Two Americans Stars on the Lower East Side

Eldridge Street Synagogue"Where do you see a five-pointed star in America?” the teacher asked the group of third graders, happy to be on a field trip.  “On the flag!” They scream out happily, even though they are in a place of worship.  “And how many points do you see on the stars in here?  Look up!”  “Five!”  “Six!”  “Five!”  Six!”

“That’s right, both kinds,” she said. “Welcome to the Eldridge Street Synagogue.”

The Jews who build this remarkable five-story Gothic, Romanesque, Moorish revival building in 1886 had escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe in search of a new homes and work, and for the freedom to worship.  On New York’s Lower East Side, at that time the most crowded community in the world, they were forced to live in dark multi-family tenement buildings and struggle to find work and food.  But they pooled money and labor, bought three lots so there could be light and windows on all sides, and built the first synagogue in the US for Eastern European Jews. (Rhode Island’s Touro Synagogue is the oldest in the US, 1763, built by Sephardic Jews from the West Indies.  That’s worth a visit also.) 

Unlike the dark and filthy crowdedness of their daily life, their synagogue was, and is, light, colorful, grand, exotic, beautiful, and ornate.  It proudly proclaims their faith and culture in a city and country that did not always want to see those six pointed stars boldly placed in the center of the western rose window and atop the ornate towers, for all to see from the street.

Eldridge Street Synagogue InteriorBut it was five pointed stars they painted on the deep blue ceiling; it’s like a night sky, and like the American flag they now honored alongside their faith.  One can learn many moving, sad and happy stories of these families here on Eldridge St. and at the nearby Tenement Museum.  There one visits an apartment in a five-story walk-up building where lived first Jews, then Irish, Italians, Dominicans and now, next-door, Chinese immigrants.

One thing immigrants do is move, from their native land to a new one, and if they can, from a hard life to a better life.  The Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side eventually moved on and up, to homes uptown and in Brooklyn and Queens, with indoor lighting and plumbing and fire safety laws absent from those tenements.  And they left behind their synagogue.  Some came back for Sabbath, but by 1948 the congregation had dwindled, and the building was shuttered and left to deteriorate. A small Orthodox congregation continued to meet on the lower level, not the sanctuary, never missing a Sabbath.

In 1980 some folks walked into the nearly abandoned synagogue and found decay, leaks, pigeons, the central chandelier hanging, they realized, “by a string from heaven.”  Twenty years and $20 million later they reopened as a museum, a cultural center, a family history research center, a place for bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings, and where that small congregation still worships.  Check out their website for the history of the buildings, its restoration, a great film about the new east window they installed 3 years ago. 

I visited the synagogue this past week, after a sudden family trip to Pennsylvania for a family matriarch’s funeral.  With five generations of my aunt’s relatives from all over the nation, I heard many stories and ate favorite family foods; an emotional reunion.  We celebrated Lillian Carpenter Streeter Lucas Chance at a 300-year-old Welsh Anglican (and now Episcopal) rural Pennsylvania church, and partied at the family farm where she lived for 65 years and raised 8 kids.

Egg Rolls and Egg CreamsAnother American family, the Jews of Eldridge St. also continue to gather and eat and tell old stories.  Not only to school groups like the one I overheard, and probably funerals as well.  But also with public events for the neighborhood, which is now the largest Chinatown in the US.  Their most popular event is an annual street fair called “Egg Rolls and Egg Creams,” a reference to Chinese food and a traditional New York Jewish milky drink.  Thousands of families come for klezmer music, Chinese opera, Yiddish and Chinese language lessons, mah jongg, scribal arts, food and folk art demos, crafts, and synagogue tours. 

The former and current residents of Eldridge St., come together to mark and celebrate their cultures, just two of many different pointed stars on the American flag.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Americans Dancing in the Streets: Part II

A minister, a poet, and a rancher marked Ash Wednesday this past week, the Christian day of repentance, by chaining themselves to the White House gates and getting arrested. 

Rev. Jim Antal“Ash Wednesday is a good day to be arrested,” said the minister, Rev. Jim Antal, Conference Minister of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ,  “because civil disobedience is a form of repentance…Our generation must now repent of the sin of wrecking God’s creation.  Our decades of science denial have now been exchanged for widespread recognition of the community-crushing effects of climate disruption, whether by way of wildfires, droughts or superstorms.”

Four days later the environmental protests continued with “Forward on Climate” rallies across the nation.   40,000 folks in the streets of Washington, DC, thousands more in San Francisco and Los Angeles, even a 100 faithful in my own town Monterey, California;  Americans took to the streets Sunday to express their concerns and demand action on climate change.

Reading my column last week, faithful reader Kathy Lique reminded me that it wasn’t just Mardi Gras drunks, Chinese American dragon dancers and Valentine’s Day protesters against violence on women who took to the streets this week.

Those street dancing environmental activists across the nation sought to encourage President Obama to keep his dramatic and somewhat unexpected inauguration and State of the Union Address promises to act boldly against climate change.  In particular they demanded he reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from land locked Canadian oilfields across US heartland rivers and wilderness and aquifers, 1400 miles to Texas refineries and then overseas for export.

Billed as the largest environmental protest in US history, the rallies are the work of a broad coalition of hundreds of organizations from the Sierra Club to Interfaith Power and Light to Canada’s First Nations to Nebraska ranchers groups, and led by Bill McKibbon’s 350.org.  Together they insist,  “We are not your parents’ environmental movement.”

Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus said to the D.C. crowd that they were like those who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963 except, “They were fighting for equality.  We are fighting for existence.”

The 48 environmental activists arrested Wednesday in anticipation of the big Sunday rallies also included Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club.  For the first time in its 120 year history the Sierra Club lifted its ban on law breaking protest.

Brune told the radio program Democracy Now: 

“This last year we had record droughts and record wildfires and temperatures a full degree above the previous record in the lower 48, and thousand-mile storm that hit the Eastern Seaboard.  And the first big test for the president of his commitment to fight climate change is whether or not we’re going to build a pipeline that would take almost a million barrels of oil every day, the dirtiest oil on the plant, ship it through the U.S and have most of it be exported.  So what we’re trying to do is convince President Obama that he needs to put his full muscle and his full ambition to match the scale of this challenge.”

Also arrested were Julian Bond, civil rights activist and former president of the NAACP, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President of the Waterkeepers Alliance and lawyer for the National Resource Defense Council, and Robert Haas, former US Poet Laureate.

Susan LuebbeAnd a Nebraska cow girl.  Susan Luebbe, a Nebraska rancher suing her state for approving the pipeline, said:

“As a third generation cowgirl from the Sand Hills of Nebraska I have worked hard with other to get XL off our ranch.  I want to take this risk of arrest with many other landowners, and indigenous tribal members from Canada through the U.S to end this fight…TransCanada’s project cuts right through the heart of environmentally sensitive land and cultural history.  I want the future generations to see what it take to fight for something so precious that our ancestors worked so hard to build for all of us.”

This wasn’t Rev. Antal’s first arrest in protest of the pipeline.  He was one of over 1200 people arrested in the same place in August 2011, again, as a leadup to a bigger demonstration.  Later that fall 15,000 people protested by holding hands in a giant circle around the White House.  Weeks afterwards Obama ordered the pipeline stopped until further environmental review was done.  Antal said, “The last time we did this it was the largest act of civil disobedience since the Civil Rights Movement, and I believe it was a direct consequence of bringing the Keystone pipeline to the attention of national press to cause President Obama to put a halt on it.”

Two years later, Antal is hoping his former senator, John Kerry, now the new Secretary of State, succeeding Hillary Clinton, will help convince Obama to be bold.  Kerry has long been an active advocate in the Senate for reducing human actions that contribute to climate change.  Because the pipeline crosses an international border, it is the State Department, and ultimately the President, who approves this project.  But Canada is banking (literally) strongly on the money it will gain from being able to sell its oil overseas.  Its conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is no environmentalist.

Many of us wanted Obama to be bolder in this second term.  So far he has been, in his inauguration and State of the Union speeches.  He knows the Republicans will try to stop him in Congress any way they can.  But he promises executive action on both climate change and gun control.  He knows he can only get much done in his first year of this his last term.  Now’s the time.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Dragons, Drinking, Dancing: US Party Week

What is it about the second week in February that gets Americans partying in the streets?   All across the nation, all through the week, we’ll will be partying down. Well, Chinese Americans, Americans protesting violence against women, and silly acting-out Christian Americans are going to party like crazy this week.

In one week, we have Chinese Lunar New Year, with dragons on parade.  And Valentine’s Day, with the new addition of “One Billion Rising” street dancing flash mobs (see below.)  And Mardi Gras, a religious excuse for dancing, and of course, drinking.  To the streets, revelers!

Actually these are all international holidays; you’ll see (and hear) these revelers all over the globe.  There are two distinctly American holidays this week as well. US presidents Lincoln and Washington were born in February, and their birthdays have been combined into a federal holiday, President’s Day.

Which is really boring, just speeches, proclamations and a Monday off.  No dancing or drinking or dragons for Abe and George.

When I was a kid in school February was all about Abe and George art projects, stovepipe hats and cherry trees.  And lots of doilies and red paper for Valentines.  Pity the poor school teachers trying to squeeze something educational out of these holidays. 

Oh yeah, and Ground Hog’s Day – we had that last week.  Do other nations celebrate that, or with as much attention?  Made a few silly art projects of Punxsutawny Phil also.

Much more fun than speeches about Abe and George are the dragons leading colorful parades and firecrackers in cities with large Chinatown’s, like San Francisco and New York.

And Tuesday there will be crazy fun in the open bar known as New Orleans, drinking and dancing and misbehavin’ in the street for Mardi Gras.  But even in small town somewhat straight churches, like my little Pacific Grove congregation, we will have a Mardi Gras party too.  No drinking, I expect, or headdresses and brass bands.  But we’ll be eating great buttermilk pancakes, in the spirit of “Fat Tuesday;” get rid of the fat in the house before 40 days of simple Lenten fare.

And a new thing this year; our church will practice that most Biblical of pre-Lenten spiritual disciplines: karaoke.  When I was a parish minister we got into the Mardi Gras spirit with silly things, talent shows usually, lots of silly kids.  But karaoke?  I’ll tell you next week how it goes.

And my favorite new holiday, or new way of celebrating the old holiday, Valentine’s Day; One Billion Rising, one billion women worldwide who will dance in the streets in flash mob dance strikes in protest of violence against women. 

For the past 15 years communities across the nation (and world?) have performed Eve Ensler’s play,  The Vagina Monologues on Valentines Day as an educational protest of violence against women; “V-Day” stood for victory over violence as much as Valentine.  But for the past couple years, and this year with a big bang, communities of women and men are planning to fill streets with dance on Thursday, one billion people they hope.

It’s an inspirational movement, the choreography by Debbie Allen, the songs, the images of girls in India and Africa and Latin America doing the simple movements.  Check out You Tube for One Billion Rising. 

On their FAQs page they answer the simple question, “Why dance?” with:

When One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2012, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness. Dancing insists we take up space. It has no set direction but we go there together. It's dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive. It breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere at anytime with anyone and everyone. It's free. No corporation can control it. It joins us and pushes us to go further. It's contagious and it spreads quickly. It's of the body. It's transcendent.

To show the world that we want to end violence against one billion women and girls! By being a part of One Billion Rising we will all discover our solidarity and the scope of the issue. We will come to know that ending violence against women is as important as ending poverty, or Aids or global warming. We will come to see that it is not a local issue or particular to any culture or religion or village or age. We will come to see what is possible. when One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2013, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness.

That sounds like the most fun holiday to me.  Even better than karaoke.  You’ll find me Thursday afternoon dancing on the streets of Monterey.  I’ll tell you about that too next week.

Party on, world.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Representative Tammy Duckworth and her Bar Brawl

“You should have seen the other chick.” That’s how Chicago area Democratic Representative Tammy Duckworth jokingly responds when people ask her about what caused her disability; “It was a bar brawl,” she says with her disarming smile.

Tammy Duckworth Actually she was commanding a Black Hawk helicopter in the Iraq War, serving in her National Guard unit as Major Duckworth, when enemy fire landed in her lap. Both her legs were blown off and one arm was severely damaged. After a long recovery she left her civilian job with Rotary International (service clubs who raise money to eradicate polio and provide free wheelchairs worldwide) and became the Director of Veteran’s Affairs in Illinois.

This past November she overwhelming won election to Congress, beating a Tea Party candidate who outspent her 13 to 1 and questioned her heroism. She became the first double amputee to serve in Congress and the first native of Thailand. Her Thai mother became a US citizen in her 50’s; her father was a Vietnam vet who worked in refugee services for the UN. She grew up all over the world.

She joined the National Guard while doing graduate work in Political Science at Georgetown University. Noticing that many fellow students were current military or vets, she felt the call to service herself. Her father had told her of his family’s generations of service; Duckworth’s had been in uniform since the Revolutionary War.

About half of America’s forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are National Guard units, volunteer reserve forces with civilian jobs who are subject to mandatory deployment for national emergencies and wartime service. The increased use these civilians in our problematic wars, with multiple deployments, and the disruption of their families, has been a troublesome feature of this past decade.

Tammy met her husband in the Georgetown ROTC and after graduation they both continued with the National Guard. Tammy describes her choice of helicopter aviation:

INTERVIEWER: Why helicopter pilot?

DUCKWORTH: In the Army, there are only two branches of the Army that is specialty jobs that accept women in combat they’re combat arms branches, aero-defense artillery and aviation. When I as deciding what job I wanted to do in the Army, all of the cadets had to put down a listing of one through 10, your top choices, whether you wanted to be a finance officer or a lawyer or a helicopter pilot or a tanker or an infantry men. But the men – the guys had to, out of their top five, three of them had to be combat branches, infantry, armor, that sort of thing. And I felt it was really kind of unfair that I didn’t have to do that as a female. So I decided that I would go for the one that had the best chance of going into combat, which was aviation. So that’s why I chose aviation, and I was lucky enough to get it.

INTERVIEWER: Did you want to go to combat?

DUCKWORTH: It’s not that I wanted to go to combat, I just didn’t want to take fewer risks than my fellow classmates who were male. So that was – nobody wants to go to combat but I just felt that I wasn’t going to try to hide away from anything that they would have to face just because I was female. So I wanted to take an equal risk, and that’s why I chose aviation. And I’ve loved flying. It’s become such a part of my identity now……

INTERVIEWER: Why do you want to stay in the National Guard?

DUCKWORTH: The explosion didn’t change who I am. I want to continue to serve. It’s just part of me and I’ve – it’s been a privilege and an honor to serve in the guard. Not a lot of people get that opportunity. And so it really is a privilege to me. I have a bond with my fellow soldiers that it’s very hard to explain. And it’s just how I choose to serve. I think – I sincerely believe that we should all give something back to our communities. Not everybody has to become a soldier. You know, you can volunteer at your church, or at the school or at your local hospital, but I feel very strongly that for everything that we have in this country, you should give a little something back of yourself. And I just choose to serve as being a soldier.

Last week Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women in combat. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey recommended the change, saying “the time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service.”

Women have long contested the ban, saying it made no sense in modern warfare, that they were already serving in combat in positions like Duckworth’s, and that the ban limited their ability to rise in the services, where combat duty is required for advancement. Americans favor lifting the ban by as much as 75%, but some conservative Republicans and Christians condemned the action as a “social experiment” and a danger to the (male) troops.

Major Duckworth’s response? “Lifting the ban on women in combat is a great step forward for our nation. America's daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.”

In her moving speech at the November Democratic Convention, Duckworth said, “On November 12th, 2004, I was co-piloting my Blackhawk north of Baghdad when we started taking enemy fire. A rocket-propelled grenade hit our helicopter, exploding in my lap, ripping off one leg, crushing the other and tearing my right arm apart. But I kept trying to fly until I passed out. In that moment, my survival and the survival of my entire crew depended on all of us pulling together. And even though they were wounded themselves and insurgents were nearby, they refused to leave a fallen comrade behind. Their heroism is why I'm alive today.

Ultimately, that's what this election is about. Yes, it's about the issues that matter to us: building an economy that will create jobs here at home and out-compete countries around the world. But it's also about something else. It's about whether we will do for our fellow Americans what my crew did for me; whether we'll look out for the hardest hit and the disabled; whether we'll pull together in a time of need; whether we'll refuse to give up until the job is done.”

Some bar brawl.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

A Church, A Bridge, A Bar: Freedom Places

In an American “Freedom Atlas” some special sacred places would have a star: Plymouth Rock, Philadelphia, Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg, Arlington National Cemetery. 

In his inaugural address this week President Obama firmly marked three more freedom places on the map: Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall.  He said:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall, just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone, to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

At Seneca Falls, New York in 1858, 300 women and men attended the first US Women’s Rights Convention, held in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, the only large meeting place in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s small hometown willing to host the event.   In a controversial vote (was the nation ready?) only 100 attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments advocating women’s right to vote, which was not granted until 1920.  The only African American there, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, said he would not accept the right to vote as a black man if women were denied suffrage.

Bloody Sunday 1965In 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr. led thousands of civil rights marchers, including many white clergy King had asked to come, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a general in the Confederate army) on the way from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery.  President Lyndon Johnson was among those who watched on national TV as state troopers brutally beat the marchers; two days later he presented the Voting Rights Act to Congress.

And in 1969 a police raid on the Stonewall gay bar on Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village led to days of spontaneous street riots by gay and straight supporters of gay rights, and the first newspaper coverage of these regular raids. Stonewall,  a popular gathering place, was the only gay bar in town that allowed dancing.  The raid and riots sparked the gay rights movement; Gay Pride parades, which began the following year, are often held in late June on the anniversary of Stonewall.

One participant wrote of that night:

We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration destruction. … And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we're going to fight for it.

Stonewall Bar is now on the Federal Register of Historic Places.  As are Seneca Falls and Selma.

In his address, after linking Stonewall to Selma and Seneca Falls, Obama continued:

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law -- for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

Stonewall Inn 1969These two words “Stonewall” and “gay” have never before been spoken in a presidential inaugural address.   Nor linked with Seneca Fall and Selma.  A trinity of freedom stars in the sky map of America.

“That all of us are created equal is the star that guides us still, as it did our forebears….” was part of Obama’s uniting theme of American on a journey; “When times change, so must we.”   Good professor that he is, Obama reminded us of our history, a people always moving, on a journey, moving across a state, a bridge, a barricade.

America has many churches, many bridges, many bars.  They are not all emblematic of freedom.  Churches can exclude and condemn, bridges go to nowhere, bars enable crushing addictions.

But the Wesleyan church in Seneca Falls, and the Quaker and Congregational faith of many of the early women’s rights advocates, were carrying on the journeys of their forebears, the inclusive freedom crowds led by Moses and Jesus.  On that hot day in 1858 both men and women, black and white advocated that all people are created equal.

The Alaska “Bridge to Nowhere” was a Republican pork taxpayer boondoggle.   That the Edmund Pettus Bridge became synonymous with freedom certainly made the Confederate racist turn in his grave.  One hopes he heard both the whites and blacks, as they sang that good traveling song, the Negro National Anthem: “stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod…yet with a steady beat have not our weary feet come the place for which our fathers sighed?”

And for the gays and lesbians at Stonewall, the bar was the only safe place (until the raid) to be themselves, and to do that wonderful liberating action – dancing!  Revolutionaries have always met in bars; bar meetings fueled the passions of the American Revolution.  And dancing!  Well, dancing has opened many a heart to freedom and possibility.

Thanks, President Obama, for reminding us of these bold freedom places; church, bridge, bar.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter