Jewish Peace Letter

Vol. 44 No. 2 Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship March 2015

Lawrence S. Wittner

The US & Russia: Nukes Redux? Stefan Merken • My Roots of Nonviolence Murray Polner • So, Ya Wanna Fight Vlad? Robert Polner • The Northeast’s Race Problem Remembering Rabbi Harold Schulweis

ISSN: 0197-9115 From Where I Sit

Stefan Merken Roots

ften I hear justifications for war as a way of restor- the street to protest the war. No one understood his motives. ing peace. I still don’t understand how that works. The authorities said he was protesting against the US and ar- I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, deep-seated, and proud rested and jailed him until he convinced them that he wasn’t Opacifist. opposed to the US, only to war. Striking out violently is the My pacifism also derives typical knee-jerk response in from his youngest daughter, my our violent world. Just look mother. She clearly explained to at how often the US justi- me how to deal with friends and fies getting involved in yet foe alike in a manner that would another war, overwhelming not lead to fist fights, to use my citizens with lies and slogans, words in an argument, to try to bolstered by a timid and con- understand other points of view. forming mass media, and Pacifism was foreign to overwhelmed by our living- my father, but when, in 1964, room neocon heroes and pa- I applied for a Conscientious triots ready to sacrifice other Objector classification, my parents’ kids, but rarely if ever Memorial stone for Conscientious Objectors, Sherborn, father came to understand their own. I often wonder how Massachusetts. Buried here are the ashes of over a dozen and somehow reached a point pacifists who devoted their lives to social change through we pacifists and nonviolent where he actually sympa- the power of nonviolence. activists manage to persist by thized with my stance. dissenting and challenging the war-makers. My answer lies When I applied for a CO classification during the very with my family. early years of the Vietnam War, I discovered the Jewish Peace My grandfather, Abraham Jacobs, was a witness to war Fellowship and its courageous, principled and Jewishly- and hatred in his native Europe. Grandpa was a very reli- knowledgeable men and women. The JPF has been my com- gious Jew who had come to realize that violence was not the munity for more than fifty years. There are of course other answer. When World War II broke out, my grandparents American Jewish peace groups. But only the JPF considers were living in Oklahoma with their four daughters. He saw, war a form of mass insanity and has taken that position from as I see now, that war solves nothing. the beginning. Since 1941, the JPF has been the only consis- With his deep European Jewish accent, he went out into tent voice for peace within the American Jewish community. Join us. Y Stefan Merken is chair of the Jewish Peace Fellowship.

Wrestling With Your Conscience: A Guide for Jewish Draft Registrants and Conscientious Objectors

Features the most recent Selective Service regulations, plus articles on Can a Jew Be a CO?; the Jewish Pursuit of Peace; Judaism and War; Registration at 18; What if the Draft is Reinstated? Israeli Refusers; What the JPF can do for you, and much more. $7.00 plus $2.00 for postage; 5 or more books, $5.00 each plus $5 for postage Order from the JPF Office (see page 6 for address)

2 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter March 2015 Jewish Peace Fellowship The Bear (I)

Lawrence S. Wittner The US and Russia Are we again on the nuclear warpath?

quarter century after the end of the Cold War hundred land-based nuclear missiles. According to outside and decades after the signing of landmark nuclear experts and a bipartisan, independent panel commissioned arms control and disarmament agreements, are the by Congress and the Defense Department, that will bring AUS and Russian governments once more engaged in a po- the total price tag for the US nuclear weapons buildup to ap- tentially disastrous nuclear arms race with one another? It proximately $1 trillion. certainly looks so. For its part, the Russian government With approximately fifteen thousand seems determined to match — or surpass nuclear weapons between them, the Unit- — that record. With President Vladimir ed States and Russia already possess about Putin eager to use nuclear weapons as a ninety-three percent of the world’s nucle- symbol of Russian influence, Moscow is ar arsenal, thus making them the world’s building, at great expense, new genera- nuclear hegemons. But, apparently, like tions of giant ballistic missile submarines, great powers throughout history, they do as well as nuclear attack submarines that not consider their vast military might suf- are reportedly equal or superior to their ficient, especially in the context of their US counterparts in performance and growing international rivalry. stealth. Armed with nuclear-capable Although, in early 2009, President cruise missiles, they periodically make Barack Obama announced his “commit- forays across the Atlantic, heading for ment to seek the peace and security of a the US coast. Deeply concerned about the world without nuclear weapons,” the US potential of these missiles to level a sur- government today has moved well along prise attack, the US military has already Submarine warfare: The view from towards implementing an administration the submarine USS Carbonero’s launched the first of two experimental plan for US nuclear “modernization.” This periscope of the “Frigate Bird” “blimps” over Washington, DC, designed entails spending $355 billion over a ten- explosion, the only US test of an to help detect them. The Obama adminis- year period for a massive renovation of US operational ballistic missile with tration also charges that Russian testing nuclear weapons plants and laboratories. a live nuclear warhead, at Christ- of a new medium-range cruise missile is a Moreover, the cost is scheduled to soar af- mas Island, the Pacific, 1962. violation of the 1987 INF treaty. Although ter this renovation, when an array of new the Russian government denies the exis- nuclear weapons will be produced. “That’s where all the big tence of the offending missile, its rhetoric has been less than money is,” noted Ashton Carter, recently nominated as US diplomatic. As the Ukraine crisis developed, Putin told a Secretary of Defense. “By comparison, everything that we’re public audience that “Russia is one of the leading nuclear doing now is cheap.” The Obama administration has asked powers,” and foreign nations “should understand it’s best the Pentagon to plan for twelve new nuclear missile-firing not to mess with us.” Pravda was even more inflammatory. submarines, up to a hundred new nuclear bombers, and four An article published in November, titled “Russia prepares a nuclear surprise for NATO,” bragged about Russia’s alleged superiority over the United States in nuclear weaponry. Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner. Not surprisingly, the one nuclear disarmament agree- com) is professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His ment signed between the US and Russian governments since latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatiza- 2003 — the New START treaty of 2011 — is being imple- tion and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark? mented remarkably slowly. New START, designed to reduce www.jewishpeacefellowship.org March 2015 Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter • 3 the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons (the most havior. Plenty of compromise formulas exist — for example, powerful ones) in each country by thirty percent by 2018, has leaving Ukraine out of NATO, altering that country’s struc- not led to substantial reductions in either nation’s deployed ture to allow for a high degree of self-government in the nuclear arsenal. Indeed, between March and October 2014, war-torn east, and organizing a UN-sponsored referendum the two nations each increased their deployed nuclear forces. in Crimea. Possibilities for compromise also exist in other Also, they maintain large arsenals of nuclear weapons target- areas of US-Russian relations. ing one another, with about eighteen hundred of them on Failing to agree to a diplomatic settlement of these and high alert — ready to be launched within minutes against the other issues will do more than continue violent turmoil in populations of both nations. Ukraine. Indeed, the disastrous, downhill slide of both the The souring of relations between the US and Russian United States and Russia into a vastly expensive nuclear arms governments has been going on for years, but it has reached race will bankrupt them and, also, by providing an exam- a very dangerous level during the current confrontation ple of dependence on nuclear might, encourage the prolif- over Ukraine. In their dealings with this conflict-torn na- eration of nuclear weapons to additional nations. After all, tion, there’s plenty of fault on both sides. US officials should how can they succeed in getting other countries to forswear have recognized that any Russian government would have developing nuclear weapons when — forty-seven years af- been angered by NATO’s steady recruitment of East Euro- ter the US and Soviet governments signed the nuclear Non- pean countries — especially Ukraine, which had been united Proliferation Treaty, in which they pledged their own nuclear with Russia in the same nation until recently, was sharing a disarmament — their successors are engaged in yet another common border with Russia, and was housing one of Rus- nuclear arms race? Finally, of course, this new arms race, un- sia’s most important naval bases (in Crimea). For their part, less checked, seems likely to lead, sooner or later, to a nuclear Russian officials had no legal basis for seizing and annexing catastrophe of immense proportions. Crimea or aiding heavily-armed separatists in the eastern Can the US and Russian governments calm down, settle portion of Ukraine. their quarrels peacefully, and return to a policy of nuclear But however reckless the two nuclear behemoths have disarmament? Let’s hope so. Y been, this does not mean that they have to continue this be-

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4 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter March 2015 Jewish Peace Fellowship The Bear (II)

Murray Polner Are You Ready to Fight Putin’s Russia?

Who came down from the mountain and are banking on the delusion that Putin (no bargain he, but said the U.S. must police the globe from the no Hitler — as Hillary Clinton once mindlessly blurted out, South China Sea to the jungles of Peru? thereby cementing her hawkish credentials for the 2016 run) — Eric S. Margolis will cravenly commit to a settlement because of “defensive” weapons. If that doesn’t tame the feral Putin, maybe our “In- or my sins, I’ve just finished reading the latest report dispensable Nation’s” volunteer military, National Guard, by three of Washington’s centrist think tanks, “Pre- Reserves, even conscripts, will. serving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian The truth is that every Cold War leader feared a US-So- FAggression.” From their peaceful, safe and posh offices, viet hot war. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, refused to in- they urge President Obama to tervene in the Soviet invasion get tough with Moscow and of Hungary in 1956 because, supply “defensive” weapons as his biographer Stephen to Ukraine, while sanctimo- Ambrose wrote, “Eisenhower niously concluding, as did LBJ knew that there were limits to and Bush Jr’s echo chambers his power and Hungary was in 1965 and 2003, that “as- outside those limits.” Ike also sisting Ukraine to … defend shut down the Korean War. itself is not inconsistent with Who in authority now speaks the search for a peaceful po- of “limits” and means it? Like litical solution.” it or not, Ukraine is histori- As if Iraq, Syria, ISIS, cally within Moscow’s sphere Iran, Cuba, Yemen, Obama’s of influence, just as all of Latin anti-China “pivot to Asia,” America has been in Wash- and the Republican train- ington’s sphere of influence, wreckers who now control at least since 1823 and our uni- Congress aren’t enough, Separatist militants of the “Luhansk People’s Republic” lateral Monroe Doctrine. In there’s a permanent taste for patrolling in eastern Ukraine. 1962, the US was ready to fight  $25 /  $36 /  $50 /  $100 /  $250 /  $500 /  $1000 /  Other $ ____ war among the Imperial City’s a nuclear war to keep the Reds hawks, ready to have your kids (never theirs) fight in order out of Castro’s Cuba — “our Cuba,” once the playground of to teach that bastard Vladimir Putin a lesson and show him foreign exploiters and the Mafia. who’s boss. We did it to Grenada and Panama — and we can The US and NATO instigated the Ukrainian civil war by do it again. brazenly drawing ever closer to the Russian border. Unan- According to the think-tankers, “The West has the ca- swered is why Obama has exerted no control over Joe Biden, pacity to stop Russia. The question is whether it has the will,” John Brennan, and John Kerry’s alleged State department sounding exactly like the blind and arrogant men who took subordinate Victoria Nuland, all of whom spent time in se- us into Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. cret negotiations with Kiev. Aside from the fact that (a) given Russia’s military back- Mikhail Gorbachev, no friend of Putin, is adamantly op- ing, sending in weapons cannot defeat the Eastern Ukrainian posed to shipping weapons to Ukraine. He has repeatedly separatists, and (b) that we’ve never had any vital interest in said that in 1990 Bush Sr. promised him (never put into writ- Crimea or the Donbass region, what then? Our think-tankers ing but never denied by the US) that, in return for allowing German unification to proceed and the former satellite states Murray Polner is co-editor of Shalom. to go their own way, NATO would never approach Russia’s

www.jewishpeacefellowship.org March 2015 Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter • 5 borders. A nation that had lost some twenty million civil- how escaped the think-tankers: Russia has almost as many ians and soldiers after yet another Western invasion, remains nuclear bombs as we do. Sending American military “train- understandably sensitive about foreign armies camped on its ers” (and eventually more and more) into a killing zone next doorstep. Those who dare to speak of this today are often door to Russia means that an unexpected blunder which smeared as “Putin lovers” and worse. leads to an exchange of nukes could happen. Sarajevo any- Then too, the presence of neo-Nazis among the Ukraini- one? an military is rarely if ever reported by our conformist mass For now, despite intense pressure to “do something,” media. For that you need to read the British press, where Obama is offering no hint of what he will do. There are of Suemas Milne of the liberal Guardian has been on the scene course peaceful alternatives, among them establishing since the Maidan Square uprising. He wrote, “The role of the Ukraine as a neutral state unattached to any one side. But fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian re- now more than ever, Obama needs to sit down and talk to gime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist some antiwar people who helped elect him but whom he has propaganda.” Moreover, “By what right is the US involved at snubbed. Andrew Bacevich is one. A West Pointer, Vietnam all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has War veteran, and a recently retired professor of history and never been a member of NATO, and whose last elected gov- international relations whose son was killed in Iraq, he’d be ernment came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality. an excellent partner for a private chat in the Oval Room. It has none, of course.” Maybe Bacevich could bring along his valuable book, Wash- Is The Guardian too liberal for you? Then try Tom Parfitt ington Rules, which ends this way: “Promising prosperity in the conservative Daily Telegraph, who reported that the and peace, the Washington rules are propelling the United Azov Battalion, one of a number of Ukrainian militias in- States toward insolvency and perpetual war. Over the hori- volved in the Eastern Ukrainian war, “uses the neo-Nazi Wolf- zon a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits…. To willfully ig- sangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner, and members of nore the danger is to become complicit in the destruction of the battalion are openly white supremacists or anti-Semites.” what Americans profess to hold dear. We, too, must choose.” And then there’s this final consideration, which some- Call him, Mr. President. It’s getting late. Y

The Challenge of Shalom: The Jewish Tradition of Peace and Justice Edited by Murray Polner and Naomi Goodman

Highlights the deep and powerful tradition of Jewish nonviolence. With reverence for life, pas- sion for justice, and empathy for the suffering, Jews historically have practiced a “uniquely powerful system of ethical peacefulness.” The Challenge of Shalom includes sections on the Tradition, the Holocaust, Israel, Reverence for all life and Personal Testimonies. $18.95 per copy, plus $5 shipping.

Jewish Peace Letter

Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship • Box 271 • Nyack, N.Y. 10960 • (845) 358-4601 Honorary President Rabbi Philip J. Bentley • Chair Stefan Merken • Vice President Rabbi Leonard Beerman z"l Editors Murray Polner & Adam Simms • Contributing Editors Lawrence S. Wittner, Patrick Henry, E. James Lieberman

Established in 1941 E-mail: [email protected] • World Wide Web: http://www.jewishpeacefellowship.org Signed articles are the opinions of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the JPF.

6 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter March 2015 Jewish Peace Fellowship In Memoriam

Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis

arold Schulweis, who died in December at age us. He helped organize Mazon and urged well-off Jewish eighty-nine, was a Conservative congregational families to donate to feed the hungry in the US and Israel. rabbi who refused to be silent in the face of indiffer- He began the Institute of the Righteous (now known as the Hence and injustice. He understood that Judaism needs to be Jewish Foundation for the Righteous) to support non-Jews shaped by each generation without the who risked their lives to help Jews dur- inflexible guidance of Halacha, or by the ing the Nazi era. He formed a group to sacrosanct notion of the Chosen People, battle genocide in Africa. He denounced or even by the revelations of Moses on the 1915 massacre of Armenians de- Sinai. He was uniquely American, given spite the fact that many would not. He the emphasis he placed in the individual. opened Valley Beth Shalom’s doors to One of his major contributions was to gay men and lesbians. Years earlier, counter the many synagogue wastelands he organized a Passover Seder service — where boredom, sparse attendance, for several hundred Jewish kids in the pulpit gimmickry and refusal to speak out Height-Asbury district of San Francis- about serious issues of war and peace and co. In his book Conscience: The Duty to inequality — which bothered so many Obey and the Duty to Disobey, published unaffiliated Jews. He drew on the havu- in 2008, he set out his memorable credo: rot movement, which reflected the high “Toward conscience, religion is am- hopes of the Jewish counterculture of the bivalent. Conscience remains forever 1960s and 1970s, with its dreams of creat- suspect. In a world increasingly laden ing a living Judaism and which rejected with unspeakable crimes against hu- the way Jewish education was transmit- manity, all in the name of pious compli- ted, the ennui of the synagogue and, most ance, the lameness and lethal silence of of all, their exclusion from organized Jew- the ecclesia are disillusioning. More is ish life, which they viewed as resembling expected of religion. Does religion have corporate life. The rich and mighty made the capacity, or more poignantly, does it all the crucial decisions and women had Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis have the will to counter the suppressive no role of any importance. culture of obedience with the culture of In Encino, California, Rabbi Schulweis’s Valley Beth moral courage and compassion?” Shalom applied havurah principles, dividing the synagogue With the recent deaths of Rabbis Leonard Beerman (see into fifty synagogues. As a result, he encouraged his congre- Shalom, February 2015) and Harold Schulweis, American gants and others to live their lives unhinged to rigid tradi- Jewry has lost two bold, caring, and spirited rabbis who tional practices and to reach out to the less fortunate among would not be silent. Y — Murray Polner

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www.jewishpeacefellowship.org March 2015 Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter • 7 Northeast Blues

Robert Polner “I didn’t even know you people existed”

rowing up, I felt proud when the majority of votes in my home- town of Great Neck, New York, Gsupported George McGovern in the 1972 Nixon landslide. Only one state in the country (plus the District of Columbia) went with the anti-war McGovern — and that was Massachusetts, which, like Great Neck, was regarded as liberally disposed. The community where I was raised was typical of many across the Northeast in assuming it was possessed of an en- lightened civic attitude on many issues, not least of them race. The adults with whom I interacted were inspired by the civil-rights movement and shared its goals of voting rights, integration and equal op- portunity. One only needed to look at the news footage of state troopers beating the “Marvelously ecumenical” Ebbet’s Field, Brooklyn, where, in 1947, Jackie nonviolent marchers in Mississippi and Robinson broke baseball’s race barrier, but the stadium’s surrounding black Alabama to appreciate that we middle- neighborhoods “remained burdened with dilapidated housing, second-rate class whites of the Northeast were, well, schools, and the impunity of a mainly white police force.” much more civilized as a group. White supremacy did not have a chokehold on the region’s prideful Reading Jason Sokol’s history of Northeast race relations sense of what it was or wanted to be. Down in Dixie, it most and politics since World War II, All Eyes Are Upon Us, brought definitely did. back some of these recollections. The book, his second since And yet many of my friends and neighbors — the chil- his 2007 work on the desegregating South, There Goes My dren or the grandchildren of Jewish immigrants — took for Everything, explores the perverse relationship between the granted or were willfully blind to the elephant in our midst: Northeast’s progressive ideals concerning race, and the re- the nearly all-white complexion of Great Neck itself and the silience of discrimination and segregation throughout the everyday hardships of poor people and especially poor people region. As he sees it, one has fueled and provided cover for of color living on the other side of the tracks. As a bedroom the other. “The mystique” — the Northeast’s much-idealized community, Great Neck was leafy and quiet. In my memory, sense of itself as blazing the path toward interracial democ- its peace was not disturbed by the civil-rights struggles, and racy — “could operate both ways.” its liberal values were not tested. An assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, Sokol does not seek to indict all Northeast- Robert Polner is a public affairs officer for New York ern whites for hypocrisy, but rather to illuminate this dual- University. He co-authored The Man Who Saved New York: ity. Unlike the Deep South’s aversion to giving blacks equal Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975; edited access to schools and neighborhoods populated by whites, America’s Mayor, America’s President: The Strange Career the Northeast’s patterns have come about less obviously, its of Rudy Giuliani, and formerly reported for New York and invisible barriers erected not with lynching, church bomb- New Jersey daily newspapers. ings, and the poll tax, but with zoning regulations, real estate

8 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter March 2015 Jewish Peace Fellowship bylaws, bankers’ decisions and the GI Bill home loans that all but excluded black veterans. Sokol’s larger point centers on the irony that some of the Northeast’s most significant breakthroughs in racial relations have only sought to obscure the racial partitions and dis- parities across the region. Sokol gives Jackie Robinson all the enormous credit he’s due, but largely to show that as white and black fans cheered him in the marvelously ecumenical Ebbets Field in 1947, Brooklyn’s black neighborhoods remained bur- dened with dilapidated housing, second-rate schools, and the impunity of a mainly white police force. Blacks aspiring for local political office were largely passed over, while the press ignored their communities ex- cept when they figured in the police blotter, in which in- stances, their race was printed as if pertinent to the crime. In the wake of the euphoria over Robinson, the Brook- lyn Eagle ran an unusual series of articles that documented the grim quality of life in the underserved black neighbor- hoods of the borough where about a hundred thousand Af- rican-Americans lived. The reporter, Syd Frigand, went on to become press secretary to New York’s first Jewish mayor, Abe Beame, a product of the powerful Brooklyn Democratic clubhouse, but by then — the mid-1970s — the conditions for blacks had gotten only worse, aggravated by white flight, deepening poverty, and floods of illegal handguns and drugs. The Northeast’s deindustrialization was gathering momen- tum, and would prove calamitous for the Northeast urban cores and especially for their low-income African-Ameri- cans, given that they already had high rates of joblessness. Minorities would be further injured by the Reagan adminis- tration’s enthusiastic cuts in funds for social services for the poor and its white-backlash politics. “I didn’t even know you people existed.” They do now. The What Robinson provided to Brooklyn and the rest of Jackie-Robinson/Ebbet’s Field Apartment complex, which the Northeast with his dignity, stoicism and defiance was stands on the stadium site in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights the dramatic evidence it welcomed — namely, that racism neighborhood. had no place in a busy community of immigrants with a col- lective social conscience. Yet blacks, at that very moment he selves, as voters, race-blind. broke the color line, and for decades after, were living sepa- But Brooke’s distinguished Senate career — he support- rate, unequal lives resulting from entrenched, segregated ed aid to the urban poor, reductions in the US nuclear arse- housing patterns and realty practices — their condition in- nal, as well as the political forces seeking to drive Richard visible to many progressive-minded whites. “Don’t call my Nixon from office — went by the boards when he firmly sup- generation racist,” Sokol quotes one Irish-American Brook- ported what its Democratic opponents (including Senator lyn writer, looking back years later. “I didn’t even know you Joseph Biden of Delaware) labeled “forced busing.” Brooke people existed.” saw school transfers as an imperfect court remedy but the Fanning out to other parts of the postwar Northeast, All only available method for blacks to escape inferior, ghetto Eyes Are Upon Us offers equally fascinating portraits of sever- schools. The response of white, working-class parents, of al successful black politicians, perhaps chief among them the course, was bitter and violent. Senator Ted Kennedy found late Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who in 1966 became this out the hard way, coming perilously close to being physi- the first African-American ever to be elected by popular vote cally assaulted when he showed up as a supporter of busing to the US Senate. The politically and temperamentally mod- at an anti-busing rally just outside the building where he had erate Brooke won the votes of blacks and whites in asking his office. The angry crowd surged towards him, shouting to be judged by his record, not his race. He summoned the threats and insults and smashing the plate-glass windows on Northeast mystique in a liberal state where Northern aboli- the ground floor as Kennedy retreated. tionism had taken root and blacks later found haven from the “Here, in 1974, was the postwar Northeast in miniature,” Jim Crow South, and modern-day whites considered them- Sokol writes. “It was a place where African Americans could www.jewishpeacefellowship.org March 2015 Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter • 9 achieve epic advances in the realm of electoral politics, but the tenacity of racism; one Congress of Racial Equality offi- where whites seemed unwilling to abide racial equality in cial working in the Northeast offered that prescient observa- everyday life.” tion at that time. The Springfield rioting was also a prelude to Damaged by the anti-busing furor, in addition to the fierce Boston backlash of less than a decade later. Brooke’s political career, was the Senate voting bloc that had I take issue with a few of Sokol’s interpretations. He given America the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and makes too much of Brooklyn Dodger president and general Medicare, and which had even come close to outlawing dis- manager Branch Rickey’s commercial motivations for re- criminatory housing practices in the Northeast in response cruiting Jackie Robinson, as Rickey was surely as strongly to Lyndon Johnson’s vision for a “Great Society.” motivated by his religious and moral convictions as he was Sokol uses an impressive variety of official documents, by the prospect of increasing his fan base. The author’s im- court transcripts, letters to the editor and speeches, along plication, too, that the very politically conservative Rickey with recollections of participants he interviewed. The com- bowed to Communist pressure in recruiting a black ball- bination of historical and journalistic research enables him player strikes me as highly questionable. That was actually to demonstrate the enormous gap between the Northeast’s the red-baiting charge made against Rickey by opponents political ideals and its enduring racism. In telling the story of mixing races. The book also suffers a bit from repetition of such artful and passionate coalition builders as Congress- of Sokol’s thesis concerning the double-edged nature of the woman (and presidential candidate) Shirley Chisholm of Northeastern mystique. Brooklyn, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, and But these are only quibbles and, in fairness, repetition Mayor Thirman Milner of Hartford (the fourth-poorest city of the main theme is probably warranted on a subject about in America in 1980 when Milner, a product of poverty, ar- which the reader may hold so many personal, preconceived rived; it became the poorest by 2010), as well as Mayor David notions and, yes, prejudices. How else can one make the case Dinkins of New York, he uses more of a pointillist approach so effectively and penetrate the many layers of denial and de- than broad brushstrokes. The approach is a refreshing de- fensiveness that the issue of race usually provokes? parture from recent histories of iconic American figures and Inexorably, the well-composed narrative leads to the ad- epic events aimed for the best-seller lists. He also allows the vent of America’s first president of color, as well as the initial perceptions of many participants in this history, major and hopes of throngs of supporters that his election marked the minor, to shape and deepen his own analysis. dawn of a “postracial” society. Sokol views Barack Obama’s A very compelling part of the book describes the pio- election as more than merely symbolic, especially for young- neering but now mostly forgotten curriculum on race that er blacks and veterans of the civil-rights campaign. But the Springfield, Massachusetts educators developed and rolled author’s research asks us to be cautious, for when it comes to out in 1939, believing that educating children about race racial progress, it has often been a case of one step forward across America and their own diverse city would help erase and one – or two – steps back. the stain of racism and bring about a more egalitarian de- “[T]he Northeast,” Jason Sokol concludes, “has been a mocracy. As totalitarianism rose in Europe, American mag- place at war with itself. It has been drawn to its lofty ide- azine and newspaper writers flocked to the sixty-thousand- als, its dreams of justice, its noble heritage; yet it has also person city to chronicle and praise “The Springfield Plan.” been deeply committed to racial segregation and economic Dozens of school districts, including Great Neck’s, came to inequality. As such, the Northeast has shaped and mirrored adopt it, and Kenneth Clark visited the city to conduct his America’s adventure with race over the past seventy-five psychological experiments with black schoolchildren and years: able to achieve stunning progress, culminating in the dolls that would influence the outcome of Brown v. Board of election of a black president, and yet unable to fully turn the Education. page, unable to absorb the new story it has authored, unable Still, it is surprising to read that in the mid-1960s, when to let that future out in the light.” school transfers and other integration measures loomed for Indeed, in Obama’s America, many whites, even those Springfield itself, the local school board resisted, and out- living in the largely homogeneous suburbs of the Northeast, raged whites poured into the streets, setting fires at night to are still capable of being shocked by eruptions of deep-seated, parts of the city’s downtown, much to the dismay of its lib- structural racism; just consider the very recent police killings eral, white mayor. The national media paid little attention to of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Is- Springfield this time, since the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles land, New York, and the response of local law-enforcement was also burning. Yet what happened in Springfield, the dis- officials. But anyone who absorbs the lessons of All Eyes Are tance it had traveled, was just as telling a demonstration of Upon Us is unlikely to be surprised. Y

Illustrations: Cover & 3• US Navy, via Wikimedia Commons. 2 • Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons. 5 • Qypchak, via Wikimedia Commons. 7 • Valley Beth Shalom (www.vbs.com). 8 • Boston Public Library/Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons. 9 • wallyg/Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons..

10 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter March 2015 Jewish Peace Fellowship