Now that virtually all of my free time is being spent at my mother's rehab facility, I'm going to have to beg your forgiveness as I take the week off from blogging. I do, however, want to thank all of my readers for your support. Hopefully, this blog has given you some food for thought ... and even some cause for empathy. That, at least, is my goal.
Have a great week and a happy New Year. I'll see you in 2015.
Dan
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Sunday, December 21, 2014
The Firing of Ari Roth and the Closing of the American Jewish Mind
Denial.
Anger. Bargaining.
Depression. Acceptance.
There you have the five so-called “stages of grief.” I’m still dealing with the second stage. And my hope with this blogpost is to place
each of you somewhere on this same continuum.
My anger relates to the firing this week of my
friend, Ari Roth, as Artistic Director of Theater J, the Washington, D.C.,
Jewish theater. The story has received
a lot of attention – and not just locally.
Here are a few of the stories that have been written since the axe fell
on Thursday:
Roth’s firing by his employer, the Jewish Community
Center of Washington, was the culmination to date of a campaign spearheaded by
a group called COPMA, which stands for Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading
as Art. COPMA didn’t take long to
proclaim victory in an e-mail blast. The
DCJCC “Takes a Stand for Israel,” COPMA announced. It went on to say that the DCJCC and the
Jewish Federation of Greater Washington “did the right thing in refusing to
continue their financial support of the anti-Israel programming that Mr. Roth
spearheaded at the DCJCC – programming that falsely accused, maligned and
undermined the State of Israel, and in doing so, caused harm to the Jewish
people.”
You’d think from this description that Ari Roth had
turned Theater J into an orgy of Israel-bashing. Believe me, there are plenty of Jews who
support just that. But Ari Roth isn’t
one of them. Ari is a proud Jew and a
lover of Israel. As an intelligent,
thoughtful mensch who has absorbed the central principles of the Jewish faith,
Ari believes that high-brow theaters have an obligation to facilitate not only
entertaining dramas but also a free and open marketplace of ideas. To his credit, he doesn’t shy away from
taking on the big issues, whether they involve theology (as when he twice ran a
play about Spinoza’s excommunication) or politics. When he has addressed the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict, he tends to present both the Israeli and the Palestinian perspectives
so that he can stimulate his audience’s hearts and minds, not to mention their
dialogue.
As someone who has devoted considerable time to enhancing
Jewish-Islamic encounters in the Washington area, I was asked to participate as
a panelist on “talk back” programs after two of Theater J’s most controversial
plays regarding the Conflict. On each
occasion, I was allowed freely to express my views, which are definitely
pro-Zionist. I cannot imagine why people
who attended either the plays or the talk-backs would have concluded that the
theater was “anti-Israel” unless they are themselves “anti-intellectual.”
During Ari Roth’s tenure, Theater J has been one of
the Jewish community’s shining lights in the Washington, D.C. area. It has maintained both high artistic
standards and a respect for the principles of Judaism as a living, breathing
faith. Fortunately,
Ari has no intent to leave Washington. He is planning on continuing to put on
quality theatrical productions in a different DC-area playhouse.
So all is well, right? Not even close. What we have witnessed this week is a symptom
of a larger problem. The Jewish
community is fracturing before our very eyes, much like the American body
politic. In each case, there are many
folks who are turned off and tuned out – which is itself a symptom and
outgrowth of polarization – but a huge percentage of those who haven’t given
way to apathy are heading in one extreme direction or another. What we’ve seen this week at the JCC is a
victory for the right-wingers: the Jews who are so paranoid that they cannot
abide knowing that their tribesmen are being exposed to the Palestinian narrative,
even if it is being presented together with its Israeli counterpart. But that type of paranoia doesn’t just
happen in a vacuum. It has grown
together with the rise of groups like Jewish Voices for Peace on the left. Just as it was once said of Rudy Giuliani
that his every sentence included a noun, a verb, and a reference to 9/11, JVP
cannot utter a sentence without a noun, a verb, and a reference to “the Occupation.” And the more traction that JVP and other
anti-Zionist Jewish groups are getting on college campuses and liberal Christian
churches, the more paranoid Israel’s right-wing zealots are getting. Extremism in both directions tends to feed
on itself. In this context, one result is that liberal
Zionists like me are wondering if this is a train station with only two
platforms, neither of which leads down the path towards a two-state solution …
or a just and secure peace.
No, I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little. When it comes to the Jewish civilization, the
sky never really falls. We encounter
horrible tragedies, but we also figure out ways to bounce back. In today’s New York Times, there is an
opinion piece stating that Netanyahu may indeed face a legitimate challenge in
the next parliament election. If he
loses and a more progressive voice takes over the Israeli government, maybe the
Jewish organizations here in America who frequently become mouthpieces for the
Israeli government’s party line will themselves head back towards a more
tolerant, less paranoid form of liberal Zionism.
Last evening as I was completing this blogpost, my
93-year-old mother fell and broke her hip while I was in an adjacent room. I told my wife, “All I want is to have hope.” And that, indeed, is my attitude about the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the American Jewish community’s ways of coping
with the Conflict. Sometimes when things
in life look bleak, it is easy to lose hope, but we must never give in to those
feelings.
Life is frequently a war between fear and hope. If you want to know what makes successful
people – not to mention successful peoples – look no further than how they wage
that war.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
The Speech
In 2004, Barack Obama stole my heart with his
keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. That speech, combined with Hillary Clinton’s
vote on the Iraq War, sealed my support.
Now, ten years later, I am wondering if there has been another speech
that will have the same effect on the 2016 campaign. This time, the speaker was Elizabeth Warren,
and the topic is a question that rank-in-file Democrats have been asking themselves
for years: does their party stand for
Main Street or only for Wall Street? Warren has made her view very clear: the Demos
are bought and sold by Wall Street and Wall Street alone. Now, she has thrown down the gauntlet to all
potential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, to prove her wrong. (Here’s a way to view the speech, if you
haven’t yet done so: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/elizabeth-warren-lindsey-graham-citigroup-funding-bill)
One possible response, of course, is that the Dems
stand for BOTH Main Street and Wall Street.
To be sure, you’d have to be quite the ideologue not to recognize that middle
class people hold interests in the stock market and even those who didn’t would
stand to lose money if Wall Street were to collapse. (See, e.g., the Great Depression.) But what we’ve seen in recent decades is
clearly a sharp rise in the wealth of the richest Americans without a rise in
the wealth of middle class Americans.
And when you are a political party whose mascot is the donkey, you can’t
keep ignoring this phenomenon and not expect to be called on the mat by one of
your colleagues. In short, “the speech”
was bound to happen. It just happened to
be Elizabeth Warren who had the skill to deliver it.
Does this mean “game on” for the Democrats in 2016? Does this mean that, once again, Hillary
Clinton’s inevitability has been overblown?
Not so fast. I can think of at
least two reasons why Clinton’s backers might not yet have to break a
sweat. First, Warren hasn’t yet demonstrated
that she has the stomach to campaign against the Clinton Machine. That is, after all, one heck of a
machine. When Obama took it on, he
needed to run an absolutely flawless and extremely creative campaign, and he
still barely won. Warren may decide
that she’s better off leading the progressive wing of the party from her perch
in the Senate and leaving the campaign trail to folks like Bernie Sanders who
will make the same kinds of arguments she would make but without the charisma
that she would bring.
Second, I’m not convinced that Warren has a second
act in her. Yes, she can summon her
inner Cicero at will when the topic turns to banking reform, but does she have
the same inspiration with respect to other topics? Hillary won’t be defeated based only on her
views of Wall Street vs. Main Street.
For someone to overtake her, they’d need to pull the kind of magic act
that Obama did – to turn themselves into almost the ideal candidate, not merely
a One-Hit Wonder.
In other words, to beat Hillary, you’d have to be
the band that wrote “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” not the one that wrote “Video
Killed the Radio Star.” The latter was a
nice song, but it won’t get you in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. And Warren’s banking reform speeches by
themselves won’t get her past Hillary.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Warren
has the stomach for a race and finds her voice on topics other than Wall Street
reform. There would remain one more
question: does she and/or her people have the stones to take on Hillary – to bring
Hillary down, as it were, at the same time that they are propping themselves up? Are they actually willing to argue that
Hillary is the voice of the status quo, whereas they are the voice of
progressive change?
It wasn’t that long ago when William Jefferson
Clinton campaigned as a “New Democrat,” meaning a Southern Democrat who was
essentially moderate, rather than an old-school liberal. Are the Warrenites willing to argue that they
are campaigning as progressives who are trying to take the Democratic Party
back to its FDR-type roots, whereas the Clintonians are mere triangulators who
stand for the status quo? Without such
an attack, I still say that Hillary has too many institutional advantages to
lose this race.
An argument can be made that even if Elizabeth Warren
isn’t really ready to rumble, she should still jump in the race as sort of a state-of-the-art
sparring partner who will get Hillary in fighting trim for the general
election. From Hillary’s standpoint, a
half-motivated Warren might well be the perfect foil during primary
season. But I don’t see Warren assuming
that role. The woman who spoke in the
Senate this week wasn’t a mere sparring partner. She was a title contender with one heck of a
punch. And remember, in the “Fight of
the Century” between “The Greatest of All Time” and a Philly boy named Joe
Frazier, it was Frazier who came out the winner. (Ali won their next two bouts, but Frazier
took the first one.) So I’m not counting
Warren out. All I’m saying is that she
still has a major uphill struggle, and in this uphill run, she’s going to have to
cross some pretty big hurdles along the way.
In her case, those hurdles won’t take leg strength – they’ll take intestinal
fortitude. If Warren has that fortitude,
Madame Inevitable could indeed have a fight on her hands.
Saturday, December 06, 2014
It's Wake-up Time in America
Climate Change
Racism
Poverty
Homelessness
Social Polarization
Spiritual Apathy
Rampant Materialism
These
are all facts of life in contemporary America.
They are either altogether denied, ignored, or ultimately
disregarded. We have given up on our
ability to make progressive social changes other than technological
improvements. We have stopped believing,
for example, that the institutions of government are capable of producing
social or environmental uplift. We have
essentially turned inward – to hobbies like marathon running or helping our
little brats get into elite colleges. You
see, we haven’t given up on our ability as individuals to amass great wealth,
financial security, or social status. It’s
only when it comes to “changing the world” in a direction of peace, justice or
truth that we start throwing up our hands and saying, “yeah right.”
Martin
Luther King, Jr. once said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it
bends towards justice.” I agree with
that quotation. It’s literally
true. But the problem is, the statement
has two parts, and interpreters tend to ignore one of them.
The
arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice. We as a society are less racist, sexist and homophobic
than we used to be. We also have more
appreciation for animal rights and for the need to educate every child, regardless
of whether their test results are “promising.”
But the first part of MLK’s
statement, and perhaps the most important part, is that the arc of the moral
universe is long. In other words, societal
moral change takes place VERY slowly. The bigotry, status consciousness, greed and
hatred that we see vividly on display at certain times and places are always around,
under the surface, even in the most “civilized” of subcultures.
As our moral universe
changes ever so slowly, our technological prowess advances rapidly. In some respects, that is a wonderful
development. But it also means that we
are increasingly able to create weapons of mass destruction. For example, just look at the effect that fossil
fuels are having in drought-suffering California and now imagine all of the
people in Africa who are likely to pass away in the next century or so because
we are unwilling to tackle the scourge of climate change. That is definitely a WMD.
Our society resembles
the good ship Titanic. We hum along at great
speed, reveling in our superficial affluence, sophistication, and power. And then, when we see icebergs in our path,
we convince ourselves that we are powerless to do anything about them. We just don’t have a nimble turning
radius. The arc of our moral universe is
simply too long for us to react in time to avoid these icebergs. And so, at the time they hit us, we’ll
probably be doing what Winslet’s and DeCaprio’s characters were doing in the
Titanic movie – pleasuring ourselves.
Why not? It’s not like we as
individuals can save the world, right?
Haven’t we learned something since the days of Woodstock?
That, my friends, is
the kind of cynicism that has brought us to where we are today. It’s a dreadful, defeatist attitude, born not
of sophistication and wisdom, but rather of ignorance and complacency. This is what happens when you live in a
society where progressive religiosity is moribund, and liberal-minded people no
longer feel commanded to fight for higher values.
I won’t talk in this
blog about Ferguson or Staten Island or anywhere else where folks are debating
the topic of justice in our legal system.
I make my living fighting for justice in our legal system, and my blog
is devoted to my avocations, not my vocation.
But this much I will say: we
Americans, we complacent ones, now have an opportunity to wake up, rise up, and
do something meaningful other than simply feathering our own nests. We have an opportunity as individuals to come
together and tackle large social scourges.
Will we make something of this opportunity? Or will we return to our shells, like a pack
of tired turtles?
I can’t answer those
questions. But what I can say is that it’s
high time that we remember the other half of MLK’s statement. The arc of the moral universe does bend
toward justice. It’s our obligation as
individuals to apply some strength and bend that sucker as forcefully as we
can. We can’t just sit on the sidelines
any longer. We’ve tried that for a
generation or two, and look what it’s gotten us?
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Time to Give Thanks
Before this weekend ends, the Empathic Rationalist
would like to join in the Thanksgiving spirit.
No, that doesn’t include eating turkey.
This is strictly a tofurky zone, and the only “Turkey Day” we acknowledge
is when some person makes enough of an ass of himself so as to deserve having a
day recognized in his honor. (How’s that for mixing a metaphor, animal
lovers?) Putting aside our dietary differences,
I think we can all come together at this time of year to express
gratitude. What follows is my own
attempt to take stock in some of our blessings.
To anyone or anything on this list, I offer my deepest thanks.
1. God
I wish to thank the Ultimate (God)
for life itself. Any other benefactor pales
in comparison.
2. The
Name of God
I am thankful that our species recognizes
the idea of Divinity. I realize that
many have turned the Name into a divisive force – and some even kill over it --
but I remain thankful that we have reached out to the Infinite and developed a
concept for the great mystery that engulfs all that exists. Hopefully, someday, the Name will become as
unifying a force as it has been a divisive one.
3. Street Protests
Some people in the media appear to look at street protests primarily through a lens of fear. These journalists seem obsessed with the potential of protests to turn violent and breed lawlessness. Clearly, they have a point. But aren't they missing a more profound one? I look at protests, or at least American protests, as a sign that in an increasingly complacent society, there are some people who still give a damn about fighting for higher causes. I look at protests as a sign that in a society that in a society that increasingly seems to be controlled by a small, privileged minority, there are some people who still believe that "we the people" have some power.
4. Boycotts
Boycotts are similar to street
protests in that, at least when they become widespread, they reflect a
concerted effort to fight for a cause and against some symbol of the status
quo. In the last several months, the
Empathic Rationalist has taken a stand against one type of boycott (those
targeting the State of Israel) and in favor of another (those targeting the
National Football League), so I clearly have strong feelings both for and
against particular protests. What I’m
thankful for is the fact that protests exist as a way for people, peacefully,
to express their commitment to a cause.
The folks who run organizations like
the National Football League count on the fact that few people in our society
believe in boycotts, so they can behave as badly as they want to and it won’t
affect their precious revenue stream.
Thankfully, though, boycotts are a time-honored way to tell companies
and organizations that “we the people” will only put up with so much B.S. and
that we intend to send a message to their wallets. May that tradition last a lot longer than my
NFL boycott, which, after 12 weeks (or ¾ of a season), will partially come to
an end after this weekend’s games. You see,
one of the great things about boycotts is individuals get to decide for
themselves the scope and the duration of the boycott.
5. Family
\
I remember studying
Marxism when I was young and reading about how the institution of the “nuclear
family” is decadent and should be abolished.
Well, I’m here to say that, thank God, we don’t live in a Marxist
world. I have been blessed with a
wonderful wife, two beautiful and fascinating daughters, and two parents who
have lived to the age of 90 (one of whom is still going strong at 93). I can’t imagine what kind of dystopia this
world would be like without the institution of family. The phrase “lonely in a crowd” comes
immediately to mind.
6. The
Evolving Movement Away from Bigotry and Violence
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