Antisemitism and Me–and You

Antisemitism has not been my cause.  I have rarely felt threatened or sufficiently angered by the “light touch” of antisemitism in friends, colleagues, teammates and institutions—though I’ve taken note.  I’ve been irritated.  I’ve been contemptuous.  As terrible and moving as the Holocaust was and how close to my life it lurked, it never turned into a central theme in my life, my work or even my thinking.  I have never felt called to action by antisemitism—until now. 

No doubt, my casual attitude was built within the castle walls of safety in the United States of America.  Between my birth in 1942 and the present moment the kind of antisemitism that has, for century after century, flooded so much of European history with Jewish blood, has been minimal and relatively easy to ignore for people as protected and, therefore, privileged, as I have been.

My family’s safety allowed us to focus on what we saw as a greater cause: the oppression of the poor, the working classes, and minority groups.  In my childhood home, Zionism, the monumental effort to create safe haven for the remaining Jews in the world, had a romantic ring to it, like the spirit of the movie, Exodus, but it was treated almost as a diversion.  A very good thing, up to a point, but problematic when it siphoned energy and people from the universal march of socialism. 

But this way of thinking takes place primarily in the privacy of my mind.  I have never publicly argued this point.  And when Christian friends comment on Jews in America, even sympathetically, much of the fear and anger and anguish that I have ceded to others comes flooding in.  All of a sudden, I tell my friends about being attacked at the age of 12 by a gang of Catholic kids when I was riding my bicycle to Hebrew School.  I tell them about the KKK, Father Coughlin, and about the hordes of “good citizens” who wanted to boot us out of America—or to exclude us from immigration.  I mention the quotas on Jewish kids in Ivy League schools when I was applying to college.  And I confess that I mistook the snobbery of the Harvard prep school kids, which I took almost exclusively for a social class kind of thing.  But, as a good friend confessed, it really was antisemitism at its subtle best. 

In other words, I generally don’t think about how antisemitism affects me and my compatriots until I have even the slightest opportunity to tell my story—or, more accurately, to tell our story. 

But antisemitism in America and elsewhere has once more broken into the open and threatens to return to the days of Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, the Ku Klux Klan, and the refusal to admit Jews into this country during the 1930’s, even though they were already being murdered by the hundreds of thousands in Europe.  Most tellingly, antisemitism has become integral to American rightwing ideology, to the White Christian Nationalism movement, and to the conduct of the so-called cultural wars. Symbolized by the liberal philanthropist, George Soros, we have become the enemy to too many in America and Europe. 

I have built up internal defenses against these forces but not so readily against the antisemitism that has worked its way into the American left, framed primarily in terms of anti-Zionism.  I oppose the Israeli Occupation and more generally, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  But why does this outrage seem easier or more central to my leftwing fellow travelers than our own centuries-long oppression of Black and indigenous peoples in the United States or the colonialism and racism of our European allies.  What about the oppressive—and racist—regimes of Israel’s neighbors?  And what about the uptick and relatively indiscriminate targeting of Jewish students on college campuses.

After all these years, the rapid rise of American antisemitism has forced me out of hiding.  My wife has always been vividly aware of antisemitism.  Lately she has joined a local effort to build an interfaith and intercommunity coalition to oppose antisemitism and to support other efforts to fight against hatred in all its forms.  While we need public policy and programs at all levels of society, building a local base, person-to-person, seems the most promising to her.

And to me, too.  The fight needs to be personal, immediate, and passionate.  So I am helping.  I am trying to bring to bear whatever skills in organizational and community development that I’ve learned over the years.  When she goes to meetings, I go, too.

I believe that my lifetime of passive opposition to antisemitism reflects the attitudes of many, if not most of my friends and colleagues.  But the time for passivity is over. Throughout our lives, we have been fighting the good fight against many forms of bigotry.  The fight against antisemitism must be part of that fight—not just for our tribe but for our tribe, nonetheless.   

This is a struggle for human justice.  When antisemitism is easily tolerated, other hatreds are, too.  Let’s stand up and stand together.

“America. I’m a Good Family Therapist. Hire Me!”

Have you noticed that our angry, embattled country is like a dysfunctional family?

One evening, when trying to sleep, I found myself in one of those strange places where my mind flitted from image to image, from thoughts that weren’t thoughts—just fantasies—to new fantasies posing as thoughts.  And, into this gauzy world, a woman, who I vaguely knew, came to me with an urgent request: tell me how to lift this poor, angry country out of its endless crises?

I get it.  Our country is a mess.  We fear and dislike one another.  We don’t understand one another because, among other reasons, we live in vastly different factual worlds: Fox worlds and MSNBC worlds and little corners of Twitter and Facebook.  Rural communities clear that cities are violent, bottomless pits of immorality. City dwellers appalled at the ignorance and defensiveness of the small towns surrounding them, emboldened by the Christian Nationalism that has taken root in rural America.   

It is as though we were a married couple with children and maybe a few cousins, aunts and uncles, once compatible enough, but now barely able to share a dinner table.  Year by year, the inclination to understand and compromise with one another, the willingness or even the ability to think and act maturely dissipates.  We enlist others to our side, passionately trying to convince them to the truth of our grievances.  And the desire to preserve the union yields to the twin imperatives to defend “our gang” and to punish the ‘others.’  Or to conquer them.  It is a truly Hobbesian world: attack before being attacked.

To say the least, this would be a tough case for a family therapist.  It would be for me.  But the image of the entreating woman from my dream remained as I awakened, and I know that she speaks the truth: my beloved country is losing its grip on democracy.  So, yielding to fantasy and grandiosity, I began to muse on her challenge: how might a clinician save this family.

I’ve seen families in comparable disarray, filled with physical and sexual violence, within and between generations, children injured and out of control, poverty stricken and hungry.  You name it.  And everyone blames the others for the troubles.

As clinicians, trying to disentangle the painful mess that some wishful thinker or sadist has referred, we often try on a variety of ways to bridge the divide (or divides), often played out in sequence.  

• “Don’t you see that you want the same thing? Let’s search for common ground.”

• “You fell in love with each other partly because you were different, not the same.  Let me help you to rediscover that appreciation.”

• “Why does this seem like an irreducible gulf between you.  Let’s step back, calm down, get some perspective, maybe do some negotiating.”

• “There’s something about each of your individual (past) experiences, np longer fully conscious that’s distorting your perspective and blocking your efforts to come back together.   Let’s try to get those feelings and images into the open so we can talk about them.”

These approaches work sometimes, especially when the problems aren’t multiple and so intertwined that, the minute you solve one, another pops up.  It may be that one member of the family buys into your interpretation and the other thinks it’s a load of crap, which alienates the first, which then hastens a downward spiral.  Often enough, when the problems are deep and long in the building, there’s a stalemate at best, and a growing and virtually impregnable divide.  There are betrayals, for instance, that move people beyond forgiveness and repair.  And when there are children, this seems particularly heartbreaking. 

Sometimes it’s possible to build a truce, based on the children’s welfare.  That is an agreement about how the family behaves, no matter what they feel. That can work but often fails, as well.  Sometimes you can develop a structured approach to enforce the truce, such as a the use of a court-appointed “guardian ad litem,” whose sole mandate is to protect the welfare of the children and has almost no interest in appeasing the parents or resolving their struggles.  This kind of structured plan has the additional advantage of separating the waring adults.  But it can fail, too. 

Here’s the approach that I sometimes fall back on.  Having tried a variety of strategies to bring people together and then acknowledging their futility, you shift your approach dramatically by announcing that there’s nothing to be done, nothing at least that you can do. 

And here’s the paradox contained in that approach: the couple has grown so accustomed to your lengthy and strenuous efforts to save the family that it has given up its own efforts.  You have become the person most urgently seeking change.  When you stop, when you say that there’s nothing more you can do, they are shocked, then irritated and angry.  “You can’t give up…. We’ve spent all this time, energy, even faith—and, by the way, money—on you.” 

And then comes at least some realization that they will have to wage the battle of peace themselves.  Or give up.  In either case, there’s reason to stop fighting.  The choice is starkly before them. 

This doesn’t happen immediately.  The adults argue with you, insist that you keep trying.  You have to insist, time after time, that there’s nothing more you can do.  The more they argue, the more they propose solutions or, at least, propose how they can try.  You might say: “OK, give it a try.”  The trying quickly devolves into acrimony and chaos.  You reiterate your resignation.  Maybe several times.  Then the whole process comes to a standstill. 

Then what?  Everyone looks at one another in disbelief.  If this pause is sustained, two things generally happen.  One, they give up.  But often enough, people take stock, think about priorities—like the welfare of the children.  And, often enough, they ask for, even demand, an arbitrator.  Not a negotiator but someone who will tell them what to do and, possibly, enforce whatever peace is prescribed.  A peace that, likely, includes a divorce or an enforced separation.  With the help of the court, of course. 

So back to the big wide world of America.  How do these therapy strategies apply to our divided, defensive, angry nation? Here are a few thoughts.

• Might we acknowledge that we simply can’t agree and that neither party can fully defeat the other. 

• Might we choose a truce over a bloody civil war? 

• Might we agree to an arbitrator (a temporary arbitrator, not an ongoing dictator? A national “guardian Ad litem” with a two or three- year term limit? The term limit is set to avoid authoritarian control. 

• Might we divide the nation?  Work out a geographical division and encourage people to move to the areas that fit their beliefs and their needs? And assign a ‘guardian’ with term limits to adjudicate the differences?  Much like we have seen in post war agreements?

If politics were more like family dynamics and family therapy, the likely outcome would be an acknowledgement of irreconcilable differences, resulting in divorce, with institutional support provided for the children. 

Might we have a national referendum to decide this case?  And, if the decision was divorce, would the referendum also include institutional ways to enforce the peace between the previously warring parties.  Something like the Paris Peace Treaty that set the terms after World War II?  And might the national reorganization consider three or four smaller nations, not just the two who are most likely to carry on hostilities towards one another?

Surely, each of the new nations would need some kind of constitutional conventions to reset their legal structures and affirm their national purpose.  After all, constitutional conventions are long overdue.

                          ——————————–

I know this has been a fantastical exercise, but the way we’ve been going in our current form may be equally ridiculous and certainly destructive.  We may have been assuming common ground when it is, at best, slim.  Why not think about a divorce?

The Course of Creativity in Our Lives

The last two years have been hard on me.  My younger brother, Kenny, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died a painful, painful death several months later.  We had been very close throughout our lives.  Some months after he died, my dear sister, Jackie, was also diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died within a few months.  Then, about a month ago, my long-time buddy, Carter, finally faded away after years of debilitating dementia.

During this time, I soldiered on, keeping my emotions more or less in check in an odd and probably misconceived effort to be brave for others.  But the result may have been that the very same ‘discipline’ also checked or dampened my mind.  I began to procrastinate, to lose sight of many practical things, to seemingly lose my capacity for sustained and intense attention, as though willing to trade attention for less pain. 

I see that now and need to return to myself. Throughout my life, when faced with a roadblock, I have climbed out or over by creating something new: a new idea, a new way to understand myself, a new organization, a new book or article; or a new building project, like the house in New Hampshire and our cheery kitchen in Newton.  At 80, these energizing, creative projects seemed unrealistic or even unattainable. 

Among other things, my attentional capacity seemed to have waned.  As it waned, I grew stagnant, which is dispiriting.  In place of creativity, I have tried to convince myself it is enough to enjoy each day, to live in the eternal moment, to find gratitude for what I have, which is plenty.  But these lovely attitudes haven’t done the trick, and truly never have.

Yearning for the life-giving nourishment of creative activity, I decided to take a side road.  I’d look into the research on aging and creativity, to see what the experts say about creativity across the life span.  To study myself, in effect, and see if there are avenues I have not yet tapped. Here is some of what I’m learning.

According to both scientific belief and cultural lore, creativity takes place primarily in the land of the young.  We think of Einstein presenting the Special Theory of Relativity at 26 and Steve Jobs beginning Apple Computers at 21.  We envision poets, like Keats and Shelly blooming and dying in their twenties.  Dylan Thomas wrote Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, his famous cri de coeur about aging, when he was in his early thirties.  I am a little older than that.

The researcher, Dean Keith Simonton, tells us that creativity tends to heighten in the mid-twenties and peak during the late thirties and forties.  Then it begins a slow, often steady decline from that point on.   According to that narrative, I may be experiencing the last few yards along that road.   

What seems to happen, according to researchers is that we become adaptive.  We stop rebelling and experimenting and accept things more or less as they are, “making us more effective with people and society. We become prisoners of our own success. Sticking with what works makes us both more successful and less creative.” (Simonton)

Lots of contemporary research tells us that our minds become less “plastic” and, as we try to hold onto what has made us successful, less exhilarated and more fearful when we encounter the new and unknown. 

But here’s a hopeful note: much of the research that draws these conclusions is based primarily on the quantity, not quality of the work.  It seems that for every Keats and Einstein, there are the late creative outbursts of Beethoven (his late string quartets) and Thomas Mann (The Merchant of Venice).  There are also numbers of late bloomers like Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, Raymond Carver, and Henri Matisse.  Charles Darwin didn’t bring together his thoughts on evolution until the age of 50. And many of our greatest poets produced their best work in old age.  Think of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. They may have produced less volume in old age but they continued on their creative pathways, often producing their most profound and contemplative poetry.

That’s encouraging.  What’s my rush?  What if I wrote just a little each day or week. What if I helped others build their organizations, instead of building one myself?  Which I already do as I coach many young nonprofit leaders. And there’s no reason the quality has to drop off.  My advice is undoubtedly different, since I’m different than I was at 50 or 60 or 70, but I can at least hope, that the difference is a good one.

I am surely not a creative master like those I noted above but, like them, the tone of my late work might be similar in its inclinations.  Beethoven’s strange and haunting late quartets, for example, diverge markedly from the immensely melodic work of his youth.  Yeats’ late poetry is less exuberant but profoundly and movingly meditative.  Monet’s paintings seem to bloom when finally released from conventional restrictions.  And the stunning simplicity of Georgia O’Keeffe’s late paintings are both meditations achieved over a lifetime, and explosions of the moment.  I identify with these kinds of shifts.

Here’s another variation on the idea of linear and universal decline.  The output of creative people tends to vary according to discipline.  Lyrical poets and mathematicians, for instance, almost always peak early, then decline, often rapidly.  But philosophers, historians, and psychologists, having absorbed complex ideas and information over full lifetimes, often reach their peak late in life.  I’m surely no lyrical poet but maybe I fit—and maybe you fit—in the latter category.

For some, creativity flashes in a moment, then disappears.  For others, productivity lasts a lifetime and well into their seventies and eighties.  Some feel and accept the decline.  Phillip Roth, for example, sensed the end and, as he approached eighty, and simply stopped writing.

Here’s yet another description of creativity and the lifespan: Some researchers have developed the idea of “career age” to differentiate it from chronological age.  So, we see early and late bloomers hitting stride at vastly different life stages, ranging from late teens to late seventies or even eighties.   

“One striking implication of these results,” wrote Simonton, “is that it seems unlikely that creative declines are caused simply by aging brains. If that were the case, it would be hard to explain why the creative path differs by domain, lifetime output, or the time someone embarks on his or her career. After all, late bloomers reach creative peaks at ages when early bloomers are past their prime. So, the good news is that it is possible to stay creative throughout one’s life span.”

In previous essays, I have sketched some of the ways that psychologists have accounted for the variety of creative styles along the life span.  I talked about Raymond Cattell’s notion of “fluid” intelligence of youth and its capacity to find new ways to see the world, compared with the “crystalized” intelligence of age that is comprehensive, not inventive, and brings together large factual and conceptual fields in unique ways.

I recounted Baltes’ model of “selection, optimization, and compensation,” the SOC model, and his brilliant description of Artur Rubenstein’s late application to piano virtuosity.  For instance, since Rubenstein couldn’t play as fast in old age, he could slow down a great deal before playing very fast, bravado passages of music, creating the illusion of his former speed.

So, what shall I conclude from this research?  First, that creativity, in and of itself, is good for us.  Innumerable researchers have concluded that creative activities have a positive effect on both physical and mental health. Research suggests that creative expression gives old people a sense of purpose, helps to sustain their coordination and concentration, and even improves their mental health.

Simon de Beauvior has something even more forceful and, to me, animating, to say about that: “There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning…”

So, I have a goal: Each day, I will try to lift myself from disengagement, from attentional drift, and devote myself again to the political and creative values that have always animated me—and expect, not just hope, that they straighten my muddled mind and lift me from grief and lethargy.