Crouching in the Pews Before Hearing A Voice of Hate Transformed

The Saturday morning service proceeded as expected, no different than countless others that were blessed by the coming of age bat mitzvah ceremony of a well rehearsed, delightful young lady celebrating her thirteenth birthday. She had just finished her recitation of the haftorah, a chanting from the book of First Kings. She stood on the altar as the rabbi praised her poise and accomplishment. Just as the rabbi was about to convey the traditional blessing that God would watch over and protect her, and grant her peace, heart-stopping drama engulfed the sanctuary.

The serenity and solemnity of the service were loudly interrupted by the blare of an electronic alert. This was not a drill. Lockdown procedures should be initiated. Some 400 worshippers slid from their seats to the floor between the pews. Many of them stayed crouched for the near 30 minutes it took for the police to confirm the alarm had been falsely triggered. 

Services resumed where they had been cleaved. More than a few congregants admitted they were scared. Why shouldn’t they be, given recent attacks on Jewish congregations and individual Jews across the country but especially in the greater New York metropolitan area.

The alarm sounded on a morning when the bat mitzvah was not the only reason Jews had gathered. After kiddish, an after prayers light meal and gabfest in the social hall, congregants would reconvene in the sanctuary for the first of three conversations on hatred featuring Derek Black, a former white nationalist now, in his words, “an advocate for anti-racism.” 

Was the alarm merely coincidental or triggered by an attempt by his former comrades to silence him? 

The story of Derek Black has been documented in the book “Rising Out of Hatred” by Eli Saslow, the broad outline of which is, he was born 30 years ago into a leading white nationalist family. His godfather is David Duke. His mother, Duke’s ex-wife, subsequently married his father, Don Black, founder of  Stormfront, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic Internet site. Derek was groomed to assume leadership of the movement. It was only after attending New College in Sarasota, Fla., that Derek experienced a gradual rejection of his parents’ principles which, he said, are based on misinformation and untrue “facts” often preached by tenured professors at white nationalist conferences. Naturally, these professors keep a low profile of their beliefs when not among their racist cohorts. (For a more in-depth article on Derek, here’s a link to a 2016 piece in The Washington Post written by Saslow: http://wapo.st/2dF28ZR?tid=ss_mail).

White nationalists, Derek explained, believe multi-cultural societies are failures. They oppose immigration and racial intermarriage, actions they say contribute to “white genocide.” Moreover, their anti-Semitism is founded on the belief that Jews advocate for multi-culturalism.

When white nationalists marched by torch light in Charlottesville, Va., while chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were decrying Jewish support for immigrants they feared would take the jobs of white Americans. 

At the core of white nationalism is the belief that people of color and Jews are inherently inferior to whites. White nationalists do not believe man-made regulations or behavioral tendencies towards minorities have contributed to racial inequality. Being exposed to truths that undermined the validity of white nationalism scrubbed Derek’s allegiance to the movement his family helped catapult to national attention. That was in 2013. He has since been a vocal adversary. 

Derek is a handsome, preppy looking, strawberry-haired man. Soft spoken. Small featured. It would require a large leap of imagination to visualize him as a storm trooper propelling thoughts of racial intolerance. But it is equally true that intolerance and non physical prejudice may reside in all of our psyches, implanted there by parents, teachers, television and other media, preachers, perhaps not on purpose but surely by their choice of words, subtle actions, casual references to people, places and events. 

Among the takeaways from Saturday at temple were two irrefutable points. No place is a sanctuary any longer from crazed individuals. No synagogue, no church, no mosque, no school. Precautions must be taken. Lock down drills must be practiced.

Second, intolerance flourishes when facts and truths are maligned.

Derek Black was home schooled, a fertile mind willing to absorb the bile his parents planted within him. He was fortunate to encounter a handful of tolerant students at New College who enlightened him and shepherded his transformation. It would be unrealistic to assume many other white nationalists would enjoy the same revelatory experience. 

The struggle for the soul of our country, for any country that harbors factions that advocate discrimination, is long term and can only be waged by adherence to truths based on facts, not biases.

Donald Trump Is The Reason I Am Sleep Deprived

For some years now I have woken up several times in the middle of the night. I’m a man approaching his late sixties so there’s nothing unusual about that (for the unaware, it’s a prostate thing). No matter. With rare exception I have always been able to easily slip back to sleep.

Until recently. Until Donald Trump. Donald Trump is robbing me of a good night’s sleep. Even as he jets home each night to sleep in his own bed atop Trump Tower I lay awake in the middle of the night too hepped up by the prospect of his becoming president to drift off into more rem cycles. This blogpost, for example, was written at 5:20 am after I already failed over the prior 60 minutes to fall back to sleep.

This is no joke. It is not funny. As my wife slumbers on next to me I lay awake wondering how any rational human being can seriously vote for such an ill-prepared candidate to be president of the United States. Has our electorate really become so gullible, so naive, so uninformed, so disillusioned, so angry that they dismiss his appeal to bigotry, racism, xenophobia, misogyny that they don’t see his divisiveness, his arrogance, his inability to tell the truth, his attacks on opponents for the very actions he perpetrates? Do they—and for the sake of the country, if not the world, I hope they don’t—share his worse traits?

Okay, I get it. Hillary Clinton is not an ideal alternative. But she has devoted almost her entire adult life to public service while Trump has devoted his to self-enrichment often at the expense of people he has bilked out of deserved compensation or personal savings.

I can’t fall back to sleep. How many others are similarly afflicted? Is Donald Trump turning half the country into a nation of sleep-deprived zombies? I once read resting is just as recuperative as sleeping. No way!

It’s 5:57. Almost time for the alarm to wake me up. But I’m not asleep.

I’m not sure I can take another seven weeks of this, much less four or, heaven forbid, eight years.

Donald Trump is the reason I am sleep deprived.

Tales Worth Retelling

In an interview with People magazine, the nation’s First Couple related their personal experiences with racism. 

“There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys,” President Barack Obama told People. The magazine reported he said “it had happened to him.”

A car key handoff of a different kind happened to one of my magazine’s salesmen, Mike B., in Detroit more than 30 years ago. Arriving late for an appointment in downtown Detroit, Mike hastily handed his rental car keys to a garage attendant. Only the person wasn’t a garage attendant, a fact Mike discovered when he returned to the garage. 

It took the police less than an hour to locate the now stripped-to-the-bones stolen rental car. Aside from his dignity, that’s not all Mike lost that day. Seems Mike had a quirky habit of stashing his wallet under his car seat, no doubt a bonanza the car thief and his cohorts had not anticipated finding. 

The People article also included Michelle Obama’s story of shopping in Target while first lady. “The only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her.”

Mrs. Obama sees that as an example of racism, an illustration of a (presumably white) woman assuming a black woman is an employee and asking her for help. Perhaps. But I’m more inclined to believe the customer looked to her as a taller,  bigger woman who could more easily reach the product she wanted to buy. While shopping in a supermarket or discount store I am often asked by women to reach merchandise on higher shelves. And since I’m generally dressed neatly, they many times presume I’m a store manager. I’m also wondering if Michelle was wearing a red polo short that day, the standard apparel worn by Target associates. 

On the other hand, I agree with Mrs. Obama’s other examples of racism encountered by her husband. “He was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee,” she recounted, while noting that before becoming president “Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs.” 

The status of race relations in America is at its lowest level in 17 years, according to a study released last week by CBS News and The New York Times. In 2009, 66% of those polled thought race relations were “good.” This year that percentage has dropped to 45%, a 31.8% decline. As could be expected in light of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown killings, as well as other incidents around the country where whites—police officers and civilians—shot unarmed Afro-Americans, the black community is more inclined to believe its members have been targeted for less than equal treatment.

Hard to blame them, but I wonder if the Barack Obama factor isn’t at play here. Instead of signaling a new era of racial acceptance, his election and re-election as president have fostered latent bias and overt racism. There just are too many people—white people—who cannot accept that the leader of the Free World is black. 

They see members of Congress publicly dis the president. They watch Fox News commentators throughout the day disrespect him. Both groups are not attacking his policies, for in truth he has done what his Republican predecessors have (including a surprise opening of a new era of relations with a devoutly Communist country). They are attacking his person. It’s thus a small leap of conscience for the individual bigot to gratify and carry out his or her own prejudices, even if it results in bodily harm to an Afro-American. 

Mind you, I am not exonerating blacks from contributing to the lower level of good race relations. I’d like to see more bootstrapping in their community. I want them to project more family values, better maintain neighborhoods, embrace education not as a stepping stone to a professional athletic career but for its ability to contribute to a more meaningful and rewarding life. They have allowed a culture of drugs and violence to dominate too many of their surroundings. 

Yes, Afro-Americans have historical, and let’s not forget physical, hurdles not experienced by other minorities. But the success of Obama and corporate leaders such as Richard Parsons and Kenneth Chenault should provide inspiration beyond recording studios, ball fields and arenas. 

The News Marches On

In response to the question, “When did you start beating your wife?”, President Obama released the long form of his birth certificate to prove he could not have hit Michelle before August 4, 1961, his official birth date in Honolulu.

Now that we have settled the birther controversy, at least for those who retain some degree of sanity, Obama’s educational qualifications are the new fertilizer of Republican mudslinging. This from a political party that lionized the underachievements of George W. Bush’s academic career. Bob Schieffer of CBS News said it best last night on the network’s evening newscast with Katie Couric. Of Donald Trump’s questioning of Obama’s merits for entry into Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Schieffer said, "That's just code for saying he got into law school because he's black. This is an ugly strain of racism that's running through this whole thing.”

Reporters are supposed to refrain from dishing out opinion, but Schieffer’s bold and honest characterization of Trump and others who would support The Donald’s bigotry is to be commended and, hopefully, emulated by thought leaders in the media and politics.

Let’s hear unequivocal support for the legitimacy of the president from John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other paragons of the right. They can challenge his policies all they want, but stirring up racial divide is not in the best interests of the country.


Cursive Class: The digital age is endangering the ability to read and write script. As related in The NY Times, precious little teaching time is spent instructing elementary school students in the art of cursive writing, of attaching rounded letters into words (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/us/28cursive.html?_r=1).

As I blogged last October, I’ve had a lifelong challenge reading my own handwriting. If I don’t transcribe notes soon after they’re written there’s a good chance I won’t be able to decipher them later on. My parents recognized my shortcoming. Though they steadfastly encouraged me to write better, my proficiency ended with learning the correct manner to hold a pen or pencil.

Nevertheless, I did earn an “A” in penmanship in fourth grade, much to the consternation of my parents, so much so that my father forced my mother to lodge a formal complaint during a parent-teacher meeting. Turns out the teacher based her grades on four reports we had to submit. Knowing that, I had painstakingly penned them with precision befitting a medieval monk transcribing sacred text (a real feat considering I attended a Hebrew day school).


To Serve Man: Yesterday was Administrative Professionals Day, more commonly referred to as Secretary’s Day. Having never been a coffee or tea drinker except on rare occasions, I mostly avoided the demeaning practice of having my assistant bring me hot liquid refreshment (for the record, I didn’t ask for cold sodas, either).

Regrettably, proffering coffee was accepted as part of a secretary’s job description, as noted by Lynn Peril in an Op-Ed piece in The Times. To rebel against this form of servitude could cost you your job: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/opinion/27peril.html.

Commerce can liberate women from traditional roles, but even business sometimes can be bound by tradition. As I wrote in March about memories of our family trip to Japan 20 years ago, women’s status there was so stunted that should the highest executive at a meeting be female, she was still expected to serve tea to all the men present. One can only hope that in the ensuing two decades that unseemly practice has been shelved (and not replaced by having a secretary do the chore).


Matzah Meal: Do birds like matzah? I’m going to find out as I’ve put leftover Passover matzah into one birdfeeder. And not just any matzah, but “shmurah matzah,” what some call the Rolls-Royce of matzah because it is made under stricter supervision than regular unleavened bread.

If they don’t like it will they turn into angry birds, purposely flying into my windows?


Royal Treatment: I can’t say I’ve been caught up in the excitement about Will and Kate’s nuptials tomorrow, though I will admit I’ve set one of our DVRs to record 6 hours of royal wedding pomp, circumstance and pageantry. Gilda and I were more invested in William’s mother’s marriage to Prince Charles, mostly because of our British friends, Dave and Gemma. Though they had already returned to London after a three-year sojourn as our neighbor when Diana joined the Windsor clan, our interest in the Mother Country remained strong.

As noted once before, Dave was a top rank tabloid journalist, with a particular knack for getting under the royal skin, especially when it came to Diana. As an editor of The Sun, Dave ran pictures of a pregnant Princess Diana at the beach (pregnant, if memory serves me correctly, with the very same William the world is now ga-ga over). Anyway, for breaching royal etiquette, The Sun was forced to apologize. Dave complied, but ran the apology alongside a copy of the picture Buckingham Palace objected to in the first place.

Some years later, as editor of The Daily Mirror, Dave authorized publication of photos showing Princess Diana exercising at a London gym. Quite scandalous, resulting in a flurry of articles on the privacy to be extended to members of the monarchy. To give Dave a taste of his own medicine, other news outlets staked out his home with round-the-clock cameras.

As befitting the queen of her household, Gemma was not amused.

Zero Tolerance

Zero tolerance is a laudable policy when abhorrent behavior is clearly visible in black and white. But as we’ve seen in the recent, sad affair surrounding Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official wrongly accused of racism and fired before all the facts were evident, reality is nuanced with shades of grey, making hasty judgments and actions suspect.

One Friday afternoon about five years ago, a frantic Human Resources person called to tell me we had to immediately fire one of my editors. His crime? A review of computer logs—a common, legal practice in many companies—revealed he had visited a pornographic Web site. Zero tolerance dictated swift, non negotiable action, I was told.

Whoa, said I. First, I couldn’t afford to release him that day. He still owed copy for our next issue. More importantly, deeper investigation seemed in order. As our Internet retailing editor, his beat was Web commerce, and, like it or not, pornography is the best seller in cyberspace. Perhaps he was just doing, ahem, some research. Beyond that, I asked if we knew how long he lingered on the offensive site? Maybe his computer accidentally was forwarded to that Web page. If corporate skulduggery showed he quickly escaped the site, that would show his intent was honorable, not sleazy. HR agreed on a stay of execution, pending more investigation. When the tapes were studied over the weekend, the editor was cleared.

The stakes in the Sherrod fiasco involve more than just a job lost. The Obama administration is quick to point out this incident is a “teaching moment.” Hopefully, one of the lessons the administration (as well as the NAACP and the media) learned is that rash decisions, even if done with good intentions, must be incontrovertibly supported by all the facts. Let’s further hope that President Obama finally gets that no matter what he does, he will never do enough to satisfy the conservative opposition. He should stop pandering and start acting presidential, not deferential.