To Find the Principles

On Martin Luther King, Monuments, & Drum Majors (and: Heinrich Heine)

2012-01-16T23:42:00.000-05:00

I wasn’t able to attend the town’s annual scholarship breakfast in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Saturday, but I was thinking about him a lot this weekend, as I always do on this occasion.

Fate has not been kind to Martin Luther King’s birthday. First, the creation of a national holiday on that date met with persistent and perverse resistance from a wide variety of reactionaries (some of whom now try to swim in the mainstream). But with most of those battles far in the past, who would have thought that his monument in Washington (once it was finally authorized) would prove controversial? And that this controversy would come to a head on the eve of the next celebration of that holiday?

Fate may have been even less kind to the monument than the birthday. At least the latter reflected the ideological struggle over the ideas at the heart of the man and his legacy. The problems surrounding the monument are the result of pure dumb luck, or, as the case may be, just a whole lot of dumb.

First, as a result of the summer earthquake, the dedication was postponed from August until October. And, as soon as the monument was revealed to the public, criticism poured in. For me, the first problem was aesthetic: It was not that the image of Rev. King emerging from the rock was too gray, stern or forbidding, as some critics said. (That’s just philistinism.) Rather: the whole thing just seemed too cautious and tame. First, it just isn’t very well done. Second, and more important: Is there really a point to a conventional, representational portrait sculpture in an age in which the most powerful (and eventually popular) monuments: the Vietnam Memorial, the new 9-11 memorial site, and the Berlin Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe draw upon a more modern language of abstraction? The King monument, its very real appeals notwithstanding, could fit perfectly well in a neo-Stalinist sculpture garden or political cemetery. (Philosopher Cornel West went even further, though in a very different direction, declaring that King would have wanted a “revolution,” not a monument.)

To be fair, however, the monument does make more sense if one understands and sees it in context. Although still photos tend to depict only the controversial portrait sculpture itself, it is in fact part of a much larger complex, truly “monumental” in proportion and with a logic and even narrative or movement of its own.

As the official website describes it:

At the entry portal, two stones are parted and a single stone wedge is pushed forward toward the horizon; the missing piece of what was once a single boulder. The smooth insides of the portal contrast the rough outer surfaces of the boulder. Beyond this portal, the stone appears to have been thrust into the plaza, wrested from the boulder and pushed forward – it bears signs of a great monolithic struggle.
On the visible side of the stone, the theme of hope is presented, with the text from King's famed 1963 speech cut sharply into the stone: "Out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope." On the other side are inscribed these words: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness”, a statement suggested by Dr. King himself when describing how he would like to be remembered.

The boulder is the Mountain of Despair, through which every visitor will enter, moving through the struggle as Dr. King did during his life, and then be released into the open freedom of the plaza. The solitary stone is the Stone of Hope, from which Dr. King’s image emerges, gazing over the Tidal Basin toward the horizon, seeing a future society of justice and equality for which he encouraged all citizens to strive

It turns out that the greatest controversy focuses on that “drum major” quotation. I should clarify: there are in fact many quotations in the memorial. In order to reach the portal, visitors pass along a whole wall of quotations (“Inscription Wall”), derived from Rev. King’s entire career: from the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955 to the last sermon he delivered in 1968, just days before his death. As the designers further explain: (1) the quotations are not in chronological order, so that readers may begin wherever they choose, rather than being forced to proceed in linear fashion. (2) anticipating the most obvious question: they omit the “I have a dream” speech because it is well known (to the point of trivialization), but also because the whole monument—being placed on the mall where that speech was delivered—in a sense commemorates it and its message.

The “drum major” quotation is perhaps not an ideal choice, but the real problem is that this is not even a statement that Rev. King actually made in so many words.

The explanation is about the lamest thing one can imagine. As outraged critics soon figured out, “suggested” is a very vague and subjective term and takes a hell of a lot of liberties with the facts. Poet Maya Angelou did not mince any words: the quotation made him sound like an “arrogant twit.”

The Washington Post’s Rachel Manteuffel explained the issue first and more clearly than anyone by doing what anyone with a brain should have done. First she applied her critical reasoning to the text itself. To begin with, it made King look stupid and verbally clumsy. Both the subject and the tone stood in jarring contrast to his famous biblically inspired sermons and speeches: “To me, silly hats and King just did not compute.” Worse still, it made him look shallow and self-centered: “akin to memorializing Mahatma Gandhi with the quote, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’” She was puzzled and taken aback.

Second, then, she went to the source. The quote came from a sermon entitled, “The Drum Major Instinct,” in which he criticized the natural but immature and selfish desire--on the part of individuals, groups, and entire nations-- “to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade.” (As in many other cases, the image was not original; he borrowed it from a liberal white minister.) It was early in 1968, but (though he did not know it) late in his life, and he spoke of how he would like to be remembered: as someone who helped others, who fought for justice and against war. So:

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. (Amen) Say that I was a drum major for peace. (Yes) I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. (Yes) I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. (Amen) And that's all I want to say.

As Manteuffel put it,

An “if” clause is an extraordinarily bad thing to leave out of a quote. If I had to be a type of cheese, being Swiss is best.

What makes this tragic is that King had the ability to say precisely what he meant, with enormous impact.

The culprit? Not, as she notes, the scholars consulting on the project, who employed the full quotation. She had no answer at the time, and simply called for correction: “I say, let’s undo the mistake. Let’s get the chisels back out.”

The architects at first stonewalled (so to speak), refusing to make changes.

It turned out that the architects and designers had shortened the quotation on their own initiative, simply because the whole text would not easily fit. (This raises a host of issues regarding accuracy, authority, aesthetics, and public history and memory, which I merely mention and would not presume to address here.)

The complaints refused to subside and, predictably, rose again as the holiday approached. On Friday, for example, the Boston Herald demanded: “Carve MLK’s words in stone—accurately.” Out of their mouth into God’s ear, as the saying goes. Sure enough, early in the evening, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar demanded that the Park Service come up with a fix within thirty days. The lead architect replied that the full text still would not fit, but that a compromise abridgement was possible. (Again, one can only wonder: what in the world were they thinking?)

And so, the embarrassing episode will at last come to a close.

I have to say: First, I thought even the full quotation not a good choice: It is not among King’s greatest remarks (others of which likewise are not absolutely original). Above all, though, unlike many others, it does not stand well on its own and really loses a great deal without the context of the sermon.

In the second place, though, and more positively, I fully understood Rev. King’s use of the drum major image because it reminded me of something from my own field of study and one of my favorite authors, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856).

At first sight, the two men could not appear more dissimilar: the one, a modern Black Protestant minister and civil rights leader from the American south, the other, a nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet and journalist known for speaking frankly—and cynically—about sex, religion, and politics (the three subjects one was famously told to avoid in polite conversation).

And yet there are some surprising connections or parallels.

Both, growing up in eras of discrimination, fought with their pens for the emancipation of their own people, which they moreover saw as inextricably linked with the emancipation of all people and nations. Both were masters of their respective languages and drew naturally and freely upon the imagery of the Bible that underlay the educated vernacular of the times. Both were controversial in their day, rejected by chauvinists and racists, but eventually lionized by the majority of the population, who perhaps valued their achievement but underestimated their radicalism. (Heine has the unusual distinction of having managed to become an icon for both the nineteenth-century liberal German middle class and Marxist East Germany.) In both cases, attempts to memorialize their careers in the public sphere proved controversial: for Rev. King, making his birthday into a national holiday; for Heine, attempts to name spaces as diverse as the Düsseldorf University and a street in Tel-Aviv in his honor.

And the drum motif?

Heine, as a Jew born in the German Rhineland, grew up under the equivalent of segregation, experienced a brief period of emancipation under French Rule during the Napoleonic era, and saw the return of discrimination with the restoration of monarchy: similar to, though of course much milder than, the transition from slavery to Reconstruction and Jim Crow. (Indeed, most Jews in Central Europe received full civil rights only between 1867 and 1871, in other words, at roughly the same time as African-Americans.) One of his minor prose masterpieces (today known mainly to specialists) is Ideas—Book Le Grand. Like other of his early, highly subjective, and unclassifiable works, it ranges freely over a host of topics, from autobiography and food, to romantic love and suicide, and revolution and censorship. The central figure, after whom the work is named, is a French drummer—“who looked a devil and yet had the good heart of an angel”—quartered in the Heine household during the period of Napoleonic rule. The drummer did not create the Revolution, but he embodies it, he is the bearer of its message.

As Heine portrays him, Le Grand is a simple man and knows only a handful of words in German, and yet he speaks through his drum more clearly and eloquently than all the politicians and subsequent generations of professors. For example, he explains the French word for “stupidity” by drumming an old German military march. He explains the complicated concept of “equality” by drumming the revolutionary tune, “Ça ira”: things will go better when we hang the aristocrats from the lampposts. The narrator later acquires the habit of unconsciously tapping his feet to revolutionary tunes, signaling his dissent during boring conservative university lectures; he reaps the appropriate rewards.

The relevant section of the slim book closes when the narrator, years later, identifies Le Grand as one of the miserable French soldiers returning from captivity in Russia, long after the Revolution has been defeated and Napoleon has died in exile. The two recognize each other. The drummer plays the old tunes, conjuring up images of a vanished revolutionary past, only now sorrowfully and mournfully, and then dies, collapsing upon his drum. Heine, the former boy, now a man, knows what to do: the drum “was not to serve any enemy of freedom for their servile roll call; I had understood the last beseeching glance of Le Grand very well and immediately drew the rapier from my cane and pierced the drum.”

It is an interesting variation on the drummer theme. Again, at first, contrast seems to prevail over similarity. Whereas Rev. King referred to the problematic role of the showy and perhaps self-promoting drum major in a parade, Heine chose to speak of the humble drummer in an actual military unit. And yet they are, certainly in this context, closely related. Both are, de facto, the visible and audible embodiment of the cause. Both, by marching at the head of the troops, become natural targets for the enemy.

In the short poem, “Doctrine,” Heine echoed the themes of Le Grand when he portrayed himself as the drummer—pointedly using the French term—on behalf of the new radical Hegelian philosophy. At the same time, he here ironizes rather than romanticizes that role, calling attention (like King) to an element of self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement. Heine rarely makes it simple for the perceptive reader.

There are exceptions, though. He on several occasions directly addressed the plight of African-Americans and slavery, and here all hint of ambiguity or frivolity is gone. In the late poem, “The Slave Ship," he depicted the cynical cruelty of the Middle Passage. Even earlier, and long before it was fashionable, he had spoken out against slavery and remarked bitterly upon the hypocrisy of the United States, which he called “that monstrous prison of freedom where [ . . . ] all men are equal—equal dolts . . . with the exception, naturally, of a few million, who have black or brown skins and are treated like dogs!”

However, I always find I am equally moved by a minor incident in one of his earliest published works, the “Letters From Berlin” (1822). There, in a seemingly trivial piece of reportage, he describes the excitement of the masked ball at which members of all social groups interact on the basis of anonymity and thus equality. In his enthusiasm, he happens to express himself in fashionable French, which earns him the predictable rebuke of a young chauvinist. He replies:

O German youth, how I find you and your words sinful and foolish in such moments where my entire soul encompasses the entire world with love, where I joyously wish to embrace the Russians and the Turks, and where I wish to collapse, crying, upon the fraternal breast of the enchained African! I love Germany and the Germans; but I love no less the inhabitants of the other portions of the world, whose numbers are forty times as great as those of the Germans. Love gives the human being his value. Praise God! I am therefore worth forty times as much as those who cannot raise themselves out of the swamp of national egoism and love only Germany and the Germans.

King was a Protestant minister, and that vocation defined his career and identity. Heine was a poet and an essayist who said a good many sarcastic things about Christianity, Judaism, credulousness, and religion in general. He converted to Protestantism out of opportunism and always reproached himself for it, but at the end of his life, as he seemed to become more religious, claimed that he had never “returned” to Judaism because he had never in fact left it. Like King, he found both personal and social meaning in the religious tradition.

If there were a world to come in which both men ended up sharing the same space, I could imagine the two of them having a very engaging conversation about the state of the world on this holiday: the one perhaps with a bit more charity, the other perhaps with a slightly malicious wit, but both with an equal and unwavering commitment to justice and the power of the word to bring it about.

* * *

Sources:

Most of the translations come from these two volumes of Heine's writings, edited by one of my former teachers, Jost Hermand, and one of his former graduate students: Robert Holub, currently Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst:

The folllowing are found in Heinrich Heine, Poetry and Prose, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert Holub, The German Library, 32 (NY: Continuum, 1982):

Ideas—Book Le Grand, translated by Charles Godfrey Leland and adapted by Robert C. Holub and Martha Humphreys, pp. 174-228 (relevant section: 190-204)
the poem, "Doctrine," translated by Felix Pollak, pp. 44-45
the poem, "The Slave Ship," translated by Aaron Kramer, pp. 84-93

The following is from Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, The German Library, 33 (NY: Continuum, 1985):

the excerpt regarding American slavery and hypocrisy is found in Ludwig Börne: A Memorial (Second Book), translated by Frederic Ewen and Robert C. Holub, pp. 261-83; here, 263.

Heine goes on to say, "Actual slavery, which had been abolished in most of the North American states, does not revolt me as much as the brutality with which the free blacks and the mulattoes are treated," which he goes on to describe

Tthe translation from "Letters from Berlin" is my own.

Marking Martin Luther King Day, 2012

2012-01-16T23:32:00.000-05:00

Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. Amherst Regional Middle School Library

Massachusetts and the nation today marked the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

In Boston, the annual celebration noted Reverend King's ties to the area, where he studied theology, and focused on the holiday as a day of service. Here in Amherst, the annual breakfast at the Middle School, now in its 28th year, honored local civil rights activist Mary Pittman Wyatt, who created the event and passed away last fall.

In the New York Times, a guest column by Oxford's Stephen Tuck recalls the international dimensions of King's movement and legacy. Paul Krugman notes that, although we have in many admirable ways overcome the old racial divides, we have not yet addressed the persistent income inequality, at least part of which is correlated with race:

Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck.

Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.

Clearly, we have much to celebrate, but marking the day as one of service, scholarship, and reflection—rather than mere lazing and shopping, to which level the holidays dedicated to those earlier liberators Washington and Lincoln have sunk—is a good way to remind ourselves that there is still much work to do.

The Martin Luther King stamp (artist: Jerry Pinkney) issued by the US Postal Service for Black History Month (Scott catalogue # 1771), issued in Atlanta on January 13, 1979, on the occasion of King's fiftieth birthday.This also corresponded to the legal code of the day, according to which only deceased individuals could be depicted on postal stamps, and not until ten years (subsequently relaxed to five) had elapsed since the time of death, the only exception being for presidents (one year).

The government recently and foolishly waived this utterly sensible proviso (1, 2, 3), thus eliminating a bedrock democratic principle in order to prostitute itself in the quixotic quest for greater revenues when it would have made greater sense to seek a more sustainable business model. (1, 2, 3)

Typically, attempts to reform and increase profitability of enterprises entail elimination of jobs, for which reason we would do well to remind ourselves that, historically, the public sector has been a key path into the middle class for African-Americans: not least, the Postal Service, in which they account for 25 percent of the workforce.

This past fall, the Postal Service issued a special souvenir cover to mark the dedication of the King Memorial on the National Mall. The cover bears a cachet depicting his colossal portrait sculpture and the new Barbara Jordan stamp.

We Seem to Have a Winner in the Flag Contest

2012-01-10T19:28:00.001-05:00

After a somewhat meandering discussion, members of the Amherst Design Review Board and Historical Commission have expressed unanimous support for flag design number 10 submitted by artist Barry Moser.

Note: this digital image does not accurately convey the colors of the design: above all, the actual background color is maroon rather than purplish.

Something New to Run Up the Flagpole: Amherst Flag Selection Process Back in High Gear

2012-01-10T18:13:00.002-05:00

Amherst will famously take no decision before its time (and even then some), so perhaps no one was surprised that this process has now stretched out over several years. In this case, though, the cause was conscientiousness rather than indecisiveness: the committee members were simply not satisfied with the submissions.

Tonight, however, the Design Review Board and Historical Commission will meet in joint session to consider these designs commissioned from renowned area artist Barry Moser.

A report on the deliberations will follow shortly.

Hampshire College, Israel, and Palestine: 1975 or 1938? And 2012? Still Seeking Civility on Campus

2012-01-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

Just under a year ago, on the eve of an event about Israel and Palestine that promised to be controversial, I wrote a piece expressing the desire for a less polarized, more civil atmosphere on campus, one in which we could debate opposing political positions without intellectual charlatanry and demonization, addressing nuances rather than resorting to gross oversimplification.

What followed has been both deeply disturbing and, in other ways, gratifying.
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It was deeply disturbing because what happened was far worse than even the most pessimistic among us might have expected. The talk, by an Israeli soldier, tore the campus apart. Activists from Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) did not merely protest outside the lecture hall (as was their right). They also disrupted and ultimately prevented completion of the talk, in clear violation of community norms. The speaker noted that this was only the second time that something of this sort had occurred. For the unashamed disruptors, their actions were a badge of honor. Responding to the administration’s condemnation of the disruption as well as the earlier verbal and physical harassment of an Israeli student, they and their supporters basically said: "Zionists” are fair game. (1, 2)

For the rest of us—the majority of the campus population as well as outside observers—it was a mark of shame and a wake-up call. What was gratifying was seeing the tide begin to turn. Most students, regardless of their political views, were revolted. The administration, from the office of the President down through Student Affairs, finally grasped the seriousness of the situation. It saw that we needed to take energetic and positive steps to restore a sense of both civility and safety.

* * *

A shrewd visitor to campus, interested in these issues, recently looked around and said:

“The situation is even worse than I thought. I can tell you what your problem is: One part of the campus thinks it’s 1975, and the other thinks it’s 1938.”

He got it exactly right.

Allow me to translate (in case that is necessary) the historical references:

• 1975 refers to the year when the United Nations General Assembly notoriously defined Zionism, the founding philosophy of one of its member states, as racism (ironically, on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany). The UN finally repealed that infamous measure in 1991, in order not just to redress a wrong, but also to encourage movement toward peace. Two years later, Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords (1, 2), affirming mutual recognition and the principle of a negotiated solution.

• 1938 refers to the tensions on the eve of World War II, when Jews felt cornered and abandoned: an expansionist Germany absorbed Austria, Britain and France browbeat Czechoslovakia into surrendering its fortified borderlands to Germany, and Kristallnacht signaled an escalation in Nazi antisemtism as well as the end of emigration. By then, there were few places for Jews fleeing Europe to go anyway: neither the western powers nor Mandatory Palestine, where civil war was raging, offered a refuge.

In other words, one side is operating with ideological caricatures older than the students themselves, and the other feels isolated and threatened with social if not physical death.

Clearly, that is anything but healthy.

Last summer, the Boston Jewish Advocate caused a stir with an article entitled, “What's up with Hampshire College? A small Bay State campus becomes a hotbed of anti-Israel fervor." It quoted the Anti-Defamation League as saying that Hampshire generates more complaints about students being targeted for pro-Israel beliefs than any other campus in the New England region. As the article goes on to note, several students have alleged that the hostile climate involves elements of antisemitism.

This is a dire situation. A college, of course, is not obligated to be either pro- or anti-Israel, as such. However, expressing opposition to the destruction of a United Nations member state really should not be a very controversial opinion. Above all, an academic institution is duty-bound to uphold principles of open and rigorous intellectual dialogue.

The situation is not unique to Hampshire. The Palestinian-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has said that he felt safer in Gaza or the West Bank than at US universities, where he needed police protection and was called a Nazi for daring to question the activist orthodoxy: “Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber.”

Still, we are naturally most sensitive to the flaws in our own surroundings. And, as serious as the problem here is, it of course cannot completely describe a vibrant and productive institution in which faculty and students of widely varying views nonetheless flourish and engage one another.

And 2012?

My deepest hope is that Hampshire College will establish a reputation, not as the epicenter of conflict, and instead, as a model of conciliation. Two of the groups with which I have been in contact offer strong examples of how this can be accomplished.

The broad-based Israel on Campus Coalition sends a pair of representatives—David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has written about the peace process as both a journalist and a scholar, and Ghaith al-Omari, Executive Director of the American Task Force on Palestine, who has served as part of the Palestinian negotiating team at Camp David and as an advisor to Mahmoud Abbas—to colleges and universities. Rather than just parachuting in to present pieties and platitudes in a one-off performance, they insist on doing at least three events so that they can start a sustained process of communication. Typically, they might begin with a luncheon roundtable hosted by leaders of various student groups, followed by a facilitated dialogue session. Later in the day, they speak to classes. Early in the evening, they join faculty for dinner or dessert. Finally, they take part in a larger event for the campus as a whole—a lecture or panel discussion, including question-and-answer from the audience.

The team has scored great successes, even in some of the most “difficult” venues, such as the University of California, Irvine (1, 2, 3). "Civility, we felt, was missing on campuses," says al-Omari. Sometimes, the partners explain, the mere sight of the two appearing together is enough of a surprise or a shock to prompt students to move beyond stereotypes and start thinking differently.

A report in the Georgetown Hoya could have been written about Hampshire:

“The campus discourse, we thought, was too much about recriminations, Makovsky said." "Usually the campuses are ahead of the curve on issues, but on this one issue across the country, we felt the campuses are behind the curve. While people are talking to each other in the Middle East, why can't they talk to each other in the Northeast?" [. . . . ]

Rather than forming factions, students should recognize that the interests of Israel and Palestine are not diametrically opposed, al-Omari said.

"You can be a pro-Palestine advocate without being anti-Israel," he said.

He illustrated the way in which campus dialogue seems focused on the "zero-sum approach," which states that what is good for one nation is bad for the other and the "tribal approach," which delves into the history of both nations to justify conflict. Neither of these viewpoints, he argued, leaves room for objectivity or potential consensus. [ . . . . ]

"If we are serious people for a two-state solution, then we have to build up both sides of the two-state solution," Makovsky said. "We found that the faculty was not attuned to these developments on the ground, that their thinking was stuck in a very confrontational age. What we want to do is bring the message to the students that you've got to be forces for coexistence."

In al-Omari's words, "You have to move beyond the tribal lines in a policy debate. Once you look at this as a policy issue, you always can find policy solutions." And as Makovsky puts it, "For the most part, what's needed is to basically treat the students as adults, not just PR targets."

The program of the “Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding” at Queens College does just that. It is difficult but necessary. Founded by Professor Mark Rosenblum, it employs a methodology of “walking in the other side’s shoes.” As a once largely Jewish campus that now boasts a considerable Muslim population, Queens College might seem an unlikely place for dialogue but it has become an ideal one. Motivated by the tragedies of the Second Intifada and the 9-11 attacks, Rosenblum explained to the New York Times, he sought a way to bridge the widening gaps that were destroying education as well as human lives. In words that, again, could as easily be applied to Hampshire, he says, "It was hard to teach in a classroom where students had such preconceived ideas and had essentially become propagandists for their own side," he said. "It was quite nasty and ruthless.”

His classes now require students to study and then “make the best possible case for the other side.” It works. "I did not expect anybody to change their position," he said. "My job is just to get you to feel a little bit of confusion by revealing that what you thought was a black and white struggle has a little more gray." Or, as one of the Muslim students put it, the class did not diminish his dedication to the Palestinian cause, but it did enable him to see the conflict in a new way: "People stop spreading legends and start talking the truth," he said. "It is so easy to hate people on the other side when you don't talk to them and you don't have to know them. But when you engage in discourse with them, you see they feel the way you do about your people. It's not so easy to hate them anymore." Classes ran overtime, and students who met in classes continued their dialogue after the semester was over.

In both cases, part of the message is: it’s easy to demonize when you’re dealing with abstractions and straw men. In dialogue, one has to deal with real people and real complexity.

Hampshire College is a leader in so many areas with accomplishments we could draw upon. Why not this one? The projects practically suggest themselves.

We have a distinguished Peace and World Security Studies Program. We have a large population of “international” students. Why could we not create a program in which Arab and Israeli students and scholars live and learn together and teach others? We are pioneers in sustainability and environmental science. Why could we not involve our students in efforts to address these issues in the Middle East, from energy to agriculture and water resources? As the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based on cooperation between Arabs and Israelis, puts it, nature has no borders. After all, our new President was the leader of a major environmental organization. Could there be a better opportunity?

Now, contrast all this with “hotbed of anti-Israel fervor.” Is that all we have to show for all the years of “activism” around the Middle East conflict here? Should we allow ourselves to be defined by negation?

Is that really how we wish to be known?

Surely, we can do better.

Why not pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace?

Why not? Really, why not?

Putting the Hampshire College Divestment Myth in its Grave

2012-01-09T05:12:00.000-05:00

The anti-Israel “BDS” (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement seems to be at a tipping point. It confidently promises an unprecedented campaign in 2012, yet its efforts in the past year met with pushback and setbacks around the globe. Its choice of targets moreover grew increasingly petty, not to say, bizarre: hummus (made in New York)? chocolate shops in Australia? a symphony orchestra on tour? (1 vs. 2) WTF?! The world finally seems to be catching on.

Plans for a national conference of the BDS movement, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania in February (1, 2), are already bringing bad news. The administration not only declared in advance that hosting the gathering did not constitute endorsement (standard operating procedure for all sorts of student events). It also took the notable step of explicitly condemning the BDS movement and affirming the importance of ties with Israeli academics.

Bummer.

The Penn activists claim to be “Picking up where the 2009 Hampshire conference left off.” They may wish to reconsider their chosen model. The rather lackluster original conference at Hampshire (1, 2, 3) followed on the heels of the claim that the College had divested from “the Israeli Occupation of Palestine” earlier that year. Unfortunately, as everyone else in the world seems to know, that divestment claim is false. Call it what you will—misinterpretation, wishful thinking, hoax, fraud, lie—it didn’t happen, and that’s that. Hampshire College disposed of any remaining doubts when it presented its new socially responsible investing policy last month.

Jon Haber, who has followed anti-Israel divestment efforts closely, likens the so-called BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement to a vampire: (1) every time you think it’s dead, it comes back, a phenomenon that conveys (in accordance with its hopes and wishes) an air of invincibility. In fact, (2) its powers are more limited than it would like you to believe, because it can become a threat only when you allow it to cross your threshold. In Jon’s view, the BDS movement—which has scored no major or lasting victories in the course of a decade—has survived beyond its normal life only by virtue of the fact that its dedicated activists prey upon those who, whether deliberately or unwittingly, allow it to gain entrance to their organizations.

high time for institutions to wake up to the threat of BDS

This explains why the academically robust but financially anemic Hampshire College would prove such an enticing victim for the vampires: the endorsement of the first American institution of higher education to divest from South Africa would lend weight to the false assertion that Israel, too, practices “apartheid.”

That the College, following a divestment request by anti-Israel activists, made changes to its investment portfolio in 2009 is not in dispute. The dispute turns instead on the meaning of that action. The task of the historian, as Thomas Babington Macaulay says in the motto on the masthead of this blog, is not merely to establish the facts, but above all, to interpret them.

As is well known: the College, upon reviewing the fund in question, found that multiple companies were in violation of its socially responsible investment policy, and reallocated its assets accordingly. That standard (e.g. declining to invest in military products) was the sole rationale behind the action. The decision had nothing to do with Israel, affected a far greater number of firms having no association with Israel, and above all, rendered no verdict on Israel or its policies, whether within the “Green Line” or in the “occupied territories.”

No credible observer believes that divestment took place, for three very simple reasons: Divestment is a political action that therefore has meaning only if it is (1) deliberate and (2) accompanied by a public statement (3) on the part of an officially responsible body. When the College divested from holdings in South Africa, the administration and trustees publicly announced their action and stated the reasons. That contrast says it all.

A mere change in resource allocation makes no such statement. I once tried to illustrate this distinction by analogy:

If I sell my shares in Chrysler because I think it's a badly-run company that does not serve its stockholders, it's technically "true" that I have "relinquished" (to use the language of another recent student flier) my investment in a particular firm that profits from our irresponsible reliance on fossil fuels, but I have hardly "divested" myself—as a conscious and political statement (which is the only practical meaning that "divestment" can have in this context)—of participation in the carbon-based economy: especially if I continue to hold stock in Ford, Toyota, and Mobil.

The disinclination of Hampshire College to invest in certain areas does not necessarily render a verdict on their legality or morality:

• The College (although this is nowhere formally stated) does not invest in companies dealing in alcoholic beverages. Unlike tobacco, the latter do not necessarily cause harm when used responsibly. However, alcohol is neither a necessity of life nor an unmitigated good, and the College simply prefers to direct its resources to firms that, e.g. “Provide beneficial goods and services such as food, clothing, housing, health, education, transportation and energy.” (Policy, p. 2: Point 1) No rational person would conclude that, by declining to support the alcohol industry, we are endorsing prohibition—or even temperance. Hampshire College serves beer, wine, and liquor at some of its events—for example, dinners of the Board of Trustees, who approve the investment policy.

• The policy does not allow investment in companies that “Make nuclear, biological, or conventional weapons.” (Policy, p. 2: Point A) Nations have the right to self-defense. The US Constitution requires the government “to provide for the common defence,” and authorizes Congress “to raise and support armies” and “provide and maintain a navy.” No rational person would therefore conclude that our policy entails a rejection of the Constitution or the armed forces of the United States.

The decision taken in response to the divestment request had to do with military products, not their recipient: not Israel, not anyone else. If and when there is a Palestinian state, the College will likewise refuse to invest in firms that provide it with weapons.

Clear, one would think.

And yet the divestment myth refused to die. BDS advocates clung to it with a religious fervor, as if repeating it often enough could make it true.

They will find it more difficult than ever to maintain that position following the report on the new socially responsible investment policy last month.

Former President Marlene Fried:

there is clarity and unanimity on the Board that it did not make a decision to divest from the State of Israel, that it did not decide that Israel was in the same camp as South Africa.

Although the student questioner, fearing some semantic or conceptual confusion, correctly pointed out that the divestment claim involved the “Israeli occupation of Palestine” rather than investment in Israel, as such, it is a distinction without a difference in light of the above (as well as the stance of the BDS movement, for that matter)—and indeed, Fried responded by reaffirming the College’s rejection of the claim: “the Board does not believe that.”

There was no dissent from any member of the committee, and that includes Professor Emeritus Stan Warner, a well-known economist and political progressive, who was the faculty representative on the subcommittee on investment responsibility (CHOIR) at the time of the original divestment request, and who advised and educated student members about investment policy. Surely, if divestment had succeeded, he would know and be duty-bound to say so. But no, in the course of the nearly twelve-minute discussion of the issue, he was in fact the only member of the committee who did not speak to the controversy, as such, jumping in only briefly to answer a procedural question.

The College has made it clear, time and again: no divestment took place in 2009.

It has now affirmed that even more clearly at the end of 2011.

As they used to say in the olden days:

Q.E.D.
(1, 2)

Or, as we say nowadays:

Myth busted!

It’s high time that we put the divestment myth in the graveyard of history, where it belongs.

Question-and-Answer on Israel and Divestment at Hampshire College (the "elephant in the room")

2012-01-08T00:10:00.000-05:00

the "elephant in the room"

The false assertion that Hampshire College in 2009 divested itself of holdings in what student activists called "the Israeli Occupation of Palestine" came up when an ad hoc committee recently presented the new "socially responsible"—or "Environmental, Social and Governance" (ESG)—investing policy (full story here).

There, the committee forcefully reaffirmed the administration's consistent past assertions that no such thing ever occurred.

Here is the video of the conversation. Because the audio quality of remarks delivered without benefit of a microphone is poor, I have also transcribed the key portions of the dialogue to the best of my ability, with approximate time-markers.

The members of the committee present are (from left to right):

• Jonathan Scott: an alumnus, from the College’s first entering class, now member of the Board of Trustees and head of the Investment Committee
• Marlene Fried: a professor of philosophy and Director of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program, who served as Interim President last year, while we conducted the search for a full-time president
• Beth Ward: Secretary of the College
• Stan Warner: Professor Emeritus of Economics, and long the faculty representative on the responsible investing committee
• Ken Rosenthal: first Treasurer of the College, now Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees

It was following the campaign by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) associated with the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement that the Board of Trustees decided the entire socially responsible investing policy had to be overhauled. The report to the community by the ad hoc committee charged with that review did not explicitly address Israel and the old divestment controversy.

An activist from Students for Justice in Palestine therefore clearly and politely raised the issue of what he called the “elephant in the room.” He had several related questions, beginning with process and procedures.

Student questioner: (00:30) “My main three questions are, first is there transparency of the investment, is any of that changing? Is CHOIR [Committee at Hampshire On Investment Responsibility: oversees the definition and application of the guidelines; JW] the still the only way, does CHOIR have access to look at specific companies, where does that happen for students? [ . . . .] Where do you get access to looking at the portfolio?[ . . . . ]"

Jonathan Scott: "CHOIR will have full access to the portfolio: it is actually a subcommittee of the Investment Committee." [this is in fact covered quite simply and explicitly in the two-page portion of the document pertaining to CHOIR; JW]. (01:14) Stan Warner further explains that there will be access through the office of the Vice President for Financial Affairs, who then affirms that statement. He continues, “We’re invested in socially responsible funds, and you can then see: what specific companies.”

Student: (01:28) “The other kind of, just, comment, question is, to me, feels like an elephant in the room, um, the reason, to me, that I felt that quite, well, not the reason, but the timing, was in February 2009, right after CHOIR had been restarted by students and CHOIR had put together this whole group of six companies—GE, DynCorp, Motorola, Terex, United Technologies, and [another] that I can’t get off the top of my head right now, as not fitting into the policy of our previous socially responsible investment [inaudible word]: making weapons and selling them to the Israeli army and being used in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza. And that proposal went to the Investment Committee, the Investment Committee passed it, and it went to the Board, and on February 9, the Board voted on, to divest from [inaudible] that had those five companies in it.”

He goes on to note that this prompted a closer look at other investments: CHOIR sent the fund "tothe entire Investment Committee to look at it and added another hundred or so companies to that list as also being, not part of the, not fitting into our socially responsible endowment (02:37) and they voted on divestment, so, one question is: did that happen? Did, are we out of that mutual fund? and are there companies—according to what we just saw, they’re [or: that are?] making weapons, operating from countries that are engaged in heavy violations, I would imagine those companies would still be, I know there’s not a blacklist of companies [ . . . . ]"

(03:00) “and lastly, just the fact that it wasn’t talked about, says something about the whole situation still”[and CHOIR’s {?} involvement] “because, that being said, sometimes even among college students with power at Hampshire our power is to make good statements [?], initially when those students joined CHOIR, that wasn’t the ritual, legal [?], to get the school to make a statement that investing in companies that are selling weapons to the Israeli army to use on the West Bank for illegal occupation or for illegal siege is socially irresponsible, and other schools should follow suit, end up doing what we did, and so powerful, what we did back in South Africa, which was: morally, you know, lift it up, [look?] at this great thing [at?] Hampshire, this moral standard that we, our power, and, you know, other schools have to move forward since Hampshire (03:57) and whether or not the administration of Hampshire, or everyone at Hampshire feels that that was what happened, the greater, um, I know I’m sure it’s been talked about in socially responsible investing statements, conversations, emails [ . . . . ]"

(04:18) “so I’m just curious if there was any of the time when you actually talked about that in relationship because [ . . . ] in February was the reason that, right after that vote, a lot of people from the school got a lot of backlash from the ADL and Alan Dershowitz and other people all of a sudden [ . . . . ] I know that’s a lot.”

Response by Jonathan Scott (04:44) “Alex, I hear your passion, and I appreciate it, having been a Hampshire student myself. And I think the best way to answer [. . . ] with respect to the decision to divest, I think that, as the Investment Committee, what CHOIR did elevated, the, made it clear, to me (I’m making that [statement] as an individual), that our policy was totally inadequate. And, so I think that it made us go back and say, ‘wow, we have an inadequate policy': Not only was it not up to date, it wasn’t clear, and it was the Policy and CHOIR and the Guidelines all together. So I for one have been really wanting this to be passed for some time. We’ve had other things going on on campus, having nothing to do with CHOIR, and I think, going forward, this policy is going to help inform the greater good of the College for what we’re doing. And it was a teachable moment for me, to get clarity on an issue—and I’m not speaking about the Israeli issue, I’m speaking about the clarity of the actual document itself. And that’s what we did, that’s what we’re speaking about today."

He goes on to explain how the College maintained its basic ethical investment strategy over the past three years by applying a particular licensed screen to an index fund.

"As far as—I guess the other thing that’s important, and we said it already–we have tried to maintain to the extent possible our belief in our core values all through the last three years." He goes on to give details on the index funds and screens.

(07:39) “As far as the securities you named [i.e. the ones involved in the alleged divestment], sitting here [. . .] it’s hard to know what’s in or out of a fund on a given day, but as I said, [ . . . ] you’ll be able to see more" [when the new system is fully in place]

(07:55) Secretary of the College Beth Ward:
“I think there’s really an [inaudible] on the part of the College to have exactly those conversations, I mean not necessarily [inaudible] reference all of these per se, but really think about all of these political issues. I mean, it’s really hard to struggle with them, and you know, I think about South Africa and some of those [inaudible], and in some ways it seems like the world is kind of murky.”

(08:29) “focusing on companies is a very clarifying way to approach these policies, which does not in any way mitigate the need for us, you know, to [take on?] other issues.” We need to have conversations about politics.

(08:56) Ken Rosenthal (noting that he joined the Board just around the time of the controversy in 2009): “What we discovered was: There had not been conversations on this campus as there should have been over a period of time, and so I think things, I think things exploded when, had we been talking about these issues regularly, we might have approached them in a more consistent and in a different way. And what we’re trying to do here is trying to reestablish a forum on this campus, a regular forum, where people can come, not feel frustrated, and can meet regularly [ . . . ] so that we can get the ideas out, we can consider them, and we can move, if necessary, quickly, to make changes. I don’t know that there will be changes that will always be necessary, but I do think conversation is necessary, especially because, especially because the tenure[s] of some of us go back many years, but for students, they may only be aware of these issues for one or two years and not be a- not appreciate that something may have been talked about three or four years ago or six or seven. We need to have those conversations regularly so people feel they’re a part ….”

(10:15) Marlene Fried: “I want to speak to the elephant. [ . . . ] I sort of came into this late, I was not the best informed or paying attention in 2008, but last year, I was paying a lot of attention [i.e. when, as interim President, she had to address the deteriorating climate on campus following the harassment of an Israeli student ( 1, 2) and the disruption of a talk by an Israeli soldier; JW], so it is very clear that there is a real divide between what the ‘buzz’ out there is about what Hampshire did or didn’t do, and about what the Board of Trustees of Hampshire College believes that it did, and there is clarity and unanimity on the Board that it did not make a decision to divest from the State of Israel, that it did not decide that Israel was in the same camp as South Africa.”

Student: “But it did say: Israel [sic] occupation, and the students on the Board did [use?] Israeli occupation, which is very different than Israel [ . . . ].”
They had been hoping that the Board would state that it broke the College's alleged ties to the occupation (or words to that effect).

(11:19) Fried: “The Board does not believe that it broke. And so, I guess the next thing is where will such conversations happen in the future, and I’m thinking it’s envisioned that CHOIR would a place where that will happen, and that’s why CHOIR is [inaudible; others break in]"

(11:36) Rosenthal: "And we hope it’s energized. We don’t want it just to be there waiting for somebody to call it to order, we want it to regularly say: we’re meeting, come talk to us."

The Hampshire College Policy on Environmental, Social and Governance Investing: A Closer Look

2012-01-07T23:55:00.000-05:00

• College unveils most ambitious socially responsibleinvesting policy in the country
• Board reaffirms: College never divested itself of holdingsin Israel, rejects parallel between South African apartheid and Israel

I. Overview

Last month, Hampshire College presentedits newdraft investment policy to the community for comment, with the expectationthat the Trustees would approve the statement of principles by the end of 2011and take up the full document at their quarterly Board meeting inFebruary.

The policy is distinctive in two regards: First,following the best practices in this evolving field, it emphasizes investmentsthat actively do good rather than merely avoid harm. For that reason, the oldphrase, "socially responsible investing," has yielded to"Environmental, Social and Governance Investing," or (because that isan unwieldy mouthful) "ESG," for short (1, 2). (Both the old version and the new mandate what is to be encouraged as well as what is to be avoided—and in largely the same terms—but the new one frames the whole in a more comprehensive, positive, and up-to-date way.)

Second, it is anunusually vigorous attempt to implement these principles. As past PresidentMarlene Fried explained, the consultants said that, "as far as they knew,our policy was the strongest and the most all-encompassing" in thecountry. Given that only about 15 percent of American institutions of highereducation explicitly pursue socially responsible investing, Hampshire Collegethus again positions itself at the cutting edge ( 1, 2, 3) of academia.

Interest in the policy, both on and beyond the Hampshirecampus, was clearly heightened by the recent history of controversy over theCollege's investments in Israel. In 2009, anti-Israel student activistsassociated with the so-called "BDS" (Boycott, Sanctions, andDivestment) movement falsely claimed that they had forced the College to divestfrom "the Israeli Occupation of Palestine" (an overview here;more detailed coverage here). Itwas an assessment of the overall investment policy at that time that promptedthe review whose results are now before us. The current document, let it besaid at the outset, contains nothing that singles out Israel, or any country,for that matter. Indeed, one of the most significant things to come out of thepresentation was an unusually clear statement to the effect that the Board hadnot in any way or fashion divested from Israel, and what is more, explicitlyrejected the analogy to South African apartheid that the activists here andelsewhere have repeatedly sought to draw.

* * *

As promised, then, here is a closer look at the presentation and the document. The approximately 80-minute information session on December 13 consisted of an overview of the review committee’s approach and a walk through the document (with highlights and excerpts in PowerPoint), followed by a question-and-answer session. Although the full text of the new document was distributed in hard copy midway through the event, there was of course no way for all those in attendance to explore and fully assess the details off the cuff. (Note: For the sake of greater clarity and coherence, I have rearranged some portions of the presentation.)

Because of the intrinsic importance of the issue and the interest that it is already beginning to arouse outside the College, I have attempted to provide as much detail as possible. Readers may thus pursue this description as selectively or extensively as they wish: The above (I) conveys the essence of the plan. The middle and longest portions (II-V) elaborate on the details. The final portion (VI) takes up the question of investment involving Israel, which had garnered national attention but surfaced here explicitly only in the question-and-answer session.

(l-r:) Jonathan Scott, Marlene Fried, Beth Ward, Stan Warner, Ken Rosenthal

II.Personae and Process

Secretary of the College Beth Ward moderated the event and introduced the participants: Jonathan Scott (an alumnus, from the College’s first entering class, now member of the Board of Trustees and head of the Investment Committee), Ken Rosenthal (first Treasurer of the College, now Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees), Stan Warner (professor emeritus of economics, and long the faculty representative on the investment committee), and professor of philosophy Marlene Fried, who served as Interim President last year, while we conducted the search for a full-time president). Not present were the student and staff members of the committee: in the meantime, the former graduated, and the second took a position elsewhere.

Jonathan Scott began by attempting, as he put it, to frame the discussion at a high level of generalization. The baseline fact is that Hampshire’s endowment today stands at only about $ 31 million (about 26 million of that in liquid securities). This combination of low total and limited liquidity, he explained, “puts some constraints on this portfolio.” The College therefore has to invest chiefly in existing funds; i.e. adapting to or modifying their selection rather than creating its own from scratch. (On the other hand, by implication, I suppose one could discern an advantage in not facing the dilemma of substantial investments in more traditional fields and firms, more likely to violate rigorous ESG standards.)

He further emphasized that, although the College had suspended the old policy and investment committee during the review process, “we never suspended how we invest.” (Translation: Board members did not run out and suddenly begin investing in sweatshops and armament manufacturers in 2009.)

Hampshire’s socially responsible investment stance dates from 1977, when the College divested itself of holdings in South Africa. The unwieldy document governing investments, revised for the ninth time in 1994, combined the overall policy statement, the specific investing guidelines, and the rules and regulations governing CHOIR, which stands for the awkwardly named Committee at Hampshire On Investment Responsibility (Ironically, it takes a clumsy and infelicitous name to generate a convenient acronym. Talk about the tail wagging the dog. But in was the '70s, after all. Maybe administrators will one day just create names that make sense. One may hope.)

III.The Document

As Scott put it, the document was thus “more than out of date, it was absolutely confusing.”

Indeed, anyone who attempts to read through the old policy—even though, at 2083 words, it is about one-third shorter than the new one—would be hard-pressed to avoid that conclusion. Some portions are clearly no longer relevant. Some are more detailed than they need to be. Others lack sufficient detail or clarity. And above all, the structure of the whole, mixing principles and procedures, was less than user-friendly, as we say nowadays.

The first task of the review committee had therefore been to break it into its constituent elements, each of which has now been rewritten and can stand on its own and be modified according to appropriately differentiated procedures. Ken Rosenthal explained:

(1) The intention was, first, to generate a short general statement for trustee approval by the end of the calendar year. This “Policy on Environmental, Social and Governance Investing” (3 pages) possesses the highest degree of authority and will remain fixed for the foreseeable future. (Note: in what follows, upper-case “Policy” refers to this document, as opposed to the investment “policy” [lower-case] as a whole.)

(2) The “Investment Committee’s Working Guidelines for ESG Investing,” by contrast, are more detailed and thus likely to be “more fluid,” with a lower threshold for modification and approval. As Scott later put it, ““a policy is something you don’t want to take back to the board every three or four months.” He cited an example from his own experience in Pennsylvania: a generation ago, in the wake of Three Mile Island disaster, “no one, even conservatives, wanted to invest in nuclear power” but today, when weighed against coal in the age of global warming, that choice may look different. Thus, a general principle (appropriate to the “Policy” document) might be upholding fair labor practices. However, the more flexible, amendable working “Guidelines” would explain how to achieve that. (This is of course, a common principle, which was crucial to our recent work on the College’s Governance Task Force: organizations apply it every day when distinguishing between authoritative and relatively stable “bylaws,” on the one hand, and more flexible policy manuals and the like, on the other.)

(3) Finally, there is “CHOIR Composition and Procedures (2 pages),” which as the title implies, addresses the operations of the investment committee rather than substance.

IV.Dilemmas and Decisions

The overall challenge or dilemma is that the Board of Trustees, in the words of the Policy (p. 1) has a “fiduciary obligation” “to optimize the financial return to the college, both currently and in the future, in order to advance the long-term financial interests of the College and support its mission.” “At the same time, “It is a core value of Hampshire College, and consistent with its historical practice, that the College invest in a socially responsible way.”

(The introduction to the old policy, perhaps because it was then breaking new ground, spoke of ethical investing first, and fiduciary responsibility only after that. Whereas the new policy allots four paragraphs to the introduction, the old one confined it to a single one, distributing some of the issues among the guidelines, e.g. III.A-C.)

As Scott observed, even though “we care greatly about both those issues,” they “don’t necessarily go hand in hand.” Attempting to balance the two “generated—I won’t say, some friction—energy.” There were “some bumps on the road at first,” but thanks to good will and a common sense of purpose, the members of the team were soon able to come up with the proper approach, and then everything moved along as if “on a superhighway.” (The document [p. 1] does make the plausible but slightly strained argument that investments in firms with sound environmental and human rights practices can be best even judged on purely financial grounds: such enterprises ultimately have the best prospects for long-term survival and growth, and whereas those that shun these values “pose reputational, financial, operational and legal risks to the College’s investments” and thus its “future financial security.”)

He cautioned, “there is no such thing as a straight line down the middle,” there is no such thing as perfection—or purity.” Or, the words of the Policy:

“investing in a responsible way does not always offer self-evident decisions. In an investment world that is ever more complex and global in scope, it is not possible to be informed of every activity that a business undertakes. There are likely to be products and services that can be used in ways that are both responsible and contrary to a shared notion of responsibility.” (p.1)

For that reason, Scott explained, it is essential at the outset not just to create clear rules and criteria, but also to indicate how they can be pragmatically applied in real life. He illustrated dilemmas and choices from other cases. The Quakers, he noted, are famously against war. They could therefore have chosen not to invest in US Treasuries, given that some of this money supports the military. In the end, however, they concluded that their mission was more jeopardized by having securities at risk, and so they decided to keep their liquidity in Treasuries.

The College’s answer to the challenge of making such decisions is a “threshold” policy. The mere fact that a corporation is involved in some activity prohibited under the investment policy is not a red line. Rather than imposing an absolute ban, which, given the complexity and diversity of economic enterprises in the contemporary world could well prove crippling, the committee chose to “create thresholds for things that are quantifiable.” For example, the College would not invest in a major defense contractor, but there would be no obstacle to investing in a consumer-electronics firm whose production of a component for the military constitutes a minuscule part of its overall activity, measured as a share of revenues: in this case, five percent.

(The old policy was both more vague and more specific [ III.C.3 ]. It framed the issue with reference to the desire "to invest in a way that reduces this country's dependency on military spending." On the one hand, it spoke of military investment in reverse terms, promising to "favor companies not heavily dependent on the sale of weapons and those which are taking active steps toward converting from production for military purposes"; it provided no quantitative or other practical measure. On the other hand, it went into considerable detail in defining nuclear and biological weapons: presumably a reflection of the debates over Cold War arms control and the relative newness of regulating other non-conventional weapons; the treaty on biological and chemical weapons cited there dated only from 1973 [III.C.4 and Definitions and Notes].)

We are at the leading edge of a trend, Scott explained: “The whole idea of ESG investing is becoming more popular, with individuals,” but it is just taking off at the institutional level. That is due in part to the complexity and limitations that might cause large investors to shy away. Given the relatively small size of its endowment, Hampshire is perhaps well able to pursue such a policy. At the same time, most investments will necessarily be in standard, pre-packaged funds, i.e. given to a fund manager, with appropriate instructions. “If we had billions,” he said, “we could hire that manager” to create a customized fund. Instead, “the best we can do is to find a fund that approximates” our desires and then customize it by employing various screens to filter out particular investments that do not fit our policy. “I’ll stress that this policy is to give guidance to our managers.” The fund mangers then give their recommendations to the investment committee, which makes the ultimate decision.

“A big constraint,” he added, “is in the emerging markets, it’s extremely difficult to invest in emerging markets in ESG, especially when you have to be in a fund.” He further clarified: “the screening is of individual companies; we do not invest in countries, as such.” (This seemed quite a clear allusion to the controversy over Israel and divestment as well as an elaboration on the general geographical question.)

Scott conceded that the thought of trying to implement what is arguably the strictest policy in the US while maximizing revenues made even him a bit nervous. The consultants, however, are confident that it is practicable.

V. The New Policy and its Implementation

Stan Warner presented the substance of the new plan and its rationale. He started with some history: “It began with one issue, and I was there, marching with 400 students around the Red Barn [building housing financial administration offices, and in earlier years, the site of Trustee meetings; JW]. We were, he said, “a place that cared about social issues beyond the borders of the College. We were trying to end the Vietnam War, trying to impeach Richard Nixon, trying to end apartheid.” The “trustees listened to this and were responsive, with a bit of nudging”

Much has changed not only since 1977, but also since 1994, when the old governing document was adopted. The world has become more complex, and the notion of ethical investing has matured, as well. In keeping with the broader notion of social responsibility represented by the ESG concept, the study committee agreed, “we will not make substantive changes in the areas that we do not invest in.” The current task, Warner said, was thus not to dilute the old system, and rather, “to expand” it. That requires some effort, as no off-the-shelf package is likely to fit the bill. “We then have the challenge of finding funds that satisfy these [standards], we can’t invest in just one fund. We need some diversity in the portfolio.”

(1) The Policy is divided into positives and negatives: those activities that the College wishes to support and those in which it chooses not to invest.

The College will favor investments in businesses that emphasize one or more of the following characteristics:
Provide beneficial goods and services such as food, clothing, housing, health, education, transportation and energy.
Pursue research and development programs that hold promise for new products of social benefit and for increased employment prospects.
Maintain fair labor practices including exemplary management policies in such areas as non-discriminatory hiring and promotion, Worker participation and education, and in policies affecting their quality of work life.
Maintain a safe and healthy work environment including full disclosure to workers of potential work hazards.
Demonstrate innovation in relation to environmental protection, especially with respect to policies, organizational structures, and/or product development; give evidence of superior performance with respect to waste utilization, pollution control, and efforts to mitigate climate change risk.
Use their power to enhance the quality of life for the underserved segments of our society and encourage local community reinvestment.
Have a record of sustained support for higher education.
The College will not favor investments in businesses whose products, services, or business practices are inconsistent with the above characteristics, in particular avoiding businesses that:
A. Make nuclear, biological, or conventional weapons.
B. Have significant operations in countries with serious human rights violations.
C. Engage in unfair labor practices.
D. Discriminate by race, gender, ethnic origin, sexual preference, or disability.
E. Demonstrate substantially harmful environmental practices.
F. Market abroad products that are banned in the United States because of their impact on health or the environment.
G. Have markedly inferior occupational health and safety records.
H. Manufacture or market products that in normal use are unsafe.
I. Refuse to make their performance records concerning Guidelines 1 - 7 andA-H available upon reasonable request.

Elaborating on the negative, he made clear that the decision not to invest in a given field should not necessarily be taken to mean that the relevant activity is illegal or immoral. For example, although this is nowhere specified in the Guidelines, the College chooses not to invest in firms a major portion of whose business involves alcoholic beverages or so-called adult entertainment (pornography). The investment policy is a voluntary statement of values and resource-allocation preferences.

(2) The Guidelines, following the same structure and numbering as the Policy, in essence go on to explain some of the metrics and evaluation procedures. For example, on the positive side, workplace conditions can be measured by a combination of “policies,” “certifications” (OSHA and equivalents), “programs,” and “performance (e.g. statistics on employee injuries and fatalities measured against industry averages, etc.) (pp. 1-2: Point 4). On the negative side, a pattern of discrimination might be measured (p. 4: Point D) by such factors as fines, penalties, and legal settlements, or individual or class-action lawsuits involving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Echoing Scott’s earlier remark, Warner affirmed, “we don’t divest from countries, we divest from firms.” “In some cases, with human rights violations, the process begins with countries and moves to funds. Closer scrutiny of investments in a particular country could be triggered if the latter had a particularly egregious human rights record might. He cited the examples of South Africa in the past, and countries practicing genocide, such as Sudan, today. Still, the point again was the firms and their practices. Thus, the prevalence of sweatshops in Indonesia might trigger a close review of firms there, but the outcome might be a decision not to invest in Nike and Gap—not a ban on investment in Indonesia.

Ken Rosenthal briefly explained proxy voting (Policy, p. 3), which adheres to the same principles as the old, namely supporting propositions that seek to eliminate or reduce "ESG injury," and opposing the reverse. The difference lies in the context: the old policy [III.D] envisioned the trustees as "voting their shares at meetings of stockholders by proxy." The new one explains that, "The College generally invests in funds, rather than individual companies, and usually has no opportunity to exercise the voting rights of shareholders because they are delegated to the manager(s)." The College simply instructs the manager(s) to cast any votes in accordance with its policy.

(The old policy [III.E], unlike the new one, contains a specific clause on "Divestment," authorizing sale "for other than financial reasons" if the "exercise of shareholders' rights . . . will not, within a reasonable period of time, succeed in changing a company's attitude toward a moral or social problem." Clearly, this is a political action, which pertains to an extreme and rare situation, such as the South African case. For example, one would not, generally speaking, seek to change the overall production of an arms manufacturer; one would instead simply determine that investment in this area was inconsistent with the policy and "delete" the company from the "master list of acceptable investment opportunities" [III.C.5]. Now that the College is invested chiefly in funds, most of which have moreover received a thorough screening in accordance with ESG policy, "divestment" in the former sense is typically not an option.)

(3) CHOIR, a subcommittee of the Investment Committee, is tasked with an advisory and reporting role concerning investment policy: chiefly, making recommendations to the former on the maintenance, revision, and application of the Guidelines; and keeping Board and community informed of its doings. (CHOIR, p. 1: Points A-B)

The committee decided to retain CHOIR as a separate standing body with the same membership (two representatives each from trustees, faculty, students, and staff, with the Vice President of Finance ex officio), but modified its procedures in a few important ways aimed at enhancing efficiency, transparency, and accountability: First, rather than coming together on an ad hoc basis, as in the past (II.E: "normally three or four times a year") CHOIR will have a regular annual meeting as a baseline (others taking place as necessary) and will report on a quarterly basis to the Board. Second, and as a corollary: now, as before, CHOIR “may initiate its own actions” but is explicitly required to solicit, take into account, and report on the full range of community information and advice when making its recommendations to the Investment Committee (old: II.B.4; J.1,3); new: Points B, F-H). The policy, appropriately enough, requires solicitation of "information and advice from individuals and groups" beyond the campus during the research and deliberation phase, but once a judgment has been rendered, focuses on "opinion" within the College walls.

What is distinctive today is the commitment to strengthen the role of CHOIR as a standing committee, with the expectation of regular and substantive dialogue with both Trustees and campus community.

Secretary of the College Beth Ward wrapped up the formal presentation by again reminding the audience that the College had never halted its socially responsible investing, and she closed by inviting public comment in the coming week. The question-and-answer session took up the final 25 minutes or so.

VI. The Israeli "Elephant in the Room"

Most of the questions, predictably, included details of implementation, some of which (also predictably) had in effect been answered in the course of the presentation.

A subsidiary concern, or at least, observation, involved the small size of the audience, and in particular, the low turnout; there were only three students, though they asked most of the questions. Given the attendance figure and the late date in the semester, the possibility of extending the comment period beyond the next week arose. The Committee showed itself open to suggestions but also offered the very logical response: what the Trustees wanted to approve now was the Policy document, which was brief, general, straightforward, and presumably uncontroversial. There would always be time for further comment on the other elements before the official February Board meeting, particularly because the process for revising them was simpler, given the lower threshold.

It was only now that the question of economic ties to Israel arose. In a way, that was only natural. The topic is nowhere to be found in the document, for reasons that should be obvious and were clearly indicated in the presentation: the College’s policies pertain to firms, and not to countries or particular political issues. There was, nominally, no need to speak of it. That said, everyone was aware of it as a subtext or background issue.As in the case of the original controversy, it is in some ways a “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” dilemma: mentioning it risks giving disproportionate attention to a non-issue and thus detracting from the real topic. On the other hand, not mentioning it allows the impassioned advocates to imply (however implausibly) that the issue is being ignored for nefarious reasons.

An activist from Students for Justice in Palestine therefore clearly and politely raised the issue of what he called the “elephant in the room.” He had several related questions, beginning with process and procedures.

• He wanted to know, first, whether the transparency of the investment process would be retained? For example, would CHOIR still have access to lists of all investments?
-The answer from Mr. Scott: yes. (it is in fact found on p. 2: Point E)

• In particular, though, he noted that CHOIR had in 2009 had "voted on divestment" from six companies involved in "making weapons and selling them to the Israeli army and being used in the West Bank and Gaza": "did that happen?" Could the ad hoc committee tell us the status of those investments?
-Answer from Mr. Scott: not off the top of his head, especially as the composition of funds continually changes.

• Students on campus and activists elsewhere were frustrated that the College, allegedly because it came under intense outside pressure, had not made a statement affirming the change in policy and holdings. The activists believed that divestment had occurred, “whether or not the administration of Hampshire, or everyone at Hampshire feels that that was what happened.” Among other things, the questioner was therefore curious as to whether the issue has been discussed as part of the review process.

There followed several oblique and rather deferential responses, the common theme of which was: apart from the substance of the issue (which none of them deigned—or dared—to address), the incident had revealed how flawed the old policy and system was, and why clearer procedures and better communication were badly needed.

Finally, former President Marlene Fried (video below) jumped in to address the issue head-on: “I want to speak to the elephant. [ . . . ] I sort of came into this late, I was not the best informed or paying attention in 2008, but last year, I was paying a lot of attention [i.e. when, as interim President, she had to address the deteriorating climate on campus following the harassment of an Israeli student ( 1, 2) and the disruption of talk by an Israeli soldier; JW], so it is very clear that there is a real divide between what the ‘buzz’ out there is about what Hampshire did or didn’t do, and about what the Board of Trustees of Hampshire College believes that it did, and there is clarity and unanimity on the Board that it did not make a decision to divest from the State of Israel, that it did not decide that Israel was in the same camp as South Africa.”

Student: “But it did say: Israel [sic] occupation, and the students on the Board did [use?] Israeli occupation, which is very different than Israel [ . . . ].”
They had been hoping that the Board would state that it broke the College's alleged ties to the occupation (or words to that effect).

Fried: “The Board does not believe that. . . ."

(I have reserved a fuller account of the exchange for a separate post.)

With that, the matter should be settled. Still, it remains of some relevance, to the extent that it bears on both the substance and practicality of the new document.

On the whole, the policy is bold and admirable. However, one clause—on its own terms and in light of the foregoing controversy—may give some readers pause. It pertains to what are called "Countries of concern." (Policy, p. 2: Point B) Among the investments that "The College will not favor" (Guidelines, pp. 2-3) are those in "businesses that":

· B. Have significant operations in countries with serious human rights violations.Countries of concern are those where there is substantial evidence of complicity in clear violations of civil and political human rights by the government in power, as evidenced by:

• Allegations or convictions resulting from serious impacts on the civil and political rights of any group of people.

a) This includes violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as government-sponsored killings, torture and abuse, forced labor, forced displacement, abuse from the local military or police services, abuse of freedom of expression, and child labor.

• Controversies substantial enough to have become an international issue or to have international repercussions. A substantial international controversy can be gauged by whether there is:

a) An international divestment or boycott campaign by two or more major human rights groups;

b) Involvement by one or more governments (outside the host country government) or United Nations (UN) agencies publicly expressing concern about the state of human rights in a country of concern;

c) Widespread and/or prolonged coverage in the international press; or

d) Some form of intervention by UN or other regional/internationalhuman rights authorities.

Typically the majority of these factors should be met in order to identify a country of concern, and then an assessment of the company's activities in these countries performed. In most cases, retail or distribution ofcompany products or humanitarian aid in a country of concern will not beproblematic, however, grounds for restriction may include the presence of company-owned facilities- in a country of concern, contractual arrangements with government entities, or operations that clearly benefit the government (most frequently via revenue generation and often entailing infrastructural investments or natural resource extraction).

Clearly, this screen is intended to flag countries that are gross violators of human rights, such as Sudan or Myanmar. And there are many sensible and reassuring specifics. Language matters. Frequently, the document includes key qualifying terms signaling a high standard to be met; thus, for example: "serious human rights violations," "substantial evidence of complicity," "clear violations," "serious impacts," "two or more major human rights groups." There is reference to foundational documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Finally, it is reassuring to see that this is not a casual menu for the fickle: the presumed need for a country to meet "the majority of these factors" before becoming a target of concern sets an appropriately high bar. It is a prudent safeguard.

To put this all in context: the old policy (III.C.4.d) defined countries of concern simply as those "engaged in serious human rights violations" and described the prohibited corporate activities there as those that "serve to perpetuate, promote, and finance these conditions, as identified through a factual case by CHOIR." Lacking is any precision or granularity, indeed, any real definition at all. The new policy is thus vastly clearer than and superior to the old one. It cannot be properly judged without reference to the former.

Obviously, any policy document is subject to both innocent misinterpretation and misuse. It is worthwhile to ask whether there is anything we can do to limit those possibilities. The text, unlike human nature, lies within our control. One hopes that the Board, when taking up this document in February, will give that issue due consideration.

To return to the "elephant in the room," one could easily imagine anti-Israel divestment advocates putting together a case that was on the surface plausible even if it in fact lacked merit:

• "Convictions" in criminal courts for violations of human rights are lacking, but "allegations," whether substantiated or not, are legion. Just how, then, would this standard be applied?

• International divestment and boycotts? It would be difficult to claim that "two or more major human rights groups" [emphasis added] are spearheading such measures—clearly, the authors of the policy have in mind something like the coordinated boycott of Sudan or the equivalent—but anti-Israel advocates would no doubt produce the usual list of bit-players, which, to the uninformed, might at first seem persuasive. We may ask: what defines "major"? And even then, how do we judge their judgments? Even undeniably "major" human rights groups have of late come under sharp criticism for bias (1, 2).

• Widespread or prolonged press coverage: is mere quantity or duration sufficient? What about the merits of that coverage? The watchdog group CiFWatch documents, on a daily basis, the distortions and bigotry in the treatment of Israel and Jews in the once-respected Guardian: a flaw that the latter has finally and grudgingly begun to acknowledge (1, 2). And a recent scholarly study discovered evidence of extensive and systematic bias by Reuters—in violation of the news organization's own explicit norms.

• Expressions of concern by UN agencies? That is a rather low moral as well as practical bar these days. To cite but two examples: The UN General Assembly, in its 61st session (2006-7), condemned Israel 22 times, yet somehow never mentioned the genocide in Sudan (between 1950 and 2007, the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, including all-out international wars, cost 51,000 lives; the Sudanese civil wars, 1.9 million; source). As for the UN Human Rights Council, it has devoted 80 percent of its censures to Israel alone, which is ironic, given that its current members include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Pakistan, not exactly paradises for human rights. Adding to the irony: Libya actually chaired the Council until its suspension in March of last year.

I offer the above merely as food for thought. (And I note that several of those standards or categories also appear elsewhere in the document, e.g. "significant controversies" as defined by legal actions, "criticism by NGOs," and "extensive media coverage" in the case of products injurious to human health or the environment [p. 4: Point F; see also p. 5: Point H].)

Naturally, any such document must strike the difficult balance between the specificity required for clarity and the breadth required for practicability. Much inevitably depends on the hypothetical "reasonable person" who will apply the standards.

The original divestment case was empty because divestment is an explicitly political act: The activists sought to win a symbolic victory by targeting primarily items of military production, which are, however, neutral in nature: they can be used for legitimate purposes (every state has the right of self-defense) or for illegitimate ones. The socially responsible investment policy does not distinguish between the two. Therefore, even the selling off of shares in every firm that has military dealings with Israel would objectively make no statement whatsoever regarding the legitimacy of the state or its policies, within the Green Line or in the territories. This is what so frustrates and infuriates the BDS activists: they want the College to admit to something that it by definition did not and could not do.

(To show you just how preposterous the whole business was:In 2009, the anti-Israel divestment activists targeted ITT and Motorolabecause they supplied equipment to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Well, asit turns out, both firms also provided equipment or other assistance forHurricane Katrina relief efforts—and, to complete the irony, the violentJihadis on board the "Mavi Marmara" used Motorola devices tocoordinate their attack on the IDF troops attempting to enforce the blockadeof Gaza in 2010. These things are just not as simple as the activists wouldhave one believe.)

My bet is that, if the new policy is implemented fairly and rigorously in the spirit in which it is intended, another anti-Israel divestment attempt would likewise fail.

-First, the new policy, even taking the aforementioned questions into account, arguably implements far clearer standards and sets a higher overall bar.

-Second, the more rigorous approach allows for a salutary and even clearer separation of human rights from narrowly political goals: Is your aim to apply socially responsible investment principles in general or to attain a specific political end? If the former, then the refusal to invest in all military production solves the problem. It makes no difference which country is involved; you can rejoice and move on. If the latter, however, then you've got a fairly tough case to make.

-Finally, the demands of transparency and communication would force the argument into the open. Last time, divestment advocates sought to achieve their victory behind the closed doors of committee and board meetings. This time, opposing views would be required to receive a full and fair hearing in the bright light of public opinion. It would be a compelling debate, I am sure.

The statements made at the presentation of the new policy make it clear, once and for all, that divestment never took place. The new policy makes it highly unlikely that it could occur in the future.

That policy will be a test of maturity for all parties concerned.

If SJP is wise, it will devote its efforts to more productive and less destructive activities. The issue of Palestine and Palestinian rights is a serious one, about which a serious conversation would be welcome. Attempting to draw attention to it through divestment is both a moral and a strategic error. Exploiting the resources and name of Hampshire College in order to do so is cynical and selfish. If, as in the past, the divestment advocates put their desires first and attempt to highjack the institution and its agenda by treating the College merely as a means to their narrow ends, that will be as revealing as it will be regrettable.

The College has registered a significant achievement by producing the most ambitious and rigorous ethical investment policy in the country. That is something that we should all applaud and support. That is where the spotlight should be focused and remain.

* * *

Resources

• "Hampshire College Policy on Environmental, Social and Governance Investing" (draft of 25 October 2011): the College has made it available here, but in the event that the draft is later replaced with another version, I have also uploaded the former here as both a Word document and a pdf.

• Hampshire College "Policy on Socially Responsible Investing" (version of 12 September 1994): as Word document and as pdf.

• Hampshire College information sheet: "Q&A: Draft Policy on Environmental, Social and Governance Investing," 13 December 2011

• Kevin Kiley, "Making Green by Going Green" [report on the new Hampshire policy], Inside Higher Ed, 16 Dec. 2011

• Chad Cain, "Hampshire College seeks socially responsible investing," Daily Hampshire Gazette, 19 Dec. 2011

• Hampshire College press release: "Hampshire College Adopts Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Investing Guidelines," 3 January 2012

[updated links]

Would have, could have, must have: Professional historian at work! Do not attempt on your own.

2011-12-17T00:32:00.000-05:00

Perhaps because 'tis the season to mark papers, I am especially on the lookout for leaps of logic, sweeping generalizations, and other unfounded arguments.

Also, because I am teaching my course on debates in history in the spring. There, I try to get students to understand several fundamental truths: persuasive argument depends on the marshaling of evidence, and evidence demands interpretation. I try to get them to see that the facts are essential, but do not "speak for themselves." The science of history is in a very real sense therefore the history of evolving interpretations, a dialogue with our colleagues and predecessors. For that reason, too, we generally say, we still find it useful to read and engage with even the historians of the distant past, whose views we no longer share. This is commonly cited as one difference between the human and natural sciences. The laboratory scientist generally derives no practical benefit from reading antiquated and refuted theories.

We examine several cases in which two historians look at the same facts and arrive at very different conclusions. A classic modern example is Natalie Davis's celebrated Return of Martin Guerre (subject of the popular film of the same name) involving marriage and mystery in sixteenth-century France. A young woman's socially awkward and sexually inept husband abandons her. How could she not know that the strapping, virile fellow who returns years later, claiming his role and rights, is in fact someone else? Oh: and this was serious stuff back then. The new husband was eventually found guilty of imposture and executed. The wife was found innocent, on the grounds that she was deceived. For Davis, she must have known, and the two must have colluded in order to fashion new identities and a romantic marriage influenced by new Protestant ideals. The judge was sympathetic and covered up the truth. For Robert Finlay, by contrast, the sources say that the wife was duped, and that is that: Davis imposes modern feminist values and a postmodernist reading on the sovereign sources. Davis's book is full of phrases to the effect that one of the characters must have or could have or might have thought or done this or that. For Finlay, this is wild speculation. For Davis, Finlay has a mindnumbingly simplistic approach to sources, assuming that they can be taken at face value, that we do not need to look beneath the surface or take into account the implicit subjectivity or even duplicity of the author. The reader will judge.

Still, even as we attempt to teach this complexity in interpretation, we teach students to err on the side of caution in their own writing. Davis and Finlay are professionals, intimately familiar with the nature of the documents and the society. They can assemble extensive evidence in support of every point. Davis's footnotes on even minor contextual matters sometimes threaten to become miniature essays in their own right. Davis brought to her adventurous interpretations decades of experience that students by definition lack. They tend to see sources in a much more limited way, and to use them accordingly. They think in terms of quoting or discussing individual sources in detail rather than synthesizing and assembling them in service of a larger point. Above all, because they necessarily lack the contextual knowledge, they are much more prone to outrun their evidence. It's a little bit like driver ed: the student may understand the theory and moreover know all the correct individual things to do, but putting them together in a real-life situation without adequate experience can be dangerous: you don't take her onto the streets of Boston or New York on the first day.

I therefore always recall my father's teaching me a Latin phrase from Terence that he learned in Gymnasium: "Quod licet Iovi non licet Bovi": what is permitted to Jove [Jupiter] is not permitted to an ox. In other words, not everyone has equal rights.

Here's an example of a reviewer grappling with this issue in a modern scholarly journal:

By the beginning of 1833, 'his views must have assumed their full shape' (p. 166). (One winces at the 'must have', a phrase to which Vereté was prone but one which if used by an aspiring postgraduate would bring deserved coals of fire on his or her head). Vereté was very good at discovering documents but he was inclined to take them at face value and sometimes failed to ask why these arguments were used, how far those who used them believed in them and how far statesmen acted on them rather than on other arguments.

from M. E. Yapp, review of From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of Mayir Vereté, Middle Eastern Studies 29 no. 2 (April 1993): 358-59

None of this, or course, is to say that facts don't matter. As we are accustomed to saying, everyone has a right to his or her own opinions, but not his or her own facts. John Adams famously said in his defense of the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

And, writing during the time of the Vietnam War and the controversy over the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt (not someone I generally quote if I can help it) cites a conversation between the French Premier and a German politician over war guilt in the First World War:

'What, in your opinion,' Clemenceau was asked, 'will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial isue?' He replied, 'This I don't know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.'

Nuff said.

Sponge Bob Alienated Not Necessarily Heterosexual Pants

2011-12-17T00:16:00.002-05:00

Aha! Now I see why my students don't understand socialism, classical radical thought, or even basic economics:

The hen house revolt in Chicken Run and the communitarian ethics of Bee Movie and A Bug’s Life become our 21st century heirs to Marx’s critique of capitalism and patriarchy. By analyzing the motley crew of anthropomorphic species, monsters and objects that band together in these kid films (Monsters Inc, Toy Story, Over the Hedge, etc.) Halberstam stresses that modern advances in animation have allowed us to more vividly imagine and depict alternative structures of kinship and subjectivity.. . . .

The politics of heteronormativity and sexual dissidence has never appeared as lucid as it does now that we have SpongeBob SquarePants as our guide.

—Chase Dimock, review of The Queer Art of Failure, by Judith Jack Halberstam, Lambda Literary Review, 12 Dec. 2011

The stuff I have to read in this line of work.

Seriously, though, it's actually serious stuff. (Well, sort of.) Check it out. Whatever.

Hampshire College Presents New Socially Responsible Investment Policy; Said Most Rigorous in the Country

2011-12-14T23:29:00.000-05:00

(l-r) Jonathan Scott, Marlene Fried, Beth Ward, Stan Warner prepare for the presentation (not in picture: Ken Rosenthal)

December 13, 2011

This afternoon, members of a Hampshire College ad hoc committee on socially responsible investing, formed in 2009, presented their long-awaited report to the community. The process, already drawn-out because of administrative transitions and other unrelated internal issues, was further delayed by the unusually early snowstorm this fall, which prompted the closing of the campus and evacuation of students. Although first scheduled for November 3, the meeting thus took place over a month later.

In part for that reason, attendance was low. Classes ended last week, and most students either had gone home or were working furiously on their final papers. There were barely two-dozen people (excluding the five presenters) in the large lecture hall—which, by contrast, was filled to capacity last February, when an Israeli soldier spoke about his experiences (or tried to), prompting one of the fiercest campus controversies (1, 2, 3, 4) over an issue that accounts for the great interest in what would otherwise be a matter mainly for the policy wonks and number-crunchers.

I counted only three students and three members of the faculty. The others present were from the staff or administration of the College. Again, the season had much to do with this. Still, the difference is telling: people will more readily turn out for a protest than a policy presentation.

The formal name is: Policy on Environmental, Social and Governance Investing (ESG).

I’ll be posting more extensively later about the entire document, but here’s the initial take-away. The content matched what I predicted, and it on the whole looks very good.

• Process and Product

Part of the task was to break down an unwieldy older document (last revised in 1994) into more logically consistent components, separating overall policy from more specific guidelines and operating procedures. Nothing earth-shattering or controversial there.

The committee members at several points took pains to make clear, however, that even during the period of review, the College had never dropped its policy on social responsible investment practices. Rather, it had simply set aside the old oversight committee and the specific document that governed its operation.

• Principles

Most people will of course be most interested in the actual content, which can be summarized with relative ease.

In part because of its relatively small endowment, Hampshire conducts its investments through various existing managed funds, which contain stock in a number of enterprises. The College seeks funds whose holdings most approximate its values, but can in addition apply various “screens” in order to further refine what it actually invests in. In some cases, we use existing screens developed by other parties, but it is the ESG that ultimately constitutes the guidance for the fund managers.

Put briefly, the document treats investments from both the positive and the negative standpoint: things that we wish to support, and things that we do not wish to support. In the former category, for example, are firms that provide necessary goods and services in sustainable ways, firms that uphold human and environmental rights, firms that enhance the quality of life and social justice, or support education.

In the latter category are firms that either seriously violate accepted norms of justice and sustainability or simply engage in activities whose net effect is destructive or at the least might not be seen as a value that the college actively needs to support. Thus, for example: on the one hand, firms that practice discrimination or have poor labor, health, or environmental records, or on the other hand, firms that engage in military production, etc.

Merely participating in, say, some form of military production, however, is not necessarily enough to preclude an investment altogether, especially in an age in which a given firm may engage in a wide range of activities. The College can therefore assess individual cases using a “threshold” measure, i.e. taking into account the share of revenue that a firm derives from a given activity.

The basic policy fits on a page. The actual guidelines are five times as long.

In summary, the document arguably sets new standards of rigor and accountability. Consultants who have examined it call this policy “the strongest and most all-encompassing” that they know of. Hampshire College thereby assumes a leading national role in yet another area of higher education.

• Politics

Because controversy involving investment in firms doing business in or with Israel was the proximate cause that led to the review of the investment policy, this was arguably the topic that will be of the greatest interest to the outside world as well as many members of the College community, even though this question plays no role in the old or new policy, proper.

Although the committee members did not explicitly raise the issue themselves, they did on more than one occasion make statements that clearly addressed the matter, e.g.

“we don’t divest from countries, we divest from firms"

When a student explicitly raised the question, former Interim President Marlene Fried stated that the College’s views on what occurred during the 2009 divestment controversy and the interpretations were quite different. Bottom line:

“There is clarity and unanimity on the Board that it did not make a decision to divest from the State of Israel, that it did not decide that Israel was in the same camp as South Africa.”

That should be the end of that story—but you can bet that it will not be.

Pre-Occupied: Hampshire Anti-Israel BDS Activists Continue to Distort the Past, Look to the Future

2011-12-13T15:26:00.000-05:00

It was bound to happen. I had been wondering how long itwould be before the anti-Israel divestment (BDS) movement would attempt toclaim its role in the Occupy Hampshire movement.

Although the issue appeared in the fliers and literatureof the College’s Occupy activists, it had not been prominent in the larger scheme of things. When it came upat the rally here last month, it was almost as an afterthought: one individualbrought it up during the open microphone time.

"Occupy Wall Street—Not Palestine!"

Snapshot:

In this version of what has become the standard "heroic" narrative, valiant activists, carrying forward the noble tradition of divestment from South Africa that their forebears had initiated, took on the College's equally sordid ties to Israel and won. The College, however, due to either lack of principle or lack of nerve, never acknowledged this, and rather, denied that the whole incident had taken place. Here, these actions are said to be in keeping with a general opposition to socially responsible investing.

Highlights/excerpts:

• introducing the notion of socially responsible investing, and Hampshire's tradition of activism. The term, he says, needs to be "unpacked": (0:35) "thinking about, like, where are we putting our money, and why are we putting our money there?"

• (c. 0:45) "um, it's something that, apparently, as, like, the administrations and the board have said, just, like, fundamentally disrupts the whole idea of a board, because our job is to make money . . . so why would I be thinking of socially responsible things?"

• (c. 0:57) regarding the socially responsible investment committee (CHOIR): "the administration never wanted it to be there in the first place"

• (c. 1:25) "in 2007 or so, students on campus brought it [=CHOIR: the socially responsible investment committee] back, specifically around S... [revealingly, starts to say: SJP, i.e. Students for Justice in Palestine] Palestine, because, a lot of you know, there is [?] Israeli occupation, a bunch of companies are making weapons for the Israeli Army and communications [scattered boos]."

• (c. 1:45) "eventually in 2009, this school was the first school in the US to divest from the Israeli occupation. [loud cheers and whistles] The school, immediately after that decided to deny that, the school denied that it was a political, it was not a political thing, it had nothing to do with Israel. They hired a socially responsible investment company just in order to depoliticize it. The school that doesn't believe in socially responsible investing, it hired a company to do screening, they didn't trust the students to do it. They used that screening to depoliticize it and say it had nothing to do with Israel."

The speaker goes on to claim that Islamophobia prevails on campus. [A glance at our courses and events suggests otherwise. In fact, Ralph Hexter, the President at the time of the divestment controversy, employed a personal research assistant whose field was Islamic history and culture, and who therefore taught those subjects at Hampshire: 1, 2.] The speaker goes on to characterize the policy review process as dishonest, disguised, and deliberately dragged out.

• (03:25) “I noticed, very subtly, on the Intranet [ . . . ] before the Snowpocalypse, that there was going to be a meeting about this new, supposedly we now have a new socially responsible investing, uh, comm…—not committee—but, like, written, written-out plan. The Snowpocalypse came, so it didn’t happen. I sent an email to Beth Ward, who is, um, the secretary of . . . I'm not sure [laughter; . . . ] she's, like, the spokesperson for the Board of Trustees."

[Ironically, Beth Ward, who has a long record of activism on behalf of peace and progressive causes, was in the audience, having joined the "Occupy" gathering a short time earlier. She can be seen in the green coat almost directly in front of the concrete pilaster bordering the windows of the building in the background.] Speaker continues:

(03:57): "Anyways, I just want you all to be aware that there is a new socially responsible investing, um, piece out there. We don't know what it is, it's been completely untransparent." Speaker again questions the character of the process.

(04:14) "So it's all just, like, a real mix. I've asked for when they're going to have a meeting about what this is. Hopefully, we'll be finding out soon, but you should, it's something, like, that's our ability to pressure the school to divest from things. We can also do it in popular campaigns, we need to be doing popular campaigns like this. But be aware that the school, again, is consistently trying to not let us know what it's invested in because it is invested in, not just in Palestine, it is invested in prisons, it is invested in, um, like, other wars all around us. So it's not just about Palestine, but that was one location again, when students get activated, they, that's what they start. So, um, I don't want to keep talking, but I think it's worth it still [?]."

(04:56) Chant: "Occupy Wall Street—Not Palestine!"

Summary:

The talk of course presents a highly tendentious narrative of whatwas by all accounts a rather tortuous process—complicated by the inveterate tendency of the institution to speak in bureaucratese and circumlocutions, and to respond with soft tones and blandishments rather than a loud voice and a fist on the table.

This is arguably the most famous academic “divestment” casein the United States, a situation remarkable mainly because this loud and persistent claim is based on a willful misreading of the facts. We live in apostmodern age of "truthiness," after all.

As should by now be well known: In February of 2009, after along campaign, anti-Israel activists on campus formally asked the College todivest from a handful of companies that, they claimed, supported “the Israelioccupation of Palestine” and violated the College’s socially responsibleinvestment policy.

The College, acting in accordance with its procedures, dulylooked into the matter not on these political grounds, but in order todetermine whether the firms violated that existing policy. The upshot: some ofthe holdings in question were found to be in violation of the policy, otherswere not. The College further discovered that several large funds containednumerous problematic items and agreed to relinquish such holdings accordingly. Finally,the College also found its existing socially responsible investment policy tobe problematic and unclear and ordered a review that would lead to the draftingof a better policy. This is well documented. (further: 1, 2, 3, 4)

That was all. The College acted on the basis of its ownregulations, targeted no country or particular type of investment, and made nopolitical statement.

Unfortunately, the well-organized activists immediatelyannounced to the world that Hampshire College, which had been the first to divestfrom holdings in South Africa, had now divested from "the Israeli occupation of Palestine." What better way topropagate the view that Israel practiced “apartheid”? It was that historicalrecord that made the College such a prize and gave activists the hope that theymight be able to punch above their weight. After all, the amount of money inour endowment—barely $ 31 million—is trivial in comparison with those of evenour neighbors, such as Amherst and Smith, whose portfolios top a billion dollars.

The incident is not intrinsically remarkable: because nothinghappened. Indeed, if it set a precedent at all, it was for the subsequent pattern of false claims of other divestment incidents, from banks to businesses.(Jon Haber has been documenting this meticulously for several years.)

* * *

To say that the College is not committed to ethical investing is as insulting as it is untruthful. It is true that there was initial resistance to the idea when it began, but that was in the 1970s (well before most of us were here, of course). Things have changed. I was the faculty member of the Board of Trustees a decade ago, so I can attest that we took the concept very seriously. The College was and has been committed to the principle that it is possible to satisfy the demands of both fiscal sustainability and social responsibility.

As for that review of the investment policy, there isnothing conspiratorial about it. Regarding the argument that the College didn't allow the students to "do" the screening. If the word "do" implies giving sole or ultimate authority to students: correct, that's not how things work. (I've just finished co-chairing the Governance Task Force, which undertook a comprehensive review of College policies and procedures.) But that is also a vastly oversimplified notion of the process. To be clear: the College would not leave that task entirely to staff or faculty, either. All three constituencies are represented on CHOIR (as on most Hampshire governance bodies), but professional expertise is sometimes required. When the initial review—prompted by the students—turned up numerous possible problems with the massive fund as a whole, the College, quite logically, brought in experts. And KLD, the firm that the College turned to, (a) is the leading firm in socially responsible investing practices and (b) found over 200 violations in the fund in question. Any member of the community—including a student or student group—is always free to bring forward a request for action or information regarding specific investments. This is exactly what happened in this case.

One reason that the subsequent review of investment policies and procedures took so long was that the campus was embroiled in various unrelated internal controversies involving everything from construction projects to admission policy, and, in the past year, was focused on the search for a new president. Even under the best of circumstances, the nitty-gritty work of internalresearch and policy development is carried out in committee and not in thepublic square. In any case, there has been public input on our overall valuesand policies, and the people leading the process are trusted members of thecommunity. The meeting about to take place is in fact a public forum: It presents the new policy to the community so that anyone can offer comment in the course of the coming week. If it was announced only via the Intranet, that is simply because the daily email bulletins and corresponding web posts are always the place where official announcements are first disseminated.

No one who has not been involved in the review process or relatedadministrative decisions can say what is in the document. According to mysources, at any rate, it will most likely present a very robust and rigorouspolicy, but not one that explicitly targets any particular country or politicalcause. This is of course as it should be: one does not design the overarchinginvestment policy of an institution around a single case.

Anyway, we will soon find out: the results will be announcedthis afternoon at 3:30.

Almost as interesting as learning about the policy itselfwill be watching the spin that people try to put on it. Assuming that things unfoldas described above, the BDS advocates will have two choices: express outrage,or claim victory and go home. That is, they will be disappointed if there is noexplicit political statement or if certain holdings are retained. On the otherhand, they may attempt to claim credit for having at least indirectly triggeredthe whole process. Hell, they may try to do both: take credit and yet demandmore.

For nearly three years, the BDS activists have boasted relentlessly of their success. Their standard line has been that they succeeded, but that the administration—as as result of a mixture of its own cowardice and sinister pressure from outside pro-Israel groups—has refused to acknowledge defeat. This is the basis for the divestment myth that BDS faithful cling to and repeat like a Gospel narrative. More recently, though, they have given signs of perhaps trying to walk that story back a bit. At the 2010 graduation ceremony, an SJP activist (so oppressed by the system that he was chosen to be student commencement speaker) expressed frustration that the effort had not really succeeded. The above video simultaneously claims that "this school was the first school in the US to divest from the Israeli occupation" and that, still, "it is invested . . in Palestine." Merely a slip of the tongue arising from extemporaneous speaking? Perhaps. But then why, if we already divested, does the flier—presumably prepared with ample care—challenge readers to "launch new divestment campaigns against Hampshire's ties to the Israeli occupation"?

So, which is it? Are we celebrating victory or still seeking it?

The BDS activists don’t know what they are talking about.Literally.

That should tell you something.

As for the results of that meeting on socially responsible investment policy? Stay tuned.

* * *

Updates

Additional updates since original posting: video transcription, flier image; minor edits.

Preliminary coverage of the investment committee report here. Detailed report to follow. (now posted: here)

Occupy Hampshire at last gets underway

2011-12-13T12:32:00.000-05:00

On November 17, at 11:00, a handful of students—some walked out of classes, others were free in any case—assembled in the wind and cold on the Library plaza to demonstrate their concerns, prior to joining a town-wide "Occupy" rally on the Common in the afternoon.

It was a relatively small but impassioned group. I was the only faculty member present at first, though about a half-dozen others eventually arrived. Two of them, from my School of Critical Social Inquiry, were featured speakers. Margaret Cerullo spoke for nearly 15 minutes on a wide range of topics, from the nature of the movement and the subversive appropriation of time and space to the penetration of the policing mentality in society at large. Chris Tinson spoke for about five minutes, on race and social justice and the nature of true radical thought and action.

Below are some video documents of the event, which I offer without commentary. I had only my phone with me, so I recorded what I could on that. Regrettably, I cannot share recordings of the two faculty speakers; due to a technical problem, those clips lack proper sound. Fortunately, someone else captured them here and here.

I hadn't been quite sure what to expect: the Occupy movement has common global and local concerns, as well as numerous specific local ones. It is a dynamic phenomenon, still evolving. By the time of this rally, it had established itself as a real force, but was also facing a moment of decision if not crisis: how to respond to both the onset of harsher weather and harsher police actions. Certainly, such a movement takes on different contours in a metropolis such as New York or Boston vs. a small rural college town such as Amherst.

At first, the talks did seem (as I had expected) to deal with global issues in both the literal and figurative sense. Soon, however, the talk turned to the situation at the College, which I found much more interesting. Hampshire College may be an "alternative" (or as we prefer: "experimenting") educational institution, but it is also an elite and extremely expensive one: combined cost of tuition, room, and board (or TRB, as the administrators call it) is over $ 53,000 per year. One wondered how students at such an institution (even if 83 percent of them do receive financial aid) would view their own situation.

Chant: "money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!"

Chant: "whose school? our school!"

denouncing the destruction of "Occupy" camp at Liberty Plaza; solidarity with the movement around the world
"This is our country, and we're going to take it back."

Chant: "they say no, we say fight, education is a right!"

Chant: "from Oakland to Greece: disarm the police!"

explaining the "human mic"

"working at Hampshire College should be a good job"

"I don't know what it would be like to go to a college in what we call the real world, I think I would go fucking crazy" ("human mic" breaks down in this one)

UMass student: "we gotta get out of this reformist rhetoric" in this capitalist, racist, society. They will not fuck with us anymore." "shit just got really crazy."

"Occupy Wall Street--not Palestine!"
Student praises alleged "divestment from the Israeli occupation of Palestine," criticizes College's process for creating new socially responsible investment policy

Sodexo which runs Hampshire dining services, is also "the largest provider of prison food in the United States." We are part of "a pipeline that is funneling us into the capitalist system, that's preparing us to be quote-unquote 'productive' members of society"

"human mic" discusses the international links of the movement: not just the US, but slavery, colonialism, imperialism "without which it wouldn't be"

Chant: "What solution? Revolution!"

Being A Wingnut Means: Never Having to Learn Spelling

2011-12-13T03:56:00.000-05:00

One of the things that I've noticed about both blog posts and signs at political rallies is the frequency of misspelled words.

Here are a few scenes from the competing Occupy Amherst and Amherst Tea Party rallies in October.

I felt sorry for this poor student:

I tried (ever so gently) to point out that radicalism is no excuse for having failed to master seventh-grade spelling. In vain did I commend to her the advice of Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, Deputy People's Commissar of Education and Enlightenment:

The student . . . must know how to use the dictionary and he must always have it handy by him; likewise, books of reference, encyclopaedias, etc.

For some reason, she did not get the point. Pity.

She should be storming a library, not the bastions of capitalism.

Still, it was the nutjob extremists who were by far the worst spellers (as well as thinkers).

It stands to reason: If you can't control your own spelling, you develop paranoid fears of conspiracies controlling the world.

This mistake was more intriguing:

You'd think that someone concerned about the lives of Muslims would take the trouble to learn how to spell the term correctly. I wondered: Could it be that he was actually a scholar, conversant with the classic "Musulman" and variants? Nah.

In the end, it turned out that this poor antisemite wasn't alone.

He was eventually joined by the lost soul who had haunted the September 11 commemorations in protest.

In September (above), she had been merely a phantom menace. Here, she became vocal and took on this dapper dude from the Tea Party:

"Satan's Spawn": always a good conversation-starter.

To Bigotry No Sanction: Antisemitic Nutjob on Parade (by himself)

2011-12-11T01:30:00.000-05:00

As the "Occupy" movement gained staying power and attracted both greater numbers of people and greater scrutiny, some observers began to express concern about antisemitic incidents. A minor debate ensued as to the representativeness of the cases in question (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). It seems to have subsided. The Anti-Defamation League soon concluded, "There is no evidence that these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are representative of the larger movement or that they are gaining traction with other participants." At the same time, it noted the historical connection between economic hardship and antisemitism, and urged vigilance, including forthright condemnation of any expressions of bigotry.

In any case, there were certainly no incidents of that sort here. Indeed, an orthodox Jew mingled happily with the others at the "Occupy" rally.

Participating? Proselytizing? Who cares. Be happy: it's Sukkot. (Occupy Jerusalem!)

Unfortunately, Amherst did have a first-class bigot on parade on October 16.

A dishonest or merely overzealous reporter might have made much of this. Fortunately, he was a parade of one, a legend in his own mind. He was not part of either the "Occupy" rally or the Tea Party counter-demonstration, both of which shunned him.

Instead, he merely attached himself, parasitically, to the events. Indeed, he seemed desperate to attract the attention of cars and passers-by who slowed to observe the events on the Common.

desperately seeking someone

Love/Hate

He had other messages, too (though not really all that different).

Clearly, he wanted his fifteen seconds of fame.

I've decided to give them to him, but for my reasons rather than his.

I've been teaching my course on antisemitism, and we just wrapped up last week, with a consideration of the complex situation in the contemporary world.

Antisemitism in the United States has greatly diminished over the past century but certainly not gone away. In fact, contrary to what one might expect, Jews remain by far the most frequent target of hate crimes directed against a religious group; there was even an uptick in antisemitic attitudes in the last two years. But that is precisely why the poor deluded fellow pictured here is noteworthy: acts of overt hostility and hatred have become rare and confined to a disreputable fringe. Since World War II—for obvious reasons—antisemitism has become morally repugnant or at least unfashionable. This is an epochal and welcome change. At the same time, it creates new problems. Antisemitism persists in many forms, but how do you define and combat it when almost no one admits to it anymore? (Traditional antisemites, at least, left no doubt as to where they stood.)

There is therefore a contentious debate over the existence of a so-called "new antisemitism." I'll spare you the lecture here, but basically, it turns (surprise) on the definitions of "new" and "antisemitism."

To adherents of the concept, it is the latest manifestation of a phenomenon that has evolved along with the place of the Jews in the larger world: For centuries, when the Church defined the Jews as the quintessential unbelievers, the Christian west kept them in a state of subjugation and eventually demonized them as the object of horrific fantasies. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the religious argument waned and Jews gained civil rights and established themselves in mainstream European society, they instead became the target of political and racial antisemitism, which regarded them as unassimilable aliens in the national body politic. Today, antisemitism tends to manifest itself primarily in the demonization of Israel and Zionism, the most visible manifestation of Jews and Judaism in the modern world (of course not to be confused with mere criticism of the policies of the State of Israel; no sensible person argues otherwise). One of the most useful and widely accepted definitions of antisemitism, developed by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, thus incorporates controversial contemporary manifestations arising from the Middle East conflict, while emphasizing the importance of evaluating the full context of any given statement.

Some of those who disagree find the phenomenon new but not antisemitic; some argue that it is neither. One should stress, however, that rejecting the label does not have to imply condoning some of the beliefs and actions that it denotes. The questions of classification and moral judgment are separable.

Obviously, the present case leaves no room for ambiguity with regard to either. The poor fellow and his sign are antisemitic in the classic sense of the term: He is a bigot. He is attacking Jews, as such, and as a collective, based on wild and imaginary fears. Still, it's worth taking just a moment in order to see why, and what else that can tell us.

• To begin with, of course, there is the language: using "Jew" rather than "Jewish" as an adjective (as H. L. Mencken—himself no paragon of toleration—noted nearly a century ago) is a venerable and offensive practice. (A parallel survives in the insulting Republican habit of using "Democrat" instead of "Democratic" as an adjective when attacking the rival party: e.g. "Democrat wars.")

As for the content:

• The sign portrays Jews as self-centered and concerned with their own interests. In the mild, "social" form of antisemitism, Jews are seen as "clannish," and "sticking to themselves." In the nasty version, here, they are driven by inherent and implacable hostility to non-Jews, causing and rejoicing in the suffering of others. This is one of the oldest themes, from the ancient pagan view of Jews as haters of mankind, to medieval fears of Jews as sadistic ritual murderers of Christian children. Elements of this view persisted in the modern era: a combination of their religious doctrines (supposedly as embodied by the Talmud) and centuries of warped socialization was said to teach scorn for and mistreatment of gentiles, for example, through dishonest business practices.

• Then there is another old chestnut: The charge that Jews control the media of journalism and entertainment dates to the nineteenth century and has been a staple of antisemitic discourse ever since. In the milder version, it is a matter of disproportionate representation or bad taste. In the nastier, one, it is a matter of nefariousness as well as numbers. Combine fantastic fears of hostility and domination, and it is but a short distance to conspiracy theories of the sort epitomized by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: the Jews engage in sinister plots to control the world.

• And why not? They are alleged to be devoted only to one another, not even to the country in which they live. The charge of dual loyalty is one of the oldest, in some ways a modernized and secularized version of the old religiously based denial of rights.

So far, so good. This is classic stuff.

At the same time, the message of the sign dovetails in disturbing ways with the slightly subtler antisemitism of both the new nativist or crypto-fascist right and the anti-globalization left. With its allusion to current conflicts in the Middle East, it is actually a very revealing amalgam of old and new—akin to what in Europe is being described as "cross-front" or hybrid antisemitism.

Polls over the past half-century show that the focus of antisemitic stereotypes in the US has shifted from ethics to power and the personal to the political: whereas the main charge leveled against Jews was formerly that they were, say, unscrupulous in their business practices, it is now that they have too much power in the business world, which they wield on behalf of collective material and political interests of their own.

If someone tells us that there is a conspiracy in which Jews control the press in order to exercise a still more sinister control over the levers of government and dominate the globe, we dismiss that as crackpot raving.

If someone tells us that Jews, because of their political influence and devotion to Israel, shape government policies that endanger the United States, we may well just stop to listen.

Pat Buchanan put it this way on the eve of the Gulf War in 1990:

"’The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. If it comes to war, it will not be the 'civilized world' humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown."

Translation: the Jews, who are not loyal to the country in which they live, and whose money runs the newspapers, will get the US into a war on Israel's behalf, paid for with the blood of white ethnics, Latinos, and Blacks. (the irony of bigot Buchanan pretending to express concern for minorities was priceless)

Still pretty crude.

Jumping ahead to the next US involvement in Iraq, it may (to some) sound a bit more plausible when put this way:

The list of Jewish neocons we came up with is a provocation, I’ll admit. And if it were a list of dentists or firefighters or stockbrokers, then that would indeed be very offensive. However, the neocons are no ordinary group – they are the most influencial [sic] political/intellectual force in the world right now. They have the power to start wars and to stop them. They are the prime architects of America’s foreign policy since 9/11 – a policy that is heavily weighed in favor of Israel and a key source of anti-Americanism around the world. So I think it is notonly appropriate, but necessary to put them under a microscope. And if we see maleness, whiteness, Jewishness, Zionism or intellectual thuggery there, then let us not look the other way.

On the ethnic question: Is it not just as valid to comment on the Jewishness of the neocons as it is to point out that the majority of them are male or white or wealthy or from the Western world or have studied at a particular university? If half the neocons were Palestinians, would the US have invaded Iraq?

That's from a 2004 piece in the magazine of Adbusters, one of the antiglobalization organizations behind the "Occupy" movement. (For the record: the US forced Israel to stay out of the 1991 Iraq war, and Israel by no means pressed for war with Iraq in 2002, being far more concerned about Iran.) As Alana Goodman recently translated and summarized:

That’s not to say the Occupy Wall Street movement itself is anti-Semitic. But if the top organizer behind the Tea Party turned out to have published a blacklist of American Jews he claimed had dual loyalty to the U.S. and Israel, the backlash from the media would be massive.

Indeed. Here, it is worth citing Oxford's Brian Klug, an avowed man of the solid left and an authority on antisemitism who rejects the notion of a "new" antisemitism, which he considers both intrinsically too broad and politically problematic because it risks tarring advocates of the Palestinian cause with the brush of bigotry:

To an antisemite, Jews are a people set apart, not merely by their customs but by their collective character. They are arrogant, secretive, cunning, always looking to turn a profit. Loyal only to their own, wherever they go they form a state within a state, preying upon the societies in whose midst they dwell. Mysteriously powerful, their hidden hand controls the banks and the media. They will even drag governments into war if this suits their purposes. Such is the figure of ‘the Jew’, transmitted from generation to generation.

Where this fantasy is projected on to Israel because it is a Jewish state, or Zionism because it is a Jewish movement, or Jews in association with either Israel or Zionism: there you have antisemitism.

The latest Anti-Defamation League poll finds that 80 percent of Americans agree with the statement, "Wall Street and major banking institutions in our country operate in their own selfish interest and not in the interest of the American economy." By contrast, 19 percent "answered 'probably true' to the statement 'Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street,' an increase from 14 percent in 2009." The same survey found that 15 percent of Americans hold "deeply anti-Semitic views."

Are those figures on bigotry high or low? In one sense, they are disturbingly high. Putting things in context, though, they represent a sea-change from the crisis era of the Great Depression and New Deal, when antisemitism was both rife and openly expressed in the US. The "deeply anti-Semitic" figure is moreover down from 29 percent in 1964, when this series of polls began, though up from a low of 12 percent in 1998. Perhaps more revealing, then, is the fact that, over those nearly six decades, the number of Americans who believe Jews are "more loyal to Israel than to America" has held strikingly steady at around 30 percent (in Europe, it's much higher).

As both the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Goodman are at pains to make clear, the point is not that the "Occupy" movement is antisemitic in origin or majority character. Rather, it is a matter of vigilance on the part of the activists and the rest of us. There are good ideas and reprehensible ones, and there are understandable sentiments couched in unfortunate terms or directed at the wrong target. It was not for nothing that the nineteenth-century German Marxists called antisemitism "the socialism of fools"—or that Paul Berman, more recently, called anti-Zionism the "anti-imperialism of fools."

Seeing the man with the sign as a deluded bigot is easy. Seeing the potential bigotry in more subtle statements, with whose underlying sentiments we may want to agree, is more difficult.

After all, isn't that the thing about the nature of bigotry?

If it were simple, it would not have remained a problem for so long.

[Updated]

December 10, 1830: Birthday of Emily Dickinson; recorded in doctor's journal

2011-12-10T15:50:00.001-05:00

Emily Dickinson was born on this date in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Below, the entry from the records (Special Collections of Jones Library, Amherst) of local doctor Isaac G. Cutler, who delivered her.

On the same page is the entry for Emily's future friend Helen Fiske, who, as Helen Hunt Jackson, earned a name as an author and an activist for Native American rights. Fiske's entry is is fourth from the top of the right-hand page, and Emily Dickinson's, tenth from the bottom.

Last year's entry describes the 180th birthday celebrations at the Emily Dickinson Museum, as well as the "baby book" and the relations between Emily Dickinson, her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson (who shares a December birthday), and Helen Hunt Jackson.

This year, the annual celebration of the poet's birth, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum, features a lecture—"Emily Dickinson - Outlaw"—by Jerome Charyn, author of the recent fictional account The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. The book has a popular Facebook page.

Covering Amherst 100-Percent: With the 99%

2011-11-30T02:29:00.001-05:00

As I've mentioned, Sunday, October 16, proved to be a busy day on the civic calendar. While Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe was serving the "99 percent" by helping to oversee the annual Shelter Sunday fund drive, I was representing the Town before the "1 percent" at the inauguration of the Amherst College President. As it happened, it was also the date of the first "Occupy Amherst" gathering on the Common.

Unwilling to miss two populist opportunities in one day, I headed over to the rally as soon as I could.

I arrived in time to hear the crowd chanting, "We are the 99 percent." It was metaphorical, or a statement of values and desires, of course, for it wasn't much of a crowd: far fewer people than at the inauguration. In fact, there didn't seem to be even 99 individuals there, let alone any significant percentage of the population. But it's the thought that counts.

To be sure, I had no idea what to expect. I had read about the loopiness and extremism of some adherents of the "occupy" movement. So, when I spotted yellow banners with a vertical emblem in the center, I just naturally assumed that they were the flags of Hezbollah (after all, Judith Butler calls it a "progressive" social movement"). Turned out this was instead a counterdemonstration by the local Tea Party. (Who knew we even had such a thing?)

The Tea Party-ers were a small but dedicated bunch. They came well prepared, with neatly lettered signs and strong messages.

Can't say these people don't know their own minds. (I can say they know nothing about socialism or communism, if that's what they think we have here now.)

They were even passing out free books.

As for the actual "Occupy" rally, it was a sedate and eclectic affair, promoting various causes, from a general longing for social justice to pacifism and local agriculture. One red flag, one American flag. Some gray hair, some pink hair. Something for everyone.

the 99 persons (or close to it)

Food, Not Bombs

Gray Hair, Pink Hair

Dissent IS Patriotic

My Tweep @amymittelman makes a statement

The Select Board Welcomes the Amherst College President, Anno 1994

2011-11-28T23:47:00.000-05:00

As I noted in my last post, I would, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Amherst College president, have preferred to offer just some pithy and witty remarks.

Problem was, a predecessor, Brian Harvey, beat me to the punch in this pitch-perfect greeting to President Tom Gerety more than a decade and a half ago:

Town Greetings

From Brian C. Harvey
Chair, Amherst Select Board

On behalf of all the people of Amherst, I congratulate Tom Gerety and welcome him—officially—into our community. In preparing for today's festivities I tried to think of an appropriate presentation I could make on behalf of the Town. I wanted something that would capture, at a stroke, the special place of higher education in our community, and that would symbolize the role of the President of the College as a leader both of the campus and of the intellectual life of the community.

So I am happy to present to you, Tom, in token of your high calling and in recognition of the awesome responsibilities that you now undertake, the following touchstones of academic leadership:
the Town's keg-licensing by-law;
its noise ordinance
the caution that no person shall play at ball or any similar amusement in any street of the town;
our local regulations regarding the application of Recombinant DNA Technology; and perhaps most important,
our requirements concerning the control of cattle and other animals in the public way
So welcome, Tom. Please accept our congratulations and best wishes, and remember: there is no overnight parking on the public streets between December 1 and April 1.

It's what I wish I could have said. Damn, Brian. You scooped me.

Then again, any mention of kegs and noise ordinances would have brought up the ultra-sensitive current topic of "students" and their antisocial behavior (alleged or real), and then I would have been in what former President Bush called "deep doo-doo": rowdiness and party houses, as well as the ongoing debate about "student housing."

Not exactly the thing for a festive occasion. Might as well just lick the third rail of the IRT.

Or, as I decided: talk about history and education and that sort of thing. In the past. Much safer.

Town Greetings: Inauguration of Carolyn "Biddy" Martin as President of Amherst College

2011-11-26T04:16:00.001-05:00

As noted in the previous post, I was deputized to represent the Town at the inauguration of Amherst College President Biddy Martin. Because several people requested that I share those remarks, it seemed simplest to post them here.

The event, as one might expect of the sponsoring organization, was a dignified and immaculately organized affair. Inauguration Coordinator Pat Allen saw to it that everything ran like clockwork (do we still say that in the digital era?). Nature, history, and a sizable endowment combined to provide the ideal setting: the southern end of the quad at the War Memorial, looking out over acres of protected land, with the magnificent Holyoke Range as backdrop. Even the weather cooperated, granting us a crisp and sunny morning after a stretch of rainy days.

musicians arriving for the ceremony: barely 20 minutes to go, and most seats still empty

The only thing that proved beyond the limits of planning and organization was: the students. Not only as we arrived for assembly in Pratt Hall (originally the wonderful old natural history museum, since refurbished as a dormitory), but even as we finally "processed" to the dais, young scholars were few and far between, as the rows of empty seats testified. It was, after all, 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning, which, as we know, follows Saturday night. (In fairness, some could plausibly plead to having stayed up too late at the inaugural dance, which President Martin herself visited until the wee hours.) At any rate, they eventually drifted in.

dignitaries line up in their regalia

outgoing President Anthony Marx pauses to greet a young well-wisher

The ceremony was complex, and if anything, threatened to burst the bounds of the schedule if not tax the patience of the audience. Careful planning and careful instructions prevented that. Speakers were given strict instructions on time limits, which most managed to obey. There was a lot to get done.

After a slightly wobbly rendition of the overture from Händel's Royal Fireworks music by the college orchestra (one could almost hear the waves rocking the barges), things got underway. There were numerous "greetings": from Amherst College and its alumni, trustees, staff, and students; from other institutions of higher learning; from the town (I represented the Select Board, and Superintendent Maria Geryk, the public schools). There were honorary degrees and various ceremonial gifts, from the symbolic keys to the College (many or most from buildings that no longer exist) to a volume (just on loan) from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington; few outsiders know that it belongs to Amherst College. There was music, old and new: in the latter case, an original piece by composer and faculty member Eric Sawyer. Among the highlights—in addition, of course, to the actual inauguration act and the address by President Martin—was Richard Wilbur's (Class of '42) reading of his poem, "Altitudes," which, concerned with spirituality and art, references both classical Europe and the nineteenth-century Amherst of Emily Dickinson.

(the full program booklet—all ten pages of it)

As on most such occasions, you ponder what to say—only more so. You don't know the audience and its tastes. The only thing you do know (and had better remember) is that they're not there mainly to hear you. Given my choice, I would have preferred to come up with something brief and witty.

In the end, lacking sufficient inspiration and creativity, I decided to stick with what I knew best: Amherst history and the Five Colleges. It proved to be the right choice. As chance would have it, several of us, including Dean of Faculty Greg Call and President Martin herself, gravitated, independently and in complementary ways, toward similar themes. We all dealt with the pattern of experimentation and change: Amherst College, despite its elite status (and at times, marked awareness of same), always had a democratic streak that made room for or even encouraged visionary change. We all mentioned the educational innovator and gadfly Alexander Meiklejohn, who served as president from 1912 to 1924. We all noted the College's tradition of assistance to students of merit rather than means, and we all noted the eventual and essential acceptance of diversity, and the significance of selecting a woman president.

* * *

Remarks for the Amherst Select Board, on the Occasion of the
Inauguration of Amherst College President Carolyn (“Biddy”) Martin
16 October 2011

When Noah Webster—whose birthday it happens to be today—spoke at the laying of the cornerstone here in 1820, he praised the location in part by virtue of the townsfolk, “whose moral, religious & literary habit dispose them to cherish the cultivation of the mind.”

The town seal depicting “the book and the plow,” invented by an Amherst professor [for our Bicentennial] in 1959, reflects our self-image. None of the pioneering institutions of higher learning in Amherst would have come into being were it not for the peculiar passion for learning evinced by the residents of this rural community.

It was the people of Amherst who created the Amherst Academy in 1814, to provide a modern secondary education for women as well as men. Citizens associated with the Academy in turn created Amherst College, to provide future Christian clergy with a new liberal-arts education, regardless of financial means. The ordinary citizens of Amherst were no less enthusiastic, donating not only money, but also stone and lumber: laboring day and night, we are told, “like the Jews in building their temple.”

When the Morrill Act of 1862 created land grant colleges to advance democratic education and scientific agriculture, our residents fought to win a charter for the new Massachusetts Agricultural College. To be sure, Amherst College, with its, shall we say, typically complex mixture of altruism and acquisitiveness, unsuccessfully sought control over the new institution—but its intellectual elite both shaped and led it.

A century later, the four area colleges—led by visionary Amherst administrators and alumni—created Hampshire College, which offered an experimental interdisciplinary education suited to a coming information age and global community.

Amherst College was conceived of as a bastion of Calvinist orthodoxy, and yet from the start, it grew and adapted. It never imposed a religious test on students or faculty. It graduated its first African-American student in 1826. It (finally) admitted women in 1975.

Vice President Webster envisioned a college shaping a world devoted to learning rather than destruction:
Too long have men been engaged in the barbarous works of multiplying the miseries of human life. Too long have their exertions been devoted to war and plunder: to the destruction of lives, and property; to the ravage of cities; to the unnatural, the monstrous employment of enslaving and degrading their own species. Blessed be our lot! We live to see a new era in the history of man . . .
In welcoming President Martin, we also mark a new era: in the history of men—and women.

Amherst College has not always been kind to its presidents: in the 1920s, when Alexander Meiklejohn tried to update that vision, he was forced out for being too radical. Today, his vision of progressive, interdisciplinary education and community-engaged learning seems, well, visionary. He left for the University of Wisconsin. In a happy irony, we today install as President a graduate of that great institution.

On behalf of our government and residents: Welcome! May we always embrace rather than fear new ideas and approaches. May your efforts be crowned with success as the partnership between the Town and College of Amherst approaches its third century.

Resources

• Information on Biddy Martin (including her inauguration) (official Amherst College President website)
• Video of the inauguration and text of President Martin's address (official Amherst College website)
• Video of the inauguration (YouTube)
• "Carolyn Martin inaugurated as first woman president at Amherst College," Hampshire Gazette, 17 Oct. 2011
• "Amherst College president inaugurated," Boston Globe, 16 Oct. 2011

Your Select Board: Covering Amherst 100% (another example)

2011-11-26T02:22:00.001-05:00

Even two weeks before the premature blizzard caused the Snowpocalypse last month, your Select Board had the town covered 100-percent, in a manner of speaking.

All members of the Select Board were invited to attend the inauguration of new Amherst College President Carolyn "Biddy" Martin on Sunday, October 16.

As it happened, that was also the date of the annual Shelter Sunday, on which volunteers fan out into the town, raising funds for service organizations that help our neighbors in need. (In 2010, they raised over $ 34,000.)

Because Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe was committed to her customary service on behalf of that effort, I was deputized to represent the Town at the celebration of the gown.

And so it happened that, while Stephanie was going door-to-door on behalf of the "99 percent," I was wearing a suit (for the first time in ages) and sitting on the dais among and for the sake of the "1 percent"—not exactly a role I'm accustomed to.

Between us, we covered the town 100-percent. As in the case of so many political issues, I guess that's all that counts: compromise, teamwork, and getting the job done.

Details to follow.

Snowtober Postmortem

2011-11-26T00:33:00.001-05:00

We're finally clearing away the last debris from the great October snowstorm, but the ultimately more important work is the assessment of how we coped this time and what we can do in order to be better prepared in the future. Town Manager John Musante reported on this to the Select Board last Monday.

Although the Town generally gave itself satisfactory marks on the report card, it also checked a few boxes labeled, "room for improvement," mainly (as noted earlier) in the areas of communication and outreach.

Specifically:

"Expansion of use of interactive social media to transmit messaging during emergencies": high time to make use of Twitter and the like
Expanded use of emergency staff "in non-traditional roles to assist in emergencies": checking in on residents, communications, and so forth
Providing warming or cooling places as sites of relief during extreme weather, but also as places for social interaction and information-sharing

Concrete action steps:

Install an emergency generator in Town Hall, and outfit the Town Room as an Emergency Operations Center
"Campaign to add citizens to the emergency alert list. Include interactive social media." [Note: the current system automatically subscribes all residents via their landlines, and they have to opt out if they wish not to take part. However, subscription by cell phone is opt-in {voluntary}, and relatively few residents have added themselves in this way. They can do so here.
Expand the Police "Are You OK" program by adding other constituent groups such as Elder Services and the Health Department Medical Needs Registry
Complement existing Medical Reserve Corps by creating a new Citizen Emergency Response Team, for which FEMA/MEMA funding could be sought.

I've uploaded the complete document, along with the chronology of the snowstorm response.

Veterans Day in Amherst

2011-11-16T03:56:00.001-05:00

flags at half-staff in the morning, before the ceremony

I was unable to attend this year's Veterans Day ceremony at the Town Common, but here is the program:

Veterans Day Program November 11, 2011

Call to Order: 10:45 A.M. American Legion

Invocation Fr. Gary Dailey of the Newman Center

Pledge of Allegiance Commander from American Legion and VFW

Welcoming from Town Manager John Musante

Words from Select Board Stephanie O’Keeffe

Reading of Heroes on the Home front Written by John Paradis; Reading by Jeannie Joy - Amherst Resident

National Anthem /Flag Raising VFW and American Legion
Performed byStudent from Wildwood SchoolGuest Speaker Capt. Colleen Caulley (Marines)

Reading of In Flanders Fields Arthur Quinton - Amherst Resident

Benediction Fr. Gary Dailey

Refreshment after Ceremonies at VFW

Amherst Village Center Rezoning: A Conversation

2011-11-15T02:55:00.000-05:00

As the final day of Annual Town Meeting approaches, there are still plenty of questions about the proposed rezoning of the North Amherst Village Center and the emerging Village Center at Atkins Corner in South Amherst.

Those questions concern both the general proposed uses and the new overlay of "form-based codes," which are an established planning and smart-growth tool but not one that is yet familiar to the general public.

Last week, Amherst Media invited several of us involved in the process to engage in a brief conversation about the process, for the benefit of Town Meeting members and other residents.

The task was, briefly, to explain at once the general logic behind rezoning of village centers, the specifics of the proposed uses for these two areas, and the nature of the new "form-based codes," which take the place of traditional dimensional regulation.

Taking part were:

• Rob Crowner, member of the Planning Board, who will make the motion at Town Meeting. (Rob is a past Chair of the Public Works Committee and member of the Comprehensive Planning Committee.)

• Laura Fitch: architect and North Amherst resident (Pulpit Hill Co-Housing). In her professional capacity, Laura is employed by fellow North Amherst resident Barbara Puffer-Garnier to design plans for one of the proposed new developments in the village center.

• Me: I, too, am a North Amherst resident, as well as a member of the Select Board (I will be presenting our official position on the article at Town Meeting). As the former Chair of both the Comprehensive Planning Committee and the Historical Commission, I am also very much engaged with issues of sustainability and how they relate to historic and neighborhood character.

• Sarah LaCour: a professional planner and historic preservationist, currently employed in North Amherst as Director of Conservation and Planning, W. D. Cowls, Inc. Land Company. W. D. Cowls is among the property-owners proposing new development in the district.

Further coverage: meetings and interviews relevant to the zoning article, from Amherst Media (ACTV).

x

Snowtober Snapshots

2011-11-15T02:10:00.001-05:00

Just a few scenes of damage and continuing clean-up:

outside Police Station

Sweetser Park

Hampshire College clean-up

Hampshire College: broken apple tree outside my office

Hampshire College: the weight of the snow uprooted this tree outside my office

all that is left

crews still at work in North Amherst November 14

Snowtober: Covering Amherst 100% (eventually)

2011-11-15T01:37:00.000-05:00

Well, at any rate: 37% with power and 63% without on Halloween; 65% with power and 35% without by November 2; 98% with power and 2% (278 households) without on November 5; 99% restored by November 7. Then, finally, 100%.

Anyway, we survived Snowtober, the Snowpocalypse—whatever one wants to call the unexpected and disastrous early snowstorm.

To be sure, there was much frustration and anger: most of it directed against the utility company, Western Mass. Electric (WMECO), less (though still a fair amount) directed at the Town, in the sense of Town departments and elected officials. (At least one irate resident stormed into Town Hall, announcing that she would "remember" us, come election time.)

Restoration of electrical power, we should make clear, was indeed a matter entirely in the hands of the utility companies. Town staff and government were responsible for emergency services for residents, though as the crisis wore on, we did try to remind WMECO of particular needs and priorities.

It's no fun being the target of abuse, especially when you yourself are in the same boat with the person doing the complaining. Just for the record (in case anyone is wondering): your Select Board and administrators suffered along with you after the lights went out on Saturday, October 29. Select Board member Alisa Brewer was evidently the first to get power back, on Tuesday. Town Manager John Musante, although he lives in a modern development with underground electrical cables in northern Amherst, was without power until Wednesday, as was Select Board member Aaron Hayden, in rural South Amherst. Select Board member Diana Stein, in central Amherst, found that her lights came back on by that evening. Meanwhile, Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe, although she, like Ms. Brewer, lives near the University, was without electricity through Thursday. Our power came back only on Friday. For good measure, both John Musante's wife and mine celebrated their birthdays in the cold and dark (though not together as they did last year).

We can therefore empathize with the residents who felt frustrated or ignored.

I myself certainly felt frustrated. It's not terribly reassuring to learn that 99% of your town has power back, when you are still in the 1% without. I live in a semi-rural area at the far northern end of Amherst (the traditional "dirty hands district"): what is more, in one of a stretch of houses that, by some quirk of wiring layout, is both distinct from its neighbors and more prone to outages. Whenever we have an unusually heavy snow or an ice storm, we know that, soon after we hear the pine branches start to crack, one of them will hit the wires, which we will learn , because the transformer will go out with a bang, and the house will go dark. Whenever there is a winter weather emergency, our neighborhood is among the first to lose power and (because it is either unknown or less important to the repair crews) the last to get it back. It has been a source of constant frustration over the years.

Part of the problem—or complication—was that, when the storm hit and power began to fail, WMECO decided to kill power to the entire town, in order to deal with the crisis more systematically and rationally. A hierarchy was established, and main lines were gradually restored, after which side lines were carefully tested for safety and brought back, one stretch at a time. The process was slow because Department of Public Works crews, eventually assisted by others, had to clear fallen trees branches from roadways and and carefully remove them from snagged or downed electrical lines.

Part of the frustration derived from the fact that, although the system was rational from the standpoint of WMECO, it was not necessarily so from the standpoint of the customer. I myself was disappointed (but not very surprised) to come home on Wednesday evening and see most of North Amherst, from the Center north along Montague Road, lit up, only to find that nearby houses just to the south and north of us had electricity whereas our little group was still in the dark (and would remain so for another two days). For some reason, as Ms. Brewer's neighbors did not fail to note, she had power back before they did. Power was restored on the central portion of the Hampshire College campus by Wednesday, but the buildings along Route 116--which one would have thought would be part of a main line restored early--got power later. And some Amherst residents just across the street, east of Route 116, did not get power back until Saturday.

What looks rational to WMECO looks a lot less rational to the person sitting in the cold and dark, gazing covetously at the warm yellow glow emanating from the windows of a neighboring house. It might (as in politics) be worth weighing the benefits of absolute and abstract rationality against those of popular satisfaction and a reasonable share of the greater good. That is: how much is objectively gained and subjectively lost by adhering to such a rigid policy? Might not more, overall, be gained by restoring power to entire neighborhoods at the same time? After all, it is not as if utility companies and other established agents of power and wealth enjoy particularly high public esteem these days.

As the days dragged on and everyone else seemed to have power, I finally tweeted on Thursday night that we were getting desperate and could not hold out much longer:

That seems to have done the trick:

WMECO took it all in the proper spirit:

All's well that ends well, I guess.

On balance—again, though some residents may not feel that way—we actually did reasonably well. I was not part of the emergency team handling the crisis, but I know from the regular reports that Town Manager John Musante and Acting Town Manager/Director of Conservation and Development Dave Ziomek sent us, as well as Select Board agenda meetings and periodic personal visits to Town Hall, that the team worked around the clock with real determination, considering all eventualities, noting complaints and problems. For example, the Town opened the homeless shelter two days ahead of schedule and arranged to transport other Amherst residents in need to the Red Cross shelter in Northampton. The Department of Public Works soon sought help from private contractors in order to expedite removal of fallen trees and branches. The Town set up power strips in the public areas of the Police Station so that residents could charge cell phones and laptops. And when—despite the arrival of additional electrical crews from Louisiana—the outage dragged on for more than a few days, the Town began compiling lists of addresses and residences still without power, in order to be sure that they were on WMECO's action list and had not simply been overlooked or forgotten. The Fire Department sent volunteers to check on people in outlying areas lacking power and cut off by downed trees and wires. Unlike some of the neighboring towns, where four people died, Amherst suffered no fatalities or serious injuries.

Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a very prosperous community less than half our size, went longer without power. And if you want to hear from some really unhappy campers, let me put you in touch with my tweeps in Connecticut, who did not get power back until the end of the second weekend.

This is not to say that the response was perfect, by any means. There is always room for improvement, and each crisis reveals lacks and gaps. For instance, Town Hall had no emergency generator. We had discussed and then deferred such a request at the Joint Capital Planning Committee (although, as Town Manager Musante pointed out at a recent Select Board meeting, even if we had recommended the purchase, the funding would not have been appropriated in time and the equipment thus would not have been available before the storm). But you can bet that it will be in the next budget proposal. On balance, we think the Departments of Public Works, Fire, and Police did an admirable job of coping with the crisis, under the circumstances.

An informal web/Facebook survey at MassLive produced a compelling list of likes and dislikes of the emergency response in local towns. In our case:

Amherst

Like: Town Manager John Musante posted daily messages to the home page of the town website, including listing information such as impassable streets. The town established a special email address to allow residents to report where power was out; emails were used to compile a list for Western Massachusetts Electric Co.

Dislike: The list of blocked streets noted that even many open streets were limited to one lane and were dangerous at night. An online mechanism allowing residents to share their own observations about problematic areas could have helped the Department of Public Works focus efforts and assist drivers to find detours.

That strikes me as a reasonable assessment. In fact, we can elaborate on it. There were limits as to what we (as distinct from the utilities) could do to change the situation. Where we arguably could stand the most improvement was thus in the area of communication. Even here, we had a good basis: Town Information Technology kept things up and running (and our servers are located far out of state, so they were not affected). Emergency updates from the Town Manager via so-called "reverse 911" emergency calls and emails worked well. The problem was: those of us who have cordless phones served by broadband providers (as I do) were out of luck: no Comcast cable service. I happen to have a smartphone, but (1) not everyone does; (2) not everyone who does signed up for alerts via cell phone; and (3) even those of us who had them found it difficult to charge them in the early days. We did not make use of radio as a prime means of communication (though it should be noted that some stations, such as the local NPR affiliate, were temporarily also without power). And as the respondents noted, we should also take into account the desire for two-way communication, and incorporation of ongoing public feedback.

We are also still eager to have feedback about the recent incident: Residents can address it to: stormfeedback@amherstma.gov (and of course to the usual organs of Town government).

On balance, then, we are generally satisfied with the response, even as we perform our postmortems and attempt to improve the response next time. To the extent that we enumerate our accomplishments, it is not in order to deflect criticism, and rather, simply in order to put the situation in perspective: things were not perfect, but they could have been much worse. Given what we have been through this year—tornado, hurricane, and blizzard—we came through better than expected.

Interfaith Relations and Genuine Multiculturalism: 2011 vs. 1723

2011-11-11T02:36:00.000-05:00

It is all too easy to dismiss our modern gestures of religious pluralism as just that: empty and often automatic if not altogether cynical gestures. Want to show you are a good person and inoculate yourself against all criticism without having to think (or even acknowledge what you yourself believe)? Hold an "interfaith" service, of the sort that we saw here and all over the country on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Much easier to invite your Muslim and Jewish neighbors to a one-off politically correct lovefest than to take the trouble to get to know their actual beliefs and engage in real and sustained dialogue.

We are entitled to an ounce of skepticism or cynicism today because those gestures are cost-free and thought-free. That was not always the case. It is good to remind ourselves that even these hollow or pro forma acts are far preferable to what came before (and, for that matter, still exists in all too many places and minds).

The two illustrations of Jewish holidays that I used in a recent post are a case in point. They come from a book published in London in 1780: William Hurd's immensely influential, A New Universal History of the Religious Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Whole World: or, a complete and impartial view of all the religions in the various nations of the universe.

They did not attract our attention precisely because they were neutral or positive in tone. The figures depicted therein look like, well, "ordinary" Europeans. They are not caricatures. Their activities are rendered realistically and without satirical or hostile intent. However, therein lies a tale.

Hurd basically ripped off the illustrations from a famous and pioneering predecessor, the nine-volume Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1743) by Jean Frederic Bernard and engraver Bernard Picart. (That's one reason that I was able to afford these engravings. The originals by Picart are much more sought-after and thus a good deal more pricey.) In their recent provocative study of that work—The Book That Changed Europe...(Harvard, 2010)—Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhart describe Hurd as "The English hack" who produced "a clever plagiarism" because "almost all his plates were crude copies of original Picart engravings" while "The text told a completely different story": the victory of Protestantism and the basic denigration of other beliefs and traditions, from the antiquated Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to the irredeemably superstitious savages. (pp. 306-7)

It was a far cry from the radical original, which, they argue, "made readers . . . see religion in a new way":

Despite being the work of two French Protestant refugees who had fled to Holland, the book attempted to accurately depict even Catholic customs, and it gave more favorable and extended attention to Islam than anyone had before. Picart and Bernard devoted so much space to the “idolatrous peoples” of the New World, Asia and Africa because they sought in comparison of the world’s religions fresh evidence for new universalist arguments about the origins and development of religion. They themselves were more interested in what religions had in common – and perhaps even in an heretical religious syncretism – than in how they differed.

Peter N. Miller recently wrote a nice review of this study as well as a complementary one, Guy Stroumsa's A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Harvard again), for the New Republic. (Because the piece is behind a paywall, I'll quote the relevant passages.) There, he analyzes the authors' research agendas and conclusions in the context of both cultural history and the history of the book. The authors persuasively argue that the Picart volume “helped create the field of the comparative history of religion." Miller does not disagree:

By approaching the book as a world in itself, and then leading out from it back into the wider world, they make a strong argument for the significance of this work and its makers. Contextualization and celebration do not always go hand in hand, and while the larger claim—changing the world—does not always come off, it is incontrovertible that the process in which this book participated, if not the book itself, did indeed change the world. For this book represents, in microcosm, nothing less than our scholarly generation’s answer to the old question, “What is Enlightenment?” . . . .

Toleration is central to this new vision of enlightenment. Its motto is not “dare to know” so much as “dare to allow others to know in their own way.” And so we are told that Religious Ceremonies of the World “marked a major turning point in European attitudes toward religious belief and hence the sacred. It sowed the radical idea that religions could be compared on equal terms, and therefore that all religions were equally worthy of respect—and criticism.” The importance of religion in our current world, and the presence in it, or absence from it, of toleration, is what on some level makes works such as this, or Jonathan Israel’s series of mega-tomes on the Enlightenment, monuments to our own concerns. Not only did Religious Ceremonies win a wide readership—and make a lot of money for Bernard the printer—but it also, according to Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, “helped create the field of the comparative history of religion, and to this day its engravings still appear in museum exhibits as documentation for religious customs.”

At the same time, he finds in Stroumsa's book "a useful corrective" to the ghost of the old "secularization thesis" in the work of Hunt, et al.:

By focusing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarian scholarship on religion, which swiftly moved to incorporate the latest ethnographic data on the principle that going far away in space helped one go back far away in time, he shows that Picart and Bernard were in fact the end point of a much longer transition. And this was a transition spearheaded by the Casaubons of European scholarship, the “dead from the waist down” researchers who wrested all sorts of obscure details from the claws of ever-ravenous time. To understand Picart, Stroumsa implies, we need to understand the revolution in Renaissance philology and comparatism. And Stroumsa makes the point that the philological comparison comes before the comparison between manners and mores, and that the sequence is necessary.

The specific way in which Religious Ceremonies of the World functioned as an agent of change was by focusing on rituals—and hence depiction becomes not only possible, but desirable. If everyone has some ritual for birth or death or marriage, then religion appears as a universal phenomenon, and a given religion but a local manifestation of it. Comparison could work to diminish feelings of uniqueness and superiority. Toleration, we are told, followed from this.

He thus concludes by praising Hunt, et al. for providing a new "model of how historians may read images." (one wonders: Is he familiar with Lynn Hunt's earlier work on the French Revolution and similar endeavors?).

The view of its authors is that the engravings are linked to the text, “but they are not just auxiliaries to it.” Hunt and her colleagues are very good at reading Picart to show the subtlety involved in how he chose the image to give to readers. His approach is essentially to “Europeanize” the natives. Even where the text went down arcane byroads, the images stayed focused on the high road: birth, marriage, death, and processions. Thus, in the section on Islam, twenty-two of the twenty-six folio-page engravings illustrate customs and religious ceremonies, even though they cover only 47 of the 291 pages. In this way the images shifted the discussion from a question of truth revealed to a select few to an issue of wider comparative practices.

Why are the images so necessary? If we compare this book to the seventeenth-century literature discussed by Stroumsa, the answer becomes clear. The same project of popularization that moves away from a learned language (Latin) and audience (professors) makes the use of images desirable: they offer a direct connection to the imagination. The broader social process that gave birth to what people today call the “public sphere,” “civil society,” or “commercial society” broadened the reading public, and gave a new meaning to “society.” Publishing was a huge engine of this development. New literary genres such as travel writing, biography, and the novel, and new kinds of books, especially illustrated ones, were essential means of communication.

Here is the illustration from the introduction to the Bernard-Picart book (from my collection; this one, I was able to acquire). It depicts members of four religions worshiping the divine, each in his way. From left: the Jew (with prayer book and what is presumably a Torah scroll; though none could ever be read in that manner), the Catholic priest before an altar, the "Mohammedan" (shoes removed and holding prayer beads in an attitude of worship), and the "Idolater" praying to the sun and nature. The engraving, by F. Morelon la Cave, lacks Picart's vaunted accuracy but is faithful to his respectful spirit.

If it is good to recognize that many of our multicultural and interfaith activities are less than profound, it is likewise good to remind ourselves of the predecessors who helped to make even such slight gestures cost-free rather than life-threatening. Not least, it is worth realizing that those pioneers of the eighteenth century still just may have something to teach us in the twenty-first.

Resources

• the web site devoted to the book by Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhart, which includes explanatory material, bibliography, illustrations, and a digital reproduction of the early editions in Dutch, French, English, and German.

• the electronic, searchable Dutch text, from the Digital Library of Dutch Literature

Intolerance Update

2011-11-11T01:17:00.001-05:00

As if recent reports of inter-religious desecration of places of worship were not bad enough, we now learn that ultra-orthodox Jews ("Haredi") in Jerusalem have been demeaning and intimidating Armenian Christian clergy: typically, by spitting on them. It's not a new phenomenon; witness this report from 2004.

Old or new, it's a disgrace. It's also a shame that the thuggish young perpetrators do not sufficiently know and value their own tradition. Or to be more precise, they unknowingly perpetuate only part of it.

Although Jews at first understandably tended to regard members of the dominant and hostile Christian culture as idolaters (because of the Trinity and graven images), that eventually changed. And in any case, Judaism, unlike Christianity, did not insist that it was the only path to salvation. It had long held that anyone—even a pagan—who observed the seven moral commandments dating from the time of Noah would earn a place in the "world to come." As Israel Abrahams told us over a century ago in his marvelous compilation on Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (1896):

Such tolerance goes far back in Jewish history. 'He who communicates a word of wisdom, even if he be a non-Jew, deserves the title of wise.' [a citation from the Talmud; JW] 'Christians are not idolaters' was the burden of many Jewish utterances . . . 'He who sees a Christian sage,' says the Shulchan Aruch [code of ritual law; JW], must utter the benediction: 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord, King of the World, who has bestowed of Thy wisdom on man.' (415)

He notes: "though the greatest Jewish authorities of the middle ages unanimously declared that the term 'idolater' did not include Christian or Moslem, many of these ceremonial laws remained in force with the masses." (411) Ironically, "the Christian masses were on the whole more tolerant than their priests and rulers. But the Jewish masses were less tolerant than their spiritual and intellectual heads."

The authoritative tradition thus commands that one should respect and honor a priest. Spitting on "idolaters"? Truly, a custom more honored in the breach than in the observance.

Update

O Rosenberg, "Israeli public figures apologize to Greek patriarch for ultra-Orthodox spitting incidents," Haaretz, 23 Nov. 2011

Breaking News Broken: Planning Board Decides to Do . . . Nothing

2011-11-03T19:41:00.000-04:00

I had hoped to be able to post a fuller report of the four and a half hours of deliberations by the Zoning Subcommittee and Planning Board last night. However, fate is not cooperating. The latest bulletin from Town Hall announced that 99% of Amherst residents were expected to have power by 6:00 p.m. Unfortunately, I find myself in the 1 percent. For Occupy Wall Street, I'd be part of the 99%, and I'd much rather be in that category in this case, as well.
In any case, since I am forced to give an abridged report: Jonathan O'Keeffe of the ZSC, working with Planning staff, had crafted a set of proposed compromise amendments to the North Amherst warrant article, addressing the strongest objections by a vocal group of Amherst residents, as well as other likely concerns of Town Meeting members.
The Planning Board, after much back-and-forth, rejected these recommendations, mainly on the grounds that they seemed to undo the Board's previous stance, taken through due process and at the appointed time. Mr. O'Keeffe withdrew the motion. The Board then likewise declined to consider an alternative motion that would have signaled the Board's willingness to endorse any hypothetical Town Meeting amendment in the spirit of the recently withdrawn motion. (Got that?). And so it went.
As the hour grew late, a hopefully offered move to adjourn found no second. This allowed time for debate on changing the current "date certain" on which Town Meeting was to take up the Rezoning article. The result: another discussion that in the end left things exactly as they had stood when the meeting began.
It's a shame, really: each argument had some merit. The proponents of the amended article hoped to address significant resident concerns, and thereby to give the controversial measure a better chance of success. Of course, the initial endorsement by the ZSC irritated the originators of proposed new denser development projects. The Planning Board's refusal to endorse the amendments, although rooted in an avowed desire to uphold the integrity of that body's process and preserve the full and proper deliberative rights of Town Meeting, irritated already restive residents.
As a result, both contending parties--the protesting petitioners and the prospective builders--were angered. And everyone who attended the meeting (I wager) went home frustrated as well as tired.

Breaking: Zoning Subcommittee Recommends that Planning Board Backtrack on Controversial Intensified Use in North Amherst

2011-11-02T18:07:00.001-04:00

Responding to an outcry from a group of North Amherst residents, the ZSC tonight recommended that the Planning Board keep a portion of Montague Road under its current residential neighborhood zoning, rather than the proposed marginally more intense village center residential. In addition, it bowed to residents' wishes in proposing that not only apartment buildings, but also townhouses be allowed only by special permit rather than the less stringent site plan review. The Planning Board meets at 7:00 to take up this issue as well as hear a presentation by the Cecil Group, the consultants for the rezoning of both North Amherst village center and Atkins Corner, an emerging de facto village center in South Amherst.
Sent from my iPhone

Snowtober, Snowmageddon: whatever you call it, it's pretty nasty

2011-10-31T19:04:00.000-04:00

Nobody expected the early October snow to be quite this bad and disruptive here in the northeast--much more so, as the New York Times pointed out today (at least the paper came) than Hurricane Irene.

I somehow ended up in the middle of it. I had to forgo the Amherst House tour—a benefit for the Amherst Historical Society and Museum, on whose board I serve—because I had earlier agreed to chair a session at the Northeast British Studies conference in Worcester. It was a very enjoyable time, though the anticipation of bad weather on the way home took some of the pleasure out the event. It proved far worse than anticipated. Many people on the road that weekend decided to seek accommodations rather than travel further, and hotel rooms quickly filled up. I was intent on going back in any case, but I did decide to convoy with a colleague. Slushy and slippery roads and at times near-blinding snow slowed traffic to a crawl, so that a trip that should have taken about 80-90 minutes lasted nearly four hours. I saw a good many accidents, ranging from cars that ran into ditches to those that hit guardrails head-on. There seemed to be at least one serious accident involving a large trailer-truck and a car. Even coming through Amherst, there were delays: trees down all over. Route 116 north of UMass was blocked by debris and emergency vehicles.

When I came home, there was still electricity, though lights flickered a few times. The power finally went out late in the evening. Reports indicated that 9,000 of WMECO's 126,000 customers were without electricity (which at least allowed me to quip that I was now among the 93 percent as well as the proverbial "99 percent.") Temperature in our house dropped to about 45 degrees Fahrenheit at night, but a woodstove in the addition made life more comfortable.

There was severe tree damage--blocking roads and downing power lines--throughout town and in particular, it seemed, at the norther end. Damage in our yard was not severe, but nonetheless sad: a dogwood and at least one of the antique apple trees near the house broke (because the trees still have their leaves, damage was much worse than in a typical winter storm).

The Dickinson Museum lost power but escaped major loss. Fallen trees and branches damaged a few sections of the recently restored fence (more on that in another report).

On Saturday, residents flocked to a Stop & Shop in Hadley, largely darkened except for emergency lights at checkout and the ends of aisles.

Dairy foods, meats, frozen foods, and other perishables were removed. Blood stains the racks.

These lobsters died in their tank instead of a pot of boiling water.

A brief report from Town Hall, where I am sitting this afternoon because I needed to charge my phone and computer. Town Manager John Musante is back at work and fully in charge of things, coordinating with the various public safety and public works divisions and keeping the community informed via email updates and SMS. There was only a skeleton staff here today, though it is expected that the building will be open for normal business tomorrow.

Fortunately, the homeless shelter was able to open in time for the storm, and served five clients. Others in need of help, including travelers stranded in town, got help from the police and other authorities.

Power in central Amherst has been restored. As of this afternoon 63% of Amherst was still without power. When John called with an update last night, he hoped that power would be restored to everyone within 48 hours. This afternoon, the estimate was a more cautious and vague "multiple days." As he and Director of Conservation and Development Dave Ziomek (whom I also saw here) indicated, power went out in some sections of town on Saturday night, but because of the extent and nature of the storm damage, WMECO decided to shut down the entire town so that it could more systematically address problems and repair service. Power enters the town grid from three points or stations: one on College St. in east Amherst, one on West Bay Road, and one on Route 116 in the north. The general plan was to work outward from each station.

As Dave and John explained, the work is particularly delicate because of the extensive tree damage. Not only did trees take down power lines in some places. In others, they are resting on the lines, which means that each such limb has to be carefully lifted out cut away and power in the affected segment tested and restored. The Department of Public Works took the lead in clearing debris from roads, and it has now been joined by other groups. Today, WMECO announced that its crews are being joined by those from Westar.

Town Manager Musante says that coordination among Amherst departments has been excellent. And on the bright side: as he and Dave Ziomek told me, the declaration of a local and state emergency means that reimbursement for a large share of the clean-up and repair expenses will be available. Not only is this good news for the budget in general: it also allows town staff more flexibility in deciding which actions to carry out where.

On balance, we have been lucky: there were no fatalities or even serious injuries. By contrast, a 20-year-old Springfield man was killed when he touched a guardrail that had been electrified by a downed power line, and two Sunderland residents have been hospitalized, apparently because they tried to use a gas grill indoors. Amherst Fire Chief Tim Nelson was blunt in warning residents not to grill indoors: "If you do this you will die. Period." He's right: both gas grills and charcoal fires generate carbon monoxide that can easily build to fatal levels (1, 2 ).

Like many other towns in the region, Amherst had decided to postpone Halloween trick-or-treating until next weekend (in our case, November 6). As one of my tweeps put it, "Nothing scarier than a 9yo having a light saber duel w/ a dangling power line."

Latest updates on other institutions:

Amherst public schools are closed tomorrow. UMass and Amherst College are set to reopen Tuesday, but Hampshire College, which sent students home or found them accommodations elsewhere in the Valley, now does not plan to have students return until Wednesday afternoon, which means that classes resume on on Friday (Thursday is an advising day.)

Tuesday update:
latest estimates are that some portions of town may not have power until Friday. It's going to be a long week.

Season of Tolerance, Season of Intolerance: Vandalism of Sacred and Historic Sites in the Middle East

2011-10-29T01:18:00.000-04:00

During the season of the Jewish High Holidays, we heard the shocking news that vandals—apparently Jewish extremists—had set fire to and vandalized a mosque and its holy books in Tuba-Zangariyye, in northern Israel (video here). Israeli political and religious leaders were swift to condemn the crime in the strongest terms. President Shimon Peres spoke out against the incident in the context of a High Holiday message, and then visited the site in the company of an interfaith delegation, declaring,

I am filled with shame for this hateful act. I came here, to this burnt Mosque, and I am shocked to the depths of my soul. This is desecrating the holy. One cannot put up with this abomination and I believe that there is not one Israeli who is not ashamed by this arson attack. This evil act is not only against the law, it is against Judaism, morality and spirit. We will not rest and will not be silent until we apprehend the culprits and they will be punished.

The Sephardic Chief Rabbi said, "This is a desecration of God's name, a desecration of the State of Israel, and a desecration of all peoples and religions. All of us must raise our voices against terror." The Prime Minister's office described Benjamin Netanyahu as "furious," quoting him as saying, "The pictures are horrifying and have no place in Israel," whose values of "freedom of religion" the incident flagrantly contradicted.

Arab voices, both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority, laid the ultimate blame at the foot of what they saw as an insufficiently sharp response to anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incitement. Some commentators thought they saw a reflection of that concern in Peres's remarks, as well. And opposition leader Tzipi Livni said, "Such serious incidents obligate us to conduct a national self-examination."

The situation seemed to worsen when, soon afterward, there were reports of vandalism of Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa, followed by the firebombing of a synagogue there. Political and religious leaders from all communities condemned the new attacks and called for calm. (1, 2) (Although some foreign publications such as the Guardian were quick to ascribe blame to "settlers," the actual scenarios and identities of perpetrators were not clear 1, 2, 3).

What got far less attention was the desecration of the Jewish sanctuary at Joseph's Tomb, in Nablus (Palestinian Authority). IDF troops preparing the site for worship during the High Holidays found the interior defaced with swastikas. The Nablus area has been identified with the biblical Shechem, where, according to tradition, key episodes in the lives of the Patriarchs Abraham and Jacob took place and Joseph was buried after his descendants brought his body out of Egypt during the Exodus.

Joseph's Tomb: lithograph by David Roberts (Brussels, 1849)

Most scholars question the identification of the edifice with Joseph, though that is beside the point in this context. The historical veracity of traditions associated with many holy sites of various faiths is, after all, tenuous at best.

The left-wing peace activist group Gush Shalom condemned the attack as follows:

“The swastika is a vile symbol of racist, murderous ideology, and it is clear that drawing this symbol anywhere in the world is a vile deed – especially in a Jewish religious holy place,” Gush Shalom spokesperson Adam Keller said.

“Joseph’s Tomb in the heart of the city of Shechem is a holy place for Judaism and the desire of religious Jews to visit it is perfectly legitimate,” he added.

Keller went on to note that some such sites, especially those located in the Palestinian Authority, were sacred to more than one faith, and that Jewish worshipers needed to be sensitive to local rules.

Although the vandalism was quickly repaired and the building was not permanently harmed, the incident was nonetheless at least as noteworthy as the attack on the mosque. First, by contrast, it earned no public criticism from leading Palestinian and Muslim figures (a call from the ADL for a condemnation notwithstanding), and no comparable outcry—or even coverage—in the world press. Second, it formed part of a long-standing pattern affecting both the Tomb and Jewish sacred and historic sites in general.

Joseph's Tomb has been the site of repeated vandalism and even violence (photos of the most recent incident, half a year ago, here). The Palestinian Ma'an News Agency, citing AFP, summarized:

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, the site was to remain under Israeli control. But the Israeli army evacuated the premises in October 2000 shortly after the start of the second intifada, or uprising, and it was immediately destroyed and burnt by the Palestinians.

The restoration of the tomb was completed recently, and following improved security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, the army allows Jewish worshipers to make monthly nocturnal pilgrimages to the site.

In 2001, Columbia anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj provoked controversy with a book on the politics of Israeli archaeology that won plaudits in some fashionable political and non-specialist academic circles but little respect from serious field archaeologists and historians of the topic. Among its most controversial aspects was her willingness to legitimize what she coyly calls "looting" of historic and archaeological resources as: "a form of resistance to the Israeli state and an archaeological project, understood by many Palestinians, to stand at the very heart of Zionist historical claims to the land.” Exhibit number 1, cited in her conclusion: the destruction of Joseph's Tomb. Abu El Haj's book is but the hyper-theoretical, sophisticated, and "kinder, gentler" form of a disturbing tendency toward denial of the historical and archaeological record of an ancient and continuous Jewish presence (e.g. 1, 2, 3).

An ironic pendant to the Tomb desecration was the story of a Libyan Jew who returned from exile in Italy to support the ongoing revolution. When, citing the long heritage of the Jewish community, he also announced plans to renovate and reopen an abandoned and desecrated historic synagogue, he was threatened, told that he was persona non grata, and forced to leave.

The point, of course, is not to cite one example in order to diminish the others, and on the contrary, to reaffirm the simple truth that all such attacks and desecrations are hateful and equally deserving of attention and condemnation. It is alarming that, in a conflict in which competing political claims are closely linked with competing historical narratives or complicated by outright historical denial, irreplaceable historical and archaeological resources have increasingly become the focus of violence and erasure.

Just this week, conflict flared up again over the revived Israeli plan to construct a new access ramp (said to be necessitated by earthquake damage) to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The controversy dates to 2007, when the initial proposal and concomitant archaeological salvage excavations provoked a firestorm of criticism. Then as now, there was room for debate: The public process has arguably been truncated and bungled. Some Israeli archaeologists have expressed the professional concern that large-scale new construction is unnecessary and would jeopardize historic resources in the ground. Muslim and Arab leaders, by contrast, raise the by now predictable charge that this is all part of a sustained plot to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque and pave the way for the building of a synagogue or even the restoration of the Temple. The Al Aqsa Foundation for Waqf and Heritage is described as saying the latest plan "would lead to the demolition of a section of the mosque itself." Israeli journalist Nadav Shragai cites such charges as yet another example of the vociferous and increasingly entrenched Muslim "denial of the Jewish bond to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Temple." (further background: 1, 2, 3, 4)

It need not be this way, for it was not always this way. Although neither the recent nor the distant past was some idyllic interfaith paradise, the fact remains that such acts of outright denial and destruction, like fundamentalism itself, are a modern rather than an ancient phenomenon.

Back in 2007, Israel scaled back and then postponed the Mughrabi Bridge project, but it first took several unusual steps to address the concerns. In addition to inviting the public to witness the salvage work in person and via webams, it sought the mediation of Turkey, then still a friend. This prompted the following recollection from Yehuda Litani about a hitherto unknown but typical episode of Jewish-Muslim cooperation under Ottoman rule. In 1992-93, when Jordan financed the restoration of the spectacular golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, he was privileged to view an artifact that had not seen the light of day for nearly a century:

The Dome of the Rock was surrounded with scaffolding, and before ascending one of them a friend of mine drew my attention to an iron panel that lay on the floor and was inscribed in French. The foreman of the Irish construction company said the panel had been found between the two halves of the crescents at on top of the mosque, and was temporarily dismantled so that the dome could be coated in gold.

The words in French revealed that the Mosque had been renovated in 1899 during Turkish rule, and that the works had been assisted by the Jewish community in Jerusalem led by a public figure called Avraham (Albert) Entebbe, who among his numerous other activities was also the principal of the city's "Kol Israel Haverim" school.

Entebbe, who was the undersigned on the French inscription, was known for his courageous ties with the heads of the Ottoman rule, and the inscription noted that for the purpose of renovating the mosques on the Temple Mount five acclaimed Jewish artists had been invited to Jerusalem. The Jewish stone carvers, wood carvers and iron mongers from various cities in the Mediterranean basin, shared their skills with their Muslim brothers during months of work.

The inscription also noted that all the students at Entebbe's school were given a three-month leave in order to assist their Muslim brothers in the renovations works on Temple Mount. In the last lines of the inscription, Entebbe described the ideal cooperation and understanding that prevailed between Jews and Muslims in the Holy City, which reached its zenith when the Jews undertook renovations of the Temple Mount mosques in 1899.

When he asked to have a photograph made and returned the next day, the panel had disappeared. (Read the rest: "Friendship on the Temple Mount. The wonderful story of Jewish-Muslim cooperation under Turkish rule."

On the one hand: an inspiring story from the past. On the other: yet another crucial historical artifact needlessly lost, and with it, both evidence and the lesson that it could teach. It's tragic in more ways than one.

[update: new arrest in mosque arson attack]

Prophet Isaiah: Occupy Jerusalem!

2011-10-29T00:59:00.001-04:00

No, I'm not talking about that issue. (In "The Occupy Movement's Branding Problem" Adam Clark Estes observes,"As the name for a protest, the word 'Occupy' works okay when you put it in front of "Wall Street," but as it becomes a worldwide political movement, it's pretty iffy. Try out: 'Occupy Poland.' Or 'Occupy Palestine.'")

As I recently noted, it was interesting to see how the "sophisticated" readers of the Guardian mostly missed the point of an opinion piece by a British rabbi, attempting to explain the importance of the notion of repentance.

One need not believe in any particular religion, or even God, or for that matter, any sense of "purpose" in life, in order to acknowledge that the world's religions arguably represent the most sustained historical record of our attempt to make sense of our place in the universe and our relation to one another.

The teachings of Judaism pertaining to the High Holy Days and immediately following festivals seem particularly relevant to current debates about economic crisis and social justice, especially in these days of the renewed "J14" and "Occupy Wall Street" movements.

Yom Kippur (copperplate engraving; London, 1780)

As I mentioned in the post on the "Days of Awe," it is striking that the reading from Isaiah for the fast day of Yom Kippur provocatively questions the meaning of such outward piety in the absence of equal obedience to the commandment to do social justice:

Chapter 57
14 [The Lord] says:
Build up, build up a highway!
Clear the road!
Remove all obstacles
From the road of My people!
15 For thus said He who high aloft
Forever dwells, whose name is holy;
I dwell on high, in holiness;
Yet with the contrite and the lowly in spirit —
...
20 But the wicked are like the troubled sea
Which cannot rest,
Whose waters toss up mire and mud.
21 There is no safety— said my God —For the wicked.

Chapter 58
...
2 To be sure, they seek Me daily,
Eager to learn My ways.
...
3 "Why, when we fasted, did You not see?
When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?"
Because on your fast day
You see to your business
And oppress all your laborers!
4 Because you fast in strife and contention,
And you strike with a wicked fist!
your fasting today is not such
As to make your voice heard on high.
5 Is such the fast I desire,
A day for men to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like a bulrush
And lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call that a fast,
A day when the Lord is favorable?
6 No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
To let the oppressed go free;
And untie the cords of the yoke
To break off every yoke.
7 It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.
8 Then shall your light burst through like the dawn
And your healing spring up quickly;
Your Vindicator shall march before you...

The High Holy Days are followed by the pilgrimage and harvest festival of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles), which commemorates the period in which the Israelites, according to tradition, dwelled in "tabernacles" or "booths" (Sukkot) while wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus. Because the holiday involves a ritual meal and the construction of a temporary and vulnerable shelter, it naturally lends itself to meditations on the theme of hunger and homelessness.

Sukkot (copperplate engraving; London, 1780)

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, citing a tradition that echoes Isaiah's warning, comments:

We celebrate by eating our meals in colorfully decorated succot which remind us of God’s protection in the desert. Our prayers in the synagogue are punctuated by the waving of the Four Species, by which we thank God for His agricultural bounty.

From this description, it might seem that the emphasis during Succot is on religious rituals connecting God and Israel. However, the great legalist-philosopher Maimonides makes the following comment in his Laws of Festivals: “During the days of our Festival, it is incumbent upon every individual to rejoice and to be glad of heart, parents, children and extended family. However, when one eats and drinks in a festival meal, we are commanded to offer hospitality to the stranger, the orphan and the widow together with other poor and needy individuals.

“He who closes the doors of his home or succa booth and only shares his meals with his personal family – without including around his table the poor and bitter of soul – is not rejoicing in a commandment, but is rejoicing in his stomach. About such individuals it is said, ‘Their sacrificial offerings are like the bread of the dead and those who eat in such an environment become defiled....’” The Four Species are symbolically described by the Sages of the Midrash as representing four types of Jews: The “etrog [citron] Jew” is both learned and filled with good deeds; the “lulav [palm branches] Jew” has learning but no good deeds; the “hadas [myrtle] Jew” has good deeds but no learning and the “arava [willow-branch] Jew” has neither learning nor good deeds. We are commanded to bind these four together, in order to remind us that a Jewish community consists of many types of Jews all of whom must be accepted and lovingly included within our Jewish community.

From examples like these, we see that a festival which superficially seems to be oriented solely toward religious ritual actually expresses important lessons in human relationships. (read the rest)

Haim Shine goes even further:

Over the past few years, Jewish holidays . . . have acquired an additional meaning beyond their religious foundation. It is in mankind's nature to seek meaning, and the incredible pace of modern day life puts us in a never-ending quest for more meaning.

The recent Jewish New Year will always be remembered as the day when the false idol of capitalism disintegrated, and its fragments were strewn about the entire universe. Even the waters of many rivers could not wash away the clouds of dust that resulted from the collapse of the modern Tower of Babel. Wall Street's walls fell in minutes, signalling the end of capitalism, just like the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of communism.

....A modern day association with Sukkot can be this past summer, when Israeli masses rallied together and answered the call of the disenfranchised throughout the country.

Judaism has a unique and ancient answer to the existential economic crisis - a beautiful and wonderful holiday, Sukkot. For centuries Jews have upheld the tradition of leaving the comfort of their concrete or wooden homes and moving in to a temporary tent-like home for eight days. The tradition calls for a small "Sukkah," with branches and leaves for a roof and walls of fabric. It is a structure that is hardly secure, and to which Ushpizin (guests) are invited, enabling every Jew to get to know their neighbor. It is a Sukkah that creates equality among mankind and binds us like the four species that are bound and presented during the holiday prayers.

Sukkot is a holiday in which we pray for rain and return to nature due to our commitment to environmental preservation and the preservation of our resources which ensure our existence. In the Sukkah we experience the temporary nature of our existence and are forced to act responsibly towards the coming generations. It is a wonderful time in which we conclude that our security does not lie in our strength, protection, or our egos, but rather in a life filled with values and respect for human life and honor, as well as a commitment to values, justice and morality.

We can only hope that upcoming events will lead Israelis and all of humanity to ponder the meaning of life beyond material assets.

Of course, holidays and campaigns for social justice, no less than the stock market, can produce outbursts of "irrational exuberance." Last I checked, the Sukkah had come down, and capitalism was still standing. But you get the point. There is much that even radicals can learn from tradition.

Religion is able to propose values, and that's a matter of ethics. How we attain those goals remains a matter for debate. That's the realm of politics.

Planning Bodies Continue to Grapple With Village Center Rezoning

2011-10-19T19:38:00.001-04:00

The Zoning Subcommittee (ZSC) of the Planning Board again took up the question of village center rezoning for North Amherst and South Amherst at a public hearing tonight

Although I was unable to arrive for the start of the session, the tenor and basic content were the same as that of previous sessions: objections from a vocal group of residents concerned about what they view as the encroachment of commercial uses into current residential areas, and in particular, the growth of rental housing that they fear (especially to the extent it might attract students) would alter neighborhood character. Controversy centers both on proposed uses and on the new application of form-based codes, an overlay zoning that regulates appearance rather than uses.

Members of Town staff and the Subcommittee attempted to address the questions and argued that the concerns were exaggerated—or simply misplaced, to the extent that they involved issues not properly within the domain of zoning, as such.

The Zoning Subcommittee voted 2-1 to recommend the proposed rezoning to the Planning Board as a whole, which is now taking up the issue. Voting in favor were Jonathan O'Keeffe and Rob Crowner. Bruce Carson voted against it only on procedural grounds: He strongly supported the measure and simply felt that it would be more effective to deal with it at a Special Town Meeting this winter rather than at the Annual Town Meeting early next month.

Update (post-10:00 p.m.)

After three hours of public comment and internal debate, the Planning Board recommended the warrant article to Town Meeting by a vote of 5 in favor, 2 opposed, 1 abstaining.

During public comment, the Planning Board sought first to encourage reactions to the South Amherst/Atkins Corner rezoning proposal, given that almost all discussion to date has focused on North Amherst. As in meeting of the ZSC, a representative of Atkins Farms/Fruitbowl spoke strongly in favor of the measure. At the ZSC hearing, a representative of the large nearby Applewood retirement community, which is also eyeing an expansion, had likewise spoken in favor of the measure. Negative reaction came chiefly from residents Seymour and Alice Epstein, who restated the contents of an open letter to the ZSC: They fear that increased density could have a fateful or even fatal effect on the life of abutters: noise from a nearby shooting range would impair the mental development of children, construction would threaten the existence of the Eastern Brook Trout, and the impact of traffic in the two new roundabouts was unpredictable; hence any rezoning should be postponed until after the actual vehicular circulation could be measured and studied. Planning Director Jonathan Tucker, although noting the thorough preparation that had gone into the zoning proposal, also said that the Board would welcome the submission of any empirical documentation on the issues in question.

The North Amherst discussion added little that had not been said in any of many previous meetings: Residents repeated their insistence that they were not opposed to development as such and proceeded to articulate their opposition to proposed altered uses or density in the village center area. As in the past, the main theme, repeated in several variations, was opposition to rental housing—in particular, anything that might become undergraduate rentals—as well as opposition to commercial or even mixed-use development in areas now predominantly residential. Paola Di Stefano summarized the contents of an open letter to the ZSC and other Town boards and officials by several residents: the belief that there is already too much rental housing in North Amherst, opposition to any zoning designation other than Neighborhood Residential (the current proposal is for the more flexible Village Center Residential) on Montague Road north of Mill River and on the residential stretch of Cowls Lane, "without exceptions for previous or present business use" (emphasis in the original). The letter and petition moreover note the pain of the signatories arising from the fact that the consultants had not adopted the particular vision of the neighborhood that these residents themselves had proposed.

Only a very few residents—notably several members of the North Amherst co-housing project, which was the object of fear-mongering when it was in the planning stages but is now considered a model of dense and sustainable development—spoke strongly in favor of the project and density and intensified and diversified use in general. Architect Laura Fitch, for example, welcomed the opportunity to address and redress what she called "the zoning mistakes of the 1970s."

In a quasi-new twist, it appeared that the objectors might be placated if the controversial areas of Montague Road and Cowls Lane would be removed from the plan—though this would of course seem to vitiate the purpose of the measure, which is to intensify appropriate development in the village center. A number of other town residents—including some from other precincts—expressed these and other concerns.

Planning Board deliberation was fairly limited. Members attempted to clarify regulations and definitions and address the numerous objections. Rob Crowner and Jonathan O'Keeffe, for example, noted that attempts to exclude certain logically appropriate portions from the Village Center simply because residents objected to the designation made little sense. After all, they reasoned, the whole idea behind a "center" is that it is encompasses a certain critical mass of territory and population.

There followed some deliberations as to whether it made sense to proceed with a vote at November Town Meeting. Did the public adequately understand the measure? Was it too complex for Town Meeting to grasp? Should it be divided or further modified? Should discussion be postponed to a Special, later Town Meeting, in order to satisfy public doubts and criticism?

Noting that the Planning Board had already held close to 40 meetings plus 5 or 6 public hearings, a visibly frustrated Planning Director Jonathan Tucker declared, "the notion that somehow Town Meeting members would not have had the chance to educate themselves" is simply "not credible." Everyone is busy, but "then it's our responsibility" to inform ourselves as best we can. "Anyone who contends that this process has not been adequate is deluded."

Planning Board member and contrarian Richard Roznoy thereupon spoke up: "If a 'delusional' can ask a question..." He repeated his longstanding complaint that the proposal did not adequately address transportation needs, specifically, public transit. (His dedication to complete streets and other sustainable transportation policies is self-evident: he arrived dramatically on his bicylce just in time for the end of North Amherst planning charrette last summer, in helmet, and yellow and black jersey and spandex pants, in order to comment briefly on this topic before the meeting dispersed.) In Roznoy's view, the "transportation flaws are just too major" and "cannot be rectified." Vice Chair Jonathan O'Keeffe asked: was it not true that the basics were there and could always be modified? Mr. Tucker read from the relevant portion of latest draft in order to demonstrate that transportation was indeed adequately addressed. Stephen Schreiber pressed Roznoy on which public transit was being excluded, saying "This is a huge step in the right direction, and I don't see how this precludes public transportation." Roznoy, it became clear, (a) did not consider the mere option or even presence of public transit adequate (e.g. he seems to have insisted not just on bus routes, but also on designated bus lanes, even though this may not be compatible with the engineering or aesthetic of a rural village center), and (b) truly prefers light rail—which, as Mr. Schreiber noted, many of us may want, but few if any of us will live to see.

Mr. Roznoy concluded by saying that he is prepared to be described as "delusional" and to explain his vote at Town Meeting, The latter, it should be noted, is no idle threat. A year ago, the Planning Board brought forward the long-awaited Development Modification Bylaw, which the Town had been eagerly awaiting for many years as a replacement for an old anti-sprawl measure, which, court decisions suggested, was unconstitutional. Indeed, the ticking clock on the expiration of this old Phased Growth Bylaw was perhaps the only factor that lent any common sense of urgency to a Master Planning process that had dragged on for a decade. At that Town Meeting, Mr. Roznoy, in effect offering an unofficial personal minority report, spoke strongly against the Bylaw, arguing that it was so complicated that he could not understand it. The measure, which faced strong opposition from others likewise opposed to or confused by its provisions, went down to defeat.

In the end tonight, the Planning Board voted 5 to 2 to 1 to recommend the Village Center Rezoning measure to Town Meeting,

• Voting in favor were Rob Crowner, Connie Kruger, Jonathan O'Keeffe, Stephen Schreiber, and Chair David Webber.

• Bruce Carson, as at the ZSC, voted against, but only because he preferred a Special Town Meeting as the forum. Richard Roznoy, as expected, opposed the measure because of its presumed inadequacies regarding transportation.

• Sandra Anderson abstained, like Mr. Carson, not due to content, and instead out of preference for a different procedure (voting schedule or forum).

(Circumstances permitting—always a big "if—I will try to elaborate on these concerns if I am, as I hope, able to prepare a more thorough review of the issues prior to Town Meeting.)

[update: corrected a few typos]

Occupy Wall Street, er, . . . wherever

2011-10-11T14:47:00.000-04:00

The "Occupy Wall Street" movement has been a big story in some circles. Not so much in others. For weeks, leftist activists protested that the mainstream media, having profligately covered every wacky utterance from the Tea Party, were ignoring this genuine social movement. That finally changed in the last week or so, as the movement swelled rather than shriveled, and a few prominent Democratic officials and a growing number of other left-liberal figures endorsed the phenomenon. The major liberal magazines, The New Republic (1, 2, 3) and The Nation (1, 2, 3), are taking the movement seriously. Conservatives of course hastened to denounce it—as, for example, when Herman Cain (though casually admitting, "I don't have the facts to back this up") labeled the whole thing a plot by supporters of the Obama administration, and helpfully added, “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Eric Cantor dismissed the protesters as "mobs," which New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg accused of "trying to destroy the jobs of working people in this city."

We may have been ahead of the curve. Already more than two weeks ago, students at Hampshire College put up a virtual occupation tent on the lawn in front of the Library, seen here in a shot from the start of the month. (One of the few times, of course, that our students ever endorsed any "occupation.")

Admittedly, graffiti on an engineering structure a few hundred yards away suggested less unity (or seriousness) of purpose.

In the meantime, the real movement has arrived here, as well: there will now be an "Occupy Amherst." Students protested at the University and downtown on the Common last week, as described in this story from the Collegian (which, incidentally features comments by my friend and colleague, economist Gerry Friedman). A major all-town demonstration is planned for Sunday, the 16th.

To be sure, it's easy to dismiss the protesters as a bunch of "trustafarian nitwits," but here is where it's good to be able to historicize one's own position. Much of the old left as well as political establishment had little respect for the hippies and yippies and other countercultural protesters of the 1960s—but even though that movement had more than its share of weaknesses, it ultimately produced or contributed to something more enduring and influential (after all, where is the old left today?). Whether today's movement has that sort of potential is very much an open question. (Personally, I was most intrigued by the analysis of Occupy Wall Street as a self-functioning ecosystem.)

Above all, the protests seem to lack deeper intellectual coherence as well as aims. A flier inviting residents to the Amherst "general assembly" basically asked residents to come and bring their suggestions. This is one clear difference from some of the protests of the so-called "Arab Spring," which, even if made up of diverse and opposing groups with no shared long-term vision, at least had some clear, shared, and verifiable short-term goals: toppling a government, altering the legal and electoral system, and so forth. Ditto for Israel's J14 movement, which eventually won social and economic reforms. It was interesting, incidentally, to see veterans of the Egyptian and Israeli protest movements offer advice to people whom they evidently but charitably regard as well-intentioned amateurs.

I'm not sure I'll be able to attend on the 16th, as I have to be at the inauguration of the new Amherst College president. It may be just as well. The incoherence of political activism, I can take. (God knows, we're used to it.) I'm not sure how long I could stand the political and rhetorical style, though. As most readers will know, use of microphones and megaphones was banned at many demonstrations (in New York, for example, a permit is required). The activists therefore improvised, creating what The Nation's Richard Kim calls "an ingeniously simple people-powered method of sound amplification":

After the mic check, the meeting proceeds:
with every few words / WITH EVERY FEW WORDS!
repeated and amplified out loud / REPEATED AND AMPLIFIED OUT LOUD!
by what has been dubbed / BY WHAT HAS BEEN DUBBED!
the human microphone / THE HUMAN MICROPHONE!!! (jazz hands here).

The aforementioned Israeli activist had other advice. In essence, if you want to be radical, then be radical, and pay the price:

Wall Street activists told Eidelman that police had threatened to arrest those who used megaphones. Eidelman thought: Why not buy a few hundred megaphones and dare them to arrest everyone? Apparently the idea hadn’t been raised.

Kim's characterization of the human microphone: "The overall effect can be hypnotic, comic or exhilarating—often all at once."

Only one of the three, if you ask me. As New York Magazine put it,

As you might expect, the message can get a bit garbled, and basic sentences (AND BASIC SENTENCES!) can take three times as long (CAN TAKE THREE TIMES AS LONG!) to complete (TO COMPLETE!). And forget about clearly explaining complex economic arguments to the crowd. We're looking at you, Joseph Stiglitz. Also, as Michael Moore learned, jokes don't really travel well over the 500-person shouting telephone game. Watch our video for a quick primer on the human microphone that's repeated daily down in the crowds. Also, jazz hands!

Combine that with the pseudo-democratic ideal of operating on the basis of consensus, and you have a recipe for, well. . . just watch.

Here, Occupy Atlanta protesters were prepared to welcome civil rights hero John Lewis, who had followed protocol by requesting permission to address the throng. Then one young bewhiskered activist sought to block consensus on the grounds that, whereas Lewis had (to be sure, yes, yes) done much for the country, no one was better than anyone else, and Lewis and his remarks were not on the agenda of the general assembly. You really have to watch the whole thing to appreciate it properly. I confess that I can barely force myself to do so.

Conservatives, who shot and posted this video, of course had a field day. But even some leftists and liberals found the scene anywhere from silly to distasteful. Hip Hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons called the Atlantans "a bunch of (blank)heads." Former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young compared the protesters unfavorably with the civil rights movement of which he had been a leader: “There’s a difference between an emotional outcry and a movement.” “This is an emotional outcry. The difference is organization and articulation.” As for Lewis himself, he just politely said that he had wanted to help and was not offended by the treatment (though one wonders what he makes of the talkbacks on the article that reported this).

I have a friend with unimpeachable leftist and feminist credentials of long standing, and she once told me that she had only a few hard-and-fast political rules. One of them was: never again join any body that operates on the principle of consensus. One can see why (I mean: ONE CAN SEE WHY).

Jewish High Holy Days (and a whiff of antisemitism)

2011-10-07T18:08:00.000-04:00

We recently noted the celebration of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The "High Holy Days" of the Jewish calendar—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—have now arrived. The first marks the new year, and the second, the Day of Atonement. The ten-day period is collectively known as the Days of Awe.

As in many other cases, there are striking similarities between the practices of the two religions. Many scholars have noted the direct connection between the Jewish fast day of Yom Kippur and the Islamic fast day of Ashurah, derived from a Qur'anic commandment that believers observe "the fast as it was prescribed for those before you." As a distinct Islamic identity and practices crystallized, the focus of fasting and atonement shifted to the holy month of Ramadan. Ashurah became a voluntary fast day and later assumed a separate and higher significance among Shi'ites, for whom it commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali at the Battle of Karbala. Still, the parallels between the Days of Awe and Ramadan are apparent: a time of introspection, self-improvement, and acts of charity.

Although it is not generally known, Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish year, falls in Tishri, the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar. The first month is Nissan, during which Passover falls. There are actually multiple Jewish "new years." Rosh Hashanah marks the new year in the sense of the birthday of the world—Creation—with which the calendar begins. By that reckoning, the new year will be 5722. Nissan marks the beginning of the year in another sense: the spring and advent of the agricultural season, and the birth of true Israelite peoplehood in the Exodus, leading to the covenant at Mount Sinai.

The liturgy for the Days of Awe is a particularly rich and complex one, focusing on the multiple roles of God as creator, king, and judge. The scriptural readings are likewise rich, and even perplexing, for they focus on difficult stories: challenging to the understanding, and in some ways, even seemingly subversive.

On Rosh Hashanah, there is first the surprising birth of Isaac to the aged Sarah and Abraham, followed by Sarah's seemingly cruel expulsion of Ishmael, the son of Abraham's handmaid, Hagar. God protects Ishmael and promises that both he and Isaac will become the ancestors of great nations. Then there is the story of Hannah, who prays desperately to God for a son and is turned away by a censorious priest who thinks her drunk.

In the words of the great scholar Ernest Simon, from 1955:

And so Judaism begins every new year with this victory of the mother over the institution and its soul-deaf representatives. Hagar the Egyptian, the mother of Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, and Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, join hands as sisters in maternal suffering and maternal consolation.

The reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah describes the Akedah, or binding of Isaac, when God tests Abraham's faith by commanding him to sacrifice his own son.

Again, Simon:

After the suffering of mothers, passive feminine suffering, comes active masculine suffering; he must inflict it on himself. The paradox of his loyal readiness to sacrifice his son, understandable only as mystery, is rewarded; as God’s angel had reserved a well for Ishmael, so God has reserved something better for Isaac: a sacrificial lamb instead of his own sacrifice. The two half-brothers and foes run the same danger and are saved in similar ways; they too have become brothers, as Hagar and Hannah have become sisters.

The readings for Yom Kippur are equally challenging. Thus, for example, the Haftarah (scriptural reading that follows the Torah reading) is from the prophet Isaiah. Ironically, the passage (57:14-58:14) is one in which the prophet questions the value of precisely the fasting that looms so large on this particular holy day. The point, of course, is not to denounce the Day of Atonement or even modest self-denial, as such (though there is no room for asceticism or world-hatred in Judaism). Rather, he criticizes those who fast insincerely, neglecting the purpose of the rituals as a means to the end of reflection on the spiritual, entailing one's obligations to both the divine and one's fellow human beings.

The rabbis made these choices quite deliberately, and there are few better demonstrations of their provocative and open-ended approach to religion and society. The choices typify what Lutheran scholar Norman A. Beck called a "mature" religion, able to relativize its own position and incorporate into its very texts and doctrines a self-critical stance.

The image of the divine particular to this season (and especially interesting from the standpoint of book history) is that of God as scribe or bookkeeper, keeping records and rendering judgment on the lives of individuals in various heavenly ledgers and archives. According to the rabbinic interpretation, he records the judgment for the preceding year on Rosh Hashanah, but the verdict is not final until it is "sealed" on Yom Kippur. Thus, the emphasis is on constant repentance during the ten days. Prayer, repentance, and good deeds, it is said, can still avert a negative judgment up to the moment that the gates of judgment close at the end of the Day of Atonement.

Accordingly, the traditional greetings for the New Year and Days of Awe are:

From Rosh Hashahah through Yom Kippur:

Shana tova: a good year
L'shanah tova tikatevu v'tichatemu: May you be inscribed and sealed [in the Book of Life] for a good year

Leading up to/through Yom Kippur:

G'mar chatima tova: roughly, May you be sealed [in the Book of Life] for a good year [literally just: a good sealing]

A week ago, a British rabbi, Naftali Brawer, attempted to explain the meaning of this season of introspection on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" page.

Why am I here? Why do I have the gifts and talents that I do? While the particular answers to such higher-order questions can be deeply subjective, Judaism at least provides a framework for considering them by asserting that every single life is imbued with unique purpose. Such as the following passage from the Talmud: "A human being creates many coins from the same die and they are all identical; the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One blessed is He, coins all people from Adam's die and not one looks like another. This is why every person must say 'The world was created just for me'."

The Talmud is not encouraging narcissism. On the contrary, it is calling on each individual to recognise his or her uniqueness and as a result to make a distinctive contribution in life. It is not a lesson about taking; it is a lesson about contributing and doing something extraordinary with one's life. In other words, identifying that which is unique in us leads us to think less about what we need and more about what we are needed for.

Returning to one's true self through higher-order questioning is what the Sabbath of return is all about. One needn't be Jewish to appreciate its importance and recognise its potential positive impact on our lives and society.

(The Talmudic passage is also known through a famous teaching of the Hasidic master Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, who said each person should carry two notes in his pockets as reminders on how to live: one reading, "For my sake was the world created," and the other, "I am but dust and ashes.")

What Rabbi Brawer said seems unexceptionable: we seek to identify our individuality and distinctive strengths in order to better the lot of all humanity.

Most of the nearly 100 comments were banal or slightly off-target at worst. Many, for example, questioned the religious assumptions behind the piece or tried to engage in philosophical subtleties regarding the purpose or lack thereof behind human existence rather than focusing on the essay's universal social message.

However, since Comment is Free, ironically, is known as a site that regularly attracts antisemitic talkbacks from its readers, it should come as no surprise that some of them gratuitously seized upon the column as an opportunity to attack Jews. The editors deleted a handful of comments, but CiFWatch, which monitors the site for intolerance and hate speech, managed to catch a couple of classics that were allowed to stand until this unwelcome attention led to their removal, as well. One asked whether "Jews believe they have been specially selected by God and are therefore 'superior' to everyone else?"

Charming, Maybe these scribblers, too, should be practicing some introspection and repentance this weekend.

Milan Kundera on Vandalism and Historic Preservation

2011-10-04T03:29:00.001-04:00

When called upon to explain the philosophy and values of historic preservation to an outsider, I often liken it to environmentalism, and I invariably refer to humility and caution: the idea that we should not rush to take irreversible action, so confident of our own tastes and power that we presume to dictate the future shape of the world.

Thinking about history and historic preservation in that vein, I often recall a wonderful passage by Czech novelist Milan Kundera, from an essay of June 1967. In a sense, it is only nominally about historic preservation and really about other, much bigger things. Still, the fact that he uses historic preservation is indicative and hardly accidental.

Kundera begins with a point that he elaborates elsewhere, namely, that small nations, unlike large ones, cannot take their continued existence for granted. In the standard narrative, Czech identity was almost destroyed when political sovereignty was lost: first, under the three centuries of German imperial domination, and then again, under Nazi rule, separated by only two glorious decades of modern independence. It was the maintenance of a distinct Czech culture that kept peoplehood alive. Stalinism proved a threat of a different kind: the state remained, but the culture atrophied. Writing in the era of the post-Stalinist "thaw" that preceded the famous "Prague Spring" of 1968, Kundera is both optimistic and cautious: he acknowledges and applauds the relaxing of political controls, the achievements of the Czech New Wave in film, and a new freedom in literature.

At the same time, he worries, a true national culture is threatened in new ways both from without and from within. On the one hand, there are the homogenizing forces of what we have now come to call "globalization," which threaten, in an entirely new way, to limit the relevance or even existence of the languages and literatures of small nations. On the other hand, a vibrant Czech culture cannot be only inward-looking and parochial. Historically, he said, the distinctive Czech culture derived much of its strength from the rootedness in a wider European tradition, the consciousness of which is fast disappearing, and not only in his native land.

Provincialism, he says, is mental as well as geographical. "Provincialism doesn't only have its impact on the nation's literary achievements, but is a problem of the nation's whole existence, especially in its schooling, its journalism. and so on."

He illustrates this point with an example taken from avant-garde film that in turn takes him into the realms of history and art, and then back to party politics:

A little while ago, I saw a film called Daisies. It concerned two splendidly repulsive girls, supremely satisfied with their own cute limitations and merrily destroying everything which they didn't understand. It seemed to me then that I was watching a profound and very topical parable about vandalism. What is a vandal? He certainly isn't an illiterate peasant who burns a hated landowner's castle in a fit of anger. A vandal, as I observe him around me, is socially secure, literate, self-satisfied, and with no very good reason for trying to get his own back on somebody. A vandal is an arrogant, limited person, who feels good in himself and is willing at any time to appeal to his democratic rights. This arrogant limitedness thinks that one of its basic rights is to change the world into its own image, and because the world is too big for it to understand, it chooses to change the world by destroying it. In exactly the same way, a youngster will knock the head off a sculpture in a park because it seems to insult him by being bigger than he is, and he'll do it with great satisfaction, because any act of self-assertion satisfies man.

People who live only in the immediate present, unaware of historical continuity and without culture, are capable of transforming their country into a desert without history, without memory, without echoes, and without beauty. Vandalism today is not just something that is fought by the police. When representatives of the people or the relevant officials decide that a statue or a castle, a church, an old lime tree, is pointless and order it to be removed, that is just another form of vandalism. There's no substantial difference between legal and illegal destruction and there is not a great deal of difference between destruction and prohibition. In the chamber a certain Czech deputy recently demanded, in the name of twenty-one deputies, a ban on two 'difficult' films, one of them, by an irony of fate, Daisies, a parable about vandals. He uncompromisingly denounced both films and at the same time declared quite explicitly that he didn't understand them. There is no real contradiction in such an attitude as this. The biggest sin of these two works was that they were above the heads of those who did not like them and thus insulted them.

—"A Nation Which Cannot Take Itself for Granted," in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945, second ed. (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 151-55; here, 153-54

For him, then, respect for the past, humility regarding the future, and freedom of expression go hand in hand, It is a potent mix.

29 September: Birthday of Architect Henry Hobson Richardson

2011-10-01T23:20:00.000-04:00

Richardson's muscular yet elegant style, derived from the architecture of the early Middle Ages, came on the scene at just the right time: as a variety of historicizing styles competed with one another and prosperous individuals, towns, and organizations confidently sought to display their status through new edifices.

Mass Moments tells us:

He designed nearly 80 buildings, including churches, libraries, railroad stations, and private homes, many of them in Massachusetts. His buildings were visually striking and beautifully proportioned. He used forms inspired by early medieval churches, including rounded arches, massive towers, and rugged stone walls, with blocks often laid in bands of contrasting color. Widely copied across the nation, "Richardsonian Romanesque" became the first and only architectural style ever named after an American. (read the rest

Here, some examples of neo-Romanesque buildings (though none by Richardson himself) in the Pioneer Valley:

Amherst Town Hall (H.S. McKay, 1889-90)

Hampshire County Courthouse, Northampton (Henry F. Kilbourn, 1884-86)

Forbes Library, Northampton (William Brocklesby; opened 1894)

"Richardsonian Romanesque" has become a term now known beyond the circles of architectural aficionados. Less well known is Richardson's work as a designer of interiors and furnishings, a topic that my fellow preservationist and tweep Anulfo Baez has written about here:"In Harmony with the Architecture: The Furniture of H.H. Richardson."

The Great Hurricane(s)

2011-09-30T23:50:00.000-04:00

New England is still recovering from the effects of the severe weather this spring and summer. Preservation Massachusetts' new list of most endangered historic resources will focus on tornado-damaged communities here in the western part of the Commonwealth. The state of Vermont has had to launch a campaign—including television and YouTube appearances by the Commissioner of Tourism—to demonstrate to fall foliage tourists that, despite Hurricane Irene, Vermont is indeed open for business (more: 1, 2).

As we all know, however, the region has been through far worse.

September 21 marks the anniversary of the "Great Hurricane of '38," that is, 1938. The first major tropical cyclone to strike New England since 1869, and the most devastating in our history (with the only possible exception of one in the seventeenth century), it has gone by various names: "The New England Hurricane of 1938 (or Great New England Hurricane or Yankee Clipper or Long Island Express or simply The Great Hurricane of 1938)."

As MassMoments tells us:

in 1938, a hurricane of astonishing force ravaged New England. Having gone to bed the night before to radio forecasts of scattered rain and fresh southerly winds, New Englanders woke on the 21st and went about their weekday routines. At least they did until the storm broke in mid-afternoon. Within minutes, the hurricane leveled virtually everything in its path. The whirling, shrieking winds and rushing waters took more than 600 lives and caused damage estimated between $6-12 billion in today's dollars. Technology now provides enough warning to evacuate vulnerable areas, so a storm of similar magnitude might take fewer lives today. But the pace of development along the coast means that property and environmental damage would undoubtedly be many times greater. (read the rest)

The hurricane is famous in Amherst, too, for it struck far inland. Amherst College students of the day whom I happened to teach in an Elderhostel course some years ago told me of the devastation, above all, to the large and stately trees that used to grace the town. Indeed, total damage to trees and utility poles alone was said to have exceeded a million dollars (in the valuation of the day).

the New York Daily Mirror covers the hurricane in New England

The Amherst Record noted, though, that the disaster united the usually contentious town residents:

The spirit of the people has been an inspiration. Nature's catastrophes bring us close together in friendliness and neighborliness, and we are much the gainers because of it. Many a person during the past two weeks has had the pleasure of doing a neighborly act to people who had never before been in need, and many another has had his heart warmed because of some unexpected kindness rendered.
(Essays on Amherst History, [Amherst, 1978], 204)

Perhaps because the main damage was only to the landscape, the Amherst high school sports teams decided to name themselves the "'Hurricanes." It always seemed doubly strange: first, because the incident was so atypical (my wife grew up in Florida where it seemed far less anomalous for her high school teams to bear the same name), and second, because, although a hurricane clearly symbolizes power, it is also a destructive and potentially lethal force. I very much doubt that sports teams in Japan are rushing to name themselves "The Tsunamis."

Perhaps because this hurricane has become so famous, most of us have no knowledge of the 1954 "Hurricane Carol," whose anniversary fell in August. "Carol" was of roughly the same power as the Hurricane of '38 when it hit our region, and the storm surge in Narragansett Bay was actually larger. It killed 65 people and destroyed some 4000 houses. Winds of 80-100 miles per hour knocked out power in the eastern part of Massachusetts and destroyed the steeple of Boston's historic North Church, made famous by Paul Revere's ride. Interestingly, that steeple, by famed architect Charles Bulfinch, was itself a replacement for the original, destroyed by another storm 150 years before Carol. Today's steeple, combining elements of both, is thus the third to grace the building.

As even Irene begins to fades in our memories and we go about our routines in calm and safety, it's easy to forget the havoc that Carol wreaked on the region.

Resources:

The Hurricane of '38 as documented in the collections of Amherst College

September Anniversaries Wrap-Up

2011-09-30T23:03:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy month, and there's a lot to catch up with. I would be remiss if I did not make a modest attempt to acknowledge at least some of the historical anniversaries that fall in the month of September (not necessarily in chronological order).

Stay tuned.

Honoring Amherst's African-American Civil War Soldiers: "Assault on Fort Wagner": "The Rush of the Garrison to the Parapet"

2011-09-23T04:27:00.000-04:00

The following engraving (20 x 23.6 cm) appeared in The Illustrated London News of September 26, 1863:

The caption reads: "The War in America: Assault on Fort Wagner, Charleston Harbour, on the Night of July 18—The Rush of the garrison to the Parapet. From a Sketch by Our Special Artist."

This was the dreadful assault made famous in our time by the 1989 film, "Glory." Although this engraving includes some iconic features in the evolving representation of the event such as the advance of the figure with the Union flag (cf., with variations, the lithographs by Currier and Ives [1863] or Kurz and Allison [1890]), it offers no indication that volunteers of the Mass. 54th—or, indeed, any African-American troops—took part.

The accompanying text on p. 317 (perhaps because written by reporters "embedded"—as we would nowadays say— on the Confederate side) speaks of the battle only in more general terms:

A Blockade-runner has brought us some sketches from our Special Artist in Charleston, two of which are engraved in the present Number. Respecting the Engraving on our first page--"The Assault on Fort Wagner on the night of July 18"—our Special Artist and Correspondent writes as follows:—"I returned from the south-west just in time to witness this most formidable of all attempts made by the enemy on the defences of Charleston. You are already doubtless aware that the Federals succeeded a fortnight since in effecting a lodgment of their forces on the islands forming the approaches to the city. A temporary success enabled them to throw up works in front of Fort Wagner, and to commence an advance on the last-named stronghold. In conjunction with their iron fleet, which took up an enfilading position seawards, they maintained a heavy fire of mortars.

Further reading on this site

• Mass 54th
• West Cemetery
• African-American Amherst

Hampshire College Students Hold Vigil for Troy Davis

2011-09-23T02:05:00.001-04:00

Late on Wednesday afternoon, Hampshire College students, like their counterparts and other citizens around the country, held a vigil to protest the impending execution of Troy Davis, sentenced to die at 7:00 p.m. for the murder of a Georgia policeman some two decades ago. A massive international petition movement protested the sentence, arguing that there was substantial doubt as to his guilt.

Surprisingly, I was the only member of the faculty present, aside from my colleague Chris Tinson, professor of African-American studies, who was one of the speakers.

Chris spoke both of the case at hand and of the broader problem of the "prison-industrial complex" and the death penalty, which, he said, disproportionately victimized the US minority population, especially African-Americans. At the same time, he reminded the several dozen students in attendance: to protest the sentence of Davis was in no wise to deny the suffering of the murdered policeman and his family, who, he said, we should hold in our hearts and prayers. The ultimate message, he said, should be not first and foremost to seek vengeance, but to set things right.

It was, all in all, a serious, sincere, and dignified event.

Around 6:00 p.m., the students boarded the PVTA bus and headed downtown to a larger rally on the Common. As all know by now, the Supreme Court—the last resort in this instance, because all previous decisions by the courts and review board had upheld the original sentence—declined to stay the execution, which was finally carried out around 11:00 p.m.

Epilogue/excursus

The only discordant note was struck by some outside "Spartacists," who, in their characteristically parasitical manner, attempted to attach themselves to this local protest in order to further their own interests. Typically, they made no statements about the Davis case and did not in any way take part in the event, instead (as is their default mode) merely attempting to peddle what they rather grandiosely call a "newspaper." (I hope that is not the sum total of their business model; I've never seen anyone actually buy the thing.) When one of them approached me, I made the mistake of being polite (yeah, I should know better), and she attempted to extol the virtues of the publication. Finally—even though it was the fortieth-anniversary edition (woo-hoo!)—I simply indicated that her parents had tried to sell me the same rag a generation ago, and I hadn't bought it (literally or figuratively) back then, either. She kept smiling her but eventually stopped talking.

Evidently the infantile leftists were not all smiles last time they darkened our doorstep, for today's internal college announcements included a lengthy statement protesting their presence on campus. The objection was not to their political views (which are merely ludicrous rather than dangerous), and instead, their social behavior. As the complaint explained, last year they "behaved in a transphobic and queer-phobic manner towards a transgender student of color on campus; in the process insulting both the student and that student's allies." To make matters worse, they declined to engage in proper (my characterization) Marxist-Leninist self-criticism: "Instead of apologizing or acknowledging the concern, the Spartacists claimed that transphobia was a made-up term, and although corrected multiple times, refused to address the student by their correct pronouns."

Not surprising that they had no idea how to talk about queer and transgender issues. They don't even have a clue about socialism. Sad that these wingnuts run around, interfering with our events and giving leftism a bad name. Maybe they should re-read what Lenin said about objective and subjective political conditions. Oh, yeah: and what their mentor Trotsky said about the garbage heap of history.

Ceremony Honoring African-American Civil War vets wrapping up

2011-09-18T14:43:00.000-04:00

Huge and enthusiastic crowd in West Cemetery today. Full report tonight.

[Update: an unusually busy stretch of days. The detailed reports will appear in installments by the end of the week.]

Local Colleges Mark 9/11 10.0

2011-09-17T03:12:00.000-04:00

All three institutions of higher learning in Amherst marked the tenth anniversary of 9-11, each in its own way.

The University of Massachusetts observed four moments of silence. Students placed flags on lawns and attended a vigil and interfaith service. Amherst College held an early-morning memorial service (at the hour at which the attacks began) as well as an evening discussion on how the world had changed in the intervening decade.

Hampshire College, as might be expected, marched to a different drummer (figuratively speaking of course. I don't think we are allowed to march: sounds too militaristic. African or Afro-Caribbean drumming is okay, though, In fact, students organized a "salsa parade" as part of their protest against admissions and construction policies last year. But I digress.)

Unlike the other two institutions, it did not (to the best of my knowledge) hold any sort of memorial for the victims. Like Amherst College, however, it sought to make the anniversary an academic and learning experience.

As has by now become the custom here, there was a screening of a film, "The Other Sept. 11," a commemoration of the 1973 coup in Chile, for which many hold the US responsible.

In addition, the Office of Spiritual Life, the Cultural Center, and the Center for Feminisms offered:"Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire: a critical view of the Administration we elected after 9/11--conservative, reactionary, and dangerous,"

and a screening of

"Saint of 9/11," which "documents the journey of a queer Fire Dept Chaplain- his life, struggles and transformation."

The main event, though, was: "9/11 Plus 10: Islam the Middle East, and the Future of American Foreign Policy," a faculty panel featuring Professors Omar Dahi, Sayres Rudy, and Falguni Sheth, moderated by Professor Michael Klare (Peace and World Security Studies) and introduced by new President Jonathan Lash.

I wish I could have attended the panel, but it was Select Board night. Duty called.

One minor note on the commemorations: I noticed that the American flag at the center of campus was flying at half-staff. This had not been the case in previous years, as in this photo from 2008.

In fact, this year, it was in the lowered position for at least three days, through September 13. Perhaps they were trying to make up for the past three years.

9/11 10.0 in Amherst: Lone Sign of Dissent

2011-09-17T01:33:00.000-04:00

As noted, the official commemorations of the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks were dignified and austere. An interesting contrast (or: complementarity) was created by the nearby presence of the traditional weekly Peace Vigil, a few yards away. Each group marked the day and expressed its values separately and simultaneously, at once close together and far apart.

There was, however, one lone protester, whose aim was more to confront and provoke. Carrying large placards, she paced back and forth behind the speakers in an attempt to capture the audience's attention. The passer-by here was clearly doing all she could to ignore her.

The reverse of the placards, displayed in alternation with these sides, was even more densely covered with writing. Although I was unable to get a photo, I recall that it included a denunciation of President Obama.

Not sure why she thinks removing Gadhafi from power is a bad thing. Spelling was not her strong suit, either.

In any case, the message seems to be that she is angry at people whom she holds responsible for killing, and thinks they should be . . . er . . . killed. Something like that.

Eventually, she walked across the street and just sat down on a bench in front of the bank, still glowering, still desperately hoping that someone was paying attention.

Vignettes of 9/11 10.0 in Amherst

2011-09-17T00:59:00.001-04:00

Here, a few further scenes of the day of remembrance in Amherst.

Police Station flag at half-staff

preparations on the north end of the Common, in front of the 1889 Town Hall

officials confer

Firehouse bell

Fire Department officers at the ready

Peace Vigil packs up at the end of its weekly event

decorated planter on Town Common

official flags fly this year

small flags planted by UMass Democrats and Republicans dot the downtown

flags in Kendrick Park

The Town of Amherst recently completed a lengthy public process to determine the future design and uses of the newly created park, expected to become a major gathering place at the north end of the downtown.

North Amherst farmhouse

I greatly appreciate ritual as long as it is tasteful and dignified. Particularly when it takes place as a true public action, it has the power to convey shared values and create or reinforce community. However the private and spontaneous commemorative gestures are often also compelling. I saw some on the way home after the official events downtown: a small flag mounted on a rural roadside mailbox, a flag flying from a house in an outlying area. Nothing grand, nothing that shouts: just small statements of mourning and belonging.

the end of the day

To Find the Principles

More on Problematic and Spurious Martin Luther King Quotations

On Martin Luther King, Monuments, & Drum Majors (and: Heinrich Heine)

Marking Martin Luther King Day, 2012

We Seem to Have a Winner in the Flag Contest

Something New to Run Up the Flagpole: Amherst Flag Selection Process Back in High Gear

Hampshire College, Israel, and Palestine: 1975 or 1938? And 2012? Still Seeking Civility on Campus

Putting the Hampshire College Divestment Myth in its Grave

Question-and-Answer on Israel and Divestment at Hampshire College (the "elephant in the room")

The Hampshire College Policy on Environmental, Social and Governance Investing: A Closer Look

Would have, could have, must have: Professional historian at work! Do not attempt on your own.

Sponge Bob Alienated Not Necessarily Heterosexual Pants

Hampshire College Presents New Socially Responsible Investment Policy; Said Most Rigorous in the Country

Pre-Occupied: Hampshire Anti-Israel BDS Activists Continue to Distort the Past, Look to the Future

Occupy Hampshire at last gets underway

Being A Wingnut Means: Never Having to Learn Spelling

To Bigotry No Sanction: Antisemitic Nutjob on Parade (by himself)

December 10, 1830: Birthday of Emily Dickinson; recorded in doctor's journal

Covering Amherst 100-Percent: With the 99%

The Select Board Welcomes the Amherst College President, Anno 1994

Town Greetings: Inauguration of Carolyn "Biddy" Martin as President of Amherst College

Your Select Board: Covering Amherst 100% (another example)

Snowtober Postmortem

Veterans Day in Amherst

Amherst Village Center Rezoning: A Conversation

Snowtober Snapshots

Snowtober: Covering Amherst 100% (eventually)

Interfaith Relations and Genuine Multiculturalism: 2011 vs. 1723

Intolerance Update

Breaking News Broken: Planning Board Decides to Do . . . Nothing

Breaking: Zoning Subcommittee Recommends that Planning Board Backtrack on Controversial Intensified Use in North Amherst

Snowtober, Snowmageddon: whatever you call it, it's pretty nasty

Season of Tolerance, Season of Intolerance: Vandalism of Sacred and Historic Sites in the Middle East

Prophet Isaiah: Occupy Jerusalem!

Planning Bodies Continue to Grapple With Village Center Rezoning

Occupy Wall Street, er, . . . wherever

Jewish High Holy Days (and a whiff of antisemitism)

Milan Kundera on Vandalism and Historic Preservation

29 September: Birthday of Architect Henry Hobson Richardson

The Great Hurricane(s)

September Anniversaries Wrap-Up

Honoring Amherst's African-American Civil War Soldiers: "Assault on Fort Wagner": "The Rush of the Garrison to the Parapet"

Hampshire College Students Hold Vigil for Troy Davis

Ceremony Honoring African-American Civil War vets wrapping up

Local Colleges Mark 9/11 10.0

9/11 10.0 in Amherst: Lone Sign of Dissent

Vignettes of 9/11 10.0 in Amherst