Why One Jewish Woman Supports the Women's March

by Jennifer Friedlin

When Rev. Louis Farrakhan calls Jews termites, I feel disgusted.

When someone says you cannot be a progressive and a Zionist, I get livid.

When someone tells me I should walk away from the Women’s March, I could not disagree more.

I am a Jewish Israeli-American woman. I know that words can lead to deadly outcomes. I know that leadership matters and that people who can draw crowds can also plant seeds of destruction.

However, I am also an activist who has sat in a police wagon with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour and listened to fellow leader Tamika Mallory speak eloquent truths to crowds of protesters. I have nodded along with their words and grew convinced that the raw power and passion generated by the march could affect real change.

So I felt deeply divided as I read about Alyssa Milano’s and Debra Messing’s decision to distance themselves from the march because of Sarsour’s and Mallory’s ties to Farrakhan and their own alleged anti-Semitic statements, respectively.

On face value how could Jewish women stand by anyone who aligns herself with those who represent hateful ideas? But I am convinced the march, and particularly the women of color who lead it, did just that when they decided to spawn this movement.

As a white Jewish woman, I have come to understand that even as I was learning about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, I was benefitting from systemic racism. My parents may not have been able to buy a home in Garden City, L.I., where anti-Semitic policies excluded Jews, but they were welcomed in Roslyn, where they got a mortgage and built equity in a way not afforded to people of color. My prestigious high school tracked kids based on the color of their skin.

In college things did not improve. My Ivy League university was filled with kids who openly said black students only got in because of affirmative action. There were just a couple of non-white students in my graduate journalism program. I have never had a boss of color.

I may have worked hard to get where I am, but any obstacles and barriers I faced reflected gender bias, not my status as a white Jew in New York.

I believe I am still racist and that, if you are white, you probably are, too. We have been indoctrinated with biased messages our whole lives and it will take a great deal of proactive work to purge them.

I think Sarsour and Mallory know this. And yet, they still took the helm of a movement made up largely of women just like me, who tend to storm into spaces to run the show. The leadership likely found common ground through tough conversations that involved listening as much as talking. Whether or not you are white and Jewish, we should all do the same.

As we do, we would be wise to remember that people with little hope are likely to look to those offering something they desperately need. Can anyone blame a Gazan for turning to Hamas, which offers humanitarian support even as it launches rockets into Israel?

Can anyone blame Mallory for taking succor in the Nation of Islam, which embraced her after her son’s father was murdered?

Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, why not focus on Mallory’s condemnations of hate and Sarsour’s raising of tens of thousands of dollars for Jewish victims of anti-Semitism, including the Pittsburgh community? Why not bring concerns to the Women’s March before shunning it?

If we decide to walk away now, and the Women’s March and its gains fizzle, we will only have ourselves to blame.

Friedlin is a marketing executive in New York.

Grace Paley Fellowships in Mexico

http://underthevolcano.org/wp-utv/choose-your-plan/full-fellowships/

GRACE PALEY FELLOWSHIP

The Grace Paley Fellowship at Under the Volcano honors the legacy of the great writer and activist Grace Paley, whose inimitable stories gave lasting life to the immigrants, artists and visionaries of her New York and who believed in all necessary and generous change, as embodied in the title of her first collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Grace Paley was a master teacher and a member of our founding faculty, who returned to teach and read in Tepoztlán many times before her death in 2007.

This fellowship covers participation in any of our English-language master classes, the two-week follow-up extension residency, 24 nights accommodation in Tepoztlán, RT travel to and from Mexico City from the US and help with childcare expenses if applicable.

The Grace Paley Fellowship will be awarded to a woman writer of any age whose work Grace Paley would have encouraged.

This week’s New Yorker has an extended review of a new collection of stories and poems by Grace Paley. The book is co-edited by Nora Paley and Kevin Bowen. It includes a lovely photo of a young Grace.

Women of Korean Jeju Island still protesting the huge Naval Base

    Ann Wright recently visited the island, famous for its diving
fisherwomen. The U.S, military has constructed a huge naval base
 there, despite the protests of local residents. Barbara Hammer
made a film about the women divers.

Ann Wright wrote:

The South Korean Navy filed a civil lawsuit against 116 individual anti-base protesters and 5 groups including the Gangjeong Village Association demanding $3 million in compensation for alleged construction delays caused by protests. 

Samsung was the primary contractor for the $1 BILLION dollar project!! Villagers are very angry--and the village has sent up a City Hall in a tent across from the entrance to the base to express their displeasure. The Vice-Mayor holds city meetings in the tent and sleeps there!

Lawyers for the activists wrote that the navy's lawsuit is "an unjustified declaration of war against the people. When the reckless development of the state and large construction companies threaten the right of citizens to a peaceful existence, the right of citizens to oppose this must be guaranteed as their natural and constitutional right since sovereignty rests with the people. To condemn this action as illegal is to delegitimize the foundation of democracy!!"

Please call South Korean embassies and consulates to protest this blatant attempt to silence criticism of government policies and actions!!!

Granny Activists Sit In to Stop Oil Trains

SEATTLE (AP) — Hundreds of climate activists on Saturday marched to the site of two refineries in northwest Washington state to call for a break from fossil fuels, while a smaller group continued to block railroad tracks leading to the facilities for a second day.

Protesters in kayaks, canoes, on bikes and on foot took part in a massive demonstration near Anacortes, about 70 miles north of Seattle, to demand action on climate and an equitable transition away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

A day before, about 150 activists had pitched tents and set up camp on nearby railroad tracks to block the flow of oil flowing to the nearby Shell and Tesoro oil refineries.

The Overtakelessness Circus 2015

Bread and Puppet honored Emily Dickenson this year. Every year there is a writer who somehow is worked into the presentations. I recall Marx, Ernst Bloch, Marcuse and others. Of course Grace was often honored by Peter Schumann, but as far as I know, this is only the second woman who has been thus featured.

GRADUATION OF THE GRACE PALEY ORGANIZING FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS

The months of learning and community-building have flown by! This year's Grace Paley Organizing Fellowship is drawing to a close and on the evening of Sunday, May 3rd our extraordinary group of fellows will be graduating. It is a night to celebrate the fellows and their work, as well as the great tradition of Jewish community organizing they're entering.

Please Save The Date and join us for a reception and graduation ceremony:

Sunday, May 3rd
7-9pm
Location tbd (Manhattan)

RSVP to leo@jfrej.org

Symposium on Grace Paley at The New School

Grace Paley and the Disturbances of Man: Day 1

Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 10:00 am to 9:00 pm 

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall55 West 13th Street, Room I202, New York, NY 10011

The MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School for Public Engagement and the Gender Studies program at The New School present a symposium on the life and work of legendary New York social activist, poet, short story writer, and feminist Grace Paley.

Paley fought for the rights of women and minorities and protested the Vietnam War and nuclear arms proliferation. It was in her extraordinary fictional stories of ordinary lives and through her grassroots activism that she changed the social and political landscape of her day.

This symposium pays homage to Grace Paley, exploring both her legacy and the complex ways her work still resonates today. The event includes a panel on her life and writings; readings by New School writing students; and a screening of Lilly Rivlin’s documentary, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, followed by a conversation with the director. There will also be a screening of Peter Barton’s Women of ’69, Unboxed accompanied by a Class of 2015 Yearbox created by Parsons’ students. The symposium concludes with a walking tour of historically and culturally charged sites from Paley’s lifetime in Greenwich Village.

Grace Paley & the Disturbances of Man: Day 2

Friday, April 10, 2015 at 10:00 am to 2:00 pm 

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall55 West 13th Street, Room I202, New York, NY 10011

The MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School for Public Engagement and the Gender Studies program at The New School present a symposium on the life and work of legendary New York social activist, poet, short story writer, and feminist Grace Paley.

Paley fought for the rights of women and minorities and protested the Vietnam War and nuclear arms proliferation. It was in her extraordinary fictional stories of ordinary lives and through her grassroots activism that she changed the social and political landscape of her day.

This symposium pays homage to Grace Paley, exploring both her legacy and the complex ways her work still resonates today. The event includes a panel on her life and writings; readings by New School writing students; and a screening of Lilly Rivlin’s documentary, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, followed by a conversation with the director. There will also be a screening of Peter Barton’s Women of ’69, Unboxed accompanied by a Class of 2015 Yearbox created by Parsons’ students. The symposium concludes with a walking tour of historically and culturally charged sites from Paley’s lifetime in Greenwich Village.

This is the second day of the symposium, which begins on Thursday, April 9.

This event has been made possible through the generous support of Phyllis Kriegel.

Auden and Day

Beneath a craggy face the bard’s brain
pulsed with a
will to share.
Into the NBC offices he strode
with his well-known fleshy nose, angling
very slightly to the left, and the thatch
of hair curving down over his right forehead
& a very wrinkled face, sensuous and also shylike with the wrinkles in his eye corners framing
his determination
He wanted a check, on the nonce,
for his translation (with Chester Kallman) of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte
for NBC’s Opera Theatre production
in honor of his bicentennial
(born 1.27.1756 in Austria)
The Flute was broadcast 1.15.56
So W. H. must have completed it in’55
The year Dorothy Day was arrested
on June 15 for refusing to take shelter as required by law, during a nationwide Civil Defense drill
to prepare the masses for nuclear war

—a flyer handed out by Day
& her associates from the Catholic Worker June 15, 1955 at City Hall Park

The bard, crusty, publicly humble
his face rutted with difficulty


His cooking techniques cruelly satirized
in The New Yorker (later on, as I recall)
admired Dorothy Day
and signed over the check he had demanded (earlier than the contract required)
from NBC Opera Theatre
to her
perhaps to help pay for repairs to
the Catholic Worker shelter for the homeless ordered by the NYC Fire Department
(& the Fire folk perhaps also acting in reprisal for her sitting in
& getting arrested
at City Hall that June)
All Hail the Spirit of Generosity
& guilt over largess the bard was not

willing to forego gone from Earth since 1973

—Edward Sanders 
    March 2014 

From Ed's blog: http://www.woodstockjournal.com
Especially poignant is Ed's  retelling in poetry of a Chekov story which is accompanied by Jay Unger and his fiddle. https://edsanders.bandcamp.com/releases

Student Protests in Hong Kong

Protests in Hong Kong began in September 2014, after the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC) of the People's Republic of China announced its decision onproposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. In its decision, the NPCSC said that civil nominations, whereby a candidate could run for election to the Hong Kong Legislative Council if he or she received signed endorsement of 1% of the registered voters, would be disallowed. The decision stated that a 1200-member nominating committee, the composition of which remains subject to a second round of consultation, would elect two to three electoral candidates with more than half of the votes before the general public could vote on them.^[9]

Demonstrations began outside the Hong Kong Government headquarters, and members of what would eventually be called the Umbrella Movement occupied several major city intersections.^[10] The Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism began protesting outside the government headquarters on 22 September 2014 against the NPCSC's decision.^[11]On the evening of 26 September, several hundred demonstrators led by Joshua Wongbreached a security barrier and entered the forecourt of the Central Government Complex(nicknamed "Civic Square"), which was once a public space that has been barred from public entry since July 2014. Officers cordoned off protesters within the courtyard and restricted their movement overnight, eventually removing them by force the next day.^[12][13]

On 28 September, the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement announced that they would begin their civil disobedience campaign immediately.^[14] Protesters blocked both east–west arterial routes in northern Hong Kong Island near Admiralty. Police tactics (including the use of tear gas) and attacks on protesters by opponents that included triad members, triggered more citizens to join the protests, occupying Causeway Bay and Mong Kok.^[15][16][17] The number of protesters peaked at more than 100,000 at any given time.^[18][19] In a poll conducted in December, up to 20% of the 1,011 surveyed responded that they have taken part in the protests. ^[20] The government called for an end to the protests by setting a 'deadline' of 6 October, but this was ignored by protesters, although they allowed government workers to enter offices that had previously been blocked.^[21]

The state-run Chinese media claimed repeatedly that the West had played an "instigating" role in the protests, and that "more people in Hong Kong are supporting the anti-Occupy Central movement," and warned of "deaths and injuries and other grave consequences."^[22] In an opinion poll carried out by Chinese University of Hong Kong, only 36.1% of 802 people surveyed between 8–15 October accept NPCSC's decision but 55.6% are willing to accept if HKSAR Government would democratise the nominating committee during the 2nd phase of public consultation period.^[23]

On the Occasion of Grace's Birthday-----

Sienna Paley:
for my grandmother's birthday

I was in three worlds. I remember playing with these small action figures in my grandmother's living-room. The action figures would be on their farm, riding horses. My body would be distracted playing with them. Although my mind would be engaged by my grandmother, Grace playing a tune on the piano and humming.

From Duncan Nichols
Duncan, son of Bob Nichols, Grace's partner. Anyone who wants to create a yearly, other-yearly, reading for Grace (or Bob and Grace) I'd come, or I'd help organize. telephone 802 281 2692. We should be having readings of their work

Duncan's memory of life in Thetford for Grace and Bob:
I am thinking of Grace sitting in her kitchen, jotting things down. Bob is upstairs shuffling around, busy like her, at writing/tidying. Grace is sweeping small piles of house dirt, leaves, pens, bob's boot clogs, paperclips, dust, and leaving them in opportune places. Bob comes down from upstairs. He goes outside, sharpens something, dumps some ashes from the stove, brings in a bag from the car for Grace, comes back in, plunks self down and opens some letters. Grace clatters a soup pot, takes out a big block of cheddar, boils the water for tea (or Bob boils the water and Grace opens letters). Grace looks at a packet of garden seeds. "I should have planted these carrots, Bob"  "You did wonderfully, Grace." "I can't plant them now, it's so wet. It's wetter than last summer, or is it still spring." "You can plant them in the rain." "Oh YOU could and get mud all over the place, Bob."  "Did you see this letter from so and so?"   "Oh, yes, isn't that terrific."  "I remember so and so in Germany, in Sweden, in El Salvador, in Russia, in Ireland, in New York, in Burlington, in Cape Cod, in where was that?"  "it was right here."  "Oh yes, I just wanted to clean up the place, and we had no crackers... but we had cheese, we had wine, we had tea, we had photographs of the children, of the children all over the world..."  "have you seen my glasses"   "they're right here, under your sweater."  "Oh, you're so great, you know that, you're so won-der-ful."

From Bea Gates:

Two poems about Grace here from my poetry ms.,  Burying Winter, here.

“Banner” dedicated to Bob, and “Oak, November” for Grace.

Banner

for Bob

1. Bob wore salvia in his blue

    shirt's buttonhole,

    brilliant summer lasting in Grace's

    garden. Red as red can be.

2. There are three beds of salvia, flaming ovals

    at the end of the drive

    where Elsa lives on the family dairy farm

    in the old stone house next to the barn.

    She sells eggs, stacked in the deep doorway,

    and vegetables on the card table by the road, honor system.

    She laughs about her high beds of salvia--

    everyone comes up the drive to talk about them--

    "You'd think there were no more flowers in the world."

3. A banner year for salvia

    and I kept thinking as the fall wore on,

    past Grace--how she always watched the spaces between

    pulling to make room for every kind,

    how the smaller buds must miss her hand,

    zinnias popping heads and tough pale stems,

    blue pansies curling to sun without her.

    The vegetable garden just over the lip of the hill,

    tomatoes still coming, long squash, and pumpkin,

    beans gone by, and Bob tramping by, walking slowly

    looking up    at the curving line of trees

    looking down    hands in pockets

    at the thick flower tangle--

    the salvia upright

    announcing triumph

    because it knows death

    alive   alive. 

--Beatrix Gates

______________________ 

Oak, November

for Grace

There’s an oak leaf, one    caught in the latch on the door

lodged like a letter in a letter box.

It knocks slowly, eight-prongs    the wind

tips it back, head leaning away    stem like a tail,

wind knocking softly    turning over the life of a tough brown leaf.

Stronger than a grasping hand, it takes years

for the veins to dissolve to brittle lace and still not want

to search the good brown dirt.

How did it? Why did it come so near the end? The oak.

From the bathroom window,

green rubber gloves across the sash

splay fingerless in crumpled, inside-out positions.

The leaf waves again.

The handsavers grow lazier and may have to go

in the trash bucket before the next cleaning.

I study the oak      the many kinds of brown

graying and reddening oak across the clearing.

The message will open, and I will not have touched the veins.

I write a friend whose blood is not making enough

more real blood    the kind that carries what we need

to every extremity in a day.   I spill out, too much on the page.

The oak scratches a life into the soft wind.

I wanted to send word, tell her I got the message--

you don’t have forever you know.  

--Beatrix Gates

(appeared in Ploughshares)

Garrison Keillor:

It's the birthday of American short-story author Grace Paley (books by this author), born in New York City (1922). She grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx, where she was surrounded by a wide variety of languages. Her own parents spoke Yiddish and Russian at home, and English in public. She loved to hear the different tongues, and especially loved listening to all the gossip, but when she first started writing poetry, she wrote in a formal, stilted British style because she thought that's what poems were supposed to sound like. Then, in college, she met W.H. Auden and he agreed to read her work. She later recalled: "We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, 'Do you really talk like that?' And I kept saying, 'Oh yeah, well, sometimes.' That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you'd better talk your own language."

She wrote while her children were at school, and eventually moved from poetry to fiction. She wrote three stories and showed them to her friend, who happened to be married to an editor at Doubleday. He told her that if she could write seven more, he would publish the collection. Her first book was The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), and it was full of the voices of the immigrant women in her Greenwich Village neighborhood. She only wrote three books in all, but she was always busy doing something: teaching, or giving talks, or engaging in political activism.

o

From Nora Paley:

Today is my mother's birthday although she thought it was the 10th for most of her life. In this photo -a march against the Iraq War -she was feeling very weak and very determined though never stopped thinking about the lives of the grandchildren and the beauty of the world.

Joel Kovel writes:

"What sticks in my mind just now about Grace is how lightly she bore the burden of fame. There was a simplicity about her that allowed her to be directly herself and transcendently universal in the same moment. That's why I write, "just now," above: a great soul like Grace is always to be renewed. How her parents must have sensed something when they named her "Grace"!"

Susan Brooke Stapleton: 
Happy birthday Grace.... miss your beautiful spirit.

Pati Hernandez:
Happy birthday my dear friend Grace..... Always missing you, yet always with me....

Linda Elbow remembers:

"...the celebration of her being named Poet Laureate of Vermont. It took place in the Representatives Chamber of State House.  After Governor Jim Douglas introduced her, Grace stood up to speak. Douglas put behind the podium a little stool for her to stand on.

When she came to see our circuses she as always sat on the ground in the front row.

Oh, Grace!

…..What's that beautiful poem that Grace wrote about sitting outside and watching Bob work and thinking how much she loved him? There might have been a grandchild in this poem too."

Nora found it:
Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips. 

John Bell wrote:
 " I think the new Modicut Puppet Theater project Great Small Works is doing (for example our performance tomorrow night at YIVO), and our commitment to understanding activism, theater, and modern Yiddish culture, is, at heart, deeply indebted to the direct inspiration Grace has given us, individually and collectively."

Dr. John Bell

Director, Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry

Associate Professor, Dramatic Arts Department

University of Connecticut

1 Royce Circle, Suite 101B

Storrs, Connecticut  06268

bimp.uconn.edu