Session 12: My Family History & How Jews Became White People

This weeks session focused on family histories and the importance of knowing where we come from in order to ground and sustain us in anti-racist work.  As part of preparation for the session, we were asked to do family history research.  Here is what I discovered through mine, with an analysis of it below:

Dad's side:

His paternal grandparents came to the U.S. from Lithuania in the 1890s due to political unrest and economic hardship.  They settled in Elgin, IL - where my family resides to this day - because it was one of only a few places in the Chicagoland area that was accepting of Jews at that time.  My great grandpa was a fruit and produce peddler - he would buy produce in Chicago and then bring it back to Elgin to sell door to door.  He started the first and still only synagogue in Elgin.

My Grandma’s family came over from Germany in the 1930s.  My Grandma Lora was first to arrive.  Her family was wealthy and she attended an elite private school and was convinced she would not be targeted there.  When she was kicked out of her school for being Jewish she decided it was time to leave.  She moved to Hyde Park, Chicago on her own at the age of 16 where her Uncle was living.  She worked retail in the city.  Right as the Holocaust was starting her sister Margot - my namesake - and her parents joined her in Chicago.  To our knowledge, the rest of the family was killed.

My grandparents met at a camp meant for young Jews to meet their partners. The agreement was that Lora would move to Elgin and move in with my grandpa Harold and his mother.  His mother - Grandma Mudi I believe - insisted on a kosher kitchen, so along with having separate dishes, Lora would have Kosher meat shipped in on the train out to Elgin.  Harold and his brother-in-law started a scrap iron business, which was very lucrative during the war because of the high demand for metal.  They would buy scrap metal and burn it down to resale.  Together, they purchased Elgin Lumber and owned both 50/50, Harold running the lumber side.  Eventually, they dissolved the joint partnership and sold each other their respective shares.  This created some sort of family feud causing a grave division within the family in which communication was basically cut off.  Elgin Lumber was changed to Seigles somewhere around then.

My memories of my grandma Lora are that we could never ask her about her experience in Germany.  She spoke Yiddush but according to my memory refused to speak it to us. She very much wanted to distance herself from her traumatic past.  My grandpa was a serious and tough loving man.  The majority of my memories of him include him sitting on a big black leather chair and him making all the grandkids give him kisses on the cheek.  After his death my Grandma funded a huge renovation of the synagogue in his memory.

Mom's side:

Her paternal great grandparents came from Bohemia of Czechoslovakia in the late 1800s.  My grandpa Herb's dad was a butcher.

Her maternal great grandparents came from Russia in the late 1800s or so.  Her grandpa was a lawyer and was of the aristocrat class, and spent a year or so in Japan as a lawyer for the WWI trials.  Bertha, her grandma was an activist and attended every hearing during the trials.

My grandparents met through friends and moved to Elgin because it was a nice town not far from Chicago with a strong Jewish community.  My grandma Cyril went to Radcliff at the age of 16 to study English and fashion.  She worked in fashion in Chicago for years and then got her real-estate license - one of the first women in the state to do so - once she moved to Elgin and practiced for 10 or so years.   My grandpa Herb went to art school and then worked at Sears decorating display windows (defying gender roles, one window at a time!).  He then worked at Merra Lee as a window dresser, Merrill Chase Art Gallery selling art after that, and finally returned to Merra Lee as a buyer for women's clothing.  He changed their last name from Freund to Friend because it was easier for people to pronounce.  They were also involved in the synagogue and had a lot of friends from that as well as a group of Catholic friends from their neighborhood.

My Grandma Cyril who passed away just over a year ago was a fierce, accepting and honest women.  When she found out I was gay she could have cared less.  She valued friends, community, family and most of all the english language.  She was quick to criticize anyone who mis-used it. My earliest memories of my Grandpa Herb were him trying to force feed me tomatoes by putting salt and then sugar on them. I hated both.  He was an avid gardener and constantly fundraising for the Elgin Symphony.

All of my grandparents lived healthy lives, passing away somewhere in the range of 90 years old.

These histories tell a story of privilege and oppression, of isolation and interdependence, of loss and survival.   When my ancestors came to the U.S., they faced huge challenges - they were discriminated against when applying for college and limited by quotes on Jewish students.  They were seen as loud, greedy, dirty and pushy among other things.  In the piece "On Being White and Other Lies", James Baldwin explains how European immigrants who arrived in the United Stated did not arrive here white, but had to make the decision to become white "because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation."  He answers the questions, how did Europeans take on this false identity?: "By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared to a white child's life."

He specifically discusses the Jewish community within this process:

"It is probably that it is the Jewish community - or more accurately perhaps, its remnants - that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white.  For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white”

Through this assimilation to whiteness, my Grandpa Harold was able to start a successful lumber company that my dad later took over.  My Grandma Lora was able to put her history of persecution behind her and live in safety and comfort.  My Grammy Cyril – the granddaughter of immigrants fleeing their country of origin - was able to attend Radcliff.  My Grandpy Herb was able to be an artist.  All were able to live peaceful lives outside the city and escape their parents’ (and their own in my Grandma’s case) reality of overt discrimination. 

How did Jews like my family move out of poverty and in to upward mobility?

In the 1940s, the GI bill offered educational benefits and technical training to white men returning from the war, allowing them to take advantage of white collar jobs that became increasingly available in the 1950s.  In her book “How Did Jews Beomce White People?, Karen Brodkin Sacks explains, “Sons of working-class Jews now went to college and became professionals themselves according to the Boston survey, almost two-thirds of them”.  In the 1950s, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and the Veterans Affairs (VA) financially supported white buyers and builders in the move to the suburbs through low-down-payments and low interest long term loans.  Federal highway funding which covered 90% of highway construction cost was also crucial in suburbanization, providing a way for residents to travel easily to and from the city.  

Sacks explains: “The myth that Jews pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps ignores the fact that it took federal programs to create the conditions whereby the abilities of Jews and other European immigrants could be recognized and rewarded rather than denigrated and denied. The GI Bill and FHA and VA mortgages were forms of affirmative action that allowed male Jews and other Euro-American men to become suburban homeowners and to get the training that allowed them – but not women vets or war workers – to become professionals, technicians, salesmen and managers in a growing economy”

It is also important to breakdown what gave Jews a particular advantage. Sacks quotes Steinberg on his debunking of the myth that Jews advanced because of cultural value on education. "Jewish success in America was a matter of historical timing...[T]here was a fortuitous match between the experience and skills of Jewish immigrants, on the one hand, and the manpower needs and opportunity structures, on the other".  Sacks explains, "Jews were the only ones among the southern and eastern European immigrants who came from urban, commercial, craft and manufacturing backgrounds, not least of which was the garment manufacturing".  She continues: "My belief is that the Jews who were upwardly mobile were special among Jews (and were also well placed to write the story)." 

This allowed Jews to take advantage of positions as the middle man: the butcher, the street vendor, the money lender, the door to door fruit salesman.  As the middleman, they were often scapegoated for economic crisis and rising prices.  In more recent times, the Jewish “middleman” looks different: now a days, upwardly mobile Jews are often doctors, teachers, landlords, lawyers, placing us as the poster child for success, and hiding the mostly white, Christian corporate executives that are truly controlling the economy.  So when things like the economic collapse happens, people are often quick to blame the Jews, as those are the people they come into contact with on a much more frequent basis that have visible access to power and privilege.  Kaye/Kantrowitz in her piece “Jews in the U.S.: The Rising Costs of Whiteness” elaborates: “When a community is scapegoated, members of that community are most conscious and often feel humiliated, alienated, endangered. But the other function of scapegoating is almost as pernicious.  It is to protect the problem which scapegoats are drafted to conceal: the vast system of profit and exploitation, of plenty and scarcity existing side by side.”

This middleman history can even be tied – as I am just beginning to understand - to the occupation of Palestine, which Christian Zionist knew was too controversial and conflict creating for they themselves to occupy.  But similar to how the colonist created slavery to divide the Africans and Europeans in order to dissuade worker power and how the British created the Witch Hunts to divide the women and men (more on this to come), it is in the interest of the power elite – the 500 or so mostly Christian white men that control this country - to create tension between Jews and other ethnic groups so we blame each other instead of seeing the true enemy that hides behind closed doors and gated communities. 

In my family’s case, my great grandpa first played that role as the middle man as a fruit vendor, which provided his family the resources for his son to start the scrap metal company which provided him the resources to buy the lumber company which provided my dad and his brother the opportunity to grow this small shop to the biggest lumber company in the Chicagoland area.  Three generations of middlemen. 

I in no way want to discount the work it must have taken to start and run any of these operations, but it’s important the context for which this was made possible – both the assimilation to whiteness that took place and the skills they arrived to this country already possessing.  

My family’s assimilation to whiteness and resulting accumulation of wealth gave and has given us a sense of safety and security, but to what cost?

We have lost a lot of our culture.  Our interdependence.  Our traditions and practices.  Our language.  Our sense of community.  Our sense of connection to place.  Our stories. Feelings of fear and scarcity are ingrained in to us even when we are living a reality of safety and abundance.

As Kaye/Kantrowitz says in reflection to Baldwin's quote about Jewish assimilation:

“What have we paid? How man of us speak or read Yiddish or Ladino or Hebrew? How many of us have studied Jewish history or literature, recognize the terms that describe Jewish experience, are familiar with the Jewish calendar, can sing more than three or four Jewish songs, know something beyond matzoh balls or stuffed grape leaves? Many of us – especially secular Jews, but also those raised in some suburban synagogues where spirituality took a back seat to capital construction, where Jewish pride seemed like another name for elitism – many of us have lost our culture, our sense of community. Only anti-Semitism reminds us who we are, and we have nothing to fight back with – no pride and no knowledge – only a feeble, embarrassed sense that hatred and bigotry are wrong. I have even heard Jews, especially “progressives” justify anti-semitism: maybe we really are “like that,” rich and greedy, taking over, too loud, too pushy, snatching up more than our share, ugly and parasitical, Jewish American Princesses, Jewish landlords, Jewish bosses, emphasis on Jewish. Maybe we really deserve to be hated.”

Within this story lay many contradictions and realities hard to face.  But as one gentile in the group commented towards the end of the session, Jews have a beautiful ability to resist those parts of our history that do not feel right while at the same time reclaiming our culture in a way that is our own.  With this in mind, I continue to live in this contradiction, navigate what a meaningful Jewish practice looks like to me, and fight for a world where no one has to occupy someone else’s land to feel safe.

(A side note that these are not my thoughts alone but lessons in my own words – except for the last sentence of the last paragraph, that was my brilliant mentor - that I pulled from conversations in and outside of the Braden Program.)

Session 11: Expanding Our Vision of What's Possible

One thing we talked about in the session on white supremacy is how it distorts white people's ability to envision liberation. On this session on Visionary Politics, we strengthened our muscle to vision a different world a bit by gaining some insight as to how organizers of color in the bay area are visioning beyond what is conventionally thought of as possible.

Like Loubna Qutami of the Palistinian Youth Movement which has brought together the Palestinian voices across the world to create a common agenda for justice and the right to return.

Or Rachel Herzig from Critical Resistance which is working from an abolitionist perspective - which sees prisons as a way to constrain, control and kill a certain part of society - to destroy the prison industrial complex, or the symbiotic relationship between private and public to maintain social and political control.  She sees the practice of hope as a way to sustain the possibility of a new world.

Or Patty Berne from Sins Invalid which challenges societies assumptions about people with disabilities as asexual by creating a space for artists with disabilities, centralizing artist of color and queer artists, to create performances at the intersection of disability and sexuality.

Or Carla Perez from Movement Generation which - as explained by Gopal previously - works from a place of resiliance based organizing as to not look to the creators of the problem for the solutions.   She talked about needing to escape the lies of our times - that credit equals money, that people are illegal, that a pill can be the cure.  MG - and originally from the Zapatistas - envisions a world where many worlds fit.

Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan expands on this vision in her article Window to a New World: "The finale of the story of our victory will be a post-globalized world based on local democracies, driven to meet residents needs in an equitable way and deeply rooted in a relationship to ecological place. It will be a world where many worlds fit, where there are a million different solutions to the question of how we should meet our needs and a million different forms of local participatory economies that emerge to meet these needs"

In a break out session with Carla, she talked about how winning every time is not most important, but rather challenging current rule and the assumption of who has the right to rule who, that we must broadcast the illegitimacy of the laws.  She talked about the idea of "translocal" - coordinated efforts at a neighborhood scale, for example a climate justice campaign bringing together struggles in Richmond, CA, Black Mesa, AZ and Detroit, MI.  Because in order to create real solutions on a national level, demands must be based in local struggles and experiences, not some office in Washington.  Carla is applying this in her own life, starting conversations with folks in her neighborhood around pressing concerns.  People of all backgrounds have come together in a "pod" as they call it to create an emergency response plan and figure out who has what tools and expertise.

It hit me after the break out session with Carla how - as a result of white supremacy and working within the non profit industrial complex - constrained my brain is from truly imagining anything outside of our capitalist system which inherently perpetuates oppression and exploitation.  These conversations got me thinking - what would it look like to create a translocal campaign against urban displacement that brought together local struggles in The Mission, SF, The LES, NYC, and Pilsen, Chicago - all historically immigrant communities that are slowly becoming yuppie havens.  And what would it look like in the LES - where I organized for 3 years prior - to do broadbased local organizing around emergency response planning (the LES was hit pretty bad by Sandy) creating a sense of interdependence and trust between the diverse neighborhood residents?  Can relationships formed through this kind of organizing prepare the neighborhood for an expanded definition of emergencies? Like the demolition of housing?  

It was also good to understand PODER - the organization where I am volunteering while in the Anne Braden Program - in the context of visionary organizing.  PODER does amazing things like grow food,  run an urban campesino program for Mission youth, gain control of the development of land and lead community based planning processes.  The project I've been most involved with is an emerging  restaurant and catering cooperative started and run by members of PODER.  This is such a clear manifestation of visionary organizing, folks out of work and/or tired of working for a boss who mistreats and disrespects them taking matters in to their own hands by creating their own establishment.

While sitting doing my readings for class at the restaurant on Thursday, I came across this in Steve Williams article "Name It & Claim It":
"There are important building blocks for us to take advantage of that have already been laid: workers coops, community gardens, community land trusts, local currencies, and time dollars.  All of these experiments could be vital and vibrant parts of a powerful movement to challenge the dominance of capitalism, but alone, they do not represent a fundamental threat to capitalism.  They are too easily assimilated into capitalism's logic as progressive window dressing.  The left must understand and eventually be able to talk to people about how these projects are incompatible with capitalism and together are central features of a new, more desirable and more sustainable economic system."

Theory became practice when I translated the quote to coop member Enrique who enthusiastically wrote it down in his notebook and began to talk about how excited he was to engage with patrons of the restaurant - through art, through the menu and through conversation, about how what they are doing is different and how it and others modeled after it are vital to the sustainability of the community.