JGA July-August 09 - The Jewish Georgian

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Page 36 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN July-August 2009 The Blumberg Report I had hardly moved into my new digs on Peachtree when the phone rang with invitations to two very interesting events. One was the ceremony and luncheon at Morehouse College inaugurating the Rabin-King Initiative, a multifaceted program for strengthening ties between Jews and African Americans. The event featured the induction of a newly appointed Board of Preachers and Sponsors that included, among others, Rabbi Peter Berg of The Temple, Ambassador Reda Mansour of Israel, and myself. The keynote speaker, also an inductee, was Rabbi David Saperstein, director of Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center in Washington, recently listed as the nation’s most influential rabbi. He gave a dynamic, highly inspirational lecture recalling the life work of Martin Luther King Jr. and his connections with Atlanta Jewry, as BY Janice Rothschild Blumberg well as the courageous leadership of Israel’s martyred Nobel Prize laureate, Yitzhak Rabin. On the personal side, I was highly honored to have been included in such an august group. It was a wonderful experience, one that certainly motivated me to help further the objectives of the Rabin- King Initiative. Where that motivation will lead remains to be seen, but there is never a lack of opportunity for extending friendship and understanding. One such opportunity came to me in the form of a phone call from Michael Baker at Positive Impact, an organization devoted to providing services to HIV sufferers. He asked me to be the guest of Positive Impact at a benefit performance of Driving Miss Daisy at the Balzer Theater. He also asked me to speak at a post-performance reception for the donors, recounting personal experiences with The Temple bombing and other historical aspects of the play. I suggested a panel discussion rather than a solo performance (for which I lack the chutzpah) and thus gained the pleasure of appearing with professor and civil rights activist Lonnie King, Jr. His input was far more relevant than mine could ever have been, since he spoke from ongoing deep involvement with race relations, the issue at the core of Miss Daisy. Questions addressed to me were largely in the realm of reminiscence, and I found myself tempted to speak more about the play itself than about the general conditions that it mirrored. In my opinion, the production of Alfred Uhry’s prize-winning masterpiece by Theatrical Outfit, whose executive director is Tom Key, was first-rate, and Robert J. Farley deserves enthusiastic kudos for his direction. Jill Jane Clements’ portrayal of Miss Daisy was harsher than Mary Nell Santacroce’s in the play’s Atlanta debut or her daughter Dana Ivey’s in New York, but, nonetheless, gave the aging matriarch a character whose metamorphosis moved many of us to tears. Rob Cleveland was so good as Hoke that I immediately stopped comparing him to Morgan Freeman, and William Murphy was delightful as the Jewish “good old boy” trying to care for his mother. Most importantly, they drew the audience through laughter and heart tugs to a renewed awareness of the need for sensitivity to the feelings of others. Positive Impact is all about that. Founded in 1993, its mission is to provide people affected by HIV with culturally competent mental health counseling and prevention counseling, as well as with intensive substance abuse treatment. In addition to other services, it hosts an annual forum, the Cultural Diversity Institute, where mental health professionals come to learn about diversity issues affecting treatment of their own clients. Those of us who thought that education and life-preserving drugs had come close to wiping out the scourge of HIV/AIDS in America have been sadly mistaken. The most recent data available indicate that there has actually been an increase of cases in Georgia in the present decade. In Atlanta, Positive Impact alone has serviced more than 4,100 clients so far this year. The organization cites complacency as one of the main reasons for the increase and is trying to strengthen awareness of the danger in order to reverse this trend. To learn more about Positive Impact and ways in which to impact its mission directly, call Paul Plate or Michael Baker at 404-589-9040. The scourge isn’t over yet, and in these times of reduced finances, agencies such as this need all the help they can get.
July-August 2009 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN Page 37 A Personal Memoir, part 1: Atlanta adolescence By David Macarov I grew up in the locker room of the Atlanta Braves—or, at least where the Braves locker room now stands. Of course, they weren’t called the Braves when I was growing up. They were the Atlanta Crackers. The Atlanta team was named Crackers as a deliberate contrast to names like the enormous New York Giants, or, obviously, the victorious New York Yankees. iSeder From page 29 ————— Crackers were supposed to be unschooled, impolite, rather simple—in short, underdogs, and that was the image that the Atlanta team liked to portray, because it enlisted a lot of sympathy. It was also a humorous method of keeping alive the myth that the South was still fighting the War Between the States, which myth had already become an elaborate Southern joke. (“Never call it the Civil War, son,” a grizzled veteran at the State Capitol once said to me when I was a schoolboy, “because it was a most uncivil war.”) It was true that we probably learned more in school about that war than about the Revolution, and certainly more than the World War (this was before there was a World War II), but, as I remember it, we were taught that slavery was wrong and that maintaining the unity of the States was right. The War Between the States was simply taught as a fact of history, but there es with each passing day; no matter where we turn, it, or some facet of it, will forever be there. The question for the future then becomes: Can religion, absent of technological influence, especially in nations as progress-oriented and industrialized as the United States, ever truly exist on a mass scale? And if the answer is no, and you accept that technology does posses at least some de-spiritualizing qualities, what will all this mean for the American Jew in the future? In response to the first question, Reeves is clear about one thing: whether for good or bad, the ever-growing connection between religion and technology is an unavoidable condition of the future. “Young Jews today rely on technology in every aspect of their lives. The 25-yearold American Jew could not imagine not having technology; it would be unimaginable to not have a telephone, unimaginable to not have access to the Internet, unimaginable to not use e-mail,” Reeves said. And, at the suggestion that such a future relationship may have negative implications, Reeves showed no quit. were still enough short stories and novels and movies to make it seem like a glamorous war—Jeb Stuart’s cavalry; Stonewall Jackson’s last words; Pickett’s charge; Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox”; noble Jefferson Davis; and, of course, angelic Robert E. Lee—were familiar to all of us. But we only put on the “proud Southerner” guise as an inside joke. It was all history, and rather ancient history. “Over fifty years ago,” to a youngster, is going back to the time of Noah. That’s why calling oneself a cracker had no historical connotation. Instead, its usage had become a form of reverse snobbery. “We’re crackers and proud of it,” had taken on an almost sly aspect. It was a method of deliberately exaggerating the characteristics that Northerners imputed to us, but which we knew weren’t there. At a later date, “redneck” took the place of “cracker,” but that was softened when Governor Gene Talmadge, of the red suspenders, began using the term “good ole boys.” Though Yankees never knew it and kept saying “cracker,” the really insulting phrase was “po’ white trash.” We never spoke of Yankees, by the way—that was a term they used themselves. To us, they were Northerners, or— when we deliberately wanted to exaggerate the differences—Nawtheners. I don’t imagine many people speak of Southerners and Northerners any more, and few people still use the term “cracker,” but, on the other hand, how many people in the United States—except in Atlanta—discuss what the Braves did last night, off an Indian reservation? “It would have been like saying, at the turn of the 20th century, if we engage people with the telephone, they’re going to be less Jewish. But the telephone became such an integral part of our society, we couldn’t imagine how we could possibly function without it. So I think these other functions of technology are the same; [young Jews] just can’t function without them, and so, by using these tools, we are reaching young people where they are, meeting them using a medium with which they are familiar.” Still, the telephone has been around for ages, and, in the lives of many Jews, its use at certain times—such as Shabbat— continues to be strictly prohibited and is done so specifically in the name of Judaism. So why, then, can we not prevent other forms of technology from finding their way into our prayers? Or, with anti- Semitism declining and intermarriage at an all-time high, is the increasingly closer connection between religion and technology merely the product of what is quickly becoming a larger and larger pool of Americanized Jews with a less traditional tilt? Only time can answer these questions, and what either conclusion would mean for the future of American Judaism ————— We used to make fun of Northerners, of course, and the trick was to do it so that they didn’t know they were being made fun of. For the most part, the humor was harmless. We would show them the round water tower in Druid Hills and explain that it was a big golf ball—a tribute to Bobby Jones. On showing them the Cyclorama, the panoramic painting in Grant Park, we assured them that the German artists who made the memorial were later deliberately blinded so that they could never create another one. We always mentioned Sherman’s retreat through Georgia to the sea (and by then, most of them didn’t know enough history to catch the joke), and we showed them the Governor’s mansion, explaining that it was the seat of the Ku Klux Klan. Sometimes, though, we played into Northerners’ worst stereotypes of Southerners. After a while, the visitor usually realized he was being kidded, but I remember one particularly obnoxious visitor, who kept bragging about how much better and bigger and more interesting “The City” was. We became so annoyed with him that we pretended we were going to take him to view a lynching, to his horror. We were evidently very convincing, because when we paused for a traffic light, he leaped out of the car and ran. We watched him disappear and shook our heads at the naiveté and stupidity of supposedly sophisticated Nawtheners. remains equally unclear. Either way, though, one thing is for sure: Rabbi Reeves has an insightful and determined perspective on religion, its purpose, and what it should work to accomplish. Regardless of the future implications, he has incorporated technology into religious practice with the most pure and innovative intentions. “When we were coming up with how we would use technology for the iSeder, some people thought, ‘Oh, are people going to be in their own homes and connect into the Seder that way?’ I didn’t want to do that purposely, because then I don’t think that you would really connect with other people in the way that religion is supposed to bring people together and form community.” ————— The girls of my generation would never date a boy who wore white shoes in the wintertime. White shoes were the style in the South as well as in the North, but Southerners wore black or brown when winter started, and the Northerners—mostly college boys going to Georgia Tech— continued with their whites. White shoes in the wintertime marked someone as not only from the North, which was bad, but specifically from New Jersey, which was even worse than New York. White shoes in the winter automatically meant no date. When we learned that New Yorkers never spoke of New York by name—it, was always “The City” (“In The City, we...” or, “One day, when I was in The City...”) we used that to needle them, too. Whenever a New Yorker began sounding off about The City, we always looked dumb and asked innocently, “Kansas City? Jersey City? Salt Lake City?” We took pleasure in forcing him to specify “New York City,” and then our reply was invariably a disinterested, “Oh, that city.” Once we had created a good relationship with a visitor, however, we usually showed him the incomplete carving on Stone Mountain, Druid Hills, the Candler estate, the Fox Theatre, the Cyclorama, and the Biltmore Hotel. But, regardless of whatever else we did with visitors, we always ended up at the Alliance. Next issue: Good times at the Jewish Educational Alliance Finally, no matter where you fall on the issue, our overwhelming reliance on technology is, no doubt, here to stay. According to Rabbi Reeves, Judaism can either harness technology’s presence and use it to persist and grow even stronger in the years to come, or, through avoidance in the name of tradition, neglect the needs and demands of its future followers, while contributing to its own end. Reeves definitely believes technology will be important in keeping Judaism alive. “I think in 100 years, we’re going to have technologies in the synagogue that right now we can’t really imagine. I think that the use of technology, in the process of how we do everything, is only going to increase.”
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