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Heather Cox Richardson: Yes, There Are Heroes

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2024 //
18

Heather Cox Richardson wrote this beautiful tribute to Dr. King. I knew I had to share it with you. Please subscribe. I read that she has a million paying subscribers. She deserves her good fortune.

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024.

[Image of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Buddy Poland.]

Categories Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, History, Unions

A Primer on The Lost Cause for Nikki Haley

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2023 //
32

Karen L. Cox wrote “Five Myths About the Lost Cause” in The Washington Post. For those who have not studied American history or don’t remember what they should have learned, this summary should be useful. Cox is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Cox wrote in 2021:

Some of the most enduring misconceptions around the Confederacy are part of a mythology, known as the Lost Cause, that developed after the Civil War. These ideas are generally understood as the means by which former Confederates came to terms with such a thoroughly crushing defeat. Over time, the narrative has expanded and been used to combat movements for racial justice, most recently Black Lives Matter and the calls for removal of Confederate monuments.

Here are some of the myths at the heart of the Lost Cause ethos.

Myth No. 1

The Civil War was not fought over slavery.

One of the most enduring ideas holds that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. Confederate veterans were among the first to make this claim about “the rights of the States against the encroachments of the Federal power,” as one war vet wrote, and to this day, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) maintain this position.

Yet these original veterans and the SCV both engaged in a bit of historical amnesia, since documents about what led Southern states to secede are clear that the Civil War erupted over the issue of slavery. From Alexander Stephens’s 1861 “Cornerstone Speech” to state ordinances of secession, slavery was at the heart of their argument to leave the Union. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, said that not only did slavery form the “cornerstone” of the foundation on which the new Confederate government was laid, but also that it was the “immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” Mississippi’s declaration of secession, like those of other states, did not mince words: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

Myth No. 2

The South lost simply because the North had more resources.

In his speech at the unveiling of the Confederate monument in Augusta, Ga., in 1878, Charles Colcock Jones Jr. averred, “We were overborne by superior numbers and weightier munitions.” And in her “Catechism for Southern Children,” written in the early 20th century, Mrs. J.P. Allison of Concord, N.C., posed the question “If our cause was right why did we not succeed in gaining our independence?,” to which children were to respond, “The North overpowered us at last, with larger numbers.”

But the South’s military defeat was also driven by social and class divisions, as well as poor morale. As the war dragged on and losses stacked up, there were desertions and the emancipation of enslaved people — the primary source of labor supplying Confederate armies. Devotees of the Lost Cause tend to disregard these other factors.

Myth No. 3

Robert E. Lee abhorred slavery.

Some Americans point to the Confederacy’s most heralded military leader, Gen. Robert E. Lee, as an opponent of slavery. Conservative journalist Stephen Moore, once a Trump nominee to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, claimed that “Robert E. Lee hated slavery.” As recently as December, in response to the removal of Lee’s likeness from Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, Twitter users perpetuated the myth, including one who tweeted: “Lee abhorred slavery. . . . he also taught the slaves he inherited to read, which was illegal.”

In reality, Lee benefited from the institution of slavery through his marriage into one of the wealthiest slaveholding families in Virginia. He was also known to be a cruel master who not only beat people he owned but, like other enslavers, treated them as property — selling them and separating families. Even in the last year of the war, 1865, Lee wrote that “the relation of master and slave . . . is the best that can exist between the white & black races.” Such words and actions offer a vivid contrast to another myth, which asserts that Lee was a noble and kindly gentleman.

Myth No. 4

Confederate monuments only recently became controversial.

In the aftermath of the deadly violence in Charlottesville in 2017, when white nationalists descended on the city under the pretense of protesting the removal of a Lee statue, journalists spilled a lot of ink on what these monuments represented. They wondered why Americans “suddenly” cared about them or asked, as one did, “Why are they being targeted now?,” suggesting that this event, and the Charleston church massacre of 2015, marked the beginning of the controversy across the South.


The truth is that they have long been controversial and despised by Black Southerners, for whom these statues symbolized their second-class citizenship. In 1932, for example, when the leading African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, asked its readers about their support for a federal law that would abolish Confederate monuments, the collective response was a resounding “yes.” As a reader from Nebraska wrote, “If those monuments weren’t standing, the white South wouldn’t be so encouraged to practice hate and discrimination against our people.” During the Jim Crow era, it was difficult for African Americans to publicly protest the monuments as they have in the past few years, out of fear for their lives, but they have long protested statues located in their communities, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Myth No. 5

Removing a Confederate monument is erasing history.

After the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, President Trump said removing the Confederate monument to Lee, or any such statue, was “changing history.” And as Texans began to reexamine their state’s memorial landscape, Sen. Ted Cruz (R) weighed in to suggest that it was a bad idea to “go through and simply try to erase from history prior chapters, even if they were wrong.”

Removing a Confederate monument, of course, does not erase history. These statues, which have represented only one point of view (a revisionist narrative of the Confederacy) throughout their existence, have never taught the first history lesson, although they have been used to reemphasize the racial status quo. The vast majority are, simply put, artifacts of the Jim Crow era, when most of them were built. Their history, like that of the “Whites only” signs of segregation, has not been lost. We will always know the history of Confederate monuments through photographs, postcards, dedication speeches and, most important, books written by historians.


Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

Categories History

Joshua Zeitz: Why Nikki Haley Did Not Admit that Slavery Was a Leading Cause of the Civil War

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2023 //
37

Joshua Zeitz is a historian and contributor to Politico. He writes here about Nikki Haley’s failure to admit that slavery was a leading cause, maybe THE leading cause, of the Civil War.

Someone asked her the question at a New Hampshire town meeting. What caused the Civil War? She released a word salad about rights and freedoms but failed to memention the peculiar institution of slavery. The next day, she realized that her omission was a major gaffe, and she insisted that everyone knows that slavery was an important cause of the devastating war, implying that it was not worth mentioning what everyone knew.

Jacob Zeitz wrote an analysis of her omission. He believed she was echoing the “Lost Cause” nostalgia so beloved to sons and daughters of the Confederacy.

As a high school student in the 1950s in Houston, I recall that our American history textbook spouted “Lost Cause” propaganda. Slaves in the South were treated kindly, it said. Plantation owners never wanted to damage their expensive human property. The Civil War was about “states’ rights,” not slavery. Many years later, when visiting an ante-bellum mansion in Charleston, South Carolina, the docent said the slaves were content; she referred to the Civil Was as “the War of Northern Aggression.”

Nikki Haley echoed Lost Cause sentiment.

Zeitz wrote at Politico:

In William Faulkner’s novel, Sartoris, someone asks the title character, Colonel John Sartoris, why he had fought for the Confederacy so many decades before. “Damned if I ever did know,” replied the aging veteran, now a pillar of his community in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

Of course, we know why Colonel Sartoris raised arms against the United States. So does anyone with a high school diploma — assuming they used up-to-date textbooks. And so did Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who in 1861 famously asserted that the “cornerstone” of the new Southern nation rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

All of which makes it disappointing, though not surprising, that at this late date — almost 160 years after the Civil War — Nikki Haley, a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, shares Colonel Sartoris’ selective amnesia on the topic. When asked a softball question this week about the causes of the Civil War, Haley, a former South Carolina governor, flubbed the answer, calling it a “difficult” question and mumbling on about “basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

This morning, Haley qualified the comment on a radio show called “The Pulse of New Hampshire,” and followed the clean-up job with a press release, stating: “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned, always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”

But as Haley must know — after all, as governor of South Carolina, she presided over the removal of Confederate flags from the Statehouse — many Americans do question the fundamental fact that slavery precipitated the Civil War, and her equivocation played into a long-standing agenda to rewrite American history. Haley was effectively parroting the Lost Cause mythology, a revisionist school of thought born in the war’s immediate aftermath, which whitewashed the Confederacy’s cornerstone interest in raising arms to preserve slavery. Instead, a generation of Lost Cause mythologists chalked the war up to a battle over political abstractions like states’ rights.

With red states doing battle with American history, seeking to erase the legacy of violence and inequality that counterbalance the great good also inherent in our national story, it’s worth revisiting the rise of the Lost Cause, not just to remember how damaging it was, but to confront just how damaging it still is.

In the immediate aftermath of the war,the work of interpreting the rebellion fell to a small group of unreconstructed rebels. The pioneers of Confederate revisionism included wealthy and influential veterans of the Confederacy like Jubal Early, B. T. Johnson, Fitz Lee and W. P. Johnson, who helped formulate the Lost Cause myth that would take hold by the 1880s.

The narrative strains were simple. They painted a picture of Southern chivalry — mint juleps, magnolias and moonlight — that stood in sharp contrast with the North, a region marked by avarice, grinding capitalism and poverty. The rebellion, by this rendering, had been a legal response to the North’s assault on states’ rights — not a violent insurrection to preserve chattel slavery. Even Confederate veterans like Hunter McGuire knew that to admit the war had been about slavery would “hold us degraded rather than worthy of honor … our children, instead of revering their fathers will be secretly, if not openly, ashamed.”

The myth gained steam by the end of the century, largely because of the work of organizations like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), groups that offered a compelling story that people could wrap their minds around — including many Northerners, who were eager to put the war behind them. Because the Lost Cause emphasized heroism and honor over slavery, it venerated military figures like Robert E. Lee and swept politicians like Jefferson Davis under the rug. So it was that in May 1890 over 100,000 citizens gathered in Richmond for the dedication of a statue of Lee.

The decade saw hundreds of towns across the former Confederacy raise similar monuments to their heroes and war dead. These marble and steel memorials were often planted in town squares and by county courthouses to help sanitize not only Confederate memory but the new Jim Crow order. After all, if secession had been a noble thing, so was the separation of the races.

The signs of revisionism ranged from subtle to clear. During the war, for instance, Confederate soldiers had keenly embraced the term “reb,” but the new gatekeepers of Southern memory abandoned the term. “Was your father a Rebel and a Traitor?” asked a typical leaflet. “Did he fight in the service of the Confederacy for the purpose of defeating the Union, or was he a Patriot, fighting for the liberties granted him under the Constitution, in defense of his native land, and for a cause he knew to be right?” Equally important was figuring out what to even call the war. It couldn’t be the “Civil War,” which sounded too revolutionary. It couldn’t be “the War of Rebellion” which smacked of treason. In the late 1880s, the UCV and UDC approved resolutions designating the conflict that killed 750,000 Americans the “War Between the States.” The term stuck for generations to come.

It wasn’t just Southerners who suffered willful memory loss in these years. Jaded by the experience of Reconstruction and in the thrall of rising scientific racism, many Northerners were equally eager to remember the war as a brothers’ quarrel over politics rather than a struggle over slavery and Black rights. The jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who began the war as a committed abolitionist, later erased the roots of the conflict and celebrated the battlefield valor of both Union and Confederate troops. “The faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty,” he said, “in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.”

Of course, historians agree that most Union troops did know why they were fighting. So did Holmes. But years after the fact, he was willing to forget. As were tens of thousands of veterans who attended Blue and Gray reunions well into the 20th century, including a massive camp gathering of 25,000 people who gathered at Crawfish Springs, Georgia, in 1889, near the Chickamauga Battlefield, for a picnic and public speeches. These mass spectacles helped Yankees and Confederates rewrite the history of the 1850s and 1860s, ostensibly in the service of national reunion and regeneration, but also in a way that fundamentally reinforced the emerging culture and politics of Jim Crow.

The Lost Cause mythology was more than bad history. It provided the intellectual justification for Jim Crow — not just in the former Confederacy, but everywhere systemic racism denied Black citizens equal citizenship and economic rights. Its dismantling began only in the 1960s when historians inspired by the modern Civil Rights Movement revisited the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, adopting the views of earlier Black scholars like W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin, who always knew what the war was about and had shined a spotlight on the agency of Black and white actors alike.

That’s why the recent retreat to Lost Cause mythos is troubling. One would think that a Republican candidate for the presidency might be proud of the party’s roots as a firmly antislavery organization that dismantled the “Peculiar Institution” and fomented a critical constitutional revolution during Reconstruction — one that truly made the country more free.

With GOP presidential candidates waffling on the Civil War, rejecting history curricula in their states and launching political fusillades against “woke” culture, it remains for the rest of us to reaffirm the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, who in the last years of his life stated: “Death has no power to change moral qualities. What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. … Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-president of the Confederacy, described the true purpose of the South’s secession: to preserve slavery. Read his famous Cornerstone speech here.

Here is the key section of his speech:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.

Categories Elections, Extremism, History, South Carolina

Israeli Peace Activist: Teach Compassion, Not Hate

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
55

Christiane Amanpour interviewed Robi Damelin, an Israeli peace activist, about her organization’s work to replace hatred with compassion. Damelin’s teenage son was killed by a Palestinian sniper 21 years ago, and she has dedicated her life since then to building a parents group of both Israelis and Palestinians.

She advocates listening to the stories of others. She recognizes the terrible suffering of Palestinians, and she works with Palestinian friends to foster understanding.

The hope for the future of both Israelis and Palestinians lies with enlightened leadership, which neither side has now. Damelin remains steadfast in believing that change will come, built on a mutual desire to end the cycle of fear and death.

Damelin speaks for me, and I hope, for most people. She wants peace and dignity for all sides, and an end to shouting and hatred, which only breeds more shouting and hatred.

Please watch the interview. It is inspiring.

Categories Equity, History, Hope, International, Love

Virginia: The Long Forgotten Story of the Danville Massacre of 1883

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
4

Many states have passed laws that ban the teaching of accurate history. Sometimes these laws ban “divisive concepts,” some ban anything that might cause students to feel uncomfortable, some find other language to warn teachers and textbook publishers to omit the shameful events of the past, especially the racist treatment of people of color.

In Florida, where the state went to great lengths to whitewash the teaching of Black history, one man has devoted himself to telling the truth. That man is Dr. Marvin Dunn. Dr. Dunn was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Network for Public Education. In the meanwhile, you can read his book A History of Florida Through Black Eyes.

In response to Dr. Dunn’s moving presentation, a friend of NPE sent me the following article about the Danville Massacre of 1883. We now know that Reconstruction was a period of impressive racial progress. Formerly enslaved people voted, opened small businesses, and asserted their newly won rights.

But the former Confederates found this rebalancing of racial relationships intolerable. The Danville Massacre put an end to a period of reconciliation and installed Jim Crow, cancelling out the gains of Reconstruction.

The author of the article could not remember learning about this important event in the state’s history.

Learning the truth about history doesn’t make children uncomfortable. It makes them informed.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Extremism, Fake, History, Virginia

Why Did Americans Abandon the Greatest Economy in History?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
43

This excellent article in The Atlantic by Rogé Karma should be widely read. Something changed radically in our economy and our society in the past several decades, limiting access to “the American Dream.” He explores the reasons why.

He writes:

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition…

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes…

The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

In the remainder of the article, the author says that the nation is at an inflection point, ready for a change. But what that change will be determined by voters next year.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Elections, History, Racism, Republicans

BOMBSHELL: Cardona Gives Hillsdale Charter School $2 Million, Despite Lies and Lack of Diversity

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2023 //
29

What an embarrassment for the U.S. Department of Education!

Carol Burris writes on Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post blog, “The Answer Sheet,” that Secretary Miguel Cardona just awarded one of its largest grants ever to expand a Hillsdale College charter school in Ohio. Hillsdale is closely tied to the conservative Christian movement and to Republican leaders such as Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee.

Hillsdale’s history program is called “the 1776 curriculum,” intended to refute the ideas of journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones’ controversial “1619 Project.” Hannah-Jones argued that American history began with the arrival of African slaves in 1619. To counter her narrative, the Trump administration in its waning days created “the 1776 Commission” to produce a quick version of a patriotic history. On President Biden’s first day in office, he abolished the 1776 Commission. Hillsdale College, however, continued the work of writing a full U.S. history curriculum based on the work of the 1776 Commission and made it available to schools that wanted history as it used to be taught: with great men, high ideals, and unblemished patriotism.

Hillsdale is now associated with a chain of charter schools that have adopted its Christian worldview and the 1776 curriculum. As Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education explains, a Hillsdale charter just won nearly $2 million from the federal Charter Schools Program. CSP is administered by the U.S. Department of Education. The charter made claims about its location and its demographics that are “misleading.”

Trying to think of an analogy to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona giving a large grant to a Hillsdale charter school: imagine Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos giving $2 million to a charter school for transgender children. Neither seems likely. But one scenario happened.

Valerie Strauss introduces Burris’s column.

A recent federal audit had a bit of bad news for the U.S. Education Department’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which has provided more than $2.5 billion in grants to help open or expand charter schools. The audit by the department’s Office of Inspector General found that the CSP office may not have had “reliable information needed to make informed decisions” about continuing funding for charter schools with program grants.

There was more in the audit, which you can read about here, but this post looks at a different problem facing the CSP: schools with highly problematic applications that win millions of dollars of federal money anyway.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, some of them as for-profit entities, and they educate about 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren. The 30-year-old charter sector has been riddled with financial and other scandals over the years, although supporters say that the problems these schools face are expected growing pains and that they offer families an important option to schools in publicly funded districts. Critics say that they are part of the movement to privatize public education and that some states have lax charter school laws that do not properly regulate them.

This post was written by Carol Burris, an award-winning former New York high school principal and now executive director of the advocacy group called Network for Public Education, which is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and seeks legislative reform of charter schools. Burris has written previously on the charter school program for Answer Sheet (for example, here and here). She has chronicled how the program spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened or closed not long after opening.

Burris writes about the funding application of a charter school in Ohio, the Cincinnati Classical Academy, and says that her organization, along with a group of Ohio legislators and other organizations, have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to rescind the school’s nearly $2 million CSP grant. I asked the school to comment and will add its response if I get one. I asked the Education Department about the letter, and a spokesman said this in an email:

“The U.S. Department of Education (Department) is committed to supporting state and local efforts to increase school diversity and reduce racial and socio-economic isolation in schools, including through the Charter School Program (CSP). There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of CSP applications and funded grants. For example, all CSP applicants must provide attestations confirming the accuracy of information submitted in their application. False, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or claims may subject applicants to criminal, civil, or administrative penalties. Such safeguards are in place to help ensure charter schools serve communities well.”

By Carol Burris


An invitation to fiction writing. That is how Mike Winerip described the federal Charter School Program (CSP) grant process in a 2012 New York Times story, a characterization based on his investigation of a New Jersey charter school, which, despite three failed attempts to open and an application full of “misrepresentations,” had secured a CSP grant.

This issues didn’t go away. The All Football Club of Lancaster, Pa., an unauthorized charter school with no community support, submitted an often-incoherent application and yet won $1.2 million in 2020. A school run by a for-profit operator immersed in self-dealings and a segregation academy turned charter school cashed in on a North Carolina grant.

But the prize for the most inventive story to secure a CSP grant may belong to the Cincinnati Classical Academy (CCA), a Hillsdale College member school, for securing a nearly $2 million grant. CCA, which prides itself on teaching virtue, asked for the grant on the basis of its claim that it was closing the achievement gap and serving disadvantaged students, never reporting that only 16 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged and that 2 percent are Black — a starkly different student body from the overwhelmingly disadvantaged and majority-Black Cincinnati Public School students, who, CCA says, it wants to save from poverty.

Cincinnati Classical Academy


Cincinnati Classical Academy is located on a cul-de-sac in a leafy residential suburb of Cincinnati called Reading. The school’s website features a motto and a coat of arms, and plays a video showing the school building with a cross atop a tower at the entrance as well as a large American flag. It currently runs from kindergarten through seventh grade but says it plans to add a grade each year until it becomes a full K-12 school.

It takes considerable digging on its website to realize that CCA is a charter school, not a tuition-free Christian private academy. Its headmaster’s message speaks of morals, virtue and “old-fashioned” methods. Pictures of the gymnasium show a large crucifix on the wall next to an American flag. In a photograph of a school hallway lined with posters depicting the school’s virtues, Mary and the infant Jesus from Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Magnificat” illustrates the virtue of humility. To illustrate gratitude, CCA shows a family praying before a meal.

Nearly all of the uniformed children featured on the website are White. There is no mention of a provision for free lunch on the school’s webpage, which features catered lunches students can purchase in full or a la carte.

Although CCA is only in its second year, it has the status of being a member school of Hillsdale College’s K-12 initiative, which entitles it to free curriculum, training and consultation from the small, nondenominational, conservative Christian college in Michigan. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn is an ally of former president Donald Trump as well as of Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and “distinguished fellow” Christopher Rufo, an activist who has fueled the culture wars.

Hillsdale provides support for CCA through its Barney Charter School Initiative, which began in 2010 with a half-million-dollar contribution from the Barney Family Foundation and which has opened a few dozen charter schools across the country. Hillsdale College’s mission is to maintain “by precept and example the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith,” while the mission of its K-12 charter schools includes a call for “moral virtue.” A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released in 2021 praises conservative values, criticizes liberal ones and distorts civil rights history.

According to its 990 tax forms, the Barney Family Foundation gives to health and child-centered charities along with Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Heartland Institute, the State Policy Network, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Heritage Foundation, and other right-wing foundations and think tanks.

Stephen Barney, a trustee emeritus on the Hillsdale College Board, has been one of its most generous donors. Between 2010 and 2019, the Network for Public Education identified more than $4 million earmarked for Hillsdale from Barney’s foundation, excluding unlisted donations in 2011 and or donations before or after those years.

Despite Hillsdale College’s frequent boasts of rejecting federal money (and the federal regulations that come with it, including Title IV provisions), the college’s affiliated charter schools eagerly dip into the federal Charter School Program through state entitlement grants. To date, the Network for Public Education has identified more than $16.75 million given to Hillsdale charters for school start-ups or expansions.
The grant to CCA is the first given directly by the federal department to a Hillsdale-connected charter school.

The questionable narrative

Applicants for Charter Schools Program Developer Grants fill out extensive applications in making the case for why their schools deserve the funds. According to the Federal Register, which calls for applications, the first purpose of the CSP is to “expand opportunities for all students, particularly for children with disabilities, English learners, and other traditionally underserved students, to attend charter schools.”

However, CCA caters to the well-served in disproportionately high numbers. State records show that it had no English language learners in 2022-2023 when it applied. Students with disabilities were enrolled at less than half the rate of the Cincinnati Public Schools. More than 80 percent of the students in Cincinnati Public Schools were economically disadvantaged compared to fewer than 17 percent at CCA. Other charter schools in Hamilton County had no problem attracting economically disadvantaged students; their average rate topped 85 percent.

The only category in which CCA exceeds a demographic of Cincinnati Public Schools is White students. More than 82 percent of CCA students are White, compared to 20 percent in the public school district.

So what can a school like this do to get a grant intended for schools that serve underserved kids? It didn’t reveal itself.

CCA cited Cincinnati Public Schools demographics to make its case in its application even though it is located in the Reading Community City School District, which is whiter, wealthier and has better ratings. Then it provided another handful of schools within five miles for comparison, none of which are in Cincinnati Public Schools. The school also talked in its application about closing the achievement gap and serving diverse, underserved students even though its unrevealed Black student population (2.4 percent) is so tiny the state does not even give it a gap-closing measure.

But where the school best revealed itself is in its list of goals and objectives. Not only did it fail to share its lack of diversity, it included no goals or objectives to address it. The application does not discuss the need to increase the number of English language learners, homeless children, students with disabilities, or students who get free or reduced-price lunches to level the enormous gap between the school’s proportions and the greater Cincinnati area.

If achieved, the goals in the application prepared by Kentucky’s Adkins and Company and signed off by the president of the school’s governing board will not disrupt the status quo. CCA will be able to meet them and keep the federal dollars flowing for four years while maintaining the reality projected on its website — that it is a magnet for White, Christian conservative families to escape the area’s diverse schools.

The CSP review process

If you have ever applied for a mortgage, you remember the extraordinarily detailed evidence you must provide to support every claim. That is not the case when “free government money” for charter schools is at stake.

The curious lack of a demographic profile of the school’s students was never a concern for the reviewers. CCA received the highest score of all applicants — 101. One of the three reviewers gave the school a perfect score. You can find the application and the reviewers’ scoring here.
Reviewers, who are solicited from the charter school world, were satisfied that “comprehensive data is provided, revealing the underperformance of Cincinnati public schools and underscoring the necessity for a high-quality alternative that offers families a viable choice,” even though the school is not a part of Cincinnati Public Schools.

The reviewers bought the same old narrative — a high-poverty district is bad, so bring in a charter school. They parroted back what the applicant said and praised Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Program.

Inexplicably, given the CSP’s checkered history, the Education Department increased the maximum amount of Developer Grants per charter school from $1.5 million to $2 million this year, and CCA got nearly every penny of the limit: a grant for $1,991,846. Grants are usually for five years, but CCA had been open for a year when it applied, so it got a four-year grant. The average amount per year is $300,000 but the Education Department gave CCA nearly half a million dollars a year — on the basis of claims that even cursory checks on state data or a visit to the school’s website would show to be untrue.

Back in Ohio, public education advocacy groups are outraged but not surprised. Bill Phillis, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, told me that the charter industry in his state “has been rife with financial and academic fraud and corruption.” He also said the CCA’s application for a development grant, with its “deception and disingenuous information,” is “typical of the charter industry in Ohio.”

The Network for Public Education sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona protesting the grant and asking that it be rescinded. It was signed by Phillis’s coalition, along with U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), five state legislators who represent the area, the Ohio PTA, both state teachers unions, the Cincinnati NAACP, and more than a dozen public education, civil rights, local teacher associations and advocacy groups.

Other 2023 CSP awardees are being challenged. The St. Louis Board of Education has passed a resolution protesting the more than $35 million CSP grant received by the billionaire-funded Opportunity Trust to open more charter schools in Missouri — nearly all of which will, because of state law, be located in St. Louis or Kansas City. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“The group misrepresented its relationship with SLPS in its application to the U.S. Department of Education, the resolution states. The school board “does not have a working relationship with the Opportunity Trust, does not collaborate with the Opportunity Trust and has opposed efforts by the Opportunity Trust to enact legislation to divert district funds to charter schools,” it [the resolution] reads.”

CSP grant applications that have been misleading and deceptive have still been rewarded with millions of taxpayer dollars from CSP. Whether the source of the problem is the department’s process, a less-than-rigorous application, the reviewer selection process or faulty regulations, awards that are based on disingenuous claims and deceit do not serve children or taxpayers well.

Until something changes, the statement that applicants sign — “I am aware that any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or claims may subject me to criminal, civil, or administrative penalties. (U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1001)” — should be enforced, and the secretary should use his authority to terminate the grant.

Categories Accountability, Cardona, Miguel, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Equity, Extremism, Funding, History, Lies, Ohio, Race, Scandal, U.S. Department of Education

Jeffrey Herf: How Hamas Fooled the Left in the U.S. and Europe

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
44

Jeffrey Herf is a distinguished university professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Since I am posting this exposé of Hamas, let me make clear that I oppose the Netanyahu government. I oppose the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. I deplore the wanton killing of civilians. I was sickened by the barbaric murders, rapes, pillage, and hostage-taking on October 7. I support a two-state solution (Hamas does not). I pray for a time when two self-governing states live side by side in peace.

In this article, Herf explores the sympathy of leftists and liberals in the West for Hamas, a terrorist organization. He analyzes the Hamas charter of 1988 and its revision in 2017, whose language was intended to place Hamas in the mainstream of leftist ideology about resistance to colonialism and to obscure its historic anti-Semitism and its determination to extinguish the state of Israel.

He begins:

The mass murders by Hamas on October 7 were the outcome of its core ideology, clearly expressed in its founding charter of 1988. That “ideology of mass murder” has its origins in the fusion of Nazism and Islamism that first took place in the 1930s and 40s, and then persisted in the Islamist politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Hamas’ ability to gain supporters, first in the universities, now in the streets, rests as well on its revised charter of 2017, which draws on the anti-Zionism of the secular Left. Hence a close reading of the revised charter, whose language and arguments now echo on campuses and in the streets, is in order.

The authors of the Hamas charter of 1988 were explicit about their ideological connections to the radical antisemitic conspiracy theories that had emerged in 20th-century Europe, and to the virulent hatred of Jews, Judaism, and therefore Israel that they derived from their anti-modernist Islamist interpretation of Islam. Yet the deadly implications of this document received far too little attention in the mainstream media of the West, despite being easily accessible online in English and German translations. Instead, an objectively pro-Hamas Left began developing among academics in Europe, Britain, and the United States, as became apparent in 2014 during one of Hamas’ attacks on Israel. They found themselves in the peculiar position as leftists of repeating Hamas’ arguments.

They did so because they had adopted the view of Israel that had become the common coin of the international Left since the 1960s. According to that view, the Jewish state is in reality a colonialist and racist endeavor built on the expulsion of the indigenous population in 1948. Relying on that profound misinterpretation of the events surrounding Israel’s founding, they were willing to make common cause with an organization that is profoundly hostile to the modernist values that had long been associated with at least some segments of leftist politics.

Seventy years of Soviet and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) propaganda mischaracterizing Zionism and Israel, equally unbalanced UN resolutions, and New Left romance about third-world revolutions had placed Israel on the “wrong” side and the Palestinians on the “right” side of the global divide between oppressors and oppressed. In the course of doing so, a distinctive leftist form of antisemitism, expressed in the language of anti-Zionism and support for armed attacks on Israel, fostered an opening to support not only the secular PLO but also Hamas. In Britain, that support and leftist antisemitism gained political influence in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn won election as the leader of the Labour Party. This bizarre fusion of the Islamist Right and the secular Left was the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact that leftist organizations made common cause with a movement of the extreme right, and the only time I can recall when they supported a group rooted in religious fanaticism. Their shared antagonism to Israel surmounted the contrasting ideological starting points.

At the same time, the Hamas charter of 1988 remained an embarrassment at least for some leftist and liberal academics and intellectuals, for the anti-Zionist Left in the universities, and for activist organizations of the left. Its celebration of antisemitic conspiracy theories voiced by the Nazi regime was impossible to deny or justify, and its calls to take up arms against the Jews were unequivocal. Its selective quotations from the Koran offered very uncomfortable evidence that Hamas—in the tradition of Islamists from Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb, all associated with the Muslim Brotherhood—defined Islam as an inherently anti-Jewish religion. For those who thought like Karl Marx that religion was the opiate of the people, the Hamas charter of 1988 revealed that such a theologically induced drug had an Islamic component as well.

The revisions in the 2017 Hamas charter were intended to resolve those issues and present Hamas as a humanitarian organization that opposed Zionism, not Jews. The new language succeeded to the extent that leftist groups were celebrating the massacre of October 7, 2023, as soon as it happened.

Please open the link to read the rest of the article.

Categories Extremism, Fascism, History, International, Religion

Watch Dr. Marvin Dunn, the Brave Scholar of Black History in Florida

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2023 //
12

At the recent conference of the Network for Public Education, one of the truly outstanding speakers was Dr. Marvin Dunn, professor emeritus at Florida International University. Dr. Dunn has written several books about Black history in Florida, most notably A History of Florida Through Black Eyes. I read that book and realized that Dr. Dunn was the right recipient for NPE’s annual “David Award,” which goes to someone who spoke out and acted on behalf of justice against the powerful, regardless of the personal risks.

Dr. Dunn is not only an author but an active preservationist of Black history. To make sure that the massacre at Rosewood, Florida, would never be forgotten, he bought five acres there and regularly brings students and teachers to learn about it. He tells the story of visiting his land with his son; a “neighbor” tried to run them over in his truck. Dr. Dunn filed a complaint with the police, and the man was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Dr. Dunn asked to have the sentence reduced, and it was dropped to only one year. The audience was impressed by his generosity of spirit. However, Dr. Dunn tweeted several weeks later that the now-released felon hung a toy skeleton where Dr. Dunn could see it. You don’t need to study Critical Race Theory to know that Racism lives.

I think you will agree that his remarks are highly inspiring.

Categories DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, History, Injustice, Justice, Network for Public Education, Race, Racism, Research

Randi and Sharon in Israel Speaking of Compassion and Sorrow and the Path Forward

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2023 //
20

Randi Weingarten and her wife, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, flew to Israel to commiserate with friends and to sit shiva for the nation. They express a strong commitment to both Israelis and Palestinians and a hope that they can one day live in peace as neighbors, in two independent states. They speak out against the Netanyahu government, whose harsh policies towards Palestinians have intensified hatred. They recognize the brutality of the October 7 massacre without qualification. I am not a Zionist but their views and mine are aligned. Neither terrorism nor indiscriminate bombing of civilians brings peace closer.

The progressive publication Haaretz interviewed them:

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum has traditionally had few qualms about being a member of a minority – as a lesbian rabbi, it is practically her brand. But in the days and weeks following the start of the Israel-Hamas war, she says it has been her identity as a liberal Zionist that has made her feel like a member of a minority.

Kleinbaum is the spiritual leader of New York’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the world’s largest LGBTQ synagogue. The space she and wife Randi Weingarten have long occupied – as high-profile American-Jewish leaders who are deeply connected to Israel, but also outspoken advocates for Palestinian rights and opponents of the occupation – is not a comfortable place to be right now.

Even within the pioneering congregation Kleinbaum has led for more than 30 years, she says the atmosphere is tense and full of “tremendous anxiety,” as the war continues with no clear resolution in sight…

“You know, the LGBT world is so focused on non-binary thinking. We’ve rejected the binary about sexuality, we’ve rejected the binary about gender identity,” Kleinbaum notes. “And yet at the same time, so many in this world have adopted a very binary approach to Israel-Palestine issues.”

Her community, she adds, is not at all immune from the expectations of conflict in American culture, in which “the good guys are always weak and the bad guys are strong. And people want a two-hour Hollywood movie in which at the end of it, the good guys overcome and vanquish the bad guys, the lights go up and you walk outside. The message I keep bringing to the congregation is that life is not a Hollywood movie.”

She tries at every opportunity, she says, to explain to those on both extremes that simple solutions are not available, and “there is not a good guy or a bad guy; there is not one victim and one perpetrator.”

That message is not always welcome. In far-left progressive circles, there are those who “believe that Israel kind of deserved what it got” on October 7 and “what Hamas did was an act of justified violence.” The fact that she “completely rejects and totally condemns” such views has made some “very angry” with her, Kleinbaum says.

At the same time, she says others are upset with her “because I continue to insist on the full equality of the Palestinian people, and I continue to stand against the occupation. I will continue to stand by the truth that I’ve said forever and is not new: Israel cannot oppress people.”

Union head Weingarten says she often finds herself in a similar position. “On the same day, I will be criticized by someone from AIPAC for being a Palestinian lover, and criticized by somebody from one of our local union branches that I have not spoken out strongly enough against Israel.”

She has been slammed in union circles for standing up for Israel’s right to defend itself, including during a AFL-CIO meeting that The New York Times described as a “raw” debate among top union officials on the Israel-Hamas conflict. She was accused by the far left of “green-lighting Zionist war crimes.”

Kleinbaum and Weingarten spoke to Haaretz on the second day of a Thanksgiving week trip to Israel, following breakfast with members of what they call their “Israeli family”: Israelis who were members of Kleinbaum’s synagogue during stints in New York, former congregants who made aliyah and other friends.

The couple note that during their last visit, in April, their friends were wearing pro-democracy T-shirts protesting the proposed judicial overhaul. Now these same people wear T-shirts with photographs of hostages on them. Like so many other Israelis, their friends have suffered losses, and some had stopped by on their way to or from 30-day memorials of loved ones killed on October 7.

“We’re so horrified and condemn what Hamas did in the strongest and most horrific terms, and we feel like we’re making a shivah visit to the whole country,” Kleinbaum says…

Both women felt they needed to be in Israel now, Kleinbaum says, “to absorb the energy here and really listen to the perspective of people who are here and to … pay our shivah call after the biggest pogrom that has happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust – and, just as importantly, also listen to Palestinian voices inside of Israel, and to listen to the voices that are fighting for shared society.” They intend to take those views back to New York.

“We have to keep telling the deep truths that those of us who are progressive Zionists understand: that there is no future except a shared future. And we have to keep reinforcing the message that this is the land with two peoples, two very complicated peoples, and that we continue to hope for a future in which both peoples can live with justice and peace and security,” Kleinbaum says.

She admits she doesn’t know where events will lead, but right now it “feels like we’re at an inflection point not only for the State of Israel, for Palestinians and Israeli Jews, but for the Jewish people. It feels like we’re at a very significant moment of Jewish history, including for Diaspora Jewish life…”

Both recognize that the failed leadership of Netanyahu and his cabinet of far-right ministers has alienated many progressive Jews.

Weingarten says “polls bear out that the Democratic Party is still supportive of Joe Biden’s approach to Israel and Gaza,” but there is still considerable pressure from those harshly critical of the amount of force used by the Israel Defense Forces, mounting calls for a unilateral cease-fire, along with a faction that does, in fact, challenge Israel’s right to exist.

Much of this, she believes, is a direct result of the images coming out of Gaza, and Israel’s decision not to widely circulate images of the horrors of October 7 in real time. Because of that decision, “the trauma, the massacre and the pogrom is just not well known and not understood in the same way as what happened to the [Gazan] hospitals” and the “sheer amount of death” in Gaza…

Biden is “a staunch ally of Israeli democracy and also supports Palestinians: he doesn’t support Israel to the detriment of the Palestinians, even though people accuse him of that. And if the Israeli right really doesn’t understand this, then they are really threatening the future of President Biden’s support. Because he cares deeply about Palestine; he cares about both people. That’s why he has said over and over again that there has to be a two-state solution,” Weingarten says…

And despite the fact that “extreme voices are the loudest right now and people are looking for simple solutions,” there are more people that share common ground with the president – particularly in America’s Jewish community.

“I believe that the majority of American Jews are actually looking for this vision,” Weingarten says. “They want to hear that they can stand with Israel, and stand with the rights of Palestinians. They don’t have to choose. And yes, today it’s a very narrow place to be. But I reject the binary that forces a simple choice. And even though it’s not an easy place to be, I believe if we keep standing in this place and pushing the message out there, more and more people will join us.”

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Extremism, History, International, Religion
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