Warren Blumenfeld's Blog

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals

can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

The bad news is that some individual or group created a Facebook page called “Easy Bake Jew Oven” showing a child’s Easy Bake Oven with the Facebook group’s name plastered across the front, and a large menacing image of Adolph Hitler with outstretched hand pointing angrily forward.

The good news is that soon after the page’s release, people throughout the world notified others of its existence and reported its abusive content to Facebook monitors who eliminated it soon thereafter from cyberspace.

I have learned many lessons in my studies of genocides perpetrated throughout the ages. Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing stereotyping and scapegoating entire groups, while other citizens or entire nations often refuse to intervene. Everyone, not only the direct perpetrators of oppression, plays a key role in the genocidal dramas.

On a micro level, this is also apparent, for example, in episodes of schoolyard, community-based, as well as electronic forms of bullying. According to the American Medical Association definition: “Bullying is a specific type of aggression in which the behavior is intended to harm or disturb, the behavior occurs repeatedly over time, and there is an imbalance of power, with a more powerful person or group attacking a less powerful one.”

Dan Olweus, international researcher and bullying prevention specialist, enumerates the distinctive and often overlapping roles enacted in these episodes: the person or persons who perpetrate bullying; the active followers; those who passively support, condone, or collude in the aggression; the onlookers (sometimes referred to as “bystanders”); the possible defenders; those who actually defend the targets of aggression; and those who are exposed and attacked.

Each day we all are called on to make small and larger choices and to take actions. Which side are we on? This question brings to mind civil rights activist Eldridge Cleaver’s call to action: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Today as in the past, no truer words were ever uttered, for in the spectrum from occasional microaggressions to full-blown genocides, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.”

Warren J. Blumenfeld is associate professor in the School of Education at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

Conservative commentators have been quick to jump on the anti-immigration reform bandwagon by attempting to tie the recent bombing incidents in Boston to further tightening immigration policy.

For example, radio talk show host Laura Ingraham on April 22, 2013 brought up suspected brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by asking: “How is it we give asylum to people from Islamic countries or Islamic territories who are claiming they are somehow deserved of this?” She concluded: “I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11, Dagestan, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.’” http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/foreign-policy/war-terror/laura-ingraham-says-ban-immigrants-tourists-dagistan-checnya

Appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox Channel show on April 22, conservative pundit Ann Coulter said that Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, wife of slain suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, “ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab [head scarf].” Connecting the attack to immigration policy, she said that “assimilating immigrants into our culture isn’t really working. No, they’re assimilating us into their culture.” Referring again to Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, Coulter asked, “did she get a cliterectomy too?”

Hannity expanded the connections saying, “if people are coming from countries where perhaps they grew up under Sharia law, I think we can make a safe assumption that they have been radicalized.” He added, “Allowing foreign students into the country without investigative background checks that are exhaustive is a mistake, and it’s putting Americans at risk.”

Coulter argued that this attack didn’t show that we need better “tracking,” it “shows that we need better immigrants.” http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ann-coulter-uses-boston-bombing-to-tear-into-amnesty-shows-how-we-need-better-immigrants/

Ingraham, Hannity, and Coulter’s not-so-subtle Islamophobic rants pose extraordinary impediments for all who believe in religious, ethnic, and yes, racial liberty, which are  foundational mandates on which our country purports to advance.

Though the brothers immigrated to the United States from the Caucasus Mountain region of Russia, where we get the term “Caucasian,” within public discourse, their Islamic faith casts them not only as “religious other,” but more significantly, as some imagined “racialized other.” Religion in this case stands in for some illusionary physical difference.

Islamophobia can be defined as prejudice and discrimination toward the religion of Islam and Muslims who follow its teachings and practices. Islamophobia is much more than a fear, for it is a taught and often learned attitude and behavior, and, therefore, falls under the category of oppression.

To stereotype and scapegoat all followers of Islam is as invalid as blaming all Christians for the despicable actions perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who was a devout Christian.

We need to keep in mind that the notion of “race” is socially constructed. The concept of “race” arose concurrently with the advent of European exploration as a justification and rationale for conquest and domination of the globe beginning around the 15th century of the Common Era. Though “race” is a human-imposed invention, however, its implications have far reaching consequences impacting individuals and groups in profound ways.

While given the option of living in peaceful co-existence, European invaders stepped upon this land guided by the conviction that Providence destined them to expand from Atlantic to Pacific (from “sea to shining sea”) led by the so-called Anglo-Saxon “race.” This they used as justification in their unquenchable thirst for land ultimately resulting in their forced removal and physical and cultural genocide of indigenous peoples, and an unjustified imperialist-inspired war with Mexico.

“This continent,” a congressman declared, “was intended by Providence as a vast theatre on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race” (quoted in Takaki, 1993, p. 176).

The Puritans fled England for the “New World” to practice their “Purer” form of Christianity, believing God had chosen them to form “a biblical commonwealth,” which would not tolerate any separation of “church and state,” or, indeed, any religious beliefs outside their own.

The newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act in 1790 excluding all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and American Indians, the later whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years. The Congress refused to grant American Indians rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though it continued to deny Asians naturalized citizenship status.

Protestant American “Nativist” prejudices against Irish Catholics escalated in the mid-1850s when the so-called “Know Nothing” movement attempted to prevent Catholics from ascending to public office. After 1860, Irish were met with “HELP WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY” signs hanging in store windows.

Congress passed the first law specifically restricting or excluding immigrants on the basis of “race” and nationality in 1882. Attempting to eliminate entry of Chinese (and other Asian) workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to constrict their entry into the U.S. for a 10-year period, while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores. The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans.

The editor of a newspaper in Butte, Montana summarized the exclusionist sentiment regarding the Chinese held by many U.S. citizens: “The Chinaman’s life is not our life, his religion is not our religion….He belongs not in Butte” (Swartout, 1992, p. 78).

The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred zone,” including parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russian, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.

Fearing a continued influx of immigrants, legislators in the U.S. Congress in 1924 enacted an anti-immigration law (Origins Quota Act, or National Origins Act) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, specifically Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slaves (so-called “PIGS” groups viewed as representing Europe’s lower “races”), including Jews (the later referred to as members of the so-called “Hebrew race,” considered the lowest of all the European “races”). The law, however, permitted large allocations of immigrants from Great Britain and Germany.

In addition, the law included a clause prohibiting entry of “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which was veiled language referring to Japanese and other Asians dating back to the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricting citizenship to only “white” people and affirmed by a 1922 U. S. Supreme Court ruling (Takao Ozawa v United States) in which the government denied Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant, the right to become a naturalized citizen because he “clearly” was “not Caucasian.”

Congress, in 1939, refused to pass an emergency measure, the Wagner-Rogers Act, which would have permitted entry of 20,000 children, primarily Jewish, from Eastern Europe over existing quotas. According to Laura Deleno Houghteling, cousin of F.D.R. and wife of the U.S. commissioner of immigration, who spoke out against the proposed legislation: “20,000 charming children would, all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

The 1952 the McCarran-Walters Act overturned the 1924 law. Later, framed as an amendment to McCarran-Walters, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural origins” as the basis for U.S. immigration. The 1965 law increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds.

Horace Kallen, a Jewish immigrant and sociologist of Polish and Latvian heritage coined the term “cultural pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he considered inherently undemocratic. Kallen envisioned a United States in the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.

Returning to today, if we learn anything from our immigration legislative history, we can view the current debates as providing a great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,” nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion, and equity. We have a wonderful chance now to avoid the mistakes of the past.

References:

Swartout, R. R., Jr. (1992). From Kwangtung to the big sky: The Chinese experience in frontier Montana. In R. R. Swartout, Jr. & H. W. Fritz (Eds.), Montana heritage: An anthology of historical essays (pp. 63-82). Helena: Montana Historical Society.

Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little Brown.

Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

“If the Jew did not exist, the Anti-Semite would invent [them].” Jean Paul Satre, Anti-Semite and Jew.

 Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich

Seventy years ago on 15 Nisan 5703 on the Jewish calendar (or 19 April 1943, Gregorian calendar), the struggle for survival against insurmountable odds began as thousands of Jewish resistance fighters staged a daring uprising within the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. As we commemorate this foundational historic event, on 15 Nisan 5773, a gleaming monument and museum, Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich (Museum of the History of Polish Jews) opened its doors on this historic site in Warsaw to honor the memory of the heroic Jews and righteous rescuers throughout Poland who fought and suffered incredible terror and as a testament to their indomitable spirit and courage. As I sat reading of this new museum, reflections of my Polish family’s connections to the German Holocaust and my own travels to Poland swirled in my mind.

Background

One day, when I was very young, I sat upon my maternal grandfather Simon (Szymon) Mahler’s knee. Looking down urgently but with deep affection, he said to me through his distinctive Polish accent, “Varn, you are named after my father, your great-grandfather, Wolf Mahler. I lived in Krosno, Poland with my father, Wolf, and my mother, Bascha, and 13 brothers and sisters, and aunts, uncles, and cousins.”

Simon talked about our mishpocheh (family) with pride, but as he told me this, he exhibited an obvious sadness on his face. I asked him if our family still lived in Poland, and he responded that his father, mother, and most of the remainder of his family were no longer alive. When I asked him how they had died, he told me that they had all been killed by people called Nazis. I questioned him why the Nazis killed our family, and he responded, “Because they were Jews.” Those words have reverberated in my mind, haunting me ever since.

Simon left Krosno in 1912 bound for New York City, leaving Wolf, Bascha, and nine of his siblings. Already in this country were one brother and three sisters. He arrived in the United States on New Years’ Eve in a city filled with gleaming lights and frenetic activity, and with his own heart filled with hope for a new life.

Simon returned to Krosno with my grandmother, Eva, in 1932 to a joyous homecoming. This was the first time he had seen his family since he left Poland. He took with him an early home movie camera to record them on film. While in Poland, he promised that once back in the United States, he would try to earn enough money to send for his remaining family members who wished to come to the United States. History, however, was to thwart his plans. During that happy reunion, he had no way of knowing that this was to be the last time he would ever see the members of his family alive. Just seven years later, on 1 September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland.

Simon heard the news sitting in the kitchen of his home in Brooklyn, New York. He was so infuriated, so frightened, and so incensed that he took the large radio from the table, lifted it above his head, and violently hurled it against a wall. He knew what this invasion meant. He knew it signaled the end of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe as he had known it. He knew it meant certain death for people he had grown up with, people he had loved, and people who had loved him.

Simon’s fears soon became real. He eventually learned from a brother who had eventually escaped into the woods with his wife and young son that a number of his siblings were killed by Nazi troops either on the streets of Krosno or up a small hill in the Jewish cemetery. Other friends and relatives were eventually loaded onto cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz and Balzec concentration camps.

Jews of Krosno, Poland

Jews migrated to the Krosno region during the fifteenth century CE, and by 1938 numbered 2700, or 18.5 percent of the town’s population. Prior to the Nazi invasion, the Jewish population in Poland numbered around 3 million. Today, only about 10 thousand Jews reside in Poland.

The Galicia governor granted Krosno’s Jews the right to organize their community (kehillah) on January 1, 1900. Subsequently, a number of Jewish stores opened, including butcher shops, fish stores, and bakeries. By 1906, two baking families, Selig Findling and Chaim Oling, ran shops. Three Jewish slaughterhouses opened owned by Fulka Breitowitz, Moses Breitowicz, and my great-grandfather Wolf Mahler. The kehillah hired Shmuel Fuehrer in 1904, their first and only rabbi. Fuehrer earlier served as rabbi in Milowka and Krakow. He also functioned as head of the Jewish judicial council of Krosno, and he consecrated Krosno’s Jewish Cemetery.

I have long believed that before the end of my days, for me to be able to say that I have truly accomplished all I needed to accomplish in this world, I must travel back to Krosno. I wanted to walk upon the soil my mishpocheh once walked upon, to witness the hallowed ground on which they prayed, and to feel the Polish sun nurturing me as it had once nurtured and illuminated them—that same sun which the Nazis eclipsed from my family all too soon.

So, in the summer of 2008, I traveled to Krosno. I took with me a DVD version of the film Simon and Eva took in 1932. Upon approaching the town of Krosno from the bus I rode from Krakow, I felt as though I were returned back home to a place I have never previously been. I checked into my hotel room, and then walked around the town, this beautiful place with its narrow streets and charming buildings, rolling hills, small factories, and bustling train station – that same station I recognized from the film I had grown up watching.

Then I saw it, and as I did, tears came to my eyes. I was at the entrance of Market Square, the same square Simon filmed in 1932 as happy family members and other residents of Krosno shopped open air surrounded by horse-drawn carriages and vendors’ kiosks selling fresh produce and Kosher meats of all varieties. Though this time no outdoor vendors could be seen, I sat down upon a small bench and took in the sweet smells of fragrant flowers and vibrant pines wafting around me. The beautiful ancient buildings transported me back to a happy time when family members walked peacefully and unencumbered on these same plaza grounds. I reached down beside me and picked up a small stone of remembrance.

Walking a very short distance off Market Square, I chanced upon a local museum, Muzeum Podkarpackie w Krosnie (which I later learned is translated in English as Subcarpathian Museum of Krosno). I entered and asked the first person I met whether anyone spoke English. The person departed momentarily, and returned with Lucas Klopot, a young man who worked at the Museum.

I introduced myself, and informed him that I had a film of the Jewish community taken by my grandparents, Simon and Eva Mahler, back in 1932. I inquired whether he would like to view the film. With a look of surprise, he assured me that he would be delighted. Upon viewing the film downstairs on his office computer, he continued to alternate looking at the film to looking at me. He suddenly paused the film and collected his colleagues who watched in shocked astonishment. One colleague shared with the others that “This is the greatest documentation I have ever seen of Krosno’s Jewish community.” Simon and Eva Mahler’s 1932 film portrayed the town of Krosno, and in particular, the Mahler family. This rare film I learned is the oldest film of the town known to exist.

The following day, Lucas introduced me to Katarzyna (Kasia) Krepulec-Nowak, local historian and assistant director of the museum who kindly gave me an English-language tour of this beautiful museum. Before I had to depart Krosno for my trip home, Muzeum Podkarpackie w Krosnie Director, Dr. Jan Gancarski, presented me with a certificate of appreciation.

I knew instantly that Kasia and I would be good friends. This was confirmed when Kasia and Lucas organized a Jewish exhibit at the Museum in September 2010 profiling the Mahler family, with the film as its cornerstone. And in their continuing efforts to recover and preserve Jewish history and to reconcile and heal from a tragic past, Kasia organized, aided by Lucas and Dr. Jan Gancarski, their “Jewish Day” Exhibit, January 16, 2011. Kasia extended a gracious invitation to me to travel back to Krosno to present the Keynote address at this historic event. My cousins, Bernard (Bert) Cohen from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Rabbi Gary Tishkoff, from Israel joined me on the trip.

“Jewish Day”

I connected with Bert at Logan Airport in Boston for a nice dinner before our flight, Thursday, January 13, 2011. Bert and I connected with Gary at the Krakow, Poland airport where he arrived from his home in Israel. Early Saturday, January 15, 2011, we took a cab to the Krakow bus station where we boarded a (very) small van/bus to Krosno.

My new best friend, Kasia, met us at the bus terminal. During the night of the event, Director Dr. Jan Gancarski opened the evening by stating that “Jewish Day” was established in 1997 and is celebrated annually usually on January 17^th, and it falls on the eve of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  Fr. Waldemar Janiga then led the assembled in a prayer of religious understanding and unity. Though the Museum auditorium holds approximately 125 people, an estimated 650 people tried to attend the “Jewish Day” event. Sadly, over 500 people had to be turned away.

Kasia followed by engaging the audience in a guided visualization developed from her extensive genealogical and historical research. She began by saying: “Our exhibition is called ‘Brothers,’ [neighbors] and it is not an exhibition about the death of people. It is about their lives. Along with our neighbors, we created the world, far from perfect. This exhibition is an invitation to walk through pre-war Krosno.”

Wearing my grandfather Simon’s antique tallit (Jewish prayer shawl) and a beautifully embroidered kippah (Jewish skull cap), a gift Gary brought me from Israel, I presented my remarks, translated by a woman coincidently also named Kasia Nowak (“Smith” in Polish). I read a personal statement I called my “Letter to My Great-Grandparents of Krosno, Poland.”

Following my talk, Gary recited and Kasia translated kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead. Before the prayer, Gary eloquently explained this tradition and added personal reflections about what this prayer means to him.

Lucas screened the film, and members of the audience sat transfixed as they witnessed the sights of their town during a time long passed. Some pointed to familiar landmarks. Others spotted possible relatives in the old Market Square. Some were visibly moved, tears streaming down their cheeks.

The program came to a stirring conclusion with the brilliant sounds of the Rzeszow Klezmer Band as Lucas ran the Mahler family film one final time. I was particularly touched when two students asked to take a picture with me. Kasia Krepulec-Nowak translated that they are currently writing their thesis paper focusing on the Mahler family of Krosno, which made me so proud and very optimistic for the future of Jewish/Polish relations.

Dynamic & Palpable Tension

When we first arrived in Poland, after checking into our hotel in Krakow, Gary, Bert, and I explored the area around the hotel. Within one block, we found disturbing graffiti spray painted on an apartment building, which was obviously anti-Jewish in tone, especially the words spelled out in English “Hitler Rules,” and the words “Jebac Żydów” (which we later learned means “Fuck the Jews”), and a Star of David enclosed within a circle, written in red and later spray painted over in black.

During our bus ride to Krosno, we engaged in some very intensive discussions including what we were feeling as Jews in Poland. A young Polish man seated in front of us named Pawel asked if he could join in our conversation. He provided us with a very interesting and informative snapshot of contemporary Polish/Jewish relations.

He informed us that while Polish anti-Jewish attitudes most certainly endure in the larger Polish society, many Poles see that their homeland culture has been diminished, and that it is not as rich and vibrant with so few Jews remaining in Poland, from approximately three million before the Nazi invasion to about only ten thousand today. Pawel explained to us that while this graffiti has a very complicated explanation (coming somewhat from a sports team rivalry), it can be seen as a visible example of the tensions currently underway in Polish society in coming to terms with its past and how it moves forward.

Many young people of the current generation like himself are working to ensure a brighter future for Jews in Poland. Pawel, who stated that he is not Jewish himself, worked for a few years at the Jewish Museum in Krakow because he is motivated to learn as much as he can about Polish Jewish history and culture.

No Jews have resided in Krosno or in the surrounding Subcarpathian region of southeastern Poland since the 1940s. Since then, a dynamic tension has developed between those, especially in many of the older generations, who bask in the monoculturalism evidenced by the longstanding Polish Catholic cultural heritage. Others, though, composed of many in the younger generations born during the past few decades, yearn for an earlier time in Polish history, one where many cultural traditions mingled and enriched the overall national culture.

During crises, some individuals step up with extraordinary courage, thinking not so much about the dangers to themselves but, rather, of their responsibilities to save humanity to the best of their abilities. History records a legion of the righteous who rescued those targeted for the horrors of certain death. Among this legion includes the famous like Oskar Schlinder, Meep Gies, Cory ten Boom, as well as the not-so-famous.

Though tragedy befell the Jewish community in my ancestral homeland, some people took and are continuing to engage in acts of courage, kindness, and compassion. In the midst of danger, righteous rescuers came to the aid of those who were oppressed.

For example, Krosno farmers, Jakub and Zofia Gargasz, who were Seventh Day Adventists, risked their own lives to shelter from Nazi troops and to nurse back to health a Jewish woman, Henia Katz, and her daughter. A neighbor, though, betrayed them, and Jakub, Zofia, Henia, and her daughter were arrested and sentenced to death on April 26, 1944. At the trial, Zofia affirmed that she and her husband took this courageous action motivated by their religious faith.

Hans Frank, the governor of the occupied Central Polish government decided to commute their death sentences to incarceration in a concentration camp. Jakub and Zofia survived the concentration camp, which the Allies liberated. Nazi soldiers, however, murdered Henia and her daughter.

Following the war, Jews no longer resided in Krosno. Subsequently, the Jewish cemetery fell into disarray. In 2002, local students from the Olszówka association, working under the energetic and compassionate leadership of Grzegorz Bożek — a local teacher and activist with the ecology organization “Workshop for All Beings” — restored the Jewish cemetery in Krosno. They removed decades of overgrown weeds, cleared bushes, restored the cemetery gate, hung new informational plaques, and preserved about 200 gravestones. The Krosno Jewish Cemetery is now considered one of the best kept Jewish cemeteries in all of Poland because people care and because people want to ensure a brighter future.

I also place in the category of “rescuers” the good people of the Muzeum Podkarpackie w Krosnie, especially Katarzyna Krepulec-Nowak and Lucas Klopot. They and all of their colleagues work tirelessly to rescue a vital part of history in keeping memories alive and in educating new generations.

Kasia is a remarkable woman, a woman with a gentle soul and a loving heart, a woman who has dedicated her life to bring out the best in people, and who is working to have us all face our past. She is living Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words: “If you want peace, work for justice.”

“Kasia,” I asked following “Jewish Day,” “what motivates you to do the pioneering work you are doing here in Krosno, especially with the subtle and not-so-subtle resistance you often face?” Without hesitation, and with her typical modesty, she told me that though she does not consider herself a pioneer, “There is much evil here, and as a mother of a three-year-old, I must do what I can to work for a better world for my son.” As Kasia proves, one does not have to be Jewish to practice the Jewish tenet of Tikkun Olam: the transformation, healing, and repairing of the world so that it becomes a more just, peaceful, nurturing, and perfect place.

Recently, a young man, also named Pawel, one of the initial students to volunteer a decade ago in the rehabilitation of the Jewish cemetery, contacted me:

“I think our motivation to do this at that point was very different for each of us, in my case it had mostly to do with the questions: what happened here some 50-60 years ago? Our neighbors were erased, like their whole civilization was — why only so few people would talk (not saying of commemorating) about it? Why no one admits their grief? And loss? You could sense this tension all around, like in many other Polish towns, I guess. And just imagine, cleaning this abandoned Jewish cemetery had something counter-cultural in it, it really had. It was an act against the silent mainstream (and often against their anti-Semitic reactions).”

Pawel now lives in Austria with his wife and young son, as he wrote, “with its vibrant Jewish community, ranging from ultra-orthodox to leftist intellectuals. I enjoy this fact very much and wish that Poland would someday become such a place of diversity too.”

The Time of Crushed Memories

During the summer of 2012, Grzegorz Bożek contacted me to attend a series of events he was helping to organize in Krosno, “The Time of Crushed Memories,” to take place October 10-11, 2012 in commemoration of the 70^th anniversary of the annihilation of the approximately 2700 Jews of Krosno. The intent of the series was as a teaching opportunity for the residents of Krosno, young and older alike, to learn and understand more about their former Jewish neighbors.

Scheduled events included a series of workshops for high school students on Jewish culture including the basics of the Hebrew language and calligraphy, dance, and music, plus a memorial service held on the grounds of the Jewish Cemetery by the chief Polish rabbi from Krakow, Michael Schudrich, and attended by Krosno’s mayor, Piotr Przytocki, and U. S. Ambassador to Poland, Ellen Germain. In addition, local high school students were scheduled to perform a play profiling the Jews of their town of Krosno composed of three acts: the Jewish community prior to World War II, the Nazi invasion, and the decimation of the Jewish population of Krosno. Since virtually no Jews remain in southeastern Poland, Polish Catholic residents comprised all of the organizers, performers, and most of the participants.

So I traveled to Poland a third time. While there and after talking with a number of Polish residents, I had the opportunity to reflect and come to a greater understanding of the social and political climate for contemporary Jews in Poland, or at least in the Subcarpathian region of southeastern Poland.

One resident told me that many people in Poland believe the stereotypes that Jews control global banking, that we are inferior human beings (lower “racial” forms), that we insinuate ourselves into the body politic as the puppet masters manipulating governmental leaders, and that we killed their Lord Jesus.

In Europe, by the late 19th century CE, Judaism had come to be viewed by the scientific community as a distinct “racial” type with essential immutable biological characteristics — a trend that increased markedly into the early 20th century CE. Once seen as largely a religious, ethnic, or political group, Jews were increasingly socially constructed as members of a “mixed race” (a so-called “mongrel” or “bastard race”), a people who had crossed racial barriers by interbreeding with Black Africans during the Jewish Diaspora. Many thought that if Jews were evil, then this evilness was genetic and could not be purged or cured. Therefore, converting Jews to Christianity, as once believed by many Christian leaders, could no longer answer “the Jewish question.”

The U.S.-American writer, Madison Grant (1865-1937) codified this supposed “racialization” of the Jews in his influential book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916). He argued that Europeans comprised four distinct races: The “Nordics” of northwestern Europe sat atop Grant’s racial hierarchy, whom he considered as the natural rulers and administrators who accounted for England’s “extraordinary ability to govern justly and firmly the lower races” (p. 207). The “Nordics” were what the Nazi regime termed the “Master Race” and a branch of which was the “Aryan race,” the ideal and “pure” and “original” racial stock called during the 19th and early 20th centuries “Proto-Aryans” (Widney, 1907). Next down the racial line fell the “Alpines” whom Grant referred to as “always and everywhere a race of peasants” with a tendency toward “democracy” although submissive to authority (p. 227). These were followed by the “Mediterraneans” of Southern and Eastern Europe, inferior to both the Nordics and the Alpines in “bodily stamina” but superior in “the field of art.” Also, Grant considered the Mediterraneans as superior to the Alpines in “intellectual attainments,” but far behind the Nordics “in literature and in scientific research and discovery” (p. 229). On the bottom of this hierarchy, he placed the most inferior of all the European so-called races: the Jews. Referring specifically to the Polish Jew, Grant asserted that “…the Polish Jews, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest…” (p. 16), present themselves in “swarms” (p. 63).

Analogous to the notion in the United States that “one drop” of “Black African” blood makes a person Black, according to Grant (1916): “The result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient generalization and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian, the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro, the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu, and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (p. 18).

Grant’s book was translated into German and provided added justification to Adolph Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf (Brace, 2005). Hitler wrote to Grant and referred to Grant’s book as his “Bible” (Kühl, 1994, p. 85).

According to Jewish historian Sander Gilman (1991), Jews were not considered as White during much of U.S. history as well, but rather they were often seen as being Asian or “Mongoloid” and were considered primitive and tribal. Gilman also found that Jews were constructed as the “white Negroes” by prevailing dominant discourses in European society: “In the eyes of the non-Jew who defined them in Western [European] society the Jews became the blacks” (Gilman in Thandeka, 1999, p. 37). Thandeka added that “the male Jew and the male African were conceived of as equivalent threats to the white race” (p. 37).

Said one resident of Krosno to me, “This is the way my brother-in-law sees all Jews as a lower race and as killers of Christ,” she said, “at least until I introduced him to you Warren. You are the first Jew he ever met. Today, as he drove me into town, we had the first rational conversation about you and about Jews in general that was not shrouded with insulting and demeaning stereotypes about Jews. Your mere presence enabled him to see you as a human being, a compassionate human being, and not as the evil, scornful, and corrupting image he carried in his head all his life.”

Following our discussion, the next day I walked from the Hotel Twist where I was staying to the Krosno Cultural Center for the 70^th anniversary commemoration and the student performance. I placed my colorful embroidered kippah my cousin Gary had given me firmly upon my head as if it were a bejeweled crown. I held back my shoulders, pulled my head upward as if a cord were uplifting my body, and while no Jews remain in Krosno to promenade down its boulevards and winding pathways, I walked proudly down Krosno streets caring not whether bystanders gazed with admiration or with scorn, with curiosity or contempt, or even with no attitude at all. I walked in pride to honor Wolf and Bascha and the 2700 others whom the Nazis took from us.

Two event organizers greeted me upon my approach to the Krosno Cultural Center. Organizers bedecked the Cultural Center with contemporary photographs of members of Krakow’s Hassidic Jewish population taken by photographer Robert Podkulski. Also evident were portraits of earlier Jewish residents of Krosno prior to the Nazi invasion, as well as sacred Jewish objects. A beautifully decked out table of elegant Polish pastries welcomed visitors to the exhibit.

As I stood fixed on one of the photographs talking to my new friend, Robin Chasse, a teacher at one of the high schools in Krosno and also a volunteer in the renovation of the Jewish cemetery, two young high school women standing only yards away, I would estimate to be 15 or 16 years old, gazed at me, pointing and giggling. I looked over in their direction wearing a friendly smile, and I said “hello.” This simple gesture intensified their giggles as they literally ran away squealing something in Polish. I assume they had never been in the presence of a Jewish person prior to this experience, and I must have appeared as a foreign and strange curiosity. This confirmed what I had been told that Jews of Krosno today are about as common as the mythical unicorn.

Students from the Zespol Szkol Ponadgimnazjalnych (Team Secondary School) no. 5 in Krosno performed a moving tribute, “Went Away By Shadow…” to their former neighbors, the Jews of Krosno, written by history teacher, Piotr Zych, from their school. Watching this play performed by these eager, fresh-faced, compassionate, and passionate young people, some decked out in Jewish holy tallits and kippahs, singing in Polish and in Hebrew, commemorating my mishpocheh and all the former Jews of my ancestral village, my tears fell unrestrained. During their bows, some looked my way, our eyes locking in profound understanding and appreciation.

The evening concluded with a Skype interview with 89-year-old Alexander Bialywlos (White), a resident of Krosno during his youth. Currently a retired physician living in Arizona with his wife, Dr. Bialywlos escaped certain death through the righteous efforts of Oskar Schlinder. He talked of his happy youth spent in Krosno, and of the terrible times during the Nazi occupation, and his remarkable rescue. Following the war, he immigrated to the United States, studied medicine, and raised a family. Hitler had not succeeded in his diabolical plan for the total annihilation of European Jewry.

[Not A] Conclusion

Rescue comes in many forms, from physically saving individuals, and also resurrecting, saving, and maintaining Jewish history and culture from the cold ash heaps of time. What happens here in Poland circulates around and through my consciousness and my soul like blood circulates around and through my body.

On my last day in Krosno on my current trip, I walked casually around the town. On one of the main streets, I recognized a small jewelry shop where I had purchased an amber pendent for my mother Blanche Mahler Blumenfeld in 2008. This time I went into the shop to look for an amber ring for myself. (Poland is renowned for its silver and amber jewelry.) As I perused the glass cabinet at the front of the store, I looked upward and saw a picture hanging on the wall of what appeared to me to be a Hassidic Jew, with long white beard and large kippah above his flowing side locks.

Taking me by complete surprise, I asked the owner, “Is that a Jew?” He responded, “Yes, it is.” The young women employee standing beside him, with a broad smile suddenly appearing on her face, looking my way said, “Yes, money, money,” rubbing together the thumb and index finger of her right hand. I then noticed in the picture that the Jewish man held a large coin in his right hand.

I bought the ring, but I left the shop with a tense uneasiness in my stomach. That evening at dinner, I asked Kasia what this image in the shop meant. She expressed to me what I had anticipated, that the image represented and exemplified the stereotype of the “rich Jew.” A number of Polish merchants place this picture in their shops not in support or appreciation of Jewish people, but, rather, as a symbol in hopes of acquiring wealth and riches. She added that while Krosno is a good place to live, to work, and to raise a family, Krosno in particular and the larger country of Poland more generally, is a good place to reside “if one is not different.”

I recently looked up the word “holocaust” in the dictionary. Among the listings was the definition: “genocidal slaughter.” As I read this, the same nagging questions came to me as they did that first day Simon told me about the death or our family members, questions concerning the very nature of human aggression, our ability for compassion, and, to those generations following World War II, our capacity to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

I know that Jews will return to Poland one day in great numbers, for we have long been part of Polish life and Polish culture, a culture that has diminished and I believe weakened since our loss. We will return one day, and when we do, we will enrich the Polish nation once again. For me, the next time I travel to Poland, I will make it a point to visit Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich.

References

Brace, C. L. (2005). “Race” is a four-letter word: The genesis of the concept. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gilman, S. L. (1991). The Jew’s body. New York: Routledge.

Grant, M. (1916). The passing of the great race. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons.

Hitler, A. (1943). Main Kampf (My Struggle). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kühl, S. (1994). The Nazi connection: Eugenics, American racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Satre, J. P. (1944). Anti-Semite and Jew: An explanation of the etiology of hate. France: Editions Morihien

Thandeka. (1999). The cost of whiteness. Tikkun, 14(3), 33-38.

Widney, J. P. (1907). Race life of the Aryan peoples. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

Warren J. Blumenfeld is associate professor in the School of Education at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

As we approach Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day on 27 Nisan (Jewish calendar), April 7 this year (Gregorian calendar), I reflect upon my familial history: two scenarios with somewhat varied outcomes.

When I was a young child, I sat upon my maternal grandfather Simon Mahler’s knee. Looking down urgently, but with deep affection, he said to me, “Varn,” (through his distinctive Polish accent, he pronounced my name “Varn”), “you are named after my father, Wolf Mahler, who was killed by the Nazis along with my mother Bascha and most of my thirteen brothers and sisters.” When I asked why they were killed, he responded, “Because they were Jews.” Those words have reverberated in my mind, haunting me ever since.

We later learned that Nazi troops forced Wolf and nine of his siblings into the desecrated Jewish cemetery in their village of Krosno and others to the woods surrounding Krosno, shot them, and tossed their lifeless bodies into mass unmarked graves along with over twenty-one hundred other Jewish residents. (Bascha died in 1934, thus sparing her of the Nazi onslaught.) The Nazis eventually loaded the remaining Jews of Krosno onto cattle cars and transported them to Auschwitz and Belzec death camps. The handful of Krosno Jews who survived liberation of the camps attempted to return to their homes that had been confiscated by the non-Jewish residents. When they returned, however, Polish citizens who had taken their property refused to relinquish it back to the Jewish owners. No Jews reside in the area today.

More recently, on a snowy February morning in 2002, while in my university office organizing materials for that day’s classes, I received an email message that would forever poignantly and profoundly change my life. A man named Charles Mahler had been looking for descendents of the Mahler family of Krosno, Poland, and he had come across an essay I had written focusing on Wolf and Bascha Mahler.

Charles informed me that he had survived the German Holocaust along with his sister, parents, and maternal grandparents and uncle, but the Nazis murdered his father’s parents (Jacques and Anja Mahler), sister, and her two children, and other relatives following Hitler’s invasion and occupation of Belgium, their adopted home country.

My cousin Charles related their story in hiding from August 1942 until the final armistice in Europe. His father, Georg, altered the family’s identity papers from Jewish to Christian, and they abandoned Antwerp for what they considered the relative safety of the Belgium countryside. During their plight, members of the Belgium resistance movement and other righteous Christians shepherded them throughout the remainder of the war to three separate locations as the German Gestapo followed closely at their heels. On a number of occasions, they successfully “passed” as Christian directly under the watchful gaze of unsuspecting Nazis.

Though the majority of Jewish inhabitants of Antwerp ultimately perished, many survived.  However, at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel) one will observe “Krosno” chiseled into the glass and the stone walls listing towns and villages where Nazis and their sympathizers decimated entire Jewish communities.

I have learned many lessons in my studies of genocides perpetrated throughout the ages. Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing stereotyping and scapegoating entire groups, while other citizens or entire nations often refuse to intervene. Everyone, not only the direct perpetrators of oppression, plays a key role in the genocide dramas.

On a micro level, this is also apparent, for example, in episodes of schoolyard, community-based, as well as electronic forms of bullying. According to the American Medical Association definition: “Bullying is a specific type of aggression in which the behavior is intended to harm or disturb, the behavior occurs repeatedly over time, and there is an imbalance of power, with a more powerful person or group attacking a less powerful one.”

Dan Olweus, international researcher and bullying prevention specialist, enumerates the distinctive and often overlapping roles enacted in these episodes: the person or persons who perpetrate bullying; the active followers; those who passively support, condone, or collude in the aggression; the onlookers (sometimes referred to as “bystanders”); the possible defenders; those who actually defend the targets of aggression; and those who are exposed and attacked.

One piece of my family puzzle met a tragic end, another partial segment survived. In both instances, the bystanders determined the balance of power: in Krosno, they conspired with the oppressors, while in Antwerp, they dug deeply within themselves transitioning from bystanders into courageous, compassionate, and empathetic upstanders in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Each day we all are called on to make small and larger choices and to take actions. At a homecoming dance at Richmond High School in California on October 27 last fall, for example, up to ten young men grabbed a 14-year-old young woman who had been waiting outside the dance for her father, dragged her behind a building, and gang rapped her for over two and one-half hours with approximately ten witnesses observing. Some even cheered on the attackers. No one notified the police. The perpetrators left the young woman in critical condition.

Which side are we on? This question brings to mind civil rights activist Eldridge Cleaver’s call to action: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Today as in the past, no truer words were ever uttered, for in the spectrum from occasional microaggressions to full-blown genocide, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.”

Warren J. Blumenfeld is associate professor in the School of Education at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

What do Reince Priebus and Timothy Dolan have in common?

Mr. Reince Priebus, Chair of the Republican National Committee, has been attempting to “rebrand” the Republican Party, and Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Catholic Archbishop of New York, is attempting to “rebrand” the Catholic Church as both of these institutions — one political and one religious (well, maybe both political and both religious) — continue to experience a precipitous exodus by former advocates, supporters, and believers (who we can now call “leavers”).

If the last series of national elections indicate anything, with the Republican Party losing the popular vote in 5 out of the last 6 contests, the Party has enormous problems if it wishes to extricate itself from the endangered political species list.

During the 2012 presidential campaign alone, the Republicans lost seats in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, with the overall national Electoral College vote going to Mr. Obama over Mr. Romney by a margin of 332 to 206. The Democrats garnered nearly 5 million more votes than the Republicans. Except for older white men and people whose incomes toped $50,000 annually, the Republicans lost most other demographic groups. For example, Democrats won women voters by 55% to the Republicans 44%, voters ages 18-29 60%, 30-44 52%, urban voters 62%, black voters 93%, Latino/a voters 71%, Asian voters 73%, and voters whose annual income was below $50,000 voted for the Democrats by a margin of 60% to 38% for the Republicans. Of the 5% of voters who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, approximately 75% voted for Mr. Obama. (America Goes To the Polls 2012: A Report on Voter Turnout in the 2012 Election by Nonprofit Vote).

Regarding the Catholic Church, poll after poll has found that the papacy is out-of-step with its increasingly shrinking U.S. flock. On the topic of abortion, 55% of U.S. Catholics do not want the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision overturned, 67% favor pre-marital sex, 71% approve of divorce, and 54% consider same-sex relations as morally acceptable  (Pew Research Center, January 2013) while 59% favor marriage equality for same-sex couples (Public Religion Research Institute, 2012), 82% approve of birth control, (Gallup, May 2012), 63% sanction medical research using stem cells obtained from human embryos (Gallup, March 2009), and 59% support ordination of women (NYT/CBS, 2010).

In addition, according to Rainer Research, approximately 70% of young people between the age of 18 and 22 leave the Church, and the Barna Group found that about 80% of people brought up in the Church will “disengage” by the time they reach 29 years of age. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/november/27.40.html

Priebus and Dolan both acknowledge the challenges to their institutions, and both came up with virtually similar solutions: change the messaging.

Chair Priebus, appearing on the CBS program, “Face the Nation,” Sunday, March 17, 2013, when asked by host Bob Schieffer “what went wrong” in the last election, Priebus asserted: “We have to relate things to people’s lives. We have to win the math war, which we do a good job of but we’re going to have to learn how to learn the heart war, and that’s what in presidential elections, what is plaguing our party.”

Priebus is now calling for fewer primary campaign debates, earlier national conventions in either June or July during election years, and in particular, initiating better public relations efforts by placing paid “outreach employees” within communities – specifically the rapidly growing voting blocs of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino/as on an ongoing basis “to make the case for our party and our candidates,” he explained to Bob Schieffer. These paid marketing consultants will also target campuses, including historically black colleges and universities.

Chair Priebus recently released a report providing a post-mortem of the 2012 presidential election, and offering “solutions” for the GOP to move forward. The report, called the “Growth and Opportunity Project” argued that “We need to do a better job connecting people to our policies….If we believe our policies are the best ones to improve the lives of the American people, all the American people, our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking to the normal people, people-oriented terms, and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case. We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate that we care about them too” (p. 7).

Archbishop Dolan, also appearing on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” on Easter Sunday, March 31, 2013, told host Bob Schieffer that he acknowledges the challenging facing the Catholic Church and concluded that “I think while we can’t tamper with what God has revealed [read as policies of the Catholic Church],…we can try to do better in the way we present them, with more credibility and in a more compelling way.”

Dolan expressed his excitement over the recent election of Pope Francis, “because what he’s trying to do I think in a very natural, spontaneous way is to restore the luster to the church, return to those biblical values of utter simplicity, of sincerity, of service, almost a no-frills religion, and that resonates with people.” http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57577177/face-the-nation-transcripts-march-31-2013-religion-and-politics-on-easter-sunday/?pageNum=2

For the Republican Party and the worldwide Catholic Church to have any future, all the public relations efforts and attempts to “restore the luster” will ultimately fail to attract voters and followers unless and until these institutions significantly reevaluate and change their policies, dismantle their patriarchal oligarchic dictatorial hierarchies, and connect truthfully and effectively to the lived experiences of real people.

Leaders in both institutions are fooling themselves if they think that merely presenting diverse faces and voices and using simple language to reach “normal people” will lead them to victory. To remain viable, the GOP and the Church must craft a diversity of thought and a diversity of policies to give people something to vote for and something to believe in, something to embrace, something that makes peoples’ lives better, instead of merely rehashing the policies of the past simply presented in a box with pretty wrapping paper and a bow.

Maybe then and only then will the Republican Party and the Catholic Church save itself from itself.

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice, co-editor of Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States, editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price, and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.

Appearing on Piers Morgan’s program on CNN, Thursday, March 28, 2013, Evangelical Christian minister, Franklin Graham, son of renowned minister Billy Graham, explained the reason behind his resolute opposition to marriage for same-sex couples:

“It’s what God says, Piers. God is the one who defined marriage, not government, but it’s God. And it’s between one man and one woman. So, to come and try to redefine what God has ordained, and what God has blessed, and what God has given, would be a great mistake for our government and a great mistake for this nation.”

Graham’s words sound eerily similar to those of a trial judge in the not-to-distant past:

The defendants in the case were Mildred Loving (born Mildred Deloris Jetter, a woman of African descent) and Richard Perry Loving (a man of White European descent), both residents of Virginia who married in June 1958 in the District of Columbia to evade Virginia’s so-called “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924. Upon returning to Virginia, they were arrested and charged with violating the act. Police entered their home and arrested them while they slept in their bed. At their trial, the judge convicted and sentenced them to one-year imprisonment with a suspended sentence on the condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia for a period of 25 years.

At the trial, the judge, Leon Bazile, used Biblical justifications to convict the couple:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

Prior to 1967, a number of states within the U.S. prevented consenting adults from engaging in sexual activities, let along marriage, with anyone from another so-called “race.” The Lovings took their case to the Supreme Court. In the case of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), the court declared the state of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional overturning the former Pace v. Alabama decision (1883) and thereby ending all race-based legal restrictions on adult consensual sexual activity and marriage throughout the U.S.

Actually, Graham’s words also harken back even earlier, though not related specifically to marriage:

“Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)

So, what is “Biblical” marriage?

One does not have to be a biblical scholar to know our society does not and has not followed many of the principles the Bibles dictate on issues of marriage. Let’s look at some of the religious teachings, many pointing out that the institution of marriage was constructed very differently from what some today consider as “traditional.”

Approximately 4000 years ago, Abraham (commonly referred to as “the father of the Jewish and Arab people” and patriarch of Jews, Christians, and Muslims) was a distant ancestor of Shem, son of Noah. When his wife Sarah (who in fact was his half-sister having a common father) was unable to conceive, as it is written, Sarah told Abraham to conceive a child with her Egyptian maidservant Hagar, who birthed a son, Ishmael. Soon afterward, Sarah also conceived a son, whom she and Abraham named Isaac. After Isaac’s birth, Abraham banished Hagar and Ishmael into the desert.

In Deuteronomy 25:5: “When brothers live together and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a strange man. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her to himself as wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.” And in Deuteronomy 25:6: “And it shall be that the first-born whom she bears shall assume the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out from Israel.”

And what about biblical injunctions on husbands and wives engaging in sexual intercourse during a woman’s period?  Leviticus 20:18: “If a man lies with a woman during her menstrual period and uncovers her nakedness, he has made naked her fountain, and she has uncovered the fountain of her blood. Both of them shall be cut off from among their people.”

Furthermore, I would think that many women today, of all sexual, gender, and racial identities and religious backgrounds, may find difficulty in Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, be submissive to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.”

And who today promotes the commandment to women in 1 Corinthians 14:33-35: “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”

I wonder how many parents actually subscribe to Exodus 21:15 & 17, which dictates: “And he that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death. And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

Actually, some biblical scholars interpret the relationships between David and Jonathan and Naomi and Ruth as romantic love. In1 Samuel 20:16-17: “So Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, ‘May the Lord require it at the hands of David’s enemies.’ And Jonathan made David vow again because of his love for him, because he loved him as he loved his own life.”

Jonathan also made a covenant with David. When Jonathan was later killed, David bemoaned his death with these words in 2 Samuel 1:25-26: “How have the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan is slain on your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; You have been very pleasant to me. Your love to me was more wonderful than the love of women.”

Naomi and Ruth likewise loved one another romantically. In Ruth 1:14: “And they lift up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother in law, but Ruth clung unto [Naomi].” The word for “clung” in Hebrew is “dabaq,” the very same word in Genesis 2:24 to illustrate Adam’s feelings toward Eve. Interestingly, the vow Ruth made to Naomi is the vow exchanged in many marriage ceremonies for different-sex couples: Ruth 1:16-17: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die — there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”

The Maintenance of Oppression

 I believe that THE prime factor keeping oppression toward LGBT people locked firmly in place and enacted throughout our society — on the personal/interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels — is the negative judgments emanating from some conservative faith communities.

Fortunately, however, there exists no monolithic conceptualization, for other faith communities’ “values” are progressively welcoming toward LGBT people, our sexuality, and our gender expression, and these communities are working tirelessly to abolish the yoke of oppression directed against us.

For in the famous words of Bob Dylan,

“The line it is drawn

The curse it is cast

The slow one now

Will later be fast

As the present now

Will later be passed

The order is

Rapidly fadin’

And the first one now

Will later be last

For the times they are a-changin’”

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice, co-editor of Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States, editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price, and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.

Ryan T. Anderson, William E. Simon fellow at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of the book What Is the Purpose of Marriage, in an opinion piece appearing on-line at CNN, wrote that the Supreme Court should not consider and rule on cases involving is the issue of marriage for same-sex couples as they are about to do in two separate cases this term, one to investigate the constitutionality of California’s 2008 passage of Proposition 8 limiting marriage in the state to one man and one woman, and the other case to judge the constitutionality of federal legislation, the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act,” which prohibits the awarding of federal benefits to same-sex couples in states where marriage equality is legally recognized.

Anderson not only argues that children do best in families headed by a “biological mother and father” (though most reputable research does not bare this out), but he also contends that by ruling on the issue of marriage for same-sex couples, the Supreme Court would circumvent the democratic process. “The Supreme Court shouldn’t truncate the debate and redefine marriage by judicial decree and include same-sex marriage,” he wrote. “Rather than cut short democratic deliberation, the court should uphold the constitutional authority of citizens and their elected officials to make decisions about marriage.” http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/opinion/anderson-states-same-sex-marriage/index.html

Anderson joins a list of conservative politicians and pundits asserting that the issue of marriage for same-sex couples must be left to the individual state legislatures or to the voters to decide because this falls under the category of states-rights or “majority rule,” and that the national government should not intrude by imposing its will on the states in this matter.

I argue most emphatically that marriage rights in general, and more specifically, legalization for same-sex couples is indeed a federal issue, and that national legislation or a Supreme Court decision must enforce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which mandates that “no state shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Since different-sex couples, upon reaching legal age, are accorded the rights and benefits of marriage, the current 30 states with state constitutional amendments legitimizing marriage only “between a man and a woman” effectively deprive same-sex couples of “equal protection of the laws.”

So then, should the civil and human rights of minoritized peoples be placed up for a vote or left to the discretion of state legislatures? In other words, should the majority determine the rights of minorities?

Take the following cases for example:

If the issue of prohibiting the practice of slavery had not been settled in Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and later codified in the US Constitution, and left to the individual states or by majority vote, I question whether the states would have uniformly voted on their own to outlaw the practice of slavery, and I indeed believe the practice of legalized slavery would have continued long after the Civil War in some states.

If the issue of school desegregation had not been settled in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision and later strengthen by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, and left to the individual states or to majority rule, I question whether the states would have uniformly relinquished the practice of de jure racial segregation, and I indeed believe that this practice would remain to this very day in some states.

If the issue of forbidding individuals their Constitutional right to privacy and, specifically, the right to contraceptives had not been decided in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut by the US Supreme Court and left to the discretion of the individual states or to majority rule, I question whether the states or the populous would have guaranteed these rights uniformly throughout the country.

If the issue of prohibiting individuals from different races from engaging in sexual relations (miscegenation) had not been settled in 1967 by the US Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia and left to the individual states, I question whether the states would have uniformly relinquished the practice of arresting and incarcerating people of different races found engaging in sexual relations, and I indeed believe that these arrests and incarcerations would remain to this very day in some states. The court declared the state of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, the so-called “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924, unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on adult consensual sexual activity and marriage throughout the US.

If the issue of freedom of speech for grade school students had not been decided in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District in 1969 by the US Supreme Court, I question whether the states would have uniformly relinquished the practice of restricting or banning students their First Amendment rights, and I indeed believe that today, students would face severe consequences for expressing their constitutional rights.

If the issues of providing for the reproductive freedoms of women to control their own bodies had not been decided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade US Supreme Court decision, and left to the individual states, I question whether the states would have uniformly relinquished the practice of outlawing and arresting doctors for performing abortions, and I indeed believe the subterranean and dangerous practices of self-induced abortions and procedures performed by amateurs would continue to jeopardize women’s health and women’s lives today.

If the issue of consensual adult sexuality, in particular for same-sex couples, had not be legalized in the Lawrence v. Texas 2003 US Supreme Court case overturning Texas’s so-called “sodomy law,” and thus eliminating similar statutes in 13 other states throughout the United States, I indeed believe we would find many of these laws remaining to this very day resulting in arrest and incarceration of anyone found in violation.

These questions once again remind me of the concept of “tyranny of the majority” articulated in the 1830s by Alexis de Tocqueville, French political scientist and diplomat, who traveled across the United States for nine months between 1831-1832 conducting research for his epic work, Democracy in America. Though he favored US style democracy, he found its major limitation in its stifling of independent thought and independent beliefs. In a country that promoted the notion of “majority rule,” this effectively silenced minorities. This is a crucial point because in a democracy, without specific guarantees of minority rights, there is a danger of domination or tyranny over others whose ideas, values, and social identities are not accepted by the majority.

Anyone from the Heritage Foundation should know because it is indeed our heritage granted to us by the founders of this country when they provided a mechanism for the protection of minorities against the tyranny of the majority. The checks and balances between the three branches of government: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, and the authority of national legislation over the individual states have been shown time and again (though of course not perfectly and not without major adjustments and reversal of policy along the way) to offer some form of protection for minority rights and benefits. If we leave these important issues of social justice and social inequality to majority rule and to state legislatures alone, then many of the evils that have plagued this country throughout its history would continue to this very day.

Returning to the issue of marriage for same-sex couples, state laws currently on the books, as well as any proposed national legislation or Supreme Court decisions will not compel religious institutions to perform religious marriages if they are opposed, for they do and will continue to have an exemption. Religious institutions will continue to set their own standards for conducting marriage ceremonies as they always have, without fear of prosecution if they decide that marriage for same-sex couples falls outside of their teachings.

The current state-by-state patchwork quilt of statutes not only serves to keep same-sex couples in marriage limbo and second-class citizenship status, and deprives us unfairly and inequitably of “equal protection of the laws,” but also is costly in terms of time and resources to all parties involved in political educational campaigns, litigation, and in the legislative process. Though I do not hold out much hope that the current Congress will do the right (correct) thing by passing national legislation, I believe and hope the Supreme Court with make marriage equality a reality.

Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

This month, my dear mother passed away two days before her 89^th birthday. I was fortunate to have had her in my life these many years, for she was not only my mother, but she was also my best friend. During the course of the past year, I also lost four close friends to cancer, which again reminded me that life is short and one must live each day as if it were one’s last.

Being now 66 years of age and not knowing how many years I have left, I have decided to retire from my faculty position at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa and return home to western Massachusetts in June where my heart lies. There I will take partial retirement by teaching adjunct in-person and on-line courses, and continue to write academic and personal articles.

Though I have enjoyed my position over the past 9 years at Iowa State University, I have also found teaching courses focusing on issues of social justice very challenging at this university.

Each semester I teach the course CI 406, “Multicultural Foundations in Schools and Society,” in the School of Education. I base the course on a number of key concepts and assumptions, including how issues of power, privilege, and domination within the United States center on inequitable social divisions regarding race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sex, gender identity, sexual identity, religion, nationality, linguistic background, physical and mental ability/disability, and age. I address how issues around social identities impact generally on life outcomes, and specifically on educational outcomes. Virtually all students registered for this course, which is mandatory for students registered in the Teacher Education program, are pre-service teachers.

Most students in my courses grew up in largely homogenous small rural communities where the vast majority comes from European-white and Christian (primarily Protestant) backgrounds and where most people look like themselves.

Of particular surprise to me were the writings of two female undergraduate students who, though they were in different courses during different years, seemed to come to the same conclusion. On a final course paper, one student wrote that, while she enjoyed the course, and she felt that both myself and my graduate assistance — who had come out to the class earlier as lesbian — were very knowledgeable and good professors with great senses of humor, nonetheless, she felt obliged to inform us that we are still going to Hell for being so-called “practicing homosexuals.” Another student two years later wrote on her course paper that homosexuality and transgenderism are sins in the same category as stealing and murder. This student not only reiterated that I will travel to Hell if I continued to act on my same-sex desires, but she went further in amplifying the first student’s proclamations by self-righteously insisting that I will not receive an invitation to enter Heaven if I do not accept Jesus as my personal savior since I am a Jew, regardless of my sexual behavior. Anyone who doubts this, she concluded, “Only death will tell!”

Over the years, I have attempted to analyze our campus environment, one that emboldens some students to notify their professor and graduate assistant that their final destination will be the depths of Hell.

One of the books I require is Joel Spring’s (2010) Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality, which explores history from multiple perspectives, and explodes some of the myths and misinformation that students may have learned throughout their educational experiences. Along with this book, I assign a “Critical Analysis” paper that requires students not to merely summarize, but rather, to critically reflect and analyze the information. I designate numerous pages in our course syllabus detailing precisely what I am looking for in terms of “critical analysis,” including:

While our personal beliefs and experiences certainly influence our opinions in the classroom, students must use empirical and/or scholarly evidence to support and prove their points in all assignments.  At our university, we value the research process and the type of discourse that arises when we combine our own opinions with the research and learning we have done. Opinions that do not have empirical and/or scholarly proof will not be accepted.  Just because we believe something does not make it truth – instead find others who have researched and supported your beliefs.  For example, your course books (or other empirically written books) serve as proof.  A personal memoir or religious text would not. 

Along with readings in Spring’s book, I give students a two-part assignment to be completed by the following class session in two days: the first part asks students a question for critical contemplation, the second part includes a research exercise.

The question I pose: “Did Christopher Columbus discover what has come to be called ‘U.S.-America’? Why or why not?” I tell students that after they reflect on this question, they are to investigate articles communicating Native American Indian perspectives of Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day.

Entering the classroom one year on the next class session, students filled the room with frenetic energy. I asked them to divide into their smaller reading discussion groups (of 5-7), and asked each group to choose a recorder who was to report themes discussed. I wrote on the board discussion directions: 1. Discuss with group members how you had initially answered the question: “Did Christopher Columbus discover what has come to be called ‘U.S.-America’? Why or why not?” 2. Discuss what you learned from Native American Indian perspectives of Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day. What did you already know? What surprised you? What insights did you gain? What, if any, emotions came up for you? What question do you still have?

Following twenty-minutes of lively student discussion in small groups, I facilitated a large classroom discussion. Many students expressed anger over the ways that teachers and textbooks portrayed Christopher Columbus during their early schooling. These students felt that they somehow “had been lied to” in the “white washing” of the history commonly taught in schools. They felt appalled and horrified by the treatment of indigenous peoples by Columbus and his crew, by the killings, enslavement, thievery of natural resources, all which set the stage for the large-scale genocide, forced Christian conversion, deculturalization, land and animal desecration, and appropriation.

One student, a geology major, responded by answering a question with questions: “How could Columbus have discovered what would later be called ‘America’ when Indians have lived on this land for an estimated 33,000 to 35,000 years after coming over the Bering Isthmus during a glacial age when the sea level dropped? How can one ‘discover’ people who have been here so long? Actually, Indians discovered Columbus on their land!”

A number of students nodded their heads in silent agreement. Other students articulated the love they have for their Christian faiths, but expressed shock and some disbelief over the murder and forced Christian conversions perpetrated by European explorers, missionaries, and settlers. At this point, I asked students to interrogate the concept of “European settlers.” “If this was Indian land (‘first nation peoples’), how accurate, then, is the term “European settlers”? Some students showed confusion on their faces by this question. For others, their eyes opened widely and they sported a wide grin. “Yeah,” said one student. “Say I own a house, and someone knocks on the door, walks in, pushes me outside, and claims: ‘I like your house, and I am now settling here. You be on your way. Good bye!’ And he slams the door in my face.” Others pondered this student’s comments.

At the close of class that day, as students left the room, one student remained behind to talk with me, with obvious rage on her face. “I thought this was supposed to be a multicultural class! You and the geology student have disrespected my culture,” she declared accusingly. “My culture teaches me that God created the universe approximately 6,000 – 7,000 years ago. So, I ask you, how could Indians have lived here for thousands and thousands of years before God created the universe? Also, since Christians are called to bring God’s message to all the nations of the world and to spread the word of Jesus Christ, I take offense with the claim that Europeans forcibly converted anyone!”

I thanked her for raising issues that she was certainly not alone in believing. I asked her if I could raise her concerns, while not referring to her by name, at our next class session, and that I would like to open it up for class discussion. She agreed.

I raised the student’s concerns over our prior class discussion, and asked students to discuss this in their small groups. I also asked students to write in their course journals their thoughts and feelings around the issues raised. Students were very respectful of differing viewpoints both in their small groups and in the larger group discussion.

Some students provided scientific evidence for the approximate age of the universe, others discussed their religious teaching. Some discussed the theological imperative to spread the word of Jesus Christ, others talked about their frustrations and resentments when others attempt to convert them to Christianity in any of its denominations.

I brought up the notion of “culture clash,” in this instance the opposing beliefs, from some perspectives, that sharing the word of Jesus is an act of bestowing a great gift on the “unbeliever,” while for others, rather than experiencing this as a gift, some perceive this as an imposition, an annoyance, a provocation, or worse, a form of oppression.

While a slight majority of students expressed that the United States had been founded on the notion of a separation of religion and government, a number of other students (approximately one-sixth of the entire class), however, asserted that we are now and that we have always meant to have been “a Christian nation,” and that the notion of religious pluralism runs contrary to their religious teachings. One student articulated this view best:

“[A]s a Christian I am called to not be tolerant. I am not called to be violent, but am called to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28). When I look through all of the information I have been given in my life…I come to the conclusion that America was founded as a Christian nation….Separation of church and state was created to keep the state out of changing the church, not to keep the church out of the state” (Undergraduate Pre-service Teacher Education Student).

This student referred to his interpretation of Christian scripture, which commands him to spread the word of Jesus:

Matthew 28:16-20:

(16) “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. (17) When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. (18) Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. (19) Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, (20) and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (from the King James Bible).

Students also wrote about the warnings from their pastors and national Christian leaders regarding the dangers to their faith in attending secular educational institutions. One student referred to Brannon Howse, president and founder of the Worldview Weekend Foundation, which I investigated further:

“Where do most Christian students get their perspective on history and sociology or learn about the question of origins? The frightening reality is that most take in the steady diet of Secular Humanism served up in our public schools. And in college, it only gets worse.” Worldview Weekend speaker Kerby Anderson puts it this way: “When a student enrolls in Philosophy 101, it could just as easily be called Atheism 101. A class in Sociology 101, should really be called Postmodernism 101. A class on Religion 101, is really a class that should be called Religious Pluralism 101. And a class in Biology 101, would more accurately be called Evolution 101. It’s little wonder that more than three out of four young people from Christian homes deny their faith before graduating from college. Parents must prepare their children to counter the lies of Secular Humanism, the New Age Movement, and bizarre forms of mysticism finding their way into our churches” (http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=1518).

This website also includes quotes from David Wheaton, a Worldview Weekend Speaker and author of the book, Surviving the University of Destruction.

“…I was now living full-time in the midst of a world diametrically opposed to the one I had grown up in — there would be no returning home to Mommy and Daddy every night. I would soon find out that an excellent upbringing coupled with academic and athletic success was no match for the maelstrom called college. The waters were baited, the sharks were circling…spiritual shipwreck loomed” (http://www.cbn.com/family/youth/UniversityofDestruction_Intro.aspx?option=print).

Students, faculty, and staff at our university, in addition to members from our surrounding communities, have founded and maintained quite a number of campus and community-based Christian student organizations, some to promote their version of their faith and to help insulate students from the so-called “secular humanist indoctrination” of public secular universities. One such organization on our campus and many others throughout the nation include local chapters of the Christian Educators Association International (CEAI). A few years ago, student leaders with their community advisors set up display tables in my building in the School of Education promoting their organization in their attempts to recruit pre-service and in-service teachers, school staff, and school administrators to serve as “Missional Teachers”:

“Missional Teachers are established by the work of Jesus Christ. They are “sent out” into the mission field of education, connected with the body of Christ to serve His purposes in all things” (CEAI brochure, emphasis in original).

The goal of the organization is to bring the word of Jesus and reintroduce Christian prayer into the schools, not merely parochial schools but within public education as well. Among the services the organization provides are a subscription to their magazine Teachers of Vision, free Bibles for the public school classroom, and most tellingly, professional liability insurance:

“Being a Christian educator has difficult barriers. Fears of saying something “illegal” often rule in the mind of Christian teachers. Many don’t know what their freedoms are” (CEAI brochure, emphasis in original).

In this regard, the organization also provides “Access to advice, consultation, support.”

The Christian Educators Association International takes quite literally the undergraduate pre-service teacher whom I quoted previously in his underlying assumption that “Separation of church and state was created to keep the state out of changing the church, not to keep the church out of the state.”

Anti-Intellectualism Has No Place in Our Schools

While I genuinely respect individuals’ religious understandings, during my service at my current university, I have been saddened and deeply concerned that some of my students have used their religious teachings as defensive shields against inquiry, creating an aura of anti-intellectualism “protecting” them from information that may contradict or challenge their beliefs. While I find this particularly troubling when I perceive it in any person, in a pre-service and then in-service teacher whose job it is to impart a life-long love of learning, the consequences can be disastrous.

Throughout the semester, I continually look around my classrooms, and I ask myself the question: If I had a child, would I want my child to be taught by this student, or that student? Happily, on numerous occasions, I answer with an unconditional and enthusiastic “yes, most definitely.” All too often, unfortunately, I am emphatic: “never, under any circumstances,” which sometimes turns me pessimistic about the future of U.S. education.

Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

We all hold concurrent “social identities” (consciously or unconsciously) based on socially constructed categories: for example, on our personal and physical characteristics, on our moral beliefs and values, on our ages, abilities, interests, professions, socioeconomic class backgrounds, and on our cultural, racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, sex, gender, sexual and affectional, and religious identifications, and more. Sometimes others ascribe these identities to us (often at or even before our birth), sometimes we choose our own self-descriptors, and some of these identities we achieve throughout our lives.

Society simultaneously grants unearned privileges and benefits, and also imposes enormous limitations and restrictions centering solely on these identities. Based on Peggy McIntosh’s pioneering investigations of white and male privilege, we can understand dominant group privilege as constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits accorded to members of dominant groups, with which they often unconsciously walk through life as if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over their shoulders.

This system of benefits confers dominance on specific social identity groups, for example in a U.S. context, men and boys, white people, heterosexuals, those who conform to established gender roles, Christians, upper socioeconomic classes, temporarily able bodied people, people of a certain age range (young adults through the middle years), U.S. born, English as first language speakers, and so on, while subordinating and denying these privilege to other groups, for example, women, girls, and intersex people, racially minoritized peoples, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender (LGBT) people, those who do not hold to Christian beliefs and traditions, working class and poor people, people with disabilities, young and old people, non-U.S. born, non-English as first language speakers, and others. These systemic inequities are pervasive throughout the society. They are encoded into the individual’s consciousness and woven into the very fabric of our social institutions, resulting in a deeply stratified social order.

In my life, early on I focused exclusively on my subordinated identities, on my pain and the pain of others within my marginalized identity categories. When I was very young, I sat upon my maternal grandfather Simon Mahler’s knee. Looking down urgently, but with deep affection, he said to me, “Varn,” (through his distinctive Polish accent, he always pronounced my name “Varn”), “you are named after my father, Wolf, who was murdered along with my mother and most of my 13 brothers and sisters by people called Nazis.” When I asked why these people killed them, he responded, “Because they were Jews.” Those words have reverberated in my mind, haunting me ever since.

In this country, my father told me how he suffered the effects of anti-Jewish prejudice. One of only a handful of Jews in his schools in Los Angeles in the 1920s and ‘30s, many afternoons he returned home injured from a fight. To get a decent job, his father, Abraham Blumenfeld, felt forced to Anglicize his name, changing it unofficially to “Eddy Fields.”

My parents did what they could to protect my sister and myself from the effects of anti-Jewish prejudice, but still I grew up with a constant and gnawing feeling that I somehow did not belong in this country as a Jew, and then later as a gay boy and man. The time was the early 1950s, the so-called “McCarthy Era”—a conservative time, a time when difference of any sort was held suspect. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, a brash young Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, sternly warned that “Communists [often thought of as Jews in the public imagination] corrupt the minds and homosexuals corrupt the bodies of good upstanding Americans,” and he proceeded to officially purge “accused” Communists and homosexuals from government service. During this era, police departments frequently raided LGBT bars, which were usually Mafia owned; the U.S. Postal Service raided organizations and even published the names from their mailing lists in local newspapers, and people lost their jobs. LGBT people were often involuntarily committed to mental institutions and underwent electro-shock therapy; some were lobotomized.

When I was quite young, long before I learned what were considered the “proper” rules of conduct in terms of socially constructed gender roles, I naively enacted gender in ways I found integral to my temperament. I quickly discovered, however, that family members and peers despised my gender expression. Children called me names with an incredible vehemence and malice that I did not understand.

Not knowing what else to do at this time with what they considered to be my gender non-conformity, my parents sent me to a child psychologist at the age of four until my 13^th birthday because they feared that I might be gay (or to use the terminology of the day, “homosexual”).

For most of my years in school, my peers, boys and girls alike, continually beat and attacked me since they perceived me as “different.” Names like “queer,” “little girl,” and “fag” targeted me like the big red dodge ball my classmates furiously hurled at one another on the schoolyard. I would not – and could not – conform to the gender roles that my family and peers so clearly expected of me, and I regularly paid the price.

I have worked many years attempting to develop a positive Jewish and gay/queer identity, which included my social activism and scholarship in LGBT/Queer and Holocaust/Religious Oppression studies. Through my work, though, I discovered the profound and poignant intersections in the forms of oppression (not only between anti-Jewish oppression and heterosexism, but in all the many forms of oppression). I thus began my journey discovering the ways that I am not only marginalized, but I also came to consciousness, at first reluctantly with guilt and anger initially surfacing then later subsiding, of my many privileged status identities. I now understand that my oppression does not and cannot trump or cancel my privileged social identities.

The relative invisibility of privilege to members of dominant social identities helps to keep this system of oppression firmly in place. I often use the analogy of dominant group privilege as the water in an aquarium in that the fish do not see or even feel the water because it is so pervasive and “normal.” For us as individuals, as entire identity categories, and as a larger society to move forward, however, we need to be conscious of the water of dominance that saturates our environment.

I understand now, to add another metaphor, oppression operates like a wheel with many spokes. If we work to dismantle only one or a few specific spokes (those spokes that represent our own marginalized identities, those spokes that represent specifically our pain and the pain of members of our groups), then the oppression wheel will continue unencumbered to roll over people. For us to reach the goal of true and lasting liberation, we must work to dismantle all the many spokes in conquering all the many forms of oppression in all their many forms.

We can revel in our past victories, for we have fought tirelessly for them. But let us not dwell there because we have further to go to ensure a truly just and equitable society and world. In the final analysis, whenever anyone is diminished, we are all demeaned, when anyone or any group remains institutionally and socially marginalized, excluded, or disenfranchised from primary rights and benefits, the possibility for authentic community cannot be realized unless and until we become involved, to challenge, to question, and to act in truly transformational ways.

If we focus only on our own pain, if we focus only on the ways we as individuals and members of subordinated groups are systematically oppressed, if we perceive instead the spokes as representing a vertical hierarchy with the forms of oppression aligned with our oppression on top and all others placed far below if at all rather than understanding the image of the wheel, and if we cannot come to consciousness of our socially privileged identities, we sabotage ourselves and the goal of liberation.

As a university professor, many of my students become initially irritated when I tell them that I do not subscribe to “The Golden Rule” (treating others as one would treat oneself), until I state that I, instead, follow “The Platinum Rule” (treating others as they would treat themselves).

I believe, therefore, that we must look within as well as beyond ourselves and base a community and a movement not simply on shared social identities, but also on shared ideals and values among individuals from disparate social positionalities, with like minds, political philosophies, and strategies for achieving, dare I say?, social justice.

We must end the “my oppression is worse than your oppression” divide and conquer dance (a tango I too have danced)  because it only serves the interests of maintaining the systemic nature of oppression by distancing people into separate and exclusive identity politics.

Whenever, for example, white gay men openly declare or imply that racism is not their issue and their only goal is to marry another man and assimilate into the “mainstream,” then the wheel of oppression gains traction and momentum.

Whenever Ashkenazi (European heritage) Jews proclaim that the German Holocaust was exclusively a Jewish tragedy while refusing to acknowledge or even entertain the notion that the Nazi also targeted homosexuals, Roma, people with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, some Catholic clergy, Communists, Socialists, and others, and when Jews fail to understand the connections between their oppression throughout the millennia with the oppression of peoples of color, then the wheel of oppression gains traction and momentum.

Whenever people of color characterize heterosexism and cissexism (oppression toward trans people) as inconsequential or irrelevant, and when they fail to understand certain parallels between the German Holocaust and the enslavement of Africans in the Americas and in Europe, then the wheel of oppression gains traction and momentum.

In short, whenever any of us rank the forms of oppression, the wheel of oppression gains traction and momentum. In the inimical words of poet, essayist, and activist, Audre Lorde, “There is no hierarchy of oppression.”

In addition, we must not expect others to convince us of their pain, to convince us of the validity, saliency, and impact of forms of oppression that may not appear to affect us personally and directly. We must commit to walking the journey of educating ourselves, for it is not your responsibility to educate me and convince me of your pain, as it is not my job to convince you of mine.

Reverend Martin Niemoeller places the intersectionalities into perspective:

“In Germany they first came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —

and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).

On a cold and windy day this week, outfitted in my warmest winter outfit from head to toes, I entered the Memorial Union on our campus with the intention of mailing a package to my cousin in Portland, Oregon. Soon after I pulled open the door through my double-layered gloves and entered the Gold Star Hall, replete with its lovely stained glass windows and the names of Iowa State University students who had fallen in war engraved proudly on the walls, a young man, who had been walking behind me, hurried his pace. Overtaking me and looking directly into my eyes, he commanded: “Sir, you need to take off your hat!”

The door through which one enters the Memorial Union displays a prominent sticker announcing: “If you are able, please take off your hat as a sign of respect.”

I clearly, though firmly, responded to the young man that “Taking off one’s hat stems from a Christian tradition. I am Jewish, and to us, we cover our heads as a sign of respect.” The man’s mouth distorted irritably as he mumbled something under his breath, and he walked down the stairs, possibly on his way to the food court, or maybe to enter the Memorial Union Chapel to compose himself beneath the seven-foot Christian cross while seated upon the pews bearing chiseled crosses on its sides, on our publicly tax supported land-grant university campus.

The tradition of removing one’s hat began in medieval times with men in Christian churches as a sign of respect to God. A number of other religious and cultural traditions, however, including Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and others show respect for God and for individuals by covering one’s head (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_men_have_to_take_their_hats_off ;  http://www.emilypost.com/everyday-manners/common-courtesies/479-hats-off-the-who-what-when-where-of-the-hat).

As the old saying goes, the fish is the last to see or even feel the water because it is so pervasive, and therefore, the fish take the water for granted. Often, those beings situated outside the water can, in effect, perceive the water’s existence with its edges, depths, surfaces, consistencies, and reflections.

By analogy, what many (most likely the majority) within our society consider as “normal” and appropriate, upon critical reflection many perceive as (re)enforcements of mainline Christian standards and what is referred to as “Christian hegemony” and “Christian privilege,” though presented in presumably secularized forms, and as such, are reminders that the United States is, indeed, not the inclusive and welcoming land of freedom, justice, and equality that it purports to be.

This applies as well to many terms that have entered the standard lexicon and daily speech. Terms and phrases such as “knock on wood,” “cross your fingers,” “to have an epiphany,” “you’re a saint,” “Baptism by fire,” “hail Mary pass,” “…the Holy Grail of…,” “I take my hat off to you,” “church and state,” “BC / AD (Before Christ / Anno Domini), “THE new millennium,” “El Niño  / La Niña,” “Devil’s advocate,” and many others derive from Christianity in that they have Christian antecedents.

As a nation, I hope we can embrace our rich diversity and enhance multiculturalism and cross-cultural literacy. According to the National Association for Multicultural Education: “Multicultural education is a philosophical concept built on the ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity as acknowledged in various documents, such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence, constitutions of South Africa and the United States, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations.  It affirms our need to prepare students for their responsibilities in an interdependent world.” (Feb. 1, 2003, http://www.nameorg.org/resolutions/definition.html)

Without a strong emphasis on multiculturalism in our school and larger society, we will continue down the historical path laid by those who have gone before us in the United States, which Joel Spring refer to as “cultural genocide” defined as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” (p. 3) through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and standards. This cultural genocide works through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring (2004) describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture” (p. 3).

Antonio Gramsci advanced the concept of “cultural hegemony,” which describes the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates its social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as “common sense,” as “normal,” and as “universal.” This hegemony maintains the marginality of other groups with different or opposing views. Hegemony is advanced through what Michel Foucault (1980) terms “discourses,” which include the ideas, written expressions, theoretical foundations, and language of the dominant culture. These are implanted within networks of social and political control, described by Foucault as “regimes of truth,” which function to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as true or as THE truth.

I define “Christian hegemony” as the overarching system of advantages bestowed on Christians. It is the institutionalization of a Christian norm or standard, which establishes and perpetuates the notion that all people are or should be Christian, thereby privileging Christians and Christianity, and excluding the needs, concerns, religious cultural practices, and life experiences of people who are not Christian. Often overt and at times more subtle, Christian hegemony is oppression by design and intent, but also by neglect, omission, erasure, and distortion (Blumenfeld, 2006).

The Jewish immigrant and sociologist of Polish and Latvian heritage, Horace Kallen (1915), coined the term “cultural pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he considered inherently undemocratic. Kallen envisioned a United States in the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.

Today, the United States stands as the most culturally, ethnically, racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse country in the world. This diversity poses great challenges and great opportunities. The way we meet these challenges will determine whether we remain on the abyss of our history or whether we can truly achieve our promise of becoming a shining beacon to the world.

References:

Blumenfeld, W J. (2006). Christian privilege and the promotion of “secular” and not-so “secular” mainline Christianity in public schooling and the larger society. Equity and Excellence in Education. 39(3).

Foucault, M. (1980). The history of sexuality, Part 1 (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). New York: International.

Kallen, H. (1915). Democracy versus the melting pot, The Nation, 100(2590) 190-94, 217-30.

Spring, J. (2004). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States (4^th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense).