The first thing you’ll want to do is get in touch with your most passionate grievances. Next, look for those grievances concerning which you have no questions and which you find confirmed daily by items in the news and/or interactions with people you see or imagine seeing each day. Then, identify that special grievance about which you are willing to admit, if only to your partner or a particularly sympathetic friend, that you can be “quite irrational sometimes.” It is this grievance that may be able to serve as the foundation for your Right-Wing Nut Practice (or RWNP).

At this point you may wish to wait a day, or at least take a break, because the second stage of developing a sustainable, satisfying RWNP requires you to disengage with the strong emotions that allowed you to identify the appropriate foundation. What you must do instead is to ask yourself what social or political remedies for this grievance have been tried in recent memory or are already in place. Think carefully about: whether any of these remedies were adequate or would have been adequate had more resources been made available by the government; or would now be adequate were they to be tried (again) today with only slight modification(s). If any such remedies exist you will need to go back to the beginning of the previous paragraph: your grievance was insufficient as a foundation for a successful RWNP.

If, however, you were unable to identify any such remedy, you are ready for the next stage of what advanced practitioners call “building out” your Practice. Ask yourself whether your foundational grievance could be remedied by a more extreme social policy or political decision than has been tried in the recent past or is being tried presently. Think hard, because if the answer is “No”, that no such remedy is possible, then you are not developing a good RWNP but only a species of hopelessness consistent with any number of moderate practices on the Left and the Right. But if you can think of a remedy that is both extreme and (in your mind) practical, you are ready to begin the build-out of your RWNP.

Although not absolutely essential to a successful Practice, many authorities recommend you pause at this stage to refine your grievance so that no current “mainstream” remedy can be said to “come close” to the social or political outcomes you desire. The purpose of this refinement is to strengthen your Practice and it is an especially good idea if you spend time with friends who enjoy debate, or people with any academic training in philosophy. Such refinement will not be difficult if you’ve followed the process of identifying a foundational grievance honestly, and the refined position will likely be more easily articulated, and therefore more easily defended, as a bona fide RWNP.

Notice that we have said nothing here about finding a model for your Practice, either in the form of a public or quasi-public figure, or in the form of a local mentor. Although your intuition may suggest you need a person on whom you can model your Practice, it is an unfortunate fact,  specific if not unique to RWNP, that many public and quasi-public figures, especially elected officials and media celebrities, are not simply poor RWN practitioners personally, but are very often inauthentic in their practice. Advanced practitioners are nearly unanimous, therefore, in teaching that a sustainable, satisfying RWNP must begin not with a model but with a strong foundational grievance.

Now we move to the further, and eventually to the full, articulation of your political position. To do this you will need to identify and consider:

• the mainstream (merely) conservative point of view concerning your grievance
• the mainstream (ridiculous) liberal point of view concerning your grievance
• the radical leftist (cartoon) point of view concerning your grievance

In distinguishing your position from those of the mainstream conservative, mainstream liberal, and radical leftist positions, you will need to find elements to incorporate into your position that are categorically opposed to elements of each of these three positions. Notice that we speak here of your position and not your beliefs. Perhaps the most important lesson at this stage of the development of a successful RWNP is to be mindful that we want to work on our political position and become attached to it so strongly that, when properly carried, it will eventually reflect back upon and transform our beliefs in certain useful ways.

Perhaps an example will be helpful. Let’s suppose that your foundational grievance concerns the imbecility of the American electorate. In identifying this grievance and making sure it can serve as a foundation of your RWNP, you may have a number of beliefs and commitments that, down the road, would lead you to moderate your passionate attachment to both innovative political remedies and extreme political positions that would of great help in building out your Practice. You might believe in the The Golden Rule, for example, or in the sanctity of the Bill of Rights as a document fundamental to the soul of America. Unfortunately, these beliefs make the articulation of a robust RWNP very difficult when they are allowed a causal role in developing the details of a political position. Therefore, we do not attempt to articulate or even attend to a great number of our beliefs once we’ve identified our foundational grievance, and we proceed to develop only our political position (and not assess our beliefs) using that foundation. Later, we will find that this position, when properly reinforced by particular opposing positions, can cause use to reduce our commitment to our previous beliefs and, in particularly successful cases, to revise these beliefs significantly.

So now, let’s suppose that, having made a productive and focused effort, you have arrived at: 1) a grievance to serve as the foundation for your RWNP; 2) a remedy or set of remedies  for the grievance distinct from those that have been tried or are currently being tried; and 3)  a political position built upon the grievance and the remedy that is distinct from those of mainstream conservative and liberal positions as well as those of the lunatic left. The next and final phase of developing the basics of a rich and sustainable RWNP is to find what experienced RWN practitioners call the “foundational targets.”

A foundational target is an element or aspect of the system of American democracy and/or American institutional arrangements that would need to be abandoned, or at least radically reformed, in order for your political position to win the day. While many RWNPs find their foundational targets in principles associated with the Constitution, an equal number use the Constitution to support their position (e.g. while having a particular government regulation or regulatory body as a foundational target). There is some debate between expert practitioners about the relative merits of foundational targets are that more or less stable over time. For example, some argue that identifying a foundational target in the Constitution is better for a life-long RWNP, while others think the prospect for rapid and/or sudden change  in a particular government body or regulation improves focus and energy, even when there is the possibility that the RWNP may have to be abandoned in the case of the successful dismantling of a particular regulation or institution. How one thinks about this controversy may depend as much on the age of the practitioner, and his/her previous political experience, as on the merits of particular foundational targets, so for the purposes of this introduction we will not explore the controversy further.

Having laid the foundation for your RWNP and built out a political position upon it and identified a foundational target, you must now develop the temporal aspects of your Practice. With unemployment and underemployment rates at historic levels, it is common to hear contemporary RWNP coaches and television spokespeople insisting on daily attention to your Practice, but of course this has not always been the recommendation of experts. In earlier times, a great number of well-known advanced practitioners devoted as little as one day per week to their RWNP, although in such cases the Practice was always highly developed and the exercises extremely productive (usually involving a good deal of writing or other forms of communication). What all accomplished practitioners agree on is that the choice of tempo for a sustainable, life-long, satisfying RWNP is crucial, because we know that many novices have had their Practice ruined not for want of an excellent grievance and a robust political position but by bad temporal choices. Therefore, here are a few questions that you should consider when deciding the temporal features of your Practice:

1. Is your RWNP something you wish to share with others and, if so, do you want those others to be like-minded or adversarial?
2. Do you want your RWNP to include “activism” and, if so, what sorts of activities do you aspire to (e.g. cafe discussions/arguments, letters to newspaper editors, postings on the Internet, local protests, national protests, underground activity, etc.)?
3. Do you intend your RWNP to generate income and, if so, do you aspire to turn your RWNP into a second (or first) career? (Here a word of caution is in order. While the job market for RWNP-suitable careers in radio, television and other media has been growing since the turn of the century, the average salary for these jobs has been falling, and after an upturn in university openings for those who achieved a certain degree of excellence in their Practice, the largest number suitable jobs in education remain at the secondary and community college levels. All this by way of noting that with RWNP, as with many forms of principled practice, money may be a poor reason to pursue it.)
4. Finally, is your RWNP something you wish to last a lifetime, or just for a fixed period of years, and how much/little revision would you like it to require in a given year/term/decade/etc.?

By answering these four questions, after articulating the other elements of your particular RWNP,  you will be able to decide more sensibly the forms that your Practice  will take, and the routines that will be necessary to sustain it. Fortunately — and unlike the foundation and political position at the heart of your Practice — your routines can be experimented with and modified over time, depending on your aspirations, and without necessarily effecting a crisis in your Practice.

A well-developed RWNP, carefully attended to, can be the source of a richer social and intellectual life as well as a form of therapeutic practice that ultimately reduces one’s anger and bitterness about one’s misfortunes and/or mistakes in life. At the same time you should always enjoy, and be mindful of enjoying, your reflections upon your RWNP as you experiment with new routines and expand the scope of your technique.

———————————————————————————————————–

“As unemployed Americans find part-time, temporary, and seasonal work, the official unemployment rate could decline. However, this does not necessarily mean more Americans are working at their desired capacity.”  (Gallup, April 1, 2010)

Reports of job statistics have been so discouraging for the last several months that paying serious attention to the underemployment problem in the US seems almost academic. The August 6 numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show adult unemployment holding steady between 9% and 15%, depending on the demographics, and recent news about strength in the balance sheets of the manufacturing sector, in the midst of a serious buyer’s market for workers, suggests that manufacturers have continued to use technology to reduce their long-term need for such workers.

As everyone looks desperately for what might bring these unemployment numbers down significantly — the fantasy in many, if not most, US cities being that somehow “small business” hiring can solve the problem — we need to recall the mid-90s, when the prospect of decreased long-term demand for full-time workers was raised by economists and technologists alike. Read Bill Clinton’s campaign speeches from 1992, gently explaining Robert Reich’s ideas about the future of wage work in a “global economy”; or read about the future of work and leisure in popular books written in the 90s by computer scientists like Hans Moravec, Nicholas Negroponte, and Ray Kurzweil; and you can find concerns that remain with us today, and will continue to remain even if we have some sort of “robust” economic recovery.

At the very least, the visions from the 90s suggested that the future would bring a need for a flexible American worker who was ready to cope with the unknown and peculiar combination of employment, underemployment, and unemployment that would likely characterize his working life. One of the reasons for Clinton’s immediate push for health-care reform and a massive job (re)training program — and watching his passionate and sensible State of the Union address from 1993 is especially heartbreaking these days — was an awareness that the changing world of work required a more stable system for assuring the health and capabilities of American workers. With these concerns in mind, the underemployment numbers reported by Gallup last week are especially sobering — Underemployment was steady in July at over 18%, and at a remarkable 28.4% for 18-29 year-olds — because it’s not clear that this has only or even mostly to do with the Financial Crisis of 2007-8.

Is there a realistic remedy for long-term underemployment in the US in the early decades of the 21st century, even with a significant economic recovery in the next 5 years? As technology continues to advance, and the phrase “global economy” has become a redundancy, we have to consider the possibility that the answer is: No. As technologists have pointed out for decades, this really could be a very good thing … if we learn to change the expectations we have about work, consumption, and the role of government! And if the answer is: Yes? Well, it will almost certainly involve significant changes in these very same expectations, and this is admittedly grim news for anyone who has observed the American resistance to changing course in the last 30-40 years.

In Judith Stein’s excellent new economic history of the 1970s, Pivotal Decade (Yale, 2010), one finds a brief mention of the origin of self-service gas stations. These began to spread in the early 1970s, around the time of the first oil crisis of that decade, and by 1978 “Americans … pumped 40 percent of the gasoline they used.” (Stein, 208). Although Stein makes little of this particular fact, it seems a sort of American epiphany: Given the choice between conserving or voluntarily cutting back on consumption, and having their neighbors be unemployed, Americans have historically and overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Variations on this same theme can be observed in the tone of the popular objections to health-care reform, immigration policy reform, and of course taxation; and, unfortunately, without the sort of leadership that can convince Americans to examine and change even this small feature of their character, it’s very difficult to imagine that a sustained 15-20% underemployment rate will lead to anything other than extreme income inequality and the social outcomes that extreme income equality always brings.

The child was fine. That was what everyone asked about and of course that was the most important thing. He had been up on the tower for perhaps forty-five minutes, and on some of the video you can see him laughing occasionally, at least until the blades begin to spin, but no one down below was laughing, even after the episode was over. “Someday,” a still unidentified person in the Salty Brine Beach parking lot had said, as the blades began to turn, “they will understand this as the story of Abraham and Issac,” and apparently this remark had provoked the brawl that had killed Mrs. Carol Kertale, of Peacedale, RI, ironically enough, but this had been the only significant physical injury of the day. The greater tragedy, in my opinion, was the mental deterioration of the father, Boswell  “Bimm”  Summers. A devoted father, his wife insisted even after the incident — she the daughter of the well-known local industrialist Giercloud, and heiress to the Rhode Island mouse bait fortune — but perhaps more devoted to the controversial Clapjack Bay Wind Project, she admitted, a project that was going to help the state’s historically pathetic economy, according to Professor Summers, by transforming Rhode Island into the global leader in turbine manufacturing.

Summers had convinced his students at Gaspee University, as well as most of his neighbors in the Providence suburb of Barrington, but the timing for such a large and risky investment was lousy, said his sympathetic Congressman, whatever the potential return, and the oil, coal and solar energy lobbyists would make sure that most of the energy dollars went elsewhere. It was the environmentalists who seemed to irritate Summers the most, however, the “so-called environmentalists” he called them, and the recent lengthy interview with the Executive Director of the influential Safe Environment for Living RI (SELRI), Dr. David Klank, that appeared over several days in the Providence Daily Business Journal, had included a claim about the dangers of wind turbines operating in populated areas that Summers regarded as not only false but pernicious. He wrote to the newspaper, and to members of the SELRI Board, calling attention to the misinformation and urging the dismissal of the Executive Director, but when these communications came to nothing, it seems that he conceived the stunt involving his 3 year-old son, Harry.

Having used Federal Stimulus money to redesign a parking lot and pavilion in Narragansett, and to build a wind turbine to power the new structure and thereby comply with “green” design requirements, the state had asked for Summers’ cooperation. Summers had donated his time as well as a state-of-the-art meter from his personal collection to measure the energy produced, although he made clear that the state had erred in not using a larger-sized turbine in order to make the cost-savings more dramatic. He was familiar with every detail of the turbine, of course, and thus knew not only how to climb the tower but how to stop the turbine, set the blades in place, and use the bolts already on the blades to secure young Harry in such a way that allowed the child to not be turned upside down even as the blades spun.

The weather had cooperated beautifully, and long before Summers and his son had reached the platform from which the blades could be controlled, a crowd had gathered with all manner of audio-video equipment. Several videos of the complete rotations of the blades with the boy attached had been uploaded to YouTube within the hour. “Spectacular madness,” said one of Summers’ colleagues in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Gaspee, and of course, depending on tomorrow’s coverage, he may have advanced the cause significantly.”

In 1988, the English writer J.G. Ballard wrote a remarkable story called “The Secret History of World War 3.” The story imagined Americans so distracted by the uninterrupted televised coverage of their President’s medical condition that they failed to notice the brief exchange of nuclear missiles, between the Soviet Union and the USA, that came to be known as the Third World War. In Ballard’s telling, Ronald Reagan is so dearly missed, after his second term, that the people demand his return. Despite his serious physical and mental dilapidation, not to mention legal term limits, he resumes the office.

In their obsessive concern for the health of their political leadership, they were miraculously able to ignore a far greater threat to their own well-being. (23)

I’ve remembered this story many times in the last few months as the Americans seem mostly to be ignoring what they can see in their own neighborhoods and cities, while faithfully looking to the newspapers, radio, television and the internet to give them their “economic news.” This “news” suggests either that the economy is recovering nicely or not-so-nicely, but in a style that suggests that the economy is a thing remote from anything they might be able to inspect for themselves.

If you attend a local City Council or School Committee meeting, however, as I have been doing recently in different Rhode Island municipalities, the irrelevance of the stories of economic recovery’s ups and downs is striking. Like all American communities, these Council and School meetings are open to the public and usually attended by a small group of concerned citizens. The realities of these meetings, in nearly all the municipalities, are similar:

1. There are very serious infrastructure problems that have not been attended to for the last 5-10 years. Deferred maintenance has been the rule, as projects have been put on hold in the face of unexpected, and then not-so-unexpected deficits.

2. There has been deficit spending despite (and really because of) laws that were designed to prevent deficit spending. Rhode Island is one of several states to have passed a state-wide cap on property tax increases, and these caps have been a disaster because of course they do nothing to contain the costs that lead to the need for such increases.

3. The State government has responded to their own deficits by cutting significantly their aid to municipalities. In East Providence, for example, these cuts will be between 1.5 and 2 million dollars between now and July!

4. What is proposed by City and School leaders are a variety of schemes that always involve enormous amounts of Federal assistance, and unrealistic assumptions about how much of their State’s slice of that Federal pie their own municipality is likely to receive.

5. Finally, in the case of nearly all municipalities (and states as well), the pension burden is growing so fast that in several communities it will be in the 40-50% range in the next couple of years (i.e. 40-50 cents of every revenue dollar will have to be used to service the pensions).

These are five features of local economic life in the United States that all Americans can inspect for themselves, and yet they are rarely attended to by large portions of the population and rarely discussed by large numbers of citizens. Instead one hears about unemployment in the aggregate, or various national statistics concerning home sales/prices or consumer confidence that are at best consequences of important measures rather than clear indicators in themselves.

There is certainly a kind of fantasy at work here, and it\’s one I think Ballard recognized in his story more than twenty years ago.

I switched off the set and sat back in the strange silence. A small helicopter was crossing the grey sky over Washington. Almost as an afterthought, I said to Susan: “By the way, World War 3 has just ended.” (31)

Ballard’s vision of Reagan’s third term is of course far more terrifying that anything facing Americans now, but unfortunately the deep economic problems facing nearly every town and city in the United States have none of the hilarity of that vision and are almost certainly not to be contained in a short story. Yet Americans still seem determined, if not exactly content, to distract themselves with the suspense of the economic pulses being broadcast on the screen.

As debates about the significance of the Greek debt crisis continue, there has been too little attention paid to a fundamental problem that the advocates of the Euro ignored or brushed aside years ago — actually, about the same time Greenspan, Rubin and Summers were brushing aside the problem of unregulated derivatives. The problem, simply put, is that every nation has a culture of work that cannot be changed quickly, except in extremis.

Paul Krugman pointed to one aspect of this problem in his 1998 piece in The New York Times, “The Euro: Be Careful What You Wish For,” when he noted that Europe can’t deal with “asymmetric shocks” the way the United States does, because “Europeans are reluctant to move even within their countries, let alone across the many language barriers.” But this is just one element in the complex set of work habits and expectations that growing up in a particular nation, at a particular time, makes “natural” for the great majority of a nation’s working population.

Martin Jacques has argued forcefully, in When China Rules the World (Penguin, 2009), that the assumption that post-Cold War economic development will always mean Westernization, is certainly mistaken. Less dramatically, we’ve known for a long time, from the experiences of globalized manufacturing corporations (e.g.  auto makers), that working with differences in the culture of work is critical to success.

I remember being on a plane from London in the mid-80s, seated next to an American on his way home to Detroit. He worked for Ford, and had just come from a frustrating visit to the Ford plant in Devon. What was the problem? He couldn’t understand the English. Ford was having a terrible time getting its Devon employees  to work additional hours, and this was mind-boggling to the fellow beside me, given how  fiercely workers at the Ford plants in the United State insisted on opportunities for over-time work. Apparently, no single incentive, or combination of incentives, that the Ford guy brought to Devon had solved the problem.

In cases like the unregulated derivatives and the Devon auto-workers, the reliable argument of “the smartest guys in the room” has been that the solution is always a matter of getting the incentives right, and the assumption is that this can be done very quickly if not immediately. What we learned in the case of the derivatives is that this argument is either trivial (because certain kinds of outcomes, like bankruptcy and death, are effective correctives) or facetious, because it ignores  culture and even time. As we watch the consequences of the Greek crisis continue to unfold, it might be worth thinking about what else, besides market incentives that lack strong cultural and temporal features, will be required if the Euro and the EU are to flourish.

Now that Israel is to be the homeland of the Jewish People and its civilization, it will have to foster the kind of Jewish religion that can afford to be voluntaristic and that will renounce all ambition to engage in power politics.\” Mordecai Kaplan, A New Zionism, (The Herzl Press, 1959), p. 92.

We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation… Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild.” Tzipi Livni, January 12, 2009, quoted in “Captives,” by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, November 9, 2009.

While all English translations of Pirke Avot1:10 begin with the sage Shemayah saying “Love work,” the translations of his next admonitions vary. Some translate them as “Abhor taking high office” and “Do not seek intimacy with the ruling power.” Others translate more generally: “Shun power and do not become close with the authorities.” Though the letter of the law may seem mysterious, however, the spirit is clear enough. It is not simply that Jews ought to study Torah and not occupy themselves with secular politics, but that Jews ought to understand that association with power and domination is not for them. Such associations and concerns are not conducive to an ethical Jewish life.

Reading Mordecai Kaplan’s forgotten book, A New Zionism, published first in 1954 and in a second expanded edition in 1959, one finds a rare sort of contemporary vision: a Zionism that regards Torah & Talmud Judaism and the regeneration of the Jewish people of the world as paramount, and nationalism as a secondary and arguably retrogressive feature of a Jewish future. With Israel barely a decade old, Kaplan recognized both the opportunities and the dangers that came with the power of statehood, and, courageously, he called for a society where Judaism and Jewishness could flourish, rather than for a Jewish state.

Unlike many Zionists of his generation, Kaplan believed: that the Jewish Diaspora had to be recognized as a permanent feature of a Zionist future; that the existance of irreconcilable attitudes of Jews about their religion was something to be acknowledged and accepted institutionally as well as personally; and that the state of Israel should exemplify modern democratic values, based on intrinsic and inalienable human rights.

Kaplan regarded Zionism, like Judaism, as something that must develop, and “should recognize and repudiate expectations that have turned out to be unrealistic.” (181) He believed that Eretz Israel should come to be the “nucleus” of world Jewry, but at the same time he insisted that Zionism was about the regeneration and development of Jewish people and Jewish life throughout the world, rather than about the forging of another nation .

For most American Jews, especially the young, Kaplan’s book may seem something from the future rather than the past. He argued against a Zionism based on, and justified by, the fear and recognition of anti-semitism, and made clear that “[i]n actual practice , neither ‘racial community’ nor ‘religious community’ has held Jews together.” (95) He recognized that the number of Jews who live in Israel is and will always be small compared to the number of Jews throughout the world, and argued that the majority of Jews who are not Orthodox must have a modern Jewish inheritance no less rich and authentic than those who continue to ground their practice in the supernaturalism and authoritarian social arrangements of the past. Finally, he seems to have recognized that Jewish tradition needs to be protected from the chauvinism of modern nationalism and the degradation that comes from adapting to the so-called political realities of the modern state. He wrote:

” … the State of Israel cannot be a Jewish State, nor can world Jewry continue to be a nation in the modern sense. The State of Israel will have to be an Israeli State, and world Jewry will have to be metamorphosed into a Jewish People which is rooted in Eretz Israel and which has its branches wherever it is allowed to live.”(93, Kaplan’s emphasis)

Although there is much that is heartbreaking about A New Zionismwhen we read it today — the sadness of better roads not taken — there is some surprise and encouragement as well. For example, Kaplan seems to have believed that Israel had to provide answers to major questions about Jewish identity and practice, and that Diaspora Jewry would be lost without such answers. Fifty years later I think it’s fair to say that most Jews outside Israel are not especially dependent on Israel for their ideas of Jewish society and identity, much less for their feeling of security.

Kaplan also believed that:

“The present crisis in Zionism is but a phase in the crisis in Judaism. The only way to overcome the crisis in Zionism is to deal with the conditions responsible for the crisis in Judaism.” (171-172)

Here it would seem he had things backwards: the crisis in Judaism in the 1950s, or at least American Judaism, was a crisis of Israeli (rather than pre-state) Zionism. Israeli leaders’ expectations of Jews throughout the world ran up against the strong but ultimately limited identification with the state, especially by American Jews. One recalls the famous 1950 statements by Ben-Gurion and Jacob Blaustein, in which Blaustein made clear (and Ben-Gurion was forced to accept) that American Jews did not consider themselves ”in exile” and were not to be so considered by the state of Israel.

The problem of Israeli expectations continued for decades, but not as a crisis for Judaism, which flourished in many nations often accompanied by growing agnosticism about what the state of Israel requires of a Diaspora Jew. I think Kaplan would be quite startled, and pleasantly so, by the degree to which Jewish Community Centers throughout the United States have provided substantive and sustaining Jewish identity and community. Indeed, if Kaplan’s love of the natural sciences led him to use the metaphor of the “nucleus”, it seems that half-a-century later Jews have taken their metaphor from technology, recognizing that healthy networks can have many nodes, none necessarily more important than any other.

Which brings me to Tzipi Livni’s machismaand the controversy concerning the warrant for her arrest recently issued in the United Kingdom. What Kaplan’s book reminds us is that Livni’s predicament represents neither a crisis of Judaism nor a crisis of Zionism, but only a crisis of secular power politics. And one needn’t know the chapters of Pirke Avot or Kaplan’s book to recognize that Ms. Livni’s choices and comments have had as little to do with Zionism as with Torah & Talmud Judaism.

What Livni’s behavior does recall, however, is the phenomena discussed in Paul Breines’ important (and oddly out-of-print) book Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (Basic Books, 1990). Breines’ book — which should not be confused with a book with the same title by Rich Cohen — described a history of “tough Jew” representations in American film and literature. He devoted a chapter to what he called “The Rambowitz Novels” and indeed it seems to me that Livni herself is character out of this tradition. But whereas Breines’ book acknowledged that the Tough Jew depictions in American literature became more complicated after 1982, Livni’s bravado seems foolish at best (and brazen at worst), precisely because of Israel’s military misadventures since that time.

And so, with Pirke Avot 1:10 in mind, along with Livni’s mercilessness, I was grateful to rediscover Kaplan’s A New Zionism. His book remains a vision of Zionism that is at once hopeful, devout, humane, and realistic: perhaps a source for a brighter, more ethical Zionist future:

“As Jews we have to stake our existence as a People upon the ultimate establishment of societies, whether nations, churches, or peoples, on the basis of universal freedom, justice and peace. The transition from supernaturalistic and authoritarian society to a naturalistic and democratic society is bound to be slow and checquered. We cannot afford, however, to let every reactionary wave make us doubt the actual direction of the tide.” (44)

A young woman was sitting at the table ahead of mine at Starbucks this morning working on a PowerPoint about Vasodilators, I noticed as I walked in, and her blondeness and general whiteness made it difficult for me to tell whether she was an undergraduate or a medical student. I sat down facing her and noticed that she wore a gray cardigan over a t-shirt I recognized at once. This was the design on the t-shirts sold during Led Zeppelin’s 1977 tour, and I had bought one then, though hers was obviously a replica, I thought, not just because t-shirts rarely last thirty years but because this woman was probably learning to master a fork when my own Zeppelin-induced vasodilation took place.

After a few minutes, the table beside hers was occupied by two blonde moms who had come from dropping off their daughters at the Hurstley School. I’ve seen one of them in local cafes fairly often, always clean-looking and attractive enough, but pushing things with the pony tail, I think, and apparently unwilling to smile. The moms seemed to be discussing discontents and grievances of one sort or another until the unsmiling mom, who was facing the young woman with the computer and the Led Zeppelin t-shirt, became distracted by the color of the girl’s hair. Soon she had convinced the other mom to turn around completely to admire the work, which was actually lit quite perfectly by the spotlights that converged on the young woman’s head, though she was focused on vasodilators and various text messages and didn’t seem to notice the attention. I returned to my book and thought: I often joke that, here in New England, all blondes look the same to me; but what if this is basically true?

A full five minutes went by before the mom on the far side got up, approached the young woman, complemented her, and asked where the hair coloring had been done. The young woman was happy to oblige and indeed she had several business cards from the hairdresser in Harrisville who had created these much-admired low-lights. The young woman said she had received many compliments, which didn’t seem to register with the unsmiling mom one way or the other, and as they talked about something to do with the cost or the coloring process I could see rising a mutual recognition that, in fact, nothing the low-light artist in Harrisville could do was going to give this mom what she wanted. Soon the young woman with the t-shirt of vintage design was back to her PowerPoint, and the moms were gathering their empty paper cups for the trash. They left the table without saying goodbye to the young woman, but she noticed them leaving nonetheless, and her eyes followed them out the door with a minor smile of surprising energy.

The recent attempted slaughter of the 18-member Board of the Rhode Island Amateur Ballet Advocacy Council (RABAC), by its newly hired Executive Director, during the organization’s annual retreat in Pawtucket, has sent shock waves through the nonprofit world. Although the Executive Director, Thomas R. Bonklin, was quickly arrested and charged with eight counts of murder, seven counts of attempted murder, and three counts of armed harassment with malicious intent, little has been reported about the events that triggered the shooting or about Mr. Bonklin’s mental state in the weeks leading up to the incident.

During the Retreat, in the course of an Executive Director’s Report that followed the approval of an unexceptional consent agenda, Bonklin was presenting a detailed overview of RABAC’s financial condition and the “big picture,” as he put it, concerning RABAC’s future. Bonklin had hoped to distinguish the Board’s stop-gap approach to the year’s financial challenges — a small operating deficit that might be overcome with increases in Annual Fund contributions — from a longer-term vision of and commitment to growing the Council’s budget through the development of an endowment.

According to survivors, Bonklin’s Powerpoint slides were exceptionally thoughtful, formatted using graphic elements and color schemes that followed the best practices identified by the Nonprofit Graphic Arts Council (NGAC) in their Nonproft Presentation Guide (2003), and visual representations informed by the latest writings by Edward Tufte. According to his life-partner, Dee van Aldington, Mr. Bonklin had worked on this presentation for several weeks, and this was confirmed by Lester Fenstemuffin, a member of the Executive Committee who survived a gunshot wound to the neck. Fenstemuffin told police:  “Tommy told us during the April Executive Committee Meeting that he thought the discussion of his presentation at the June meeting of the full Board would be a turning point for the organization this year. I don’t think most of us understood why he felt this way, but we try to support our ED  however we can,  so everyone just nodded OK.”

Unfortunately, as Mr. Bonklin began his presentation, and commented on the first few of the the seventy-three (73) slides he had prepared, he became aware of indifference on the part of some members of the Board. As he continued, he apparently became convinced that none of the members were paying sufficient attention. According to a spokesman for the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office, Bonklin continued until slide #24 when, the prosecution alleges, Bonklin quizzed the Board about something that had been presented on a previous slide — a practice warned against explicitly each year in the prefaces to Deegan and Deegan’s Best Board Presentations Annual. When there was no response from the Board, Bonklin began to breathe heavily, according to several survivors, and then removed a Baretta 93R pistol from his Museum of Work and Culture tote, shouting “Pay attention to this, you little bastards: Next slide please!!!”

Whether Bonklin waited for any significant period of time before firing is not clear, but before he put the gun away nearly half his Board lay dead and those who were alive were seriously wounded. According to Pawtucket Police, Bonklin was still attempting to finish the Powerpoint presentation when they arrived at 6:23 p.m.

The RABAC shooting was the third attempted massacre of a nonprofit Board by an Executive Director in 2009, and it lifts the veil on an embarrassing but pressing question facing nonprofits all over America. What is it about nonprofit structure and governance that might be causing, or at least promoting, this kind of violence?

According to Dr. Lindsey Flingerman of the Institute for the Study of Soft Money Diseases, at the Klepft Medical Center in Geneseo, New York, medical professionals around the country are finding a sharp increase in the number of cases of what they call “Pearls Before Swine Syndrome” (PBSS), and this almost exclusively in the nonprofit sector. In both its mild and severe forms, PBSS is characterized by exactly what we find in the Bonklin case: Someone in a leadership role terribly invested in the production and presentation of important information, for the purposes of thoughtful discussion and collaborative decision-making, who meets with profound disinterest and apathy on the part of an audience who he/she believes is by definition charged with attending to the presentation. The Syndrome is characterized by rising anger that often results in violence and/or nervous collapse, although Flingerman admits that outbursts like Bonklin’s remain rare.

What makes PBSS such a difficult diagnosis, says Dr. Lintz Kupkek, of the Association of Nonprofit Federations, is that “the person with the Syndrome need not be possessed of true pearls, and his or her audience need not be real swine.” Indeed, in the RABAC case, Mr. Bonklin’s Powerpoint presentation was mostly modeled on the diagrams in Maxine Donkelman’s classic From Finances to Governance and Back (1997). Similarly, the RABAC Board was known throughout the Rhode Island nonprofit community as among the most receptive, energetic and engaged Boards in the State. In a tribute to the deceased half of the RABAC Board, published in the Providence Journal, Mrs. Rinse Chesterton of the Rhode Island Foundation for Nonprofit Awarenes wrote: “In many ways, the Ballet Advocacy Council’s Board was every Executive Director’s dream, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Board really goofed in hiring someone with so little leadership experience in the nonprofit sector.”

Could the RABAC tragedy have been avoided if the Council’s Search Committee had been tougher about requiring nonprofit experience? Should Search Committees in nonprofits take special precautions when they hire Executive Directors in light of growing awareness of PBSS?

Although Thomas Bonklin’s credentials were very good — he had been a successful CEO of one local company, the CFO of a major regional corporation before that, and his devotion to amateur ballet was recognized as unparallelled in his state — he had never worked in a nonprofit setting. In the for-profit corporate world, of course, the sort of frustration he experienced during his Powerpoint presentation would likely have been assuaged by the reality of his executive salary and/or a recognition that attention from underlings is never disinterested and attention from superiors is the responsibility of the superiors themselves. In the nonprofit world, however, the Executive Director is poorly paid and is often hired with the expectation of the Board’s attention, despite the Board’s having little or know idea what that means in the mind of the prospective ED.

So what can Search Committees do to avoid the sorts of bloodshed that ruined the RABAC Retreat this year? We recommend a four-step “PBSS Filter Hiring Method”™:

1. Invite each prospective candidates to give a talk on some topic of clear importance to the full Board.
2. Invite only the Search Committee to the talk, but do not tell the candidate, so that attendance will be a disappointment to him/her.
3. During the candidate’s talk, all but one member of the Search Committee should appear severely apathetic or severely distracted (or both), while the remaining member (this can be, but need not be, the Chair) should lie in wait, preparing to ask a question about the most obviously trivial assertion made by the candidate during the talk.
4. A meal should follow at which a pleasant discussion with the candidate is attempted, while no mention is made of the Board’s behavior during the candidate’s talk.

Using this method, and based on the performance of the candidate under these conditions, the Search Committee can decide whether the candidate is at risk for PBSS and act accordinging. We agree with Dr. Kupkek who, in the latest issue of Nonprofit Lens (June-July, 2009), writes: “In the nonprofit sector, we are always trading off between excellence and safety. By using the PBSS Filter Hiring Method™ I think the Board members of many organizations may not minimize future operational headaches, but they will almost certainly minimize the probability of a violent death.”

On May 9th, President Barack Obama delivered his first speech to the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner. Obama joked about himself, members of his  administration, and members of Congress, and his speech was well-received. The contrast between President Obama’s remarks to the gathering of journalists and President George W. Bush’s speeches to the WHCA during the previous eight years, was remarkably clear, and acknowledged in part during one of Obama’s first punchlines: “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me.”

The most telling difference between President Obama’s speech and those delivered by President Bush, however, was Obama’s  avoiding jokes about journalists and the American media generally. In fact, at the end of the speech, Obama acknowledged the difficult economic times facing journalism and applauded the dedication, passion and talent of the journalists in the room. He made no jokes about these things, and this was no accident.

After President Bush’s address to the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004, the event, and indeed the integrity of the Washington correspondents generally, might have appeared disgraced. In that  speech, President Bush joked about the unsuccessful search for “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs) in Iraq, and he did so in such a way as to make everyone in the room a party to the joke. He showed ridiculously posed slides of himself looking between his legs, and under desks, in the Oval Office, and commented: “Those weapons of mass destruction gotta  be somewhere.” The WHCA audience laughed and laughed.

Mr. Bush gave that speech on March 24th, by which time  it was clear to most members of the American press that the administration had no solid evidence of WMDs  in Iraq and, worse, had deceived Congress in its presentations of  “evidence” known to be unreliable. In January of 2004, Tony Blair had admitted as much, and of course Seymour Hersh’s article about this problem, “The Stovepipe,” had appeared in The New Yorker in October, 2003. Meanwhile the number of American casualties in Iraq was rising daily — by the time Bush delivered his jokes  there were already more than 500 American casualties, and more than 50 UK casualties. Thus the laughter of the journalists, to be replayed endlessly on YouTube (despite apparent attempts to remove official versions of the speech), has become a haunting reminder of the fundamental complicity of the press during the Bush administration’s decision to go to War in Iraq.

If President Bush possessed a genius in dealing with the American press it was certainly on display that night in 2004. Playing the simple guy, his performance left the audience with a difficult choice: laugh and be part of the deceit; or protest, ruin the evening, and maybe ruin your career. As Alexandra Pelosi’s important documentary, Travels With George (2000), makes clear, from the very beginning of his campaign for the presidency, Bush and his handlers confronted individual journalists with a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and trusted that the outcome would be complicity. And they were right nearly all of the time.

As the Obama administration now sorts through the messes and abuses that will be the most  significant legacy of the Bush-Cheney years, there is a problem of accountability, and specifically a problem concerning the scope of responsibility. When he released the now-famous “torture memos,” President Obama at the same time assured CIA officers that they would not be prosecuted for carrying out interrogations they believed to be legal because of these memos. The effect of this assurance was to focus the attention of the media, the US Congress, and indeed the world, on those who authorized the methods the world regards as torture.

But the charges and prosecutions that come from the release of the torture memos may be only the beginning of a broader investigation into whether and how laws were broken during the Bush-Cheney years. We still haven’t investigated whether or how laws were broken in the run-up to the Iraq War, and we don’t even have a full accounting of whether and how individual members of Congress were deceived or complicit when they decided to give President Bush the powers he requested (or when they failed significantly to call him to account in the years that followed).

And what of the press? As the nation’s greatest newspapers struggle to survive and forge a sustainable future  for professional general interest journalism,  the last thing reporters or news organizations (or the corporations that own them) need is an investigation into whether and how journalists and news organizations abdicated their professional responsibilities during the Bush-Cheney years.

Listening to President Obama’s May 9th speech to the WHCA in this light, it seemed to me that he was offering this group a deal. “Look,” he might well have said — and is very fond of saying — “I could easily and legitimately have razzed you about what you did to America during the Bush years, but I’m not gonna do it. Instead, I’ll joke about myself, and Hillary, and all the usual political stuff; but you really need to get to work.” It’s actually a generous offer, given the ease with which the American press could be indicted for  its recent failings; but it’s the only reasonable offer given how seriously the country now requires some truth-telling and a revived Fourth Estate.

“It was all a matter of luck. In London the cantor and his family have been starving in a cellar, begging favors from the London charities and depending on the advice of good people like Mr. Klammer. But in New York to cantor suddenly became a celebrity. He stood three feet taller, and his reputation resounded from one end of the city to the other.” (287)

English translations of Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Stars have not been so lucky. The first, published in 1952, was reviewed in the New York Times by Philip Rubin, who faulted the novel for not being like the stories and popular novels people had come to expect from Sholem Aleichem. Rubin said very little about the story, or the characters, which may have been just as well given that the translation not only abridged the Yiddish original, but changed its ending.

Aliza Shevrin’s English translation of the complete novel was published earlier this year by Viking, and should have received widespread notice. Instead, the Times has yet to review it, more than two months after its publication, and Tony Kushner’s introduction to the new translation seems to improve on Rubin’s damnation by faint praise only slightly: although he is enthusiastic about the book, he accepts the idea that the hero and heroine are somehow less than full characters, and he refers repeatedly to the novel’s obvious “imperfections”.

Perfect or not (whatever that means!), Wandering Stars is a wonderful and significant book. The story concerns two children, and the theater: the teenage son of a Russian shtetl’s wealthiest family, (the “Rothschilds of Holeneshti”), and the cantor’s teenage daughter, are first taken with each other — with an attraction both sweet and mature beyond their years — and then taken (in every sense) by a traveling Yiddish Theater group:

“And this was all done by ordinary people? No, these were not ordinary people like you and me. These were imps, spirits, devils, or angels. Their postures and gestures, the way they moved and talked — everything was full of charm, enchantment, magic. From the moment the curtain rose, Leibel and Reizel were enchanted, transported to a world of imps, spirits, devils, and angels. Once the curtain fell, it vanished!” (21)

Leibel and Reizel are smitten and stagestruck, and then taken from Holeneshti. Their paths diverge, but eventually they become successful performers who cross paths in London and finally in New York. Unlike the characters that surround them, however, the feelings and behaviors of Leibel (who becomes the famous Yiddish actor Leo Rafelesco) and Reizel (who becomes the famous concert singer Rosa Spivak) are never completely predictable or understandable. Whereas Rubin and Kushner both found a lack of substance in the novel’s main characters, it’s possible to find the opposite: from the moment their eyes meet until the culmination of their relationship at the end of the book (ten years and 400 pages later), Leibel/Leo and Reizel/Rosa are remarkable in their never being simply true to our expectations of them — and indeed they become something different than what each expected to find in the other.

In the figures of the parents of Leibel and Reizel, of the theater directors and managers, of the nudniks and nudges, of the clamoring capitalist and the defiant unionized waiter, we have in Wandering Stars plenty of typical characters. They are entertaining, and would have made the novel a good-enough read on their own. Moreover, they allow the narrator(s) to comment on yiddishkeit in the “Old Country” and in America, and simultaneously assert a sort of Jewish superiority while admitting to all the shlemiels, shlimazels and shmegeges in our midst.

In Leibel/Leo and Reizel/Rosa, however, we find characters who aren’t merely clever elaborations on a joke or two, and their emotional swings reveal artistic personalities both peculiar and conflicted:

“You were always a loser, and you’ll always be a loser! Rafelesco berated himself, eating himself up alive. The company members kept bothering him about his first appearance. Reporters asked for interviews, while streetwalkers smiled at him and made tempting propositions. And Henrietta [his co-star] pestered him with her toilettes and photographs. He did not know what was happening to him. He was lost in a void.” (334)

The narrative too has mood swings that give Wandering Stars some darker passages than most English readers would expect from a Sholem Aleichem novel. Written after the author’s own immigration to New York, in 1905, and the separation from his family, the chapter “America! America!” includes the following:

“For Jewish emigrants the entry was torture, an ordeal, a foretaste of gehenam, a purgatory where sinners had to purify their souls in order to enter Paradise. Once this purgatory had been called Castle Garden, but today it was known as Ellis Island. The name had changed, but the woes and sufferings, the sighs and the tears, the humiliations and the torments remained the same, and with God’s help they would remain so as long as some people lorded it over others, as long as some people needed to demonstrate that they could still be bestial.” (267)

Neither of the passages I’ve just quoted appeared in Frances Butwin’s English translation of 1952, and one hundred years after the serial publication of Wandering Stars in Yiddish it may be difficult to appreciate its “edginess” for other reasons. It’s easy to forget, for example, that the American Jewish embrace of yiddishkeit is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the extraordinary twelve-volume Jewish Encyclopedia published by Funk and Wagnalls in 1901, there is no entry for either “Yiddish” or “Yiddish literature,” and the short entries on Abramovitch, and Rabinovitch describe them as writing in Hebrew and “Judeo-German” (though the entry on Peretz does use the word “Yiddish”). The combination of kibitzing harshness and self-conscious historical wisdom at the heart of  successful Yiddisher humor doesn’t shock us as it might have shocked the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia at the turn of the 20th century; in the midst of a description of the success of Leibel’s/Leo’s New York debut, for example,  we find another passage omitted from the 1952 translation:

“That silky young man with a fine, noble, pallid face, the long hair, the large, tired-looking eyes, the newly sprouted blonde beard, and the open-necked shirt begged comparison to Jesus Christ.” (366)

One of the themes in Wandering Stars is the new life made possible by the freedom, speed, and strange camaraderie amongst the Jews in America, even as the meshugas of this new life is inescapable:

“America is, God bless it, a free land, even freer than London. Here everyone does what he wants. Come the High Holidays, this one runs to the synagogue, another goes to work in a shop. Come Yom Kippur or Kol Nidre, this one weeps at the Ya’ales, another goes to a ball, a Yom Kippur ball, it’s called. A group of young people gather together and over a glass of beer and a pork sausage they make their peace with the old Jewish God for His evil deeds, for His edicts and for His pogroms, and take him to task so he will have what to remember till next year’s Kol Nidre! If you’re talking about a free country, here you can do anything!” (327)

Perhaps what drew Sholem Aleichem to his main characters, his wandering stars, was the desire to break with, or at least try to resist the temptations of, much that was predictable in the typologies of the old world. The temptations of the old world and the new are at the center of Wandering Stars and, for better and worse, the willingness to resist the expected suggests an excellent “fit” between such a character and America.

“Who knew which counted more in America: piety or vanity? Maybe one needed to have both. Anything could happen in America.” (268)

We should be thankful for Aliza Shevrin’s complete English translation of  Wandering Stars, and feel lucky too: the novel turns out to be much more than just another Tevye.

*****
Wandering Stars, a novel by Sholem Aleichem, translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin, with a forward by Tony Kushner (Viking, 2009).

Wandering Star, by Sholem Aleichem, translated by Francis Butwin (Crown Publishers, 1952).