Fall Harvest Moon
Friend Bill Schmidt, cyber mage, sent me a link to this New Yorker the article, The Nazi 
Sites of Los Angeles, and wondered about my reaction. Here’s what I wrote to him:
“Well. There are two responses, both right, in my mind, but somewhat contradictory.
The first is that there has been a rise in anti-semitism in schools here in Jefferson County. Beth Evergreen and the anti-defamation league have been in conversation with the various school’s leadership and promoted responses that you might expect: curriculum about the Holocaust, anti-discrimination, anti-bigotry workshops for students and teachers, that sort of thing. This increasing anti-semitism seems, at least to me, given license by our bigot-in-chief. His rhetoric, whether explicitly anti-semitic or not, encourages those who fear the other-any other not white or evangelical. And yes, Never again, does come to mind.
The second response, made by a woman from Beth Evergreen whom I know, appeared just this week in the Canyon Courier as a letter to the editor. She said that the kids were not the problem and that convocations on discrimination, curriculum additions would not solve the problem, which she identifies as rooted in the home. This backs up something another woman, Tara, said when she dismissed much of the school brouhaha by saying it was kids trying out various attitudes. Both Tara and Lisa, the letter writer, see the uptick in anti-semitism as only to be expected in an environment where hatred is a family value, one passed down through the generations.
It’s a little strange for me, being in but not of the tribe, a privileged fellow traveler, to notice that I experience these attacks more personally now. These are acts against people I know, whom I care about, some of whom I’ve come to love over the past year. Rabbi Jamie, in his sermon Wednesday night for Rosh Hashanah, referred to Beth Evergreen as a family. Now, that can be a canard, a something religious leaders like to imagine is the case, but I have to say I experience Beth Evergreen that way. It has become a real community, a family, for me, much in the same that the Woolly’s did-except here I have sisters as well as brothers. From within that sort of embeddedness I feel things as a part of this particular family of Jews, this Beth Evergreen congregation. I’m not of the tribe, but I am of Beth Evergreen.”
