racism – Page 10

Oberlin’s Jewish problem

Protesters at Oberlin College. (photo by Pteranadons via Wikimedia Commons)

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The second article examines the student-as-customer approach at universities and its relation to identity politics on campus.)

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote in a June article that “Oberlin College would certainly be in the running” if he picked one campus “that has been roiled the most by struggles over political correctness.”

While university president Marvin Krislov has acknowledged upheaval, he wrote – in the same Times section – that Oberlin’s “faculty and staff … maintain high academic standards and rigor.”

Since I attended the 50th reunion of my class, I realize I do care about the calamity that Oberlin College now exemplifies.

Every town in northern Ohio has history built around either its bar or its liberal arts college. Oberlin was a “dry” town, founded in 1833, the same year as Oberlin College. Then, in 1893, Oberlin became the birthplace of the Anti-Saloon League, the political movement behind the U.S. Constitution’s 18th amendment: prohibition, which took effect in 1920. That social experiment was a disaster, and the 21st amendment repealed the 18th in 1933. Oberlin College finally eased its ban on beer decades later, yet zealotry still haunts the campus.

Bruni scorns “the demand for a so-called trigger warning to students who might be upset reading Antigone,” and he seems bemused by “complaints about the ethnic integrity of the sushi in a campus dining hall.” But it was not funny when, in September 2013, a Latina Jewish student helped plan a Shabbat dinner where Latin American food would be served – and another Oberlin Latina student denounced the event’s “cultural appropriation.” As one Jewish student recalled in a Tablet article this past May, posters for a previous Asian Fusion Shabbat were “defaced with graffiti about appropriation and orientalism. Comfort food Shabbat was also ill received, with comments about appropriating black cooking.

“There is a common belief at Oberlin that all Jews are white and rich” – so a Jew cannot be Latin American, cannot be a “person of color,” etc. – and, therefore, all Jews on campus should eat “white” food. Of course, such dogma defies both fact and logic, harms individuals and undermines the college’s stated “diversity” goals.

In the same Tablet article, it was noted that, in 2013, the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association revoked affiliation of one dining hall, “the Kosher-Halal Coop (used predominantly by Jews).”

Timothy Elgren became Oberlin’s dean of arts and sciences in July 2014. In February 2016, Oberlin’s online news site posted the transcript of conversation in which Elgren told Krislov that “changes to the way we run our faculty searches have been very important.”

One such search for an assistant professor led to the appointment of Joy Karega. By March, Karega had received worldwide attention for her social media postings of anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracy theories. Karega has neither denied nor disavowed her connection to these items.

In November 2015, for example, Karega wrote that “ISIS is not a jihadist, Islamic terrorist organization. It’s a CIA and Mossad operation….” In other online postings, Karega asserted that Israel and/or Jews also were responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre on Sept. 11, 2001; for murders at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January 2015; for the massacres of 130 people in Paris in November 2015; for shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine; and for “weaponizing the weather” to inflict the damage of Hurricane Sandy in New York City.

Karega’s illustrated postings also have claimed that the Rothschild family is “worth 500 trillion dollars,” owns “nearly every central bank in the world” and owns “the media, your oil, and your government.” Abraham Socher, an Oberlin associate professor of religion, noted in the student newspaper, the Oberlin Review, that such notions harked back to the infamous antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He reminded his readers that a U.S. government definition of antisemitism specifically includes: “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective – especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”

While Karega posted anti-Jewish bigotry and conspiracy theories online, she also taught “social justice writing” to Oberlin students. When I spoke with Krislov on April 6, he could not identify any actual research or publication by Karega at Oberlin. Yet, Karega retained her professorial position there.

Starting in March, publicity about Karega and Oberlin spread among online news sites and print newspapers in the United States, then to papers in England and Israel. Articles about controversy at Oberlin had appeared months earlier in The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, as well as a New Yorker feature that followed in May.

As I learned about Karega, I found that broad anti-Jewish manifestations at Oberlin predated her – and that other campuses in the United States and Canada may have similar cultures, in which it is acceptable to denounce, mock, bully or intimidate any student who is perceived to be Jewish. Perhaps only “fringe” individuals on campus indulge in bigoted behavior, but the community as a whole may ignore or appease the fringe – as part of “free speech” and “academic freedom” or to avoid personal reprisals?

Some of the fringers, however, restrict free speech. They disrupt presentations that they disdain and they have invaded Hillel meetings or other Jewish activities, according to one unnamed “longtime Oberlin professor,” quoted in the same Tablet article as the student cited previously.

Hadas Binyamini, a 2014 Oberlin graduate and co-founder of the college’s J Street U chapter, wrote in the Forward in March this year: “I was uncomfortable publicly identifying as a Zionist” but, even more importantly, “What I didn’t find at Oberlin were spaces to engage with prevalent forms of antisemitism that have nothing to do with Israel. No tools were offered for students to critically examine American Jewish identity and to deconstruct antisemitic motifs….” And, Binyamini continued, “the Multicultural Resource Centre … remains silent on antisemitism. Similarly, the department of comparative American studies, which trains students to ‘investigate power, inequality and agency through the analysis of … race … class … and citizenship,’ [seems] unable to engage students with these same issues when it comes to American Jews.”

Marc Blecher, an Oberlin professor of politics and East Asian studies, agreed: “our Multicultural Resource Centre has been silent on antisemitism.” It is worth noting that, this year, Oberlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of its MRC, which “strives to advance … multicultural understanding among all campus communities.”

Isabel Sherrell, another Jewish graduate of Oberlin – who, according to the Forward, attempted some dialogue with Karega – compiled a list of anti-Jewish incidents and attitudes on the campus. She permitted the use of her name when a Washington Post blog publicized her observations this past February. For instance, Item #6 on her list is anti-Zionist advocacy in the classroom of an African studies professor. Item #18 includes, “Being told I was simply European and Judaism is a religion not an ethnicity,” although the latter view logically contradicts the (false) campus dogma that a person cannot be both Jewish and a “person of color.”

Item #10 on Sherrell’s list begins, “The fact that so many Jewish students are bullied into silence….” Unlike Sherrell, I have zero personal knowledge of “cyber-bullying” or “trolling” or “doxing” via “social media” and I have no idea how a target on campus should respond to such abuse. But Jonathan Weisman – who is not a student, but rather is an editor at the Washington bureau of the New York Times – announced in June that he felt obliged to quit Twitter altogether, because, “For weeks, I had been barraged on Twitter by rank antisemitic comments, Nazi iconography of hooknosed Jews stabbing lovely Christians in the back, the gates of Auschwitz, and trails of dollar bills leading to ovens.” (Weisman believes that the tweets he received came mostly from right-wing white supremacists, not from left-wing campus “social justice” warriors.)

By mid-April, Oberlin’s board of trustees and a majority of faculty members had publicly criticized Karega. Also, some sort of investigative process was announced. But at least three members of the Africana studies department individually voiced some support for Karega. One concern was that

Karega might be a scapegoat, burdened with blame for an anti-Jewish climate that pervaded the campus before she arrived.

I have found no record of public comment by Krislov regarding Karega or related issues until after her story went viral. Then, he issued a statement, which the Oberlin news site posted on March 1, about “The Mission of Liberal Arts Education”: “At Oberlin, we are deeply committed to … ensuring our students a diverse, inclusive and equitable educational experience. We demand intellectual rigor….”

In his mission statement – as in his Times essay and elsewhere for months – Krislov minimized campus problems, promulgated platitudes and did not mention Karega by name.

Oberlin has an Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and it released on May 19 a “Campus Climate Report,” which also did not include Karega’s name in its Jewish section.

During the first week of August 2016 – five months after the earliest Times article about Karega, and fast approaching the start of the 2016-2017 academic year – Oberlin finally announced that “Dr. Karega has been placed on paid [emphasis added] leave and will not teach at Oberlin” until “the faculty governance process … plays out.” Karega’s attorney accused Oberlin of “pandering to the dictates of a handful of vocal and wealthy religious zealots.”

The Atlantic, back in 1941, invited and published an article on “The Jewish Problem in America,” in which the journalist (formerly an Episcopal priest) Alfred Jay Nock wrote: “The problem, stated in the fewest words, is that of maintaining a modus vivendi between the American Jew and his fellow citizens which is strong enough to stand any shocks … such as may occur in the years ahead.”

From New York City, he observed with alarm: “… in the late summer of 1939 … anti-Jewish street demonstrations … were going on in Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, the Bronx and Yorkville at the rate of 50 or 60 a week. “These were assaults, baitings, intimidations, picketings, soapbox speeches, incitements to boycott, and the like.

“I think it is not impossible that I shall live to see the Nürnberg laws reenacted in this country and enforced with vigor.”

The Nürnberg – or Nuremberg – laws, which were announced by Nazi Germany in 1935, stripped Jews of citizenship and institutionalized their persecution. Happily, Nock lived to see Hitler and Nazism defeated in 1945.

In 2014, the Nuremberg city council adopted a one-page resolution stating: “We are decisively opposed to every form of antisemitism…. Jewish life in Nuremberg enjoys our very special protection and our care [and] demonstrations in the context of the Israeli-Palestine conflict must be prevented from being misused as political manifestations of antisemitism.”

Oberlin’s official online optimism outshines Pollyanna, Pangloss and Pinocchio. But the actual campus – the college on the ground in Ohio, about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland – does have a Jewish problem in 2016.

Ned Glick lives in Vancouver. His baccalaureate is from Oberlin College and his PhD is from Stanford. After teaching at the University of Chicago, he had University of British Columbia appointments in mathematics, in statistics and in the faculty of medicine. He retired to emeritus faculty status in 1992.

Such hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is everywhere, perhaps, and it can be a full-time occupation to call it out. For years, the anti-Israel movement, which generally comprises advocates of social justice who envision themselves as defenders of human dignity and respect for the diverse experiences of peoples, has employed the most toxic language and imagery imaginable against Israel. This includes the routine equation of Zionism with Nazism, apartheid and even Satanism. “IsraHELL” is commonly used in online commentary, and how frequently have we seen images of Israeli leaders with devil’s horns drawn on them?

Such language and imagery are often condemned as antisemitic, because, well, they are – regardless of the insistence of perpetrators that the target is Israel, not Jews. It is sheer hypocrisy when concern about antisemitism is dismissed as Jewish posturing to “silence” criticism of Israel or deflect attention from Israel’s “war crimes” and other “atrocities.” There is almost certainly no other ethnic or cultural group whose expressed concerns would be so summarily disregarded by people who proudly carry the mantle of social justice and human equality.

Criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, of course. But sometimes it is. And well-intentioned people will take the time to distinguish when it is and when it is not. Instead, while asserting that Zionists equate “any” criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the anti-Israel side goes full-tilt in the opposite direction, claiming that no criticism of Israel is tainted by antisemitism. Antisemitism, in their narrative, is not a bigotry to be confronted, but an always-false assertion used to deflect or negate criticism of Israel.

Antisemitism, as we have said here before, has its own name because it differs in critical ways from other forms of discrimination and bigotry. For instance, where many forms of racism are premised on the idea that the perpetrator perceives themselves as better than the victim, antisemitism, in some instances, is founded on the assumption that Jews perceive themselves as better than other people – see how often the “chosen people” concept is raised in online dialogue as criticism of Israel and Jews.

Similarly, anti-racism activism sees race as integral to economic and class division, which it often is. But, because one of the key prejudicial assumptions about Jews is that they are both economically and socially advantaged, Jews de facto cannot be victims of discrimination. The corollary of this is twofold. Jews do not (in the narrative of contemporary anti-racism activism) experience economic disadvantage, therefore, there is no evidence of antisemitism. Ergo claims of antisemitism are a cynical attempt to gain sympathy by a group of people who have long since exhausted the world’s reserve of empathy.

Alternatively, there are those who accept that antisemitism may exist. After all, it is hard to ignore the Jew-hatred spray-painted on walls, prevalent on social media and filling the comments sections after almost any news story involving Israel or Jews. Yet even this evidence may not elicit sympathy or allyship. In fact, there may be a counterintuitive response. Given the prejudiced idea that Jews consider themselves superior – usually founded on an ignorant misreading of the concept of chosenness – there may be a frisson of satisfaction among some that the uppity Jews are getting taken down a notch.

In the face of this reality, what should we do? For one thing, we should not allow the hypocrisy of others to distance us from the values we share with those others. We must not abandon the fundamentally Jewish commitment to racial, social and economic justice that has been central to our identity for hundreds of generations before this postmodern incarnation of social justice emerged a couple of decades ago. We should not cower from the concept of chosenness, because we know this is not a symptom of superiority but of a humble role in service of tikkun olam, of a better world.

Concerns about the alt-right

There used to be just conservatives. Then there came the neo-conservatives, a largely American variation on the theme that venerates free markets, but marries it with an interventionist foreign policy. Neo-conservativism got a black eye after the interventionism its proponents advocate led to the quagmire in Iraq. In a resurgence of old-fashioned conservatism, stalwarts proudly adopted the self-deprecating paleo-conservative, a blatant rejection of the neo-conservative moniker.

In recent months, a new term has come into common usage in American politics: alt-right. The contraction of “alternative right” is a sort of whitewashing umbrella for a range of ideological streams that were, until recently, considered well outside the mainstream. White nationalism, itself a whitewashed term for white supremacy, is chief among these. While not precisely defined, alt-right has also been said to encompass the anti-immigration and xenophobic nativism that has been articulated by Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for U.S. president. Populism is a term also associated with the alt-right, although Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination was also defined as populist.

The banality of the term “alt-right” – it almost sounds like something you do with a computer keyboard – masks the mainstreaming of terrible ideas. Concurrent to, and not the least bit unrelated to, the rise of alt-right as a term is the rise of Trump as a political phenomenon. The Republican standard-bearer has said, on an almost daily basis, things that would eliminate any other candidate in history from contention. Yet his supporters dismiss (or embrace) his hateful, ignorant and, seemingly as often as not, outright false statements. The litany is endless. Last week, he suggested that Clinton’s secret service details should disarm and “see what happens to her.” This unsubtle allusion to violence is not at all uncommon in Trump’s rhetoric. That he remains a contender for the presidency is alarming. That he is rising in the polls, almost tying Clinton in aggregates and leading her in many polls, suggests that Americans are seriously considering taking a dangerous political turn.

Trump idolizes “strongmen.” He has reveled in the admiration of Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader who has undone that country’s nascent steps toward democracy. He is unequivocally a solo act, openly insisting that he will run roughshod over Congress and the judiciary, the institutions that the founders of the United States set up as checks and balances on the presidency. He has stated that the electoral system is rigged against him and predicted rioting in the country should he lose. The image he projects of America is of a third-world economy, and the vision of political violence he purveys is more suited to an unstable dictatorship than to the reality of American government.

It is in the nature of human beings to take for granted what we have the moment we possess it. Readers of a certain age remember The Jetsons, with its incredible futuristic gadgets, a cartoon we can now watch on a device we carry in our pocket that contains all the accumulated knowledge of humankind, and we have the ability to speak face-to-face with almost anyone in the world instantaneously, in real time. And yet, when this gadget alerts us that we have a message or a call, we are as likely to respond with a weary, “Oh, what is it now?”

Likewise, perhaps, with democracy. In its modern incarnation, democracy was born 240 years ago in what is now the United States of America. In the span of human history, this is the blink of an eye. About Trump, many commentators, most recently this week in the Washington Post, have said, “This is how fascism comes to America.”

On numerous occasions over the years, we have used this space to condemn flippant use of such terms as fascism, warning that overuse will dull sensitivity to the seriousness of the language and its threat. We are less reticent to condemn the use in this case. The rise of Trump and the “alt-right” ideologies he empowers are cause for very real concern.

We have our own issues

American politics, these days, attracts global disbelief and revulsion. The contest pits against each other two of the most unpopular candidates since polling began. One of them, the Republican nominee Donald Trump, is endorsed by the country’s leading white supremacists.

There is no question that Trump has tapped into something. Most of his supporters are not now and never have been members or supporters of the Ku Klux Klan or similar fringe groups. They are, in fact, a large and mainstream enough group that he won the nomination of the Republican party and now stands just a couple of points behind Democrat Hillary Clinton in polls, with at least two in five Americans saying they intend to vote for him. Among white Americans, if they alone were the electorate, polls say Trump would win a landslide.

Leaving aside his nonchalance about the fact that David Duke, the former imperial wizard of the KKK, and other of America’s most prominent racists think he would make a top-notch president, Trump has legitimized a host of barely more discrete forms of bigotry, chauvinism and hatred. People who strive for human respect have responded with two approaches. They have condemned the most overt examples of Trump’s racism, while acknowledging that many Americans are experiencing economic and social displacement that could justify their scapegoating of other groups or otherwise find reason to support a candidate whose policy positions are nothing more than accumulated Twitter tantrums.

If Trump wins, there will be more issues to address than this space can accommodate. If he loses, there will still be a divided country where parents have to explain to their children why it is inappropriate for them to express ideas that have been so effortlessly articulated by one of the two leading candidates for the highest office in the country.

Incongruously – or is it? – we are also in a time when the United States is engaged in a deep public reflection on race. The Black Lives Matter movement, which is partly a result of the murder of young African-Americans by police officers but also of broader systemic racism, has opened an overdue public discussion. Decades after legal racism was upended, there remain serious issues that the country needs to confront. Small gestures like that by Colin Kaepernick, a football player who is refusing to stand for the national anthem as a protest against discrimination, have aroused outrage but also raised legitimate awareness. Can you love your country and still condemn aspects of its nature?

Israelis, perhaps foremost among others, have faced this question for decades. And Canada is also engaged in a discussion around race. While we, too, have a history of racism against people of African descent, this history is different from that of the United States in myriad ways, including the absence of slavery in our history. But our past includes racist and antisemitic immigration policies, social and systemic antisemitism, racism and mistreatment of women, degradations of many varieties and, in something we are only beginning to come to terms with, treatment of indigenous Canadians that was intended to erase their cultural identities. And these are not the only areas where our society fails to live up to our ideals.

It is certainly tempting to look at what is happening to our south and feel superior. It would be more productive as a society for us to acknowledge that, while we see fault in others, we will be a better country when we keep our gaze closer to home, and use our stones for repairing, not throwing.

Beneath burkini

The burkini fiasco, if it has had any positive effects, should have opened some eyes to how silly human beings can behave when we become enmeshed in a fabricated social panic. The issue, for those who have not seen the image of French police standing over a woman at a beach, requiring her to remove articles of clothing, is the idea that Muslim women in modest beach wear are a threat to Western civilization.

About 30 coastal towns in France banned the “burkini,” swimwear that generally covers all but a woman’s face, hands and feet. Even after a French court ruled the ban illegal, most of the mayors insisted they would continue enforcing the dress code.

The irony is jarring. Ostensibly based on the idea that Islam or Islamism – the motivation and the perceived threat are blurry – oppresses women by forcing them into extensive body-covering clothing, police in a democratic Western country force a woman to disrobe. (It was inevitable, also, that photos would soon go viral depicting nuns frolicking in the ocean in full Christian religious regalia, unmolested by authorities.)

France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called the burkini a “provocation” and “an expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women,” an “archaic vision” in which women are “immodest, impure and that they should be totally covered. That is not compatible with the values of France and the Republic.”

We can leave to the French what is compatible with the values of France and the Republic, yet surely a nation founded on the pillars of liberty and equality must find something amiss when its police devote their time and resources to enforcing swimwear rules.

France is singular among European countries for its stated commitment to laïcité, the prohibition against religious involvement in government affairs in service of a secular ideal. Similar issues have been addressed in Quebec, where overtly religious Christian symbols, including the crucifix, were deemed part of the province’s cultural heritage and thereby conveniently exempted from the ban on religious imagery. But, in France, as elsewhere in Europe, more is at play than ideas of secularism. In fact, the imperfect heritage of secularism is being manipulated as an excuse to target a particular group.

On the one hand, let us not pretend that there are not legitimate concerns and issues raised by the increasing population of Muslims in Europe. Among this population, both among immigrants and those born in Europe, are a small number who have become radicalized and are a genuine threat to society. A larger number holds ideas that challenge the European consensus on the role of women in society, pluralism and the rights of people to live free from religious coercion. These are legitimate concerns that require addressing through long-range integration strategies and societal accommodation between traditions – as does the rise in Europe of nationalism, xenophobia and racism.

But the burkini is, at best, a side issue; a symptom of a few things, none of them healthy. Regardless, the “solution” to any social coercion around women’s clothing is certainly not legal proscription, at least it should not be in a Western democracy. Burkini-banning has more in common with religious extremism – modesty “police” exist in various communities around the world – than the Western freedoms the burkini-bashers claim to defend.

Uniquely B.C. baseball story

Ellen Schwartz (photo from Ellen Schwartz)

Historical fiction is a great way to learn about the past and, while aimed at younger readers, many an adult will enjoy and learn from Ellen Schwartz’s Heart of a Champion (Tundra Books).

For Schwartz, a TV documentary led to her novel about the fictional Sakamoto family, set in the very real time when Japanese Canadians were interned during the Second World War. It was in watching this documentary that Schwartz first found out about the Asahi baseball team.

In the author’s note, she explains that asahi means “morning sun.” The team was established in 1914, winning their first title in 1919, the Vancouver International League championship. They won the Pacific Northwest League championships every year from 1937 through 1941.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and declared war on Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, writes Schwartz, “In Canada, Japanese Canadians were branded ‘enemy aliens’ and quickly lost their rights. The government, fearing that they would be loyal to Japan and would share war secrets with the enemy, took away their fishing boats, cars, radios and cameras. The Japanese were subject to a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

“In the spring of 1942, the Canadian government began to remove Japanese Canadians from the west coast of British Columbia. Men between the ages of 18 and 45 were sent to road camps in the Interior to build roads. Women, children and older people were sent to internment camps, many in abandoned mining or logging ‘ghost towns.’ Small, primitive shacks were hastily built to house them. The people lost their homes, businesses and possessions, never to get them back.”

In her research for the novel, Schwartz told the Independent, “I learned so much. In addition to the Asahis, I delved into the history of the Japanese-Canadian community in Vancouver and then in the internment camps. I hadn’t realized how established and prosperous the Japanese-Canadian community was in the pre-World War II years. Although there was a lot of discrimination – for example, Japanese Canadians didn’t have the vote, they were paid less than Caucasians for the same work and they often suffered racial slurs – these were middle-class families who were integrated into Canadian society. That’s why it was such a shock when they were uprooted and sent to internment camps in the Interior.

“I had heard about the internment camps but I didn’t realize how awful they were until I went to the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre in New Denver [on Slocan Lake in the Kootenay region] as part of my research. When I stepped inside the original 1942 shack that is preserved there, I was shocked at how primitive and barren it was. In that moment, the second half of the book came to me, as I experienced what it must have felt like for Kenny and his family.”

In the novel, 10-year-old Kenny (Kenji in Japanese) aspires to be an Asahi like his older brother, star player Mickey (Mitsuo). However, Kenny has been diagnosed with a heart condition, which means he has to practise secretly, so as to not worry his parents. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, dreams of baseball are replaced with the nightmare of having to register as an enemy alien, of being subjected to a curfew, of having his father’s business closed, of his father being sent to a work camp and of being evacuated to an internment camp, only allowed to bring minimal belongings. In Kenny’s case, he, his mother, older brother and younger sister (Sally) are sent to New Denver, where Kenny and his mother manage to find the strength to inspire others in the camp to hope – and play baseball again.

The Sakamotos’ neighbors, and dear friends, are the Bernsteins, who have two daughters, Susana and Brigitte (aka Gittie). This allows Schwartz to draw parallels between the treatment of Jews in Europe leading to the Holocaust and Japanese in Canada during the war.

“I wanted to point out that the treatment of Japanese Canadians, although obviously not nearly as lethal or horrific, was comparable to that of Jews in Europe,” explained Schwartz. “In both cases, a minority was being persecuted simply because of their religion or nationality. Giving Kenny a Jewish best friend would make both characters sympathetic about this issue.

“The other reason I made Susana Kenny’s best friend is that, because of his heart defect, he would not have been able to keep up with other boys and might have had a girl as a best friend. Initially, Susana was a minor character, but I really liked her – she had chutzpah – so I gave her a bigger role in the story. It’s her courage and loyalty that give Kenny the impetus to find his own.”

Schwartz herself didn’t have a particularly religious childhood. “My mother was religious; my father wasn’t. We went to High Holiday services and that was about it,” she said. “But we lived with my grandparents when I was little, and my grandfather was observant and I adored him, so I grew up with a real fondness for Jewishness. I loved the family seders with everyone together and my grandfather chanting the Haggadah. I feel Jewish inside even though I’m not observant now.

“When I’m thinking of characters, I don’t set out to make them Jewish, but sometimes they emerge that way. Even if a character isn’t identified as Jewish, I know that that character is, and that gives the character an inner richness for me. For example, my first novel series was about a girl named Starshine Shapiro. I never mentioned that Starshine’s family was Jewish, but in my mind they were, and some of the humor in the books had a definite Jewish flavor.”

Schwartz hasn’t always been a writer.

“After I stopped teaching elementary school in the late ’70s, I started writing educational stories. That was my first foray into writing,” said Schwartz, who grew up in New Jersey and moved to Canada in 1972 with her husband, Bill. “I wrote stories for kids about energy conservation and the environment, which were important to me. I suppose I started with educational writing because I was comfortable ‘talking’ to and teaching kids. I sold the first educational story to the government of B.C. and the second one to the National Film Board. Then I decided to try to write a regular story, and that became my first book, Dusty.”

Schwartz teaches creative writing at Douglas College and she also works as a corporate and technical writer and editor, she said. “My husband and I own a small communications company called Polestar Communications. We do all kinds of writing and editing for public agencies and companies – reports, brochures, articles, educational material, technical material, web writing, etc. We also do marketing and organize events. That’s how I spend most of my writing time.

“I also write magazine articles, mainly for the Costco Connection, the magazine of the Costco corporation,” she added. “The editor usually assigns me stories about books and authors, which, of course, I love. I have interviewed and written about some great authors, including Ann-Marie MacDonald, Richard Wagamese, Linden MacIntyre and Alice Munro.”

On her website, Schwartz notes that she hasn’t even always wanted to be a writer.

“Dancing is my favorite thing,” she said, “and I often tell kids that if God tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You can be a professional dancer tomorrow if you give up writing,’ I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute. I take a jazz class once a week and love it.”

While her career path may have changed a few times, Schwartz said the process of getting an idea to publication hasn’t changed much since she published her first book more than 30 years ago.

“Essentially, it’s the same,” she said. “I get an idea, mull it over for awhile, make notes and then plunge in. Many drafts later, I send it to a publisher and hope for the best. Once a manuscript is accepted, I work with an editor (I love working with editors) and do another rewrite. Then the book goes into production, which I have very little to do with other than approving the cover. (I have no artistic talent – my abilities extend to stick figures – and don’t illustrate or do any book design.)

“Of course, now I can submit work electronically, and it’s a lot easier to bounce ideas back and forth with my publishers before I send them the story,” she continued. “And I do a lot of research on the internet rather than in the library, though, for most stories, I still read many print articles and books for background information.”

And she does more than that.

Linda Kawamoto Reid, research archivist at Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, writes in the foreword of Heart of a Champion that Schwartz “thoroughly researched the times by talking extensively with members of the Japanese-Canadian community. She met Kaye Kaminishi, our last Asahi baseball player, who was a rookie in 1941, and sought out the facts by conducting interviews, reading books and watching films. The story has surprising elements of reality, from the food eaten to the description of events following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

Japanese Canadians were not allowed to return to the coast until 1949 and it wasn’t until 1988 that the Government of Canada formally apologized for the treatment of Japanese Canadians during the war. As for the Asahis, the team was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003 and into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2005; in 2008, the team was designated an Event of National Historical Significance.

So, is the country in which we’re now living less, more or similarly susceptible to the factors that allowed the refusal of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and the internment of the Japanese, as but two extreme examples of the racism of those decades?

“Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think we’re less susceptible to that kind of racism and exclusion in Canada,” said Schwartz. “The recent acceptance of the Syrian refugees is a heartwarming example. When my kids were in school in Burnaby in the ’90s, there were kids of every color and nationality in their classes and no one thought anything of it. We can’t ever take tolerance for granted, but I think that Canada in 2016 is a pretty welcoming place.”

Ellen Schwartz will be at Word Vancouver on Sept. 25, at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival Oct. 18-23 and at the Calgary Jewish Book Festival Dec. 4-11.

Reacting to others’ suffering

Gun violence in America is an intractable, apparently unsolvable crisis. This month, it has intersected catastrophically with other tenacious American ailments: race and police violence. These issues have been inextricable in many ways for decades, of course, but the pervasiveness of video-recording and social media have helped turn what was once a matter of competing testimonies into irrefutable proof of police overreach, including murder.

The police killings of black civilians in Louisiana and Minnesota last week, followed by the revenge killing of five police officers in Texas, created a climate of crisis in the United States. Such times are, sometimes, opportunities for progress. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s was advanced by the widespread awareness among Americans of all races of injustices being perpetrated against black Americans. However, anything involving guns in America seems somehow impervious to reason.

Race is a unique flashpoint in American life and approaches to it have very often split directly along color lines. This may be changing, with more white Americans recognizing the injustices experienced by their fellow citizens of color. Like sexual orientation equality, issues of racial justice seem to be advancing because of a wider appreciation that transcends personal identity and relies on human empathy for those who are different from ourselves.

Still, Americans – and Canadians in somewhat different contexts, and all peoples – struggle to find balance and moral approaches to confounding issues. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, a counter-campaign declares “All Lives Matter.” After the police killings in Dallas, “Blue Lives Matter” became a slogan. While the veracity of these statements cannot be refuted, they are nonetheless unhelpful and dismissive. Responding to Black Lives Matter with an appropriated variation is disrespectful. It is akin to the complaints by members of the majority when gay pride events occur and the question arises, “When do we celebrate straight pride day?” The answer, as empathetic people know, is that straight people (or white people) don’t need special days to celebrate their situation in society.

The insensitivity of such approaches has been slyly critiqued in social media recently, with one cartoon showing a house on fire while firefighters douse the house next door in water, declaring “All houses matter.” Similarly, a man in the doctor’s office with a broken arm is told, “All bones matter.”

The message should be clear: the perennial problems America has around race are particularly enflamed right now and attempting to dilute these through banal attempts to universalize what is a very particular problem effectively exacerbates the issue. Just last week in this space we noted that the specious way some people respond to any mention of the Holocaust is to note that Jews aren’t the only people to have suffered. Replying to the suffering of one group by an erroneous universalizing of race-particular situations is not a healthy response.

Another development seen recently is the attempt by “pro-Palestinian” activists in the United States to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent catastrophes to their own narrow ends. Students for Justice in Palestine at New York University declared that those responsible for the “genocide” of Palestinians are likewise responsible for the “genocide” of African-Americans, a circle they attempt to square with the fact that a small number of U.S. police have received anti-terrorism training from the Israel Defence Forces.

There are plenty of issues competing for the attention of people of goodwill. There are injustices everywhere, God knows. There is racism, homophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia and every range and permutation of human misery that deserve attention. Yet, when something as systemic and pernicious as the murder of African-Americans by those entrusted to protect American citizens becomes epidemic, this is not the time to elbow one group out of the way or try to co-opt their tragedies.

Concern over incarceration

A new handbook published by T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights provides a resource for the Jewish community to press for change around the problem of mass incarceration in the United States.

“We are here to uphold ideas of redemption and mercy,” said T’ruah director of programs Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, citing a colleague who described America’s prisons as having a “mercy deficit.”

The handbook is available for free download at truah.org/incarceration. It provides background and resources – steeped in Jewish texts and teachings – for Jewish communities to take action around these issues. Leading a network of 1,800 rabbis across North America, T’ruah aims to bring attention to an array of domestic social justice issues, as well as human rights for Israelis and Palestinians.

When it comes to mass incarceration, Canada doesn’t have the same problem, but we have similar societal ills when it comes to race, ethnicity and imprisonment – as well as problematic prison conditions themselves – that call out for redress.

The handbook initiative came out of T’ruah’s earlier work on ending solitary confinement. Over the last couple of years, Kahn-Troster has found the Jewish community to be increasingly receptive to grappling with issues around incarceration. Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which details the effect that mass incarceration – and the subsequent denial of civil rights for convicted felons – has had on the African American community, really opened people’s eyes, she told the Independent.

Why the term mass incarceration? Compared to other countries, the United States imprisons its population at alarmingly high rates: 698 out of every 100,000 citizens are behind bars. For comparative purposes, Canada’s per capita rate is 141 out of 100,000, according to Statistics Canada.

And then there is the problem of race. African Americans are six times more likely to be jailed than their white counterparts, yet crime rates are not necessarily different. According to American Civil Liberties Union data cited in the T’ruah report, despite equal rates of actual usage, a black person in America is 3.73 times more likely as a white person to be arrested for drug use.

In Canada, blacks are incarcerated at three times their rate in society, according to the Office of Correctional the Investigator of Canada (OCIC). And, while only four percent of the population of Canada is aboriginal, 25% of the prison population is aboriginal. Among the female prison population, fully 36% are aboriginal, and these percentages are only increasing, according to CBC News reporting from January of this year. For aboriginal adults in Canada, the incarceration rate is 10 times higher than for non-aboriginal adults, says OCIC. Maclean’s, in February, quoted criminologists describing Canadian prisons as the country’s new “residential schools.”

In addition, a report from Saskatoon and Regina, cited in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, revealed that indigenous students are 1.6 times more likely to be stopped on the street than non-indigenous students. A Toronto Star analysis revealed that, in Toronto, blacks are three times more likely to be stopped by police than non-blacks.

As the Supreme Court of Canada has noted, “courts must take judicial notice of such matters as the history of colonialism, displacement and residential schools and how that history continues to translate into lower educational attainment, lower incomes, higher unemployment, higher rates of substance abuse and suicide and, of course, higher levels of incarceration for aboriginal peoples.”

The legacy of slavery in America looms large, and racial bias in the criminal justice system continues to haunt society. “People of color are more likely to be pulled over,” Kahn-Troster said. “The War on Drugs enables cops to search them. There’s a higher level of policing in black areas; there’s racial bias in jury selection; it’s easier to strike black people from juries; the sentencing is harsher if there’s a black perpetrator and a white victim than the other way around.”

In Canada, solitary confinement is an ongoing issue, as is overcrowding, concern over mental and physical health and rehabilitation, and an overall troubling rise in incarceration rates just as the crime rate lessens. Reporting in the Toronto Star puts the figure at a 17% increase in the federal prison population over the last decade.

With t’shuvah (repentance), cheshbon hanefesh (personal accounting), a questioning spirit and the search for social justice all core Jewish values, T’ruah’s initiative is laudable. It’s easy to look away – and harder to do the tough work of asking how we can both prevent harm to victims while improving our nation’s justice system to avoid discrimination and to shelter the most vulnerable.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She is a columnist for Canadian Jewish News and contributes to Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward, among other publications.

Be prepared to speak up

On Sunday, it appeared that Norbert Hofer had been elected president of Austria. By Monday, when absentee ballots were counted, he had lost by a mere 31,000 votes out of 4.6 million. The election captured worldwide attention because Hofer represents the Austrian Freedom Party, one of a string of extreme-right parties catching fire across Europe.

Hofer’s defeat was a relief to many, including Jewish organizations, but the narrowness of it is being declared a wake-up call. It wouldn’t be the first such warning. There have been multiple close calls, going as far back as 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the antisemitic founder of France’s Front National, made it to the presidential runoff. But never has any far-right figure come as close as Hofer to becoming head of state of a European country.

Hofer’s campaign of anxiety and scapegoating used Middle East immigration and associated (and unassociated) crime as an accelerant. As is happening in various places, including the “Brexit” referendum in the United Kingdom on June 23, countries are reconsidering their positions as part of the larger community of European nations. Part of this, again, goes back to the immigration issue, as some seek to bring immigration decision-making back to national capitals from the European Union.

While Europe appears a hotbed of emerging far-right parties, some Israelis are sounding the alarms over recent events there.

Over the past few days, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has closed the door on a possible unity government with the left-leaning Zionist Union, setting the stage for an alliance with Yisrael Beitenu, and its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, to become defence minister, a position that Moshe Ya’alon abandoned in a flurry of disgust and condemnation of Netanyahu last week.

Some commentators say the result will be the most right-wing government Israel has ever seen. Ehud Barak, former Labor Party prime minister, said the developments amounted to “the seeds of fascism.” Three-time defence minister Moshe Arens predicts a “political earthquake.”

Lieberman, a settler himself and a leader in the movement representing Jews who live outside the Green Line, has a strong base among Russian immigrants, of which he is also one, and a reputation for antagonizing Palestinians and international diplomats. Originally a high-level member of Netanyahu’s Likud, Lieberman broke with Netanyahu over what he saw as Netanyahu’s overly conciliatory approach to the Palestinians during the 1997 negotiations that resulted in the Wye River Memorandum. Lieberman opposed Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement and dismisses land for peace – the primary approach Israel has operated under for years in negotiations with its neighbors – as a “critical mistake” that will destroy Israel.

Suffice to say that politics is a vocation that invites hyperbole. Yet developments in many places – in Europe, in the United States, in Israel – invite strong reactions. The political spectrum has changed; terminology and policies differ with the times. While antisemitism has always been a defining characteristic of the far-right, some extreme-right European parties are now highly pro-Israel and eerily even philosemitic, seeing Israel as a bulwark against the “real” enemy – Islamism (or, less specifically, as is their wont: Islam). While the United States has seen its share of demagogues, it is equally true that, should fascism of some native form find root there, it would almost certainly be led by a buffoon who people underestimated for too long.

Canada sometimes seems like a blessed island in a roiling world – something we should never take for granted. It may be tempting to be smug, but instead Canadians should use our comfort and whatever influence we have to evangelize, to reclaim a phrase, for a world where moderation and tolerance prevail. While we might be more comfortable currently with politely withholding our opinions, the time may be upon us when we are truly called upon to register our disapproval of events – next door, in Israel or anywhere. We shouldn’t be afraid to speak up.

האם יש שכירות בחינם?

בתקופה האחרונה מתפרסמות מודעות מסוג חדש להשכרת חדרים ודירות משותפות בוונקובר, באתר האינטרנט עם לוח המודעות המקוון קרייגליסט. (צילום: theprovince.com)

האם יש שכירות בחינם?
לא בדיוק – השוכרת תאלץ “לענג” את המשכיר

בתקופה האחרונה מתפרסמות מודעות מסוג חדש להשכרת חדרים ודירות משותפות בוונקובר, באתר האינטרנט עם לוח המודעות המקוון קרייגליסט. המשכירים מטבע הדברים גברים מציעים להשכיר חדרים או דירות ללא תשלום. הם מבקשים לקבל “רק” קצת מאסג’ים או עינוגים אחרים מהשוכרות. במילים אחרות סקס במקום דמי שכירות.

לדברי פרופסור למשפטים באוניברסיטת יו.בי.סי, ג’נין בנאדט, הגברים המשכירים מנצלים את המצב הקשה בו השוכרות נמצאות, כיוון שמחירי השכירות בוונקובר מרקיעי שחקים וקשה מאוד למצוא חדרים או דירות להשכרה במצב השוק כיום. בנאדט: “לא מדובר במערכת יחסים בין בני זוג שחולקים דירה במשותף. שכירות תמורת סקס היא אקט לא חוקי והמשכירים יכולים להסתבך גם עם חוקי זכויות האדם והטרדות מיניות”. דוברת הארגון לסיוע לנאנסות ומקלט לנשים בוונקובר, סמנתה ריי, מוסיפה כי הגברים משתמשים בטקטיקה חדשה של מסחר בשכירות, עבור קבלת שירותי מין כדי לנצל נשים. ריי: “הגברים משתמשים בכוחם ומנצלים את הייאוש הכלכלי של הנשים בעיר. נשים צעירות ומהגרות יכולות בקלות ליפול בפח של המשכירים”.

לעומת זאת טוען דובר משטרת ונקובר, בריאן מונטגיו כי לאור צורת הניסוח המודעות, אין בהן משום עבירה על החוק. מונטיגו מציע לנשים להתעלם ממודעות שמציעות שכירות חינם תמורת שירותים מפוקפקים ואל להן לקחת סיכונים מיותרים.

האם יש גזענות בעבודה?
קורות חיים אנונימיים צפויים להגביר את שוויון ההזדמנויות בתעסוקה

קנדה נחשבת למדינה ליברלית ומכניסת אורחים כלפי זרים שמהגרים אליה ועבור פליטים שנקלטים בה. אך מתחת לפני השטח מתברר שכמו במדינות מערב אחרות, גם בקנדה המתקדמת אין בדיוק שוויון הזדמנויות בתעסוקה לכל האזרחים, ללא קשר למוצאם. לפי נתונים ממשלתיים המיעוטים בקנדה מהווים למעלה מ20% מהאוכלוסיה, אך לעומת זאת הם מקווים בקושי 14% ממצבת העובדים בשירות המדינה. מחקרים שונים שנערכו בארה”ב ובקנדה מצביעים על כך שלמועמדים לעבודה ששמותיהם אינם אנגלו-סקסים, יש סיכוי קטן יותר להיות מועסקים.

לאור זאת חבר פרלמנט מטעם המפלגה הליברלית, אחמד חוסיין, טוען שהגיע הזמן שקנדה תאמץ מדיניות חדשה בתחום התעסוקה, לפחות במגזר הציבורי, שבו יקלטו עובדים לפי כישוריהם באמצעות קורות חיים אנונימיים, ועל ידי כך תקטן תופעת האפלייה.

התזמורת הסימפונית של טורונטו אימצה לפני שנים את המדיניות לקלוט נגנים חדשים באופן אנונימי. המועמדים לתזמורת נבחנים בזמן שהבוחנים לא רואים את פניהם, לא יודעים מה מינם ומה שמם. כתוצאה מכך כיום לפחות 50 מהנגנים בתזמורת הם נשים, ורבים שייכים לבני המיעוטים. לאחרונה מספר בתי ספר בקנדה אימצו מדיניות דומה בוגע לבדיקת מבחנים ועבודות של התלמידים, שמוגשים ללא שם לבוחנים.

החיפושיות בהתכתבות
קורס באוניברסיטה על סיפור הצלחתה של הלהקה הבריטית

הביטלס ממשיכים להצליח גם באוניברסיטה של מחוז נובה סקוטיה. 66 סטודנטים נרשמו לקורס חדש בתחום המוסיקה שעוסק בסיפור הצלחתה של הלהקה הבריטית. לאור הפופולריות של הקורס הוא יתקיים שוב גם בשנה הבאה.

פרופסור למוסיקה באוניברסיטה קווין ברנקורסט, מעביר את הקורס המעניין שעוסק בחיי הלהקה ובתקופה בה היא פעלה. הסטודנטים יבחנו כיצד הביטלס נולדה ובתוך תקופה קצרה הצליחה בצורה אדירה והפכה להיות הלהקה המשפיעה ביותר בהיסטוריה של המוסיקה והתרבות בכלל. הקורס כולל צפייה בסרטים, וידאו קליפים וראיונות עם הביטלס. ברנקורסט מציין כי אף אחד לא היה מצליח לכתוב את סיפור הצלחתה של הביטלס שהיה כל כך בלתי צפוי, וזה לבד הופך את הקורס לכל כך מעניין.