled to the backwoods.
They were my parents.
I grew up in a hard place, and lived a hard, desperately poor childhood, often alone. Continuously the target of blatant and hidden bigotry and abuse.
It causes me pain. It shaped who I am, with all the good and the bad that this entails.
Don’t sneer. Don’t insinuate. Don’t accuse.
Agree or disagree doesn’t matter.
Respect. Recognize. Represent.
That’s all I ask. And it is what I will always try to give in return.