The Nostalgia of White Flight

My high school classmates were back on my Facebook feed this morning, whooping it up about our rebel youth. The last time I wrote about this they were obsessing about our antiwar activism and about a rather tasteless performance some of us engaged in for a high school "battle of the bands." This time they revived a conversation from two-and-a-half years ago, which was originally started by the news of the death of our attorney from a 1968 freedom-of-speech suit against our principal. That thread devolved into nostalgia about the humorous newspaper for which the editors were suspended, then reminiscences about favorite teachers, and -- finally, because that principal, many teachers, and lots of parents left Newark for the suburb we lived in -- idylls about both our home town and the Weequahic section that so many of them lived in before moving.

Yes. The nostalgia of white flight.

When Chris Christie declared his candidacy for Presidency of the United States, he did it in the gymnasium of our high school. He graduated ten years after we did. His speech was an encomium to white flight. He made it synonymous with the American dream, saying:

I'm here in Livingston because all those years ago, my mother and father became the first of either of their families to leave the city of Newark to come here and make this home for us.

He spoke about his dad working days in the Breyer's ice cream plant and attending Rutgers at night. He added:

My parents moved to Livingston and they moved to Livingston to make this part of their fulfillment of their dream. Of their version of the American dream. 

He didn't mention that this move came immediately after the Newark rebellion of 1967. He didn't have to. His audience understands that without even thinking.

Chris Christie's high school buddy is best-selling author Harlan Coben. Coben, too, was born in Newark. His parents, too, fled to Livingston. I have read only a few of his dozens of popular mysteries, but what they all had in common was Livingston-as-utopia.

When I look at my high school yearbook I see 625 (give or take) white faces. I remember a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl. In the class that followed me there were two (2!) African American students, the first ever to attend the school. This was no accident and I remember speaking about this intentional segregation at the time. I remember adult neighbors, angry at my dad for refusing to pledge never to sell to a non-white family. But I also know that my parents moved to that town. I know that they made that choice.

A lot of the classmates waxing sentimental about our youthful rebellions brag about their parents liberality and even leftism. Some of those parents were activists in the unions. Some of them were members of socialist organizations. But they all left Newark for all-white Livingston. They describe the Weequahic section of Newark in the forties and fifties (when it was the home of celebrated novelist Philip Roth) as "Jewish" and "liberal." Yet all these "liberals" and "leftists" fled for an all-white suburb. It begs the question what those words mean.

But I am not interested in interrogating our parents. I am not even interested in tarnishing our memories of them, so many already gone. I am interested in asking what kind of "liberal" are you in 2019 if you cannot see any of this? I know all of you oppose Trump. I know all of you oppose "hatred" and "racism." But we grew up in a place that institutionalized white supremacy by establishing itself as a separate municipality, with separate taxes for separate schools. So many dads of my childhood friends went to Newark every day to enrich themselves, some with liquor stores, some with real estate, some with less egregious forms of cockroach capitalism. So many moms of my childhood friends had "help": women who rode the bus from Newark everyday to work in the homes of essentially middle-class families, families who could afford to act like gentry because the women who cleaned for them were systematically denied other opportunities!

This is why I am so suspicious of people who think that socialism will solve other social problems, especially white supremacy. I don't believe you actually care about it. I don't believe you even see it.

Why do you call him Prophet?

Prophet at about 5 weeks

Prophet hadn't been living in our house four days before we noticed that his endless diarrhea required attention. Our vet, the gifted Dr. Angelo Rosado, did some imaging and diagnosed intussusception, a condition in which a section of the intestine folds into an adjacent section. He told us that he could do the surgery, but that there was a chance that the sections had fused together, in which case he would need to close Prophet up and send him to a specialist. His advice was that we just take Prophet directly to the specialist, and he recommended one in Brooklyn: 20 miles and (in the unlikely event of no traffic) 45 minutes away from our home in the Bronx.

Judy was resolute. But I never thought of myself as that person who provides expensive medical care to a pet. Moreover, we simply didn't have the money. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was something we had to do. Apparently the finance industry understands this very well, because a loan was not hard to secure.

Visiting hours at VERG

The surgeons, regular vets, and techs at the hospital were terrific, as Dr. Rosado told us. He had to stay there in Brooklyn for days of post-op observation, but we drove over daily to visit. It is hard to describe Prophet's excitement when he was brought into the examining rooms where we were allowed to hang out with him.  I knew - in a way - that we had bonded with him during our visits with him and his siblings before he was old enough to be weaned and leave his mom. I knew that we had become close during those first few days at home. But every day at the hospital he flew over and leaped into our arms. You don't think German Shepherds are lap dogs? I can tell you that Prophet was as a puppy. I can tell you that he still is today with so many of the people he loves... and that dog loves a bunch of people.

It took a long time to pay off that loan, but I never regretted it. We shared adventures in the White Mountains and in local parks, in lakes, rivers and in Long Island Sound. He had a habit of introducing himself to every new dog and every new pers

Crossing a stream on a log

on. He never started a fight and never backed down from one: with dogs (even multiple dogs), with skunks, with the local coyotes. He learned eventually to take my cues about whether we were going to say hi to people or chase wildlife.

So when he suddenly (suddenly!) turned up lame and Dr. Rosado diagnosed a rupture of his cruciate ligament I didn't hesitate about care, even though it meant another loan. I was relieved to learn this is typically a predisposition in dogs, not a sudden injury, like in people. Prophet doesn't play basketball, but he does have the habit of running down near-vertical rock faces. It also turned out the the insurance we purchased for him actually reimbursed us for part of the surgery. This time Dr. Rosado sent us to an orthopedist in New Jersey. (Only 17 miles and 30 minutes without traffic.) Again, the care was superb and the orthopedist had several surgical options, choosing the best one for Prophet's particular leg geometry.

Working out on the treadmill

What was a question for me was physical therapy. A close friend had recently had an ACL tear repaired and his PT was cut off by the insurance company as soon as they concluded that he could walk again. If he was getting shorted, what did it mean that we were providing this care for our dog? I swallowed that question and just concluded that I wouldn't broadcast the news all over Facebook. This time we had to go to the East Side of Manhattan, 12 miles, but usually forty-five minutes.

Cold laser treatment, with protective eyewear

Prophet loved physical therapy. He treated it as his personal day spa. I will back up here and say that he learned polite leash walking early on, but that he has never mastered it in the vicinity of his vet's office. As soon as we get nearby he begins tugging and lunging to get there to see all his friends: the vets, the techs, the receptionists. No amount of poking and prodding, shots or rectal thermometers, have ever discouraged his enthusiasm for that place or those people.

Rehab was different. He calmed down and blissed out immediately. He learned how to walk in the
underwater treadmill without any problem. (Peanut butter helped keep him focused) The cold laser seemed to be a heightened form of personal worship, like belly rubs or grooming.

Hiking by Eastchester Bay in the Bronx

And there was no question that it helped. I started to wonder whether I hadn't seen signs of the ligament tear before it actually ruptured, without fully understanding what I was seeing. He seemed stronger than ever. We were warned that about half of dogs with CL tears will develop one in the opposite leg within a year. I watched closely but didn't see anything. We were also warned that the surgical site itself is vulnerable to arthritis. We looked for that, too. But everything was good. The adventures resumed and continued.

I know that the lives of dogs are accelerated when compared with ours. I know that fact can be painful for us. Prophet's friends who have walked on are too many. When Harry, a boxer, passed, his owner left the neighborhood for good. When Doon died his owner stayed in his apartment for over a year. Blanca's human is still mourning quietly although she continues with her work. I didn't go directly to these dark thoughts when Prophet developed a wobble and a drag in his gait. I didn't think about this even when he turned around quickly and fell on his ass. I certainly didn't worry when he got an arthritis diagnosis and a prescription for anti-inflammatories.

But the meds didn't seem to help. And the radiologist said that his arthritis was too minor to account for the symptoms. And the vet said "degenerative myelopathy," a condition like Lou Gehrig's, a condition without a treatment, a condition that would lead to no hind leg control at all, then no body control at all. That's when I started imagining a future without my friend. Thats when my sun started to fade.

The vet said there was not much to be done. Reading suggested that physical therapy might slow the progress of Prophet's degeneration. So we went back to see the rehab vet. We borrowed money again. The specialist confirmed the diagnosis and performed a DNA test which was ambiguous. But the therapy? Well, the therapy helped a lot. And I don't mean by stopping the deterioration. Prophet has actually improved since we got the diagnosis in September. He is not cured. (There will be no cure.) But he can turn without falling, which he could not do when he first went to PT. He can jump into the car, with some hesitation, but without a full minute of thought. And the wobble in his step is occasional, not regular.

So I am glad we are getting him this therapy. He, of course, still loves it and loves the people who provide it. He loves the daily massage and passive range of motion exercises that I give him. But there is another piece.

Prophet is not worried. He doesn't obsess over what the future will bring. He walks out happily to each new day's adventure - wildlife, friends, rocks, creeks - without concern about how long he will be able to. I owe him the physical care we provide. But I also owe him the happiness he brings to me. I have to enjoy each day with him as much as he enjoys each day with me. And I am trying. That is why his name is Prophet. That is why he is our prophet.

The Federal Trough

My dad (z"l) was always cynical about people who claimed to be opposed to federal aid programs. He noticed that what they really opposed was federal aid to people other than themselves. He had a colorful way of describing this phenomenon, too. He said all of us are like pigs with our snouts in the federal trough. Once in a while, though, each of us picks our head up, looks around, and comments disgustedly, "What a bunch of pigs!"

I was reminded of this by a news item on the radio this morning. The President is headed to New Orleans to address a convention of Farm Bureaus as his government shutdown enters its fourth week. How does this affect farmers, who have been among his strong supporters?

• The US Department of Agriculture can't process loan subsidies that farmers use to finance their seed for the next planting. In many places, that should be two to three weeks away.
• The USDA is no longer sending out emergency checks for the losses farmers are suffering from the President's trade war with China.
• Nobody at the State Department is processing requests for H2A visas for temporary agricultural workers to enter the country.

It is not schadenfreude to notice that all of us are dependent on one another and that we negotiate our mutual needs through government. I can differ with the specifics of agricultural policy while still realizing that we need one if we want to eat. But it is important to note: People who pretend to support market-driven decisions and individualism really only believe in those things when it comes to others.

Fifty Summers Ago

Fifty years ago, the summer before my senior year of high school, I visited Eretz Yisrael with my Jewish youth group. I so looked forward to that trip. It was a kind of coming-of-age experience. After years of looking at the big kids, our leaders, wearing  keffiyehs and worshipping in big 72” x 54” tallitot, it was my turn. That was the summer of Woodstock, of Apollo 11, and of “Tommy” by The Who. I had no problem about having missed all that, because I was doing what I had dreamed of for so long. Even after all this time, my memories of that trip are still very strong. I also have the journal I kept to clarify how much of what I think I remember feeling actually came later.

For example I note an entry from our first morning waking up in Jerusalem after the late-night drive up into the Judaean Hills from Lod (now Ben Gurion) Airport. It is marked “Friday Morning, Ron Hotel.” A quick look at the calendar for 1969 tells me that this was the Fourth of July. I mention this just to convey how deeply I was immersed in what I imagined I was doing and how disconnected I was from everything else. And in that post I wrote about our arrival: “We sang and said Shehecheyanu [the prayer for something new and momentous]. Many wept.”

Jewish law proscribes writing on Shabbat, so it was Sunday, two days after our arrival in Jerusalem when I described my first Sabbath in Israel. I was already having internal conflicts. I wrote briefly about attending services at a Moroccan synagogue and the women ululating. I remember what they were celebrating, too, the entry of a 13-year old boy for his first aliyahto the Torah, his bar Mitzvah. I can still hear their trilling tsahalulim and I can still see them whipping hard candies at his head in his honor.

But then I describe my ambivalence about the guides and gift shops of the Arab Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. I was deeply uncomfortable about treating the Palestinians as some sort of tourist attraction. That thought doesn’t last long, because I was soon writing about what our own guides were directing us to see. They asked us to look at the Intercontinental Hotel on Har Ha-Zeitim (the Mount of Olives) which King Hussein of Jordan allowed to be built in the middle of a centuries-old Jewish cemetery. They pointed to the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem, leading into the Temple precinct, which was bricked up by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent to prevent a false Messiah from entering. But that isn’t what they told us. They told us that “the Arabs” closed the gate to prevent the arrival of the Messiah, with laughter, because the Messiah cannot be barred by bricks. Of course this is something that Suleiman, a devout Muslim (and a Turk, not an Arab) knew. But 17-year old me didn’t know that about Suleiman. I just knew what my beloved group leaders told me.

I say I loved them, and I did. Everywhere we went they turned into a celebration.  I wrote, “If there is one thing I love about our group, more than anything else, it is the way we liberate buses, streets, walls, rooms, whole cities with our singing and dancing.” And note that word: “liberation.” I will return to it. They kept us focused on the spirit of what we were doing. All over United Synagogue Youth (USY) the Hebrew word ruach (which can be understood as “wind” or “breath” or “soul”) is construed as “spirit,” as in “school spirit”; a kind of “rah-rah us”. But that summer, on that trip, it was always much deeper, much more… can I say “spiritual”?

One of my strongest memories of the summer was our visit to Ramat Golan. It is important to remind you here that Israel had seized the heights during the Six-Day War only two years earlier. Before that, we had heard about sporadic Syrian artillery shelling of the Huleh Valley and Kiryat Shemona. Our first stop was Kiryat Shemona, a community of mostly Yemeni Jews. They told us about the constant artillery drills their children had to practice and showed us the underground bunkers where they spent so much of their class time before the war.

Then we drove up the hill to the formerly Syrian side. Our counselors showed us how you could literally see the old boundary, as if you were looking at a map: brown on the Syrian side, green on the Israeli side. I remember thinking this was deeply significant at the moment, but because I didn’t write about it until later in the day, this observation is followed by the sarcastic note that it is “proof positive” of Syrian “laziness.” Why sarcastic? Because five minutes later we entered the Edenic orchards and fields of a Syrian village. And in another five minutes we saw the villagers themselves threshing wheat.  My journal has two more sarcastic comments about this display of “laziness.”

My journal continues to report – without comment – the experiences that were meant to reinforce our commitment to the narrative of Israeli and Jewish victimhood… this after the Six-Day War! And I say without comment because 17-year old me was clearly deeply moved and swallowing so much of this without question. I wrote about our visit to the crusader fortress in Akko where the British executed the Jewish Underground fighters, Dov Gruner and Shlomo Ben-Yosef. My journal for the day reports only, “Saw hanging room,” and I remember being unable to write any more because I was so deeply revulsed. There is a more flippant note about our walking through a minefield: “Don’t walk off the path!” wrote the boy I was. Reading this today, high-school-principal me is skeptical that anybody took us through an actual live minefield, but the message had its intended effect. That boy believed in the ubiquity of our enemies.

Except. Except. Except they kept on overplaying this message. The following day I was able to put my feelings while standing in that hanging room onto paper. I described the room, its overhead I-beam, its movable blocks-and-tackle, its iron trap doors on the floor under the feet of the condemned. I reported the flowers we lay on the doors and the Kaddish we prayed. “I imagined myself awakening in a cell with a red suit on and knew that I would cry then about dying… I saw several hands go instinctively to throats at the sight. It put me in a state of mind for the afternoon.”

That day we went immediately afterward to Lohamei ha-Getaot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, about six kilometers away from Akko Fortress. I don’t know what exhibits they have there today. At that time there were photos of concentration camps, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Vilna Ghetto. After walking through we had time to reflect alone or in small groups. I sat in a dusty field and listened to cocks crowing. Some of my friends described it afterward as sounding like the screams of the dying, which I found annoying. Here is a longer quote from the journal:

I thought of what I had seen. The ground seemed to drop from me. I remembered a picture of a laughing Nazi sergeant. I knocked him down, kicked him, broke open his belly, kicked him again. I almost fell down.

When we gathered again near the building our leaders told us that a Jew can only trust a Jew. They told us about a B’nai Brith survey (which I now believe to be apocryphal) that showed that in the event of a holocaust in the US, only 1% of Americans would actively help us, while 33% would actively persecute us, and another 33% wouldn’t care. This was all quite overwhelming and the only choices for me in that moment seemed to be to remain there in Israel or to return home and stockpile arms.

But as I began writing a letter home on the subject I had different feelings about it. I spoke to one of our counselors, a rabbinical student, and asked why they were poisoning our minds in this way. I wrote in my journal about how this all felt like every other emotional appeal that is made to get strangers to murder one another. And I described the fight they seemed to want to enlist us in as a genocidal race war. Yes, I did. Then, still desperately confused, I wrote: “I am absolutely unresolved as to the implications of all this but I am sure it is important.”

It was a couple of weeks later that we moved our base to a new kibbutz at Gush Etzion in the hills about 20 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem in the West Bank. I had no way of knowing that this place and these people were going to become the center of the settler movement and the militant Israeli right, although I suspect our leaders might have had some clues. For a week our hosts took us on daily hikes up and down the ridges, which I really enjoyed. The fact that they were always armed with Uzis just reinforced my feeling that we were doing something terribly important. And every single hike ended at a location with its own story about the Jewish settlements that were destroyed here during the 1947 war or the Palestinian uprising of 1929.  All of our hike leaders had lived in this area as children. Every year for nineteen years they had been taken to the border to look at an oak tree across the way in Jordan – the sole survivor of their former village – as a reminder of where their home had been. Now, they told us, they were home again.

Thursday of that week the idyll started to turn a little sour for me. We were having a great hike along the ancient Jerusalem aqueduct, starting at the spring of Ain Burak, in the village of Al-Khader. There were underground chambers, tunnels, a canal, a mulberry tree. I was having a beautiful day. Then, this:

The aqueduct went underground so we had to cross a field, a hillside field with terracing. We had to jump from a stone wall at one point. Rather than jumping, most kids were pushing off from a sitting position – not much good for the wall. As one girl went off she brought a section of underpinnings with her. I then took the task of standing there, directing people away from the damaged section, making them jump from a standing position, giving them a hand coming down. Then one big kid came along and just barged over the damaged section, completely destroying it. The Arab farmer who owned the field came running up angry. ‘Why couldn’t we walk through someone else’s fields?’ He’d been there for years. I started to repair the wall. The guy said he appreciated it, but we should go on. Lee [our rabbi] said alright. I felt and still feel incomplete not having repaired it.

That was what I wrote the day it happened. I can say the same thing today. I still feel incomplete for not repairing that man’s wall. 

There is only a little more to my journal. We spent the following week at a vocational high school near Petach Tikvah doing some work on the school, visiting some tacky tourist attractions and having group adventures. The best part was hanging out with the kids boarding at that school: playing hoops, playing guitar, exchanging stories. I kept thinking I should stay there for my senior year instead of going back to finish high school in New Jersey. After that week, the entries end. My memory tells me I must already have been ill with whatever it was that eventually landed me in a Jerusalem hospital with a very high fever. I have to guess that explains the absence of any more journaling.

But I remember the final day of our stay in Gush Etzion. We went to the city of Hebron to visit Me-arat Machpelah, the tomb of the patriarchs. There was another story, this time about the 1929 riots, during which dozens of Jews were killed. Our guides did not tell us about the hundreds of Jews whose lives were saved by their Arab neighbors. They told us that Hebron – home of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah – had been ethnically cleansed by that riot (although they used other words, that phrase not being in use yet.) And then they told us that Hebron was now once again a Jewish city; that several families had returned to Hebron. Would we care to visit their homes?

Would we? My heart soared! I suppose I imagined them living happily side-by-side with the Palestinians of the city.

I did not imagine that we would be going to the top of a hill outside town. I did not imagine that we would be passing through a barbed-wire fence. I did not imagine that we would be entering the compound of an Israeli police station. I did not imagine that we would be visiting a garden apartment inside that fence. I did not imagine that the returning Jews of Hebron lived in a colonial hill station.

Our hosts there were perfectly nice people, to us, at least. I think they gave us all cookies. I couldn’t know the subsequent history of the Jewish cantonment in Hebron, the curfews, the militarization, the stabbings and bombings. But it looked awful to me. I had been content to see the State of Israel as a project of liberation from British colonialism. I had been content to see the intercommunal violence between Israelis and Palestinians as an artifact of British divide-and-rule tactics. I had been content to see the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews as evidence that we could never be Nazis ourselves.

That day in Hebron was my first inkling that wewere the colonialists.

That day in Hebron was my first inkling that we were the Nazis.

The State of Israel has for decades utilized home demolitions against Palestinians both as a form of collective punishment and as a means of ethnic cleansing. Both are violations of international law. Just in the last few days, leading members of the governing party have insisted that the entire town of Khan el Ahmar will be bulldozed. The Jahalin of Khan el Ahmar first moved there because the Israeli government removed them from the Negev. They are accused of “building without permits” which is absolutely accurate, the government won’t give them any. I should add that you will search the US press in vain for the years-long struggle of the people of Khan el Ahmar to remain in their homes, both in the courts and through non-violent protest.

For a dozen years Israel, with the assistance of Egypt, has blockaded Gaza.  During those years Israel has also launched numerous, massive armed incursions into Gaza, each time killing hundreds as well as destroying schools, hospitals, and cultural centers. Last spring, Gazans organized giant protests against the blockade and the border barrier. Israel responded with military force, killing over 100 protesters and wounding over 13,000, including medical personnel tending to the wounded. The best known of these latter is Roujan al-Najjar. She was a twenty-year old medic who was shot to death by Israeli snipers. A New York Times investigationpublished two weeks ago suggests that they weren’t aiming at her in particular, but that they were aiming at the group of medics she was part of. That is a war crime. The IDF chose to respond to the case by fabricating a video claiming that she was intentionally acting as a human shield for armed militants. 

Israel has adopted the British colonial tactic of administrative detention, holding prisoners without charges and on secret evidence. They lock up an average of a Palestinian a day using this method. In one current case, 18-year old Anwar Makhtoob was arrested because of some old Facebook posts. The Army prosecutor told the judge that there were no grounds for a trial, but that he should be held nevertheless! As I write this, Anwar remains in administrative detention.

I grew up believing that Israel was not just a homeland for Jewish people, but that it was a shining beacon for all humanity. It took me a while to recognize that the profoundly-disturbing practices which I saw as flaws in its perfection were actually essential features of an ethnostate, roughly half of whose population are not admitted as citizens. It took me longer to be willing to say that in public. What I feel is shame. I am deeply ashamed. 

We Jews are heirs to millennia of thought and practice on ethics and morality. We have written countless volumes of literature on justice and right living. We have provided by our very existence a prophetic voice for humanity. I am ashamed that we will now be known for colonialism and cruelty, for abusing the bodies and souls of our brothers and sisters, the Palestinian people.

We have an obligation to speak. We are enjoined to by our Torah. Even before Moses received the Law we had the story of Cain and Abel in Bereishit (Genesis) 4.

מה עשית קול דמי אחיך צעקים אלי מן האדמה

“What have you done?” He said. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the Earth!”