Give DC Full Representation in Congress Now

Over on his blog, my friend David in DC opines about the disenfranchisement of the residents of the District of Columbia, in his post Taxation Without Representation . There's no point in my repeating his remarks, made so eloquently. It's a shanda, and an embarrassment to our nation. Simply put, partisan politics and racial bigotry are at the heart of this shameful situation. Write your congressional representatives and senators now, and tell them that the time to give full DC representation in congress is long overdue. For more information, check out www.dcvote.org.

MG

Remembering Art Buchwald

What can one say about the death of Art Buchwald? Thankfully, he has left us a legacy of writings.

Starting early in my childhood, there was several writers whose articles I always made it a point to read: Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, and Art Buchwald. Art was a satirist and not as much the muck-raker as Pearson and Anderson - Art had a way of sticking-it-to-them that was gentler and far more humorous.

In fact, making sure that a local newspaper carried Art's column was always a factor whenever I moved somewhere!

Others can express so much more eloquently than I what Art Buchwald meant to this world he has now left, so I leave it to them:

The Washington Post's obit

Here's the International Herald Tribune's tribute

And be sure to catch "Art's Last Laugh" from the NY Times.

So long, Art, and thanks for all the laughs, and the insights.

Migdalor Guy

Americans Are Not Evolving

In today's Washington Post, the Trend Lines column on page two is entitled "Acceptance of Evolution." (This item isn't featured on the Post's website so I can't provide a link to it.)

The data comes from an article published a few months ago in Science Magazine by Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University. U.S. Adults were asked if the following statement was true or false:

"Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

In the U.S., 40% said it was true, 21% were not sure, and 39% said it was false.

Then the data was compared to similar surveys in 33 other countries. Guess what? The U.S. ranked 33 out of the 34 for the percentage who accepted the statement as true. Only Turkey had a lower percentage (27%.) Iceland is at the top was 85%, followed by Denmark (83%), Sweden (82%), and France (80%.) Ahead of us at the 32nd rank is Cyprus. In the 60-70% range you'll find Ireland, Italy, Hungary and Estonia, to name a few.

Human beings evolved from earlier species, but it seems the brains of many Americans are not as evolved as the rest of our species.

Migdalor Guy (Adrian)

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught

Growing up in my predominantly secular post-Holocaust era Jewish family in the 60s, the Jewish values always shone through. My parents truly shaped my values, and only now, as an adult and engaged Jew do I realize how centered in Judaism those values were.

Many parents sing pretty lullabies to their children. My mother, a self-proclaimed "listener's listener," whose tone-deaf and always out of tune singing (and nevertheless yielded to musically talented children) didn't matter to me - she was my mother, and she was singing songs to me - would sing us songs like "We Shall Overcome" and "Dona, Dona." But there's one song whose message she always stressed. It's from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific." Lieutenant Cable has fallen in love with Liat, a half-breed Tonkinese beauty. His response to the concern of others about "what will the neighbors think" is this song, with some of Oscar Hammerstein's best lyrics:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught!
You've got to be carefully taught!

Well, these words came strongly to mind when I read this article come across the JTA Feed:

Jewish, Arab students share negative views
An Israeli survey found that large numbers of Jewish high school students
view Arabs as uneducated,uncivilized or unclean and vice versa. The Haifa University poll from October 2004, which was presented at a conference at the university this week, interviewed 1,600 students across the country, with 75 percent of the Jewish students harboring negative impressions of Arabs. It also found that one-third of them were afraid of Arabs. "We have found a serious expression of stereotypical thinking on the Jewish students' part regarding the Arab youth,"said Haggai Kupermintz, one of the researchers who conducted the survey. "These students come in with firm stereotypical baggage regarding the other, and in this case, this is the Arabs." Arab high school students also had negative impressions of their Jewish peers: The survey found 27 percent believed Jews were uneducated, 40 percent said they were uncivilized and 47 percent found them unintelligent. But while 75 percent of Arab students showed willingness to meet with Jewish students, less than 50 percent of Jewish students were willing to reciprocate.

That's really sad. What are we teaching our children?

A few years ago, I overheard one my my religious school teachers (I'm a religious school principal) suggest to a class of teens that perhaps the incessantly negative portrayal of Egyptians in the Passover Hagaddah might influence the views of young Israeli and Jewish children. At the time, I thought it was a somewhat inaccurate and gross exaggeration of reality - surely today's children could distinguish between the Egyptians of old and today's Arabs and Muslims. Yet, over the years, I have heard young children, teens, and even adults, make ignorant comments that clearly betray making such distant connections. We connect Amalek, Haman and Hitler. It's not inconceivable that a child could connect the Persian people (and thus modern Iraqis and Iranians) with Haman and the German people with Hitler, and make gross assumptions and generalizations about all of them.

I'm not suggesting we change the Hagaddah. Nor am I suggesting that we Jews don't have both the right and the obligation to bring to mind all the wrongs done to us over the millenia. We do and should. "Never again" is more than a slogan. It is our inheritance. (Thank G"d we're standing up against the genocide in Darfur, although it even took a while the for Jewish community to mobilize on that.) It is not wrong to teach our children that terrorists and oppressors are people who have transgressed permitted moral boundaries of human behavior. It is wrong of us to allow them to generalize about an entire group of people on the basis of the actions of some. And we must not forget how easy it is for anyone to get caught up in mob mentality. It does give one pause when even Arab Israeli MKs speak out in support of the terrorist struggle, and we read of the thousands of Palestinians at rallies insisting that they will not stop until Israel no longer exists. Yet if G"d would spare S'dom and Gomorrah for just 10 righteous persons, should not we? Can we be certain there are no righteous, peace-loving Palestinians or Muslims or IRA members or Iraqis or Republicans or Democrats or Christians or Jews, or Janjaweed, etc.? Our children must be carefully taught to hate and fear. Let us resolve to teach all of them otherwise.

Migdalor Guy (aka Adrian)

Why I Am A Confused Dove on Israel

In their editorial reviewing the secular year 2006, the Jewish Daily Forward included this disappointing fact:

"It was a year when Israelis rallied themselves to elect, for the first time, a
coalition of parties committed to ending the occupation of the West Bank and
seeking good neighborly relations with an independent Palestine — and when
Palestinians elected a government committed to rejecting coexistence and
destroying the State of Israel."

These are the kinds of facts that prevent me from being the kind of dove with relation to the Israeli/Palestinian situation as I was regarding, for example, 'Nam. When it comes to Israel, I am a hawkish dove, at best. Things so often seem so unilateral, and so rarely reciprocated. From both sides.

I cannot side fully with either the right-wing or left-wing of American Jewish Israel advocacy. Surely I am not alone in this dilemma?

Migdalor Guy (aka Adrian)

More Dinosaur Slaying-Jew It Yourself

This post was also posted as a comment to this article on JewSchool by Mobius. It describes the "Next Big Jewish Idea: Jew It Yourself" (JIY.) It sounds like a concept I could really get behind.

Here's what I wrote:

It's taken me a while to post a response so I hope these thoughts remain timely.
Though raised in NYC, and now living in the DC area, I spent ten years in Fargo, North Dakota, 8 years in Elkhart, Indiana, and a few years in other places like New Orleans, Clearwater, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee.

Though I am now enjoying and utilizing the more expansive Jewish resources of the DC area, my experience has taught me that Judaism can and does flourish in places like Fargo. In many ways, it takes more committment to be part of a small-town Jewish community. It takes a little more effort to live Jewishly in places like Fargo as opposed to places like NYC.
It is, however, also true, that in a small community, you either afffiliate with whatever Jewish community there is, or you simply have no Jewish life. So the myth of Judaism requiring large communuties to thrive is largely myth--yet at the same time, there does need to be some kind of community - not necessarily synagogue-based, although this is the model used is most small communities.

While living in the Dakotas, I worked with others to use the then finally being discovered Internet (which I had been using since the time it was ARPANet, but that's a story for another time) as a tool to connect even smaller and more far-flung Jewish communities like Missoula, Montana, and Rapid City, South Dakota. We had ourselves a little Jewish network of the Plains and were able to share information and resources this way.

Having come so much further than it was in the 80s and 90s, I imagine that were I still in Fargo, the Internet would be providing rich content and support to help keep the Jewish community thrive. I am sure it is doing so for those I left behind in the Northern Plains.

As a Jewish educator, though now in the over 50 crowd, and employed in the synagogue world, I nevertheless remain convinced that this model is a dinosaur, and I am continually exploring alternative settings for supplemental Jewish education that can serve the type of Jewish community that I have observed developing over the past decades.

I've been an active CAJE member, and have even chaired a CAJE conference. I do think that the organization was doing the best it could to be true to its origin as grassroots and outside the establishment. However, it has become the establishment, and, as a result, I believe it is veering in directions that, while they may satisfy the vision of an aging membership that is seeking more in depth learning and higher standards, is not at all the direction that it needs to go to serve the next few generations of Jews. It is too invested in the status-quo. There are a few others in the CAJE community who are willing to say such things openly (and by that I include both what is happening to CAJE, and my belief that we are entering a post-synagogue age) and I believe a goodly number who believe so but are scared of telling the Emperor he is naked.

Not just the leadership, but the rank and file in the Jewish world is a bit out of touch. They don't realize how married they are to the status-quo of synagogue-centered Judaism, and the current institutional system.

And for those that are in touch, they often make the mistakes cited in your post, of trying to make Judaism like pop culture. Now, I am a firm believer in the co-option of popular culture in service to Judaism. I used SpongeBob as a prop and a hook for years-but I used it as a way in to young minds - not as the end product - and sought to use it to teach my understanding of Jewish "core values." Sure, there's a little shtick involved, but the product wasn't entertainment-it was Jewish learning. Crabby Patties weren't just a funny kosher joke-they were a path to serious learning about kashrut. And it worked. (I'm moving on to a new mascot, but have yet to find a cultural icon that crossed as many age barriers as SpongeBob. I am open to suggestions!)

I remember the session at CAJE last August when the "Throw the Jews Down the Well" clip from Da Ali G show was shown and all but two small segments of the audience of Jewish educators were in total shock. (The small segment not shocked were the groups of college-age kids that were there, plus the two or three in the over 50 crowd like myself who, as students of popular culture, keep up with such things. Sadly, even after it was revealed to them that it was an outrageous piece of cultural satire by a cutting edge comedian and social critic, most still considered it unusable in their school-ever. Now I, too, have a few mixed feelings about the Borat phenomenon, but I remain generally approving--I'll have to save this for a future post.)

Yes, we need some bricks and mortar - places to assemble, to socialize, etc. but there are other ways of making this happen. The "anarchistic" web can and will likely prove to be a component of this, despite reservations that even I have about it. Yes, being at a real Pesah Seder with real people is different (and better) than participating in a virtual one, even when the technology has advanced far beyond where it is now. But I participated in a virtual online Seder in the years when the entire process was text-based and run in a DOS window. And it wasn't entirely empty and meaningless. You could feel the others as if some aspect of their souls was being transmitted through the ether along with the text. (As I once said to a critic of email communication "if e-mail is so impersonal, how come it is so capable of upsetting another person based just on words that I type?")

JIY is indeed part of the future-and I, too, hope to see it make a big splash, and thrive. It will take lots of nurturing, and have to fight lots of entrenched interests - and it will still requires some form of "common core Judaism" for the post-synagogue age to truly happen. G"d-willing, it will come to pass. Keep up the good fight.

Migdalor Guy

Virginia Needs a New State Song-And This Is It

For a number of years now, the Commonwealth of Virginia has been seeking an official state song. A competition was held, but none of the entries seemed to really stand out. Frustrated, state legislators were about to make "Shenandoah" the official. Now, it's a wonderful song, but here's the problem- it's not necessarily about the Shenandoah river valley in Virgina. This entry on Wikipedia tells the story of the song and the abortive attempt to make it the official song of the Commonwealth.

My friend and professional colleague, Carol Boyd Leon, a log-time Virgina resident, and talented songwriter (primarily in Jewish music) who happened to compose the song that George Mason University selected as its new Alma mater, Patriot's Dreams, decided to take a crack at a state song for Virgina. The result was " Virgina, Ever Enshrined." With the sponsorship of two local state delegates, the song will be submitted for consideration by a committee and the legislature in this term. Carol was fortunate to have a talented daughter, Sarah Boyd, now embarked on a career as a professional theatrical music director, arranged the song for choir, and recruited a few friends from the College of William & Mary from which she graduated last year to record it. That recording was distributed to all state legislators near the end of last year's term. You can listen to that recording here.

Wanting to demonstrate the versatility of the song for use in different settings and different styles, Carol wanted to record another version. Carol and I have been professional musical partners for some years now, and we sought the right voice and style for the song.

Last fall, we discovered the right voice. We were attending an interfaith concert for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter in northern Virginia at Vienna Baptist Church in Vienna, VA. Carol was there with her adult choir from Olam Tikvah, a Conservative congregation in Fairfax, VA, and I was there to accompany them. (As an aside, it was a wonderful evening with Jewish, Christian and Muslim music. Hearing and seeing Native Deen, an incredible Muslim hip-hop trio based in D.C., with international reputation, perform, was an absolute pelasure. ) There was a singer in the Christian praise band, Works in Progress, from nearby Vienna Presbyterian Church which performed that had the right voice. His name was Doug Traxler.

Recently, the three of us were able to get together at our favorite local studio, Cue Recording in Falls Church, VA, and record a demo of a more pop style version of the song which you can listen to here. (You can also hear recordings of a number of Carol's songs there. )

Delegates Marsden and Englin plan to introduce a bill in the 2007 Virginia legislative session to make "Virginia, Ever Enshrined" the official state song of Virginia. If you are a Virginia resident and would like this song approved as the official state song, please contact your legislators! Go to http://legis.state.va.us/Under QUICK LINKS, click on "Who's My Legislator" and type in your address.

By the way, the District of Columbia has no official song either, and Carol is attempting to fill that gap as well with this song, "By George, It's Washington!" Thought it's only recorded in a very rough demo form, I'm trying to persuade Carol to post it so you can give that a listen as well. I'll keep you posted.

By the way, one doesn't usually earn royalties or other payments for writing these kinds of official songs for states, cities, or universities, so even though I've worked with Carol on these, my reasons for blogging this are not commercially motivated!!

If you happen to be Jewish, and have kids or know someone who has kids, you ought to buy a copy of Carol's 2-CD set, "Gan Shirim" with 70 new Jewish songs for children, published by KTAV, the only Jewish album to win a 2004 Parent's Choice Award, and 4th place finalist in the 2006 Just Plain Folks Music Awards best Jewish album category. If you're a teacher in a Jewish school, you should have a copy of the CD and the songbook as well--it's chock full of ideas for using the songs. And you will find songs to fill needs that just aren't found anywhere else. (That's why she wrote many of them-to fill needs for songs when she was teaching.) By the way, this isn't one of those Disney-ized children's CDs, with a perfect choir of kids singing. That's Carol's voice of most of the songs, and real kids, and their un-studio-magicked voices. Your kids will know that they can sing these songs, and won't be intimidated by them. Oh, and I'm the nut that came up with and played the accompaniment for all 70 tunes. In essentially one week. There's a nutsy week of my life I might blog about someday...

Happy listening,

Midgalor Guy (aka Adrian)

All Hail the Dinosaur Slayers

Over at Jewschool, Kung Fu Jew highlights the turn of many Jews, and not just younger ones, away from the traditional agencies and institutions, the "dinosaurs," who are

"focused myopically on the numbers of Jews rather than the quality of their existence, their impact, on this here earth."

to new grassroots organizations like the Jewish Funds for Justice, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and the National Council of Jewish Women.

The thrust of Kung Fu Jew's post is to also point out the rapid growth of the progressive Israel advocacy group, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom. While I may not entirely agree with some of the positions of Brit Tzedek, and so cannot endorse them whole-heartedly, they are a good example of the potential of Israel advocacy that is not right-wing and hawkish.

And despite reservations I may have with a few of Brit Tzedek's positions (just as I do with some positions of Rabbis for Human Rights) I hope that not just the 20-somethings out there, but also us 50-somethings, and other generations, will continue to support this new trend in Jewish organizations that put tikkun olam ahead of "the continuity question." We will continue-but what's the point in growing our numbers if we don't stand for making a better world?

Migdalor Guy