Two nights ago I heard a fox bark in our garden. There had been sightings according to our neighbor’s gardener, but I was skeptical. With so many coyotes around, maybe they just saw a young one, still small? But this sound was identifiably “fox” when I went to Google to check against my memories.
It felt like an affirmation of my – long debated – decision to include the image of a fox into a montage about The Cunning Little Vixen, an opera by Leo Janàcek. I hesitate to be too literal, but I also have a fascination with plucky characters, and if there ever was one, it is the fox heroine in this piece of music. She does deserve place of honor, or at least some visibility.
Janàcek’s opera is a romp, composed late in life, daringly taking a newspaper serial/comic strip as a basis for the libretto that includes all kinds of animal characters featuring nature’s life cycle and humans’ ties to it, in good and bad ways. The score is gorgeous, influenced by Czech folk music and language, animal sounds that the composer ardently recorded, and the fluidity of the Moravian landscape, its pine forests and lakes. It is also about the lives and interactions of generations, one’s place in a chain alternating between life and death.
Janàcek lost his son at age two, and his wife took his daughter away from him after separating, the girl subsequently died at age 20. The opera can be seen as one way of trying to come to terms with the legacy left through one’s children, literally and symbolically. I got to know the music in intimate detail when I sat through the rehearsals of the Portland Opera Production in 1999. I was no longer doing the super-text calls during actual performances, which also required rehearsal attendance. Instead I was accompanying my then eleven-year old who had been selected for a solo performance of one of the young fox roles, and the chorus of fox cubs. The mix of parental pride and anxiety was intense.
As parents we were intent on not pushing our children into activities, or force them to excel, or make their days endlessly structured outside of school, with little room for exploration and/or boredom (which I consider an important part of creative development, in many ways.) Years of adolescent time spent in front of computer games, without sports or social contacts, were quite worrying, yet we did not change our approach. We offered options, and any time some interest emerged, a passion for theatre camp, a new hobby of rock climbing, or the like, we had the privilege to enable them to participate, schlepp them there, funding equipment and the like. We also had the privilege of school choice – whether we chose the right one, who knows. But the boys did end up, eventually, with an education that suited their interests and talents, now doing meaningful work, these two amazingly cool human beings. With partners the same!
I have been thinking about Michelle Obama’s DNC speech which included a quip about “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” It is not just about parent’s money. It is about the time they are willing and, importantly, able to invest, the education that they themselves received and that now opens doors for their children, whether directly passed on around the dinner table, or linked to networking in academic communities and the like. It is about the willingness and ability to move into a good school district even if it means leaving a neighborhood you love, or stretching your funds beyond comfort level. It is about access.
It is about access to education at all – just look at the mind boggling numbers, newly published, that show how state-provided bikes for girls has impacted the rates of attending and finishing high school in rural areas around the world. Cycling, rather than walking miles on end, empowered female students.
It is about access to the education you wish to receive. In the context of voucher scams and political reemergence of publicly rooting for segregated schools, it becomes a burning issues connected to racism. (Here is an informative essay about school choice published this week in ProPublica.)
It is about access to education that is tailored to the needs of the disability community. We are not just talking about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration. It includes the elimination the Department of Education altogether and drastically cuts federal funds for schools. The plan includes proposals to phase out the $16 billion Title I funding program over the next 10 years, convert the $13 billion IDEA program for students with disabilities to block grants or a private school choice offering. This means that students with disabilities no longer have the protections during public school education imposed by law. Vouchers for private schools? Does not include the cost of transportation, schools can throw them out at will, with no oversight, these schools are not accountable for outcomes, and they can reject students whose disabilities are particularly severe. (Ref.) Note that these are not just future possibilities. Last May House Republicans proposed to “Reduce Support for Students with Disabilities.” Under the proposal, as many as 7.5 million children with disabilities would face reduced supports—a cut equivalent to removing more than 48,000 teachers and related services providers from the classroom.
The montage is based on a photograph of a pine forestc like those in Bohemia, reflected in an icy lake, with several pale suns traversing the horizon to indicate the change of seasons. The vixen is peeking through the tree trunks, their pattern of repeated bars reminiscent of a cage (one she escapes in due course in the opera, as kids escape into adulthood.) Whether we continue to erect barriers like this towards equal opportunity education for all remains to be seen. Vote accordingly!
Here is the Orchestral Suite that gives you a glimpse of the music.
“How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance? Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.” – Emma GoldmanAnarchism (1910)
If revolutionary Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) and OMJCHE executive director Judy Margles miraculously connected across time, they would likely discover many commonalities. Both of Jewish descent, both allergic to hypocrisy, both with a strong belief that a better world can be achieved if we act on it, and, importantly, both committed to the idea that education is one of the most important tools to affect change towards a more just world.
Determined women, visionaries even.
Of course, one of them, prone to destruction, ended up in prison and exile, while the other is an ultimate builder, leaving Portland with a legacy that is beyond valuable, for Jews and non-Jews alike – which is why it is so hard to see Margles depart, no matter how much she deserves retirement after years of incessant work at the museum.
No “mental indolence” for the director, who received a B.A. from the University of Toronto in her native Canada, and her M.A. in History and Museum Studies from New York University. If ideas catch her attention, they will be tracked, examined and turned into action. Her life’s work includes a quarter-century’s engagement in establishing a museum that will preserve the history of Oregon Jewry, inform about the Holocaust, and expand its mission to a pluralistic embrace of education about human rights and their potential violation.
Margles blazed a path – if not always in a straight line – from idea to institution, one that has made its mark on Portland’s cultural landscape, and is increasingly recognized within the national domain of Jewish museums as well. What began as a “museum without walls” based on discussions with prominent local Rabbi Joshua Stampfer and his wife Goldie in the late 1990s, soon morphed into small quarters that provided room for archived materials, including recorded oral histories, and modest exhibitions of art or photographic collections that depicted the everyday life and historical presence of Jews in Oregon. Many in the community stepped forward to help, offering practical, organizational and/or financial support, with active Boards and a small, dedicated staff shepherding the museum towards growth. But it was Margles’ leadership and relentless push that propelled the organization through various brick-and-mortar rentals to the building in the North Park blocks that is now owned by and houses OJMCHE.
Today’s various exhibition halls, conference rooms, archives, giftshop and cafe are a far cry from the early beginnings, rental rooms in Montgomery Park, followed later by a mostly windowless hole-in-the wall also on Davis St., and until 2016 a larger space on NW Kearny St. that was occupied together with the Holocaust Resource Center.
Ongoing changes extended to the museum’s mission as well, which expanded from preservation of local Jewish history to include more focused education about the Holocaust, particularly after the official 2014 merger between the Holocaust Resource Center and the museum. Teaching about the Holocaust and honoring the memory of those who perished under Nazi persecution took on new urgency, given the continual rise in anti-Semitism and the parallel loss of actual witnesses to the atrocities, with the few remaining survivors now in their 80s and 90s. Keeping the memory alive and transmitting the lessons learned to prevent future catastrophes became an important task for the museum, with a special focus on reaching schoolchildren both inside and outside of the museum walls.
Female leadership has been, interestingly enough, a hallmark of Jewish museums and also the cultural centers aligned with them. Jewish women established the earliest “identity” museums — trying to connect to culturally specific history and opening the avenues that subsequently led to other such museums, including the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C.
In the U.S., it was the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods that founded the very first Jewish museum at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1913 (now the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, after reorganization in 1972.) In the late 1990s some 80% of Jewish Museum directors were women. The Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM,) an association of some 70 American Jewish institutions devoted to Jewish culture and promotion of its richness and educational value, has been headed by a woman for the last many decades. This is not just an American pattern. The large Jewish museums in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna are all lead by a woman.
Makes me curious, of course. Historically, this pattern of widespread female leadership might have been the result of the limited options for women hoping to serve public roles in societies where gender separation was still part of a cultural and religious system. Leaving the arts or the tending to local history, so connected to families and networks, to women might have been a way to give them – or have demanded by them – some limited empowerment.
Apparently, though, women brought something special to these roles; how else are we to explain the continuation of this history, given that it is the exception to the rule of male dominance of leadership roles across many sectors of western societies, the arts included? The challenges Margles faced, and her success in dealing with them, provide a plausible explanation.
What are the challenges? Just like for other organizations, leadership of a culturally specific museum requires an enormous amount of multi-tasking, given the diverse set of task demands. Yet it also requires social intelligence, given that it operates within a relatively small set of, in our case, Jewish-identified people, many known to each other and having a stake in their history as a community.
As the museum’s leader, you have to decide on the exact terms of your mission, you have to procure funds, both from private donors and publicly available sources, until grant proposals invade your dreams, more likely nightmares. You have to initiate or think through potential mergers with other organizations, which will be enormously valuable but also add to the list of obligations. You have to predict what size staff will be allowed by your funding and you have to manage the staff, taking on various jobs yourself if you can’t afford enough people to divide the labor. In the meantime you’re fighting a tendency to micro-manage, born out of a sense of responsibility more than a need for control. You have to find space – oh, do you have to fight for space that is affordable, accessible, safe. Never mind parking.
You are also responsible for programming, gambling on what a given budget can provide, and making educated guesses about what type of exhibition would be most effective in promoting your mission, all the while attracting visitors who might become involved with the museum and/or potential supporters. You need to devise curricula for educational programs, that are age appropriate and portable to be brought to schools and other educational settings. You need to train volunteers as exhibit guides, you need to appease committees where different ideas over annual Galas or other festivities clash, find board members that bring complementary skill sets to their role and are committed. You need to create effective PR, and oversee digitalization to keep with contemporary practices. You need to make choices among job applicants once you’ve reached a financial standing that allows you to hire specialists, you need to stay up on the literature conveying modern museum standards and practice, and you need to travel to conferences and meetings to keep up the networking efforts. Occasionally you need to mop up the water spilled by leaks in the roof on a Sunday when no janitorial staff can be reached. I am sure I have forgotten half of the jobs that are potentially on leadership plates.
That is not enough, though. For Jewish museum leadership it has always been important to recognize the changing social or religious needs of their community and to navigate the fact that this community is not monolithic and will confront at times with conflicting demands. A sensitive ear, and an ability to compromise, then, need to be added to the skill set.
Add to that the requirement to straddle a thin line that is particularly treacherous: finding the right answer to the question tackled by contemporary Jewish museums around the world. Who do they serve? Is their role determined by the Jewish community or the non-Jews around it? Is their mission to preserve and educate about the specifics of Jewish history, or are they allowed to address the general politics of their times in the context of Jewish experience – and then whose Jewish experience, given the fractious nature of contemporary Jewish identity, starting with those who live in Israel and those who live in the diaspora, those who promote Zionism and those who make an emphatic distinction between being Jewish and being a Zionist, those who are religiously affiliated and those who define themselves culturally, to name just a few divisions?
These are not just theoretical considerations. The newly appointed director to the Jewish Museum of Vienna, Barbara Staudinger, landed in hot water with her inaugural exhibition last year, 100 Misunderstandings About and Among Jews. Curatorial decisions had to be reversed when large parts of the Jewish community were in uproar over some textual items and a video presented relevant to Israel and the Holocaust.
Likewise, three years earlier, the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin had to resign after the Israeli government and the main organizations representing Jews in Germany complained that JMB’s exhibitions were overly political and, worse in their view, friendly to Palestinians and explicitly anti-Israel (long before the atrocities of October 7, 2023 and all those that followed). The museum was accused of having become too political, beyond the boundaries of its mission. The voices of international scholars and museum professionals who lauded JMB for its willingness to serve as a place for dialogue on issues of identity in an age of growing anti-Semitism across Europe, were drowned out by the critics.
One of the Berlin exhibitions that drew ire, and contributed to job loss, was “The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews,” a 2013 show intended to resolve misconceptions about what it means to be Jewish or how Jewish life unfolds. People could peruse answers to frequently asked questions and also ask a Jewish person him or herself, who was placed for two hours at a time, into a glass box. “Jew in a box,” as it became known, was judged despicably degrading by some (the parallel to Eichman in his glass witness box in Israel during his trial for implementing the Final Solution, among others,) wonderfully provocative by others, making people think about the ongoing divisions between Jews and non-Jews in Germany, and the lack of knowledge or (worse) conspiratorially tinged assumptions still held by many who approached the sitter to ask their questions.
My questions to Margles, when I interviewed her for this article, were simpler. What was the high point of her 24 years’ tenure at the museum? The spontaneous answer referred to the opening date of the museum in its current location, the fruit of the labor of so many years finding the right container to hold all the history, objects and ideas alike and move forward with larger exhibitions. That date, however, also denoted one of the lowest point as well, she added; it was just days after the fatal TriMet stabbings occurred, a racially motivated hate crime, reminding everyone of the vulnerability of minorities. Another low point hit 3 years later, when the museum had to close its doors under lockdown requirements during the first year of the pandemic. It was unclear how the museum would survive, with PPP loans not yet available; happily, though, the museum was rescued by a terrifically supportive Board.
What was her favorite exhibition across all those years? That’s All, Folks: The Mel Blanc Storywas the immediate answer. The tribute to this local comedian and voice artist who made it big in Hollywood movies and TV after years in Vaudeville and radio, was one that made you laugh, and laugh loud. I can just see how this counterbalances the darkness of so many of the topics associated with the collective memory carried by the museum and its educational focus on the Holocaust that was Margles’ daily concern for so many years.
I, on the other hand, would vote hands down for OMJCHE’s new core exhibition, Human Rights after the Holocaust. For me it is the epitome of forward thinking at a time where teaching the history of minorities is ignored at best and actively suppressed at worst in a country that grapples with human rights violations every single day. This emphasis, Margles notes, does not in any way diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust, at the same time that it draws attention to trauma and injustice more broadly. Importantly, the call has to be to explore the underlying mechanisms that can lead to prejudice, discrimination and persecution, so that we empower new generations to be prepared to fight for what is just, regardless of racial, cultural or religious origin.
This, for me, is leadership, the pursuit of a vision that grows to be inclusive over time, a pluralistic view of the world that will serve the museum for decades to come and one that ultimately believes in the power of education. Farewell, Judy Margles. We owe you.
In memory of Alice Meyer (z”l) who fought the rising dark forces to the end.
Tiresias:” You mock my blindness? Let me tell you this: You with your precious eyes,you’re blind to the corruption of your life, to the house you live in, those you live with – ” (415) – SophoclesOedipus the King, translated by Robert Fagles.
DO YOU REMEMBER the unfolding of this famous tragedy? A priest implores the mighty Oedipus, the king of Thebes who rescued all his people once before, to stop the plague that’s ravaging the land. The ruler eagerly agrees, but when he starts intuiting the truth that after all might save them, he does not want to see it – just as the blind prophet Tiresias, who knows and was commanded to reveal it, has trouble naming it for fear of wreaking havoc. The truth, once it’s acknowledged, will lift the plague but also devastate the king, and his desire to remain unseeing does end up leading to his ultimate demise, including gouging out his eyes himself. Blind, after all, for real.
Perhaps you share with me a sense of needing to protect ourselves from ever more bad news, unending, constant, one development more dire than the next. It feels like our sanity depends on turning our eyes and ears away from yet more fear-inducing bits, just like the king of Thebes. Pandemic(s), the rise of authoritarian regimes drifting into fascism, wars and the ultimate threat to our existence, the devastation of our planet through self-inflicted climate change: plagues, all.
So why expose yourself to looking at depictions of the Holocaust, no matter how compelling, how educational, how directly speaking to the human heart? Won’t looking at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education‘s current exhibition, Harley Gaber’s Die Plage (The Plague) depress us even more?
We must. We must engage because we’ve known since Ancient Greece, if not before, that blind passivity does not end well. We must, because the medium that carries the message, in this case walls and walls of 390 assembled, collaged, sometimes manipulated archival photographs from 1918-1945 Germany and other objects, is more effective than a thousand words or numbers. It conveys that plagues will haunt us unless we fight them and uproot the seeds that have been lying fallow, not destroyed. And if you argue I should skip the guilt trip, since all your life you’ve faced the issues of the Holocaust to utmost saturation, I get it, but I disagree.
The only way to fight the plague is to name, to depict and educate. It requires from all of us a willingness to be confronted with the history, our part in it, its implications for the world we live in right this moment. Even when looking is hard.
A close inspection of Gaber’s installation might reveal some parallels to social and political developments right here and now. It reminds us how authoritarian mindsets are fostered and how right wing structures are organized from scratch, with the support of protofascistic organizations. We live in a time where authoritarians get increasingly elected into office internationally, like Meloni in Italy, Orban in in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia or are hovering in the wings, like Le Pen in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid, (party for Freedom) PVV in Holland, and the Sweden Democrats, a right wing, Islamo-phobic populist party that won in recent elections as part of a coalition with centrists. Yesterday holocaust survivor #LilianaSegre (a victim of Mussolini’s race laws) handed over the Presidency of Italy’s Senate to Benito La Russa, a man who wants to be an heir to Mussolini, gives the fascist salute, and collects fascist memorabilia.
Just last weekend, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) doubled their votes in state elections to over 10%. One of their politicians, Holger Winterstein, publicly danced on the slabs of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin this week, spouting phrases about the rebirth of the German Volk.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin – Photo Friderike Heuer
Many characteristics of fascism can be found in the platforms of all of these leaders, including racial purity as a basis for national belonging, a fear of White-replacement, anti-feminism, a cult of leadership and worship of the military, a rebirth narrative, suspensions of democratic freedoms, and attacks against the press. I need not spell out how all of this applies to what is going on closer to home.
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“Perhaps the belief that consciousness permeates everything and transcends – by that I mean encompasses – the cyclic nature of living and dying, would allow us to accept the inevitable beginnings and endings of things as part of a meaningful continuity, not just a tragic aberration” – Harley Gaber, September 2010 as related in the Interviews by Robert Reigle.
HARLEY GABER (1943 – 2011) was born in Chicago into a Jewish-American family. Until the 1970s he was trained and worked as a composer, studying with Horace Reisberg in high school, then Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and later Darius Milhaud, among others. His minimalist work is hailed as among the most distinctive of post-World War II American music. (The link leads to a detailed review of the artist’s music.)
His interest in artistic abstraction had started early with a fascination of Jackson Pollock’s painting, which he claimed influenced his music. So did Morton Feldman‘s elegant 1963 chamber work dedicated to the painter “De Kooning,” by all reports. The cross-over between music and visual art was present then, from the beginning. So was the tendency, in both art forms, to alternate between sparseness – compression, exigence, selection – and abundance, with the former more characterizing the music, the latter the visual onslaught of the montage motifs. Major compositions include Sovereign of the Centre (1972-74),The Winds Rise in the North: String Quintet (1974), I Saw My Mother Ascending Mt Fuji in 2009, The Realm Of Indra’s Net and InMemoriam 2010.
Harley Gaber in front of one of his photomontage panels in 2000 – Photo courtesy of Christina Ankofska
In the late 1970’s Gaber moved from NYC to California, leaving music behind for a time, devoting himself to playing and teaching tennis, taking care of his aging parents, and eventually the montage work across a decade that resulted in Die Plage. Several trips to Germany were undertaken for archival research and exploring historic places, Weimar and the concentration camp Buchenwald memorial site in Weimar’s suburbs, among them.
KZ Buchenwald Memorial Site – Photos Friderike Heuer
By 2002 he returned to composing, as well as some forays into film-making. His view of music shifted in perspective, former technical musical tools and conceptualization of consciousness replaced by a focus on the complexities of the heart. In a profound crisis, wrecked by insomnia, he took his own life in 2011 two weeks after his last composition, In Memoriam 2010, was published, a piece commissioned by the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation, dedicated to Nancy Epstein, who passed away in 2010 and was a close family friend of the Gabers.
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“Eine neue Kunst muss endlich angeben müssen wozu sie gebraucht werden will. ” (It’s about time that a new form of art declares what it wants to be used for.) – Berthold Brecht, Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst.
FOR SOMEONE INTERESTED in quantum physics and in the art of the Weimar Republic, as Gaber was by all reports, photomontage seems ideally suited as a visual medium. The combination of intimate scale and monumental extent, with ever smaller units affecting each other across space, in some ways mirrored his approach to musical notation. He drew parallels between our insights from physics to how he perceived humanity to function. In quantum entanglement you cannot describe the state of one of the quanta without the state of the other one. They can only be apprehended as a unit, even if they are far apart. Gaber’s montages gave visual life to this concept: the distinct groups of a society only to be understood in their linkage to each other. Perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed part of the same system under the umbrella of a deadly ideology.
Photomontage basically refers to collaging with photographs, creating new and different wholes from altered parts, telling a story. It used to be a dark room, paper, scissors and glue affair. These days computer technology allows seamless merging and alteration of digital images where all evidence of historical reality of the components disappears. At the heart of it is fragmentation and construction, playing with perspectives that encourage or prevent a subject’s visibility. The use of scale can obscure – sometimes smaller segments can distract from the larger picture, sometimes grand expansions blur your ability to see detail. Visibility, of course, will matter only if you are inclined to look. The switching back and forth between micro, macro or intermediate levels can be in itself demanding.
Then there is the matter of representation: who is represented, how do we represent? Are we manipulated by caricature, or surreal additions, by use of symbolism and/or text? If our hold on reality is ridiculed by including absurd juxtapositions, are we turned off enough to turn away? The question every artist needs to struggle with is how to represent a topic so over-saturated in visual memorial culture like the Holocaust. How do you prevent archival photographs of boots and soldiers, trains and camps and swastikas in endless repetition from being seen as overly familiar tropes, sparking associations only to a concept, safely relegated to the past?
In Europe between the wars, photomontage techniques were used by many artists who were part of the Dadaist movement, protesting against the First World War. The surrealists soon grasped this tool that lent itself to their exploration of consciousness and free association – with quite a few women as path breakers: Emila Medková, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, and Hannah Höch. But the real surge of photomontage could be seen when first Russian constructivist artists applied it regarding issues of social justice and then the Neuer Deutscher Verlag (New German Press), run by Willi Münzenberg, committed itself to photomontage as a propaganda tool, most famously in its flagship periodical Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (or AIZ) (Worker’s Illustrated), which it began publishing in January 1925. By 1930, artist John Heartfield, clearly a model for Harley Gaber, began to contribute his intense montages to the AIZ, attracting yet more readers. The new art form had signaled its intentions: agit-prop.
In 1931, one of my favorite montage artists, César Domeal-Niewenhuis, curated the very first exhibition devoted solely to the new art form – Fotomontage – under the aegis of the Berliner Kunstbibliothek, in Berlin. Raoul Hausman opened the event, and the montages were displayed in sections divided between advertising and political art, with John Heartfield and the Bund revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (The league of revolutionary German visual artists) dominating those exhibits. Experimental works by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch, among others, had their own corner. I do not know if Gaber saw the catalogue or was familiar with this work, but it likely would have resonated. A fascinating retrospective of the history of art during the Weimar Republic opened in Berlin at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in 1977 – Wem gehört die Welt: Kunst und Gesellschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Who owns the World: Art and Society in the Weimar Republic). It might have been an impetus for Gaber’s new dedication given that the exhibition focused on the ways in which the artists related to the people, how they attempted to contribute to changing the world and how those actions were received. The anti-war photomontage work of his U.S. contemporary, the brilliant Martha Rosler, devoted to exposing the failure of our political class to learn anything from history, might also have been of interest to him. We will never know.
Then again, the desire to create this monumental work might have come from a uniquely Jewish-American perspective trying to map the universal principles that emerge when humans embrace or are exposed to the maelstrom of ideology and desire for dominion. By deconstructing the specifics of that moment, or of the era that produced the horror, Gaber hoped, perhaps, to lay bare mechanisms that translate generally. As a humanist he certainly acknowledged the agency of human beings, respecting moral values, but was also quite aware that living up to our potential is contextually shaped.
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“Here the ten plagues will be enumerated, and it is a widespread—though not particularly old—custom to remove a drop of wine from the cup for each plague. This strange practice was explained to me, when I was still a boy, that wine is a symbol of joy, and because each plague caused our tormentors to suffer on our account, the joy over our own liberation is diminished…Whether this explanation may make claim to historical truth may remain unanswered, but one must recognize the poetic truth in it, because it breathes the spirit of Judaism.”Rabbi Eduard E. BanethDer Sederabend: Ein Vortrag, (A Lecture on the Pesach Seder) published in Berlin in 1904.
ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHTS of the Passover Seder is the recitation of the plagues sent by G-d to punish the Egyptians who enslaved the Jews – that is if you share the table with young kids. With glee and abandon they dip their fingers, fling the drops of grape juice, yell the names of the afflictions, vermin among them. (Bonus: throwing the plastic frogs and locust used for decoration at each other.) The plagues seem far away, the threats averted. But much history is learned during this annual event, oral transmission linking generation after generation.
Harley Gaber did not grow up around a seder table, the household culturally Jewish, but he intuitively understood the role of children in societies that try to relate their history and, for some, keep their power hierarchies intact.
The montage display contains numerous single images of children and also groups them in ways that form more cohesive narratives. You have the (pre)-teens of the Hitler Youth right next to their Jewish age mates, ready for the trains to be transported. The uniforms of the Hitler Youth (an early unit of the Storm Troopers, mandatory participation for all youth) prepared for the soldierly character of the NSDAP, signified in-group membership, and conferred status. They had to be bought by the parents and many boys were keen on them, thinking it was cool. Children learn the values early, but also understand the power distribution, growing right into docile and willing soldiers, as long as they are not the bottom of the heap.
Top and bottom, after all, a major concept in fascistic thinking, which denies the truth that all of usare equal. In their twisted ways, race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical and mental health were markers of the hierarchy. The spatial word “unter” (below) an important suffix for power relations: there was the Untertan (imperial subject,) the Untergebene (subordinate) and eventually the Untermensch (subhuman), denying Jews and Roma their humanity.
One of the prominent texts in Gaber’s installation reads: “Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen.” (We’re traveling to Poland to give the Jews a good hiding.) The German verb is mostly used in the context of teachers beating their students, something children could easily comprehend. Now they weren’t the targets, but someone else was. It was not just the teaching that violent persecution of minorities was ideologically justified. Children learned early on that hatred, anger or resentment – the whole range of anti-humanistic feelings – were acceptable and even desirable, as long as they found their targets in convenient scape goats. Rote expression of loyalty in these paramilitary youth camps eventually turned to the real thing. Belonging felt good, de- individuation in those group settings eased remaining conscience.
Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen
Parallel to spending afternoons and evenings in these organizations (divided by age groups and gender,) indoctrination became part of the school day as well. It was not just what was NOT allowed to be read or learned, (book banning, anyone?) but importantly how curricula and instruction materials were centrally under the complete control of the party apparatus, as were the hiring and firing of (dis)loyal teachers and professors. Education was no longer geared towards the development of personality and learning, but forced the kids to put on mental blinders, uncritically digesting what was offered, a reduction to the atavistic stages of development. I see Harley Gaber’s work as enormously prescient in that the indoctrination of youth, so prominently displayed in his montages, is to be feared, and easily accomplished when education becomes usurped by those in power and ideologically or religiously driven. We see it, here and now.
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“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”– James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
GABER’S INSIGHT about the interconnectedness of a nation’s strata can be found in his depictions of ordinary Germans going about their lives in union with the rising fascists, as well as conservative politicians, who engaged in Faustian bargains with the Nazi representatives in order to hold on to power. At least that was my interpretation, thinking that perhaps one of the photographs portrayed Kurt von Schleicher, the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, eager to keep oversight over the military and appeasing his rival Hitler, eventually murdered by the Nazis during the Night of the Long Knives.
Top row, 6th panel from the left – portrait of someone reminding me of von Schleicher.
We often forget that during the rise of radical forces more moderate political parties are willing to form alliances with them in order to achieve or stay in power, with the strong belief, if one is generously speculating, that they might keep them in check and under influence within their power arrangements.(A good introduction to this topic can be found here.) That certainly was the case with Hindenburg and Hitler, or Emperor Emanuel and Mussolini, catastrophic miscalculations, both.
Just looking at the current gubernatorial race in Oregon, we have reports that one of the candidate has tied herself to “multiple far-right extremists, including a militia leader, a financial backer of the January 6th insurrection, and a Q-Anon conspiracy theorist.” Another one is reported to have sought the endorsement of the Timber Unit, a group full of extremists, and accepted their award. She lamented to The New York Times: ‘You can see the deterioration of the beautiful City of Roses, now the city of roaches.’ Some people have interpreted that as a de-humanizing reference to Portland’s many unhoused people (a claim denied by the candidate), and a dog whistle to the far right that calls them pests. Roaches. Pest. Plague.
It is not only politicians, though. When celebrities, like Kanye West this week, spout unequivocally anti-Semitic statements on Twitter to their 30 million followers (there are roughly 14.8 million Jews alive) and are welcomed to the platform by the richest man in the world in short succession, it opens more space for resonance for poisonous beliefs and strengthens those who already agree. In Germany, 36.000 people marched in the state of Thuringia alone, at the beginning of October, called by the AfD to protest political conditions, with far-right extremists joined by many ordinary citizens in fear of deteriorating economic conditions due to the war in Ukraine and other political decisions around immigration and environmental protection. When right-wing extremists take to the streets together with the supposedly “middle class,” when there are no longer any fears of contact, the citizenry acts like a sounding box for the Neo-Nazis, amplifying the message. It normalizes anti-democratic positions. Harley Gaber warned us.
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“Memory, the mind’s power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind’s power to make invisibles present.” –Hanna Arendt,The Life of the Mind (1977)
HARLEY GABER’S PHOTOMONTAGES attempted to make the invisible present through creative juxtapositions. He was keenly aware that only testimony, in this case a visual, constructed epic, can keep the past and its lessons alive. In that way, this installation could not be more timely for Jewish museums and institutions in a day and age where the memory of the living is receding, given that the last survivors of the Holocaust are passing on. Memory can only be kept maintained, if we transmit it, true for German and U.S. history of fascism alike. We owe a debt of gratitude to individuals as well as organizations who engage in that task.
From left to right: Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, Steve Gaber, Harley’s brother, Christina Ankofska. Harley Gaber installing one of his panels. photo on right courtesy Christina Ankofska.
After Gaber’s death, his friend Dan Epstein, President of the Epstein Family Foundation that sponsors this exhibition, and Steve Rees, a close friend of the Gaber family, organized the preservation of the work. Much time and resources went into digitizing, cataloguing and storage of 4.200 (!) montages (the 390 on exhibition are a subset based on prior selections by the artist.) This will enormously help curations of this body of work in the future.
Alerted by an article in the NYT about new and diverse approaches to Holocaust and genocide education at Jewish museums, Epstein and Rees (the co-manager of the project) approached a number of them to discuss the possibility of exhibiting Gaber’s work. OJMCHE, under the leadership of Judy Margles, decided to host the project. Margles was able to secure the talents of Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, Executive Director of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) to act as guest curator who extended the scope of the project beyond the photomontage work. You will find interesting materials that allow glimpses of the musician and philosopher as well. Yaverbaum, in turn, received support from Gaber’s brother Steve and Harley’s former partner Christina Ankofska in exploring the art and life of Gaber.
Christina had accompanied Gaber on one of his research trips to Germany, and was present for much of his work creating his montages and preparing them for one of the few exhibits he lived to see. She told me a story that she thought encapsulated his humanism, as much a part of him as were his visionary and creative talents. They left the installation of Die Plage in L.A. (LA Times review from the year 2000 here,) long after midnight, starving. Miraculously they came upon a hot dog cart, amidst a group of unhoused people. Gaber decided: “Hotdogs for all!” and they found themselves happily gorging in famished company now generously treated in the early morning hours. A Mensch, in other words, whose memory should be a blessing. It is up to us to keep his memory and that of all who perished under fascist rule, alive. Gaber’s montages will be of great assistance in that effort.
Memorial marker at the concentration camp Buchenwald memorial site. Part of the inscription for the victims, women and girls in this case, reads: “But you live as long as other humans keep you in their memory.” Many other markers are spread across the site for specific groups of victims. NON OMNIS MORIAR – I shall not wholly die. Photo Friderike Heuer
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Harley Gaber: Die Plage
October 7, 2022 – January 29, 2023
OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION 724 NW Davis Street Portland, OR 97209
TO PUT IT BLUNTLY: I came for the art. Stayed for the history. And left with a mind filled with thoughts about access to education. It all started out, however, with standing at the doorstep of the wrong museum.
Leave it to me and my heat-addled brain to drive to Newport, OR to visit OSU’s current Art About Agriculture exhibit displayed at a Lincoln County Historical Society‘s venue, look up the address for something called “museum” and end up at the Society’s Burrows House. Which was closed. I rang the doorbell and a startled, but exceedingly friendly book keeper tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted. Ah, I was supposed to be at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center (PMHC) overlooking the bay and the iconic Yaquina Bay bridge!
Good thing that my ridiculously stereotypical German punctuality had left some leeway to make it in time to the appointed meetings across town with the various parties involved in my query to learn more about what’s going on in Newport, OR. Somewhat flustered, nonetheless. Soon absorbed by so much I had to take in.
Let us first look at The Sustainable Feast (August 5- September 30, 2022) a collection of artworks about food production and consumption. It was in the process of being hung by Owen Premore, Directing Curator of OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, when I arrived. Curating so many diverse works across two locations (the Visual Art Center at Nye Beach is the second one) is an art in itself – the sequencing as demanding as the mounting. Premore had his work cut out for him, while also training museum staff how to hang and distribute. Consider the statistics:
Number of art submissions to the open call: 290 artworks by 91 artists. Counties represented: 12 Oregon counties, 5 Washington counties, and Kaua’I County in Hawai’i. Artworks selected for inclusion in the tour by a blind jury: 59 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at PMHC: 49 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at VAC: 12 artworks by 12 artists
Quite a feat.
I will then turn to what I learned about the Maritime Center and its new Executive Director, Susan M.G. Tissot, appointed at the beginning of May, who gave me the grand tour of the building, related its history and provided much food for thought. Finally I will fill you in with what’s new at Newport’s Visual Arts Center, which is also exhibiting some of the Sustainable Feast‘s displays in the Upstairs Gallery (August 5 to 28, 2022) and has new leadership as well. Yes, it was a full day. Glorious, too.
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FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS, OSU’s College of Agricultural Science has called on local artists to submit work that helps bring people closer to agricultural resources and research, increasing our understanding and valuing of agriculture, diversity of approaches and innovation in our food system. At its core it is an educational mission, one made possible by significant resources put into the Art in Ag production, including helping the annual show tour across the state for maximal access for visitors. Included is the acquisition of jury-selected art works for the University’s Permanent Collection, which at this time holds fiber arts, mixed media assemblages, paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and works on paper including drawings, photographs, and prints. Permanent collection displays can be found across the state, including at the OSU campus in Corvallis, the Oregon Housing and Community Services in Salem, and the Oregon Food Bank and Wheat Marketing Center in Portland.
The current exhibition shows a wide array of media, and ranges from mediocre to stellar exhibits, a fact I found particularly appealing: this is not an elitist display, but a cross section of artists of all levels interacting with nature, their eco systems, the way food is processed and problems or successes associated with issues related to agriculture. Rather than being in awe, the visitor is drawn in, recognizing our own place and time, exposed to art that is quietly accessible.
I am featuring below selected works that give an impression of the range of media and topics. Go visit the exhibition to get the full sense of artistic talent!
Toni Avery Grey Skies,Golden Fields Acrylic
As a photographer I was of course drawn to particularly strong work by Loren Nelson, David Schaerer, and someone new to me, Craig J. Barber. Whether you depict the simple beauty of a vegetable,
Loren Nelson Bent Pepper, 1999 Black&White Photograph, Archival Pigment Print
or the interaction with the land,
Dave Schaerer Commercial Clam Diggers 2 2012 Digital photographic print
often made harsh by working conditions under a system that has not been kind to or even exploitative and harmful to those it hires, the photographs engage the viewer to think through the issues. This is particularly relevant in a year where farm workers in Oregon, most of them Latinos, have finally been granted overtime pay, something they had been excluded from since the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Since June and July, Oregon also has new OSHA state rules that protect workers when temperatures soar beyond 80 degree or the air becomes clogged with wildfire smoke.
Craig J. Barber Trimming Rhubarb Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
The heat protections require employers to allow workers to take paid breaks to get relief from the heat, provide access to shade areas outdoors and an adequate supply of drinking water, have a heat illness prevention plan and to gradually introduce workers to high temperatures. Some 87.000 farm workers, independent of immigration status, construction workers, forestry professionals, highway workers, and utility personnel will be protected. (Ref.)
Craig J. Barber Hooking Up an Irrigation Hose Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
My eye was caught by a mixed media exhibit by a local Newport artist that teemed with detail, helping us understand the biodiversity required for healthy soil.
Carol Shenk Healthy Soil Biodiversity Mixed media – Details below
My interest was piqued by a mixed media installation that informed, in rebus-like fashion, about animal husbandry and intergenerational transfer of knowledge on a Central Oregon sheep farm in Crook County.
Andries Fourie Powell Butte Romneys Mixed media
There was fiber art,
Sheryl LeBlanc Eat Uni and Help the Kelp Fiber arts
unusual bead work,
A. Kimberlin Blackburn A Farmer’s Life with Luna at the Waterfall 2022 Glass beads, acrylic, thread and up-cycled ceramics
gorgeous sculpture of fungi,
Hsin-Yi Huang The Magnificent Fungi 2022 Porcelain fired to Cone 8 in oxidation atmosphere
and a cabbage.
Crista Ames Unfurl Ceramic: stoneware
There was whimsical work combining installation and photography (all the vegetables were photographed at markets by the artist.)
James Erickson Singer Farms Mixed media sculpture
Video installation could be found next to traditional paintings.
Katy Cauker Orchard Late Summer – Carpenter Hill 2022 Acrylic on Canvas
Julia Bradshaw Cafeteria 2022 – Video, Chafing Dish, TV Monitor – you saw empty dishes moving along an assembly line inside the chafing dish, clever.
Mabel Astarloa Haley Decay 2 2022 Oil
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THE EXHIBITION AT THE MARITIME CENTER is located in the Mezzanine, a space recently refinished, plied with soft carpeting to shelter from uneven floor planks, equipped with beautiful exhibition panels, and with a professional lighting system that tells you right off the bat that Susan Tissot is not a woman of half measures. If something needs done, it will get done right.
30 years of experience in the museum world, including 19 years as Executive Director at different institutions across the western states and Hawai’i, have produced an accumulated knowledge base and varied skill set (think fundraising, grant writing, and above all museum development) that are surely needed in the current situation: cultural institutions all over the place have been battled by economic factors, the closures and difficult working conditions due to the pandemic, with non-profits some of the hardest hit.
What stood out to me in our interaction, though, was Tissot’s infectious enthusiasm for education and her curiosity in conversation. Here was a woman who could have simply made a sales pitch to get her institution on the map – plenty of positive features to highlight, intriguing history of the building to report, neat stuff to show. All of which she did, mind you – I now know the history of a house built by wealthy entrepreneurs, converted into nightclubs and restaurants, and eventual transformation of this beautiful space with its breathtaking views into the current historical center.
The Doerfler Family Theater, for example, is in the building’s basement. There you can directly choose which of 12 short documentaries you would like to see. It also serves as an auditorium for a variety of performances and belongs on a long list of things that hold much potential for this venue. The varied engagement of community members is formidable. To mention just a few, the Board President and retired Director of the Port of Toledo, Bud Schoemake, spent the last 18 years working tirelessly on the building and also oversaw project management of the mezzanine remodel.
Jo An McAdams, the Board Secretary has also been very involved; she is a USCG wife whose husband was a Master Chief. Jo An got the USCG in Newport to help the PMHC do some heavy lifting getting the new exhibit panels here and up on the mezzanine from the shop in Toledo. Joe Novello, a retired US Coast Guard, educator and author who runs the Toledo Community BoatHouse worked with Schoemake on the exhibit panels. Art exhibits are lined up for the near future that will speak to a variety of interests and regional strengths.
The work of three Northwest artists, Cascade Head artist Duncan Berry’s Gyotaku printing on wood panels, McMinnville artist Andy Kerr’s wildlife painting on wood panels and Lincoln City artist Nora Sherwood’s bird illustrations on paper are pretty striking.
The visual art is paired with objects from the museum’s collection, taxidermy specimens including exquisite maritime birds, and a hands-on opportunity that includes wildlife pelts for kids of all ages, courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Tissot very much wants to provide occasions for the general public, children included, that allow people not just to experience wonder or surprise, but that makes them ask questions, the very first step to become more engaged, be it in science or art.
Not the easiest thing to do, when your institution runs on a staff of 5, and is physically slightly removed from the tourist strip that is Bay Boulevard in Newports’ Historic district, if only by a few steps up a staircase, or a driveway that leads to plenty of free parking behind the building. That distance is enough to have people blindly walk by, not aware of what one misses. I, too, plead guilty of not even knowing about the PMHC, despite annual pilgrimages to Newport with the kids, who would have just loved, loved, loved this museum. (Here, by the way, is an online resource for maritime institutions nationally that you can visit, virtually in may cases. Use it as a teaser and then explore the real thing in Newport!)
Andy Kerr Owl Painting on Wood
Here is an interview where Tissot explains the plan for public programs. Still to come are a free Exhibit Art Talk on August 21, 1-3 pm about how nature is used as inspiration for art with artists Duncan Berry and Nora Sherwood. They also discuss the reasons why they focus on the subject. And on Sunday August 28, 1pm, Skyler Gerrity, Assistant District Wildlife Biologist, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, will be at the PMHC to give a presentation on How to live peacefully with our local black bears.
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I RECENTLY LISTENED TO AN INTERVIEW with Heidi Zuckerman a young American leader in contemporary art, formerly a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Berkeley Art Museum. As CEO and Director of OCMA/The Orange County Museum of Art in California, she is building a new, ground-up project with Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Thom Mayne, as well as producing podcasts featuring conversations about art. She talked about her three criteria for a successful institution that serves the public (other than free access which is only a possibility if you have a wealthy and generous donor base. One should be so lucky.) She listed:
1) looking back to look forward – have history as a guide.
2) be mindful of place – anchor yourself locally and within the specifics of your time (awareness of what Covid has done to us and institutions was one example she used.)
3) caring and sharing – be aware of the needs of the community you want to reach, and approach them, invite them, engage them where they are, rather than expecting them to find their way to you.
I was thinking that Tissot’s approach to her work – and partially what PMHC has done since its inception – really fits with these criteria, biding well for the institution. History is preserved, explored, taught; it is anchored in place, focussing on local needs, interests and struggles. (One of her biggest achievements, in her own words, for example, was support for an oral history program (Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai’i at Manoa) that taught younger generations of Hawai’ians about the devastation and horrors of previous tsunamis destroying the islands.) And she is a conversational partner, caring and sharing indeed, not just a representative of an institution, but voicing interest in her interviewer and taking time to discuss shared concerns about how art can be of help in education. She was clearly curious about who she interacted with, something that happens rarely in my reporting experience.
Let’s help keep the PMHC afloat!
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THE NEWPORT Visual Arts Center, my last stop for that day, has seen its share of challenges as well. After admiring the Sustainable Feast artworks displayed in the Upper Gallery (selective images are posted below,) I was sitting down with Sara Siggelkow, OCCA Arts Education Manager, well known for her important role in Newport’s paper book arts festival, and OCCA Executive Director Jason Holland, who arrived in 2020 after 18 years of experience in various roles at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California.
The Covid pandemic had a huge impact on the institution given that educational classes and camps could not take place, and performances at the Performing Arts Center had to be canceled. At this point the institution operates with 50% of the original staff, a large decrease for an organization and a major upheaval for those who lost their jobs, some permanently, in a small community where the arts are likely not hiring for some time to come. Lay-offs are always difficult, but particularly jarring when alternative options are slim.
Holland emphasized how much flexibility is needed and day-to-day decision making required to adapt to new and ever changing circumstances. He was excited to be joined in this venture by a new Director of the Visual Arts Center. Ceramic artist Chasse Davidson who operated Toledo Clayworks from 2015 thru 2020, served as Toledo Arts Guild President 2014-2015, and has participated in the Newport Visual Art Center’s Steering Committee since 2020, will join the staff.
Robin Host Crab Season 2022 Acrylic and Paper Collage on Panel
Bill Marshall Quamash 2022 Watercolor
Lisa Brinkman Sophia’s Garden 2022 Eco-prints of sumac, eucalyptus, and maple, cold wax and oils on raw silk canvas
I was fully familiar with the important role the VAC plays for Oregonian artists as a place to exhibit art. I knew much less about its role in education, beyond my general knowledge of summer camps and year-round classes. Both Holland and Siggelkow reported on their venture with the Oregon CoastArt Bus, a vehicle that literally brings art to the people, instead of people to the arts center. Or, to be more precise, brings the chance of making art and thus involvement in art to those who might be stuck in their communities due to lack of transportation, funding, or simply information.
Oregon Coast Council for the Arts is pleased to announce the creation of a new mobile arts-learning platform—The Oregon Coast Art Bus, which will bring creative learning projects to students throughout Lincoln County this summer and beyond. The project has been funded by the K-12 Summer Learning Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation and is designed to address the “opportunity gap” associated with educational challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Oregon Coast Art Bus’s summer initiative will focus on under-served youth populations. The Bus event will be free and families are encouraged attend.
The bus comes equipped with an arsenal of tools to introduce a theme, parks at the local library, or a box store parking lot, or a sports field, and everyone can come and participate. For the last round it was printing of nature’s bounty. Planned for the next round are geometric shapes. Struck me as a splendid idea, and I wonder how many counties in Oregon could copy that approach to help children find access to and grow an interest in art. Here is a detailed article on the project published in Oregon Arts Watch last year.
Looking forward, concerned with place and sharing and caring here as well. Art is in good hands at the Oregon coast. A sustainable feast with our continued support.
Artwork by a child participating in the activities offered by the Art Bus crew.
And finally a note to my regular readers: I will take the rest of the month off, an earned break!, see you in September.
I get mail that tells me I make too much use of the bully pulpit and should seduce the reader on an easy slope into hard topics. Noted.
I get mail that urges me to be more straightforward and cut the superfluous trimmings from the message core. Under consideration.
I get mail that compares me to a mindreader, expressing word for word what is a fog of thoughts in someone’s brain. I don’t think so.
I get mail that simply says: Spot on! Makes my heart sing.
On some days, I am told by strangers that they love my work, so glad they stumbled on the blog. Makes my day.
Occasionally I get yelled at. So be it.
Yet all agree I have some quirky habits. One of them is to recommend books to read that I have not (yet) read myself, as you all well know. (There are other, quirkier habits. They include one that I have had since childhood. I leave the cores of apples, religiously consumed as one per day for the last 60-odd years, lying around wherever I drop them, much to the consternation of my mother who called me Appelschnut, a vernacular for “little apple mouth,” and my roommates, lovers, girlfriends, or my husband. Should I ever get lost in the Hänsel and Gretel woods, just follow the trail of pips….
Regarding that unseemly habit, I wouldn’t know the answer to the question: “Why?”
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I do know the reason for the book recommendations, though: I simply do not have enough time to read everything in a timely fashion. When books crop up that tie into something that is of current interest or importance, and if they are recommended by a source I trust, I have no quarrel with putting them up and out there. Who knows, maybe I’ll get mail that tells me they were worth it?!
Case in point was a reminder in our current discussion about race relations and discriminatory treatment, that our educational institutions, as designed, have been at the forefront of keeping race and class in separate corners, perpetuating a division that prohibits young minds to snap out of historically and culturally ingrained patterns of group identity.
An article in yesterday’s Washington Post reported on the results of studies of White students’ attitudes after forced school segregation was ended in Charlotte, NC, in 2002. Students’ views became closer to those of their minority peers, and a significantly smaller proportion registered as Republicans later in life. Exposure to minorities in grade school also affected whether you doubted that they were structurally disadvantage in our society and influenced your choice of room mated during the college years.
The book Cutting School – The Segrenomics of American Education by Noliwe Rooks who is the W.E.B. Du Bois professor of literature and the director of American studies at Cornell University, and was for ten years the associate director of African American studies at Princeton University, paints a larger picture. On the one hand, the book is a personal memoir of living in two very distinct educational environments simultaneous – she alternated between her divorced parents’ households in Florida, with an overwhelmingly white, integrated school, and San Francisco, where her peers were POC or all Black.
“That experience, and my family history, led me to understand the tremendous influence of the segregated history of American education on our educational present.
“In our current moment, the type of education, the quality of the school buildings, the experience of the teachers, and the ability to graduate are vastly different depending on the racial and economic makeup of one’s community. It is apartheid: a system that is, at its core, organized by physically separating racial groups and then privileging one racial group over another (a construct that cannot be disentangled from social class). “
On the other hand, it is a rigorous research study of the historical dynamics of race and class, and contemporary attempts to co-opt educational reform in favor of maintaining double standards and increasing further privatization (often as a means to blur the separation between church and state as well. Here is a verbatim quote ( I found somewhere else) by Betsy de Vos: “Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s kingdom.”)
Rooks’ work came to my attention when I listened to a conversation between Amy Goodman and the author in a radio program about the effects of the pandemic on education. Rooks felt that our current circumstances in some ways shine a light on the inequalities that are already there, with those who are suffering the most tending to be Black and poor. Remote education – the fall-back option after city after city had to close the schools – works for some parts of the population, but not those for whom school meant so much more than just receiving lessons: a place to get fed, wash their clothes, have structure and social services, mental health stability.
In communities where you do not have access to stable, fast Internet, on-line learning is problematic. For many poor people, the internet is accessed through their phones, which means on-line sessions accrue more charges, money they don’t have. And in much on-line learning schools expect parents to hand out lesson plans and facilitate homework assignments beyond the twice-a week 40 minute lectures, which many poor parents are unlikely to be able to do. Home environments also do not facilitate concentration needed for remote learning, if they are cramped or noisy. (Harvard Law asked students worried about these issues to rent office space – no joke!.)
On the college level, the vast majority, well over 60%, of Black and Latinx kids who get BAs do so at community colleges or for-profit universities, not at four-year institutions. There has been little exploration about how these institutions are going to re-open, if at all. What works perhaps at truly wealthy institutions who have funds to spend for prevention and protection, is not going to work at the schools that serve the majority of the population. And we are not even having a national discussion about this.
Nothing is easy. Learning about the historical factors that created and perpetuate unequal education for groups of people in this country, however, might help figuring out what must be urgently re-structured and how we can go about it.
Should all this be thoroughly depressing, the photographs of yesterday’s walk might just be the balancing ticket – the beauty out there cannot be tempered even with the rain-filled skies.
Music today about schooling across several generations.
The auditorium at Jefferson High School was humming like a beehive, punctuated by giggles and squeals of excited youngsters greeting each other, and the occasional wail of a baby in their parent’s arm, all waiting for the Spring Recital of the Harriet Tubman Middle School and Faubion Elementary School.
Before photographing the performance, I had a chance to walk the dark stage, occasionally taking a picture of the students, blurry in the absence of good, well, almost any light. The blurriness matched the mood to perfection, though – everyone was eager to go, quick on their feet, slightly nervous and wondering if all the hard work they had put in for months on end would pay off. Sort of a fleeting moment before the show started for real.
And what a show it was: the energy on the stage amplified by the appreciative reception in the hall, the musicians’ visible joy amplified by the stomping of quick feet, competing for control over the speed, the room lit up by the smiles of the performers, amplified by the proud smiles of their parents.
The school leadership, the teachers, the musicians, the choreographers all pulled something together that was remarkable. The dancers themselves were a wonder – making it work in ways that integrated everyone from beginners to young people who might as well be professionals. The same was true for a grand finale drumming performance that had the audience stomping in the aisles.
And I asked myself, why are not more people coming to applaud these kinds of achievements? How are we, the community, represented when it comes to providing encouragement to projects like these? For all the talk of helping underserved populations, where are we when our mere presence could provide some actual support?
I had the privilege to listen to the drumming of Hakim Rashad Muhammad and Derrel Sekou Soumah Walker, the students’ teachers, on many previous occasions. Sekou’s wife, the intensely talented Karida Griffith Walker, is going to be part of the teaching faculty at Portland Tap Dance Fest, coming up next weekend. You can read about her below.
I will be watching the Friday night performance of our cousin Bethany Reisberg and her colleagues – if you want to be uplifted, consider coming as well!
