VICTORY OF OBAMA, A SALUTE TO BROOK-KRASNY AND KAGAN FOR COMING TOGETHER, AND WHAT THEY SHOULD DO TOGETHER NEXT

Dear All,
Consider this the re-launch of Rubyjewsday. I have been overwhelmed in recent months organizing the upcoming Weekend of Twinning of mosques and synagogues Across North America, which will bring together more than 40 synagogues and 40 mosques that weekend to hold one on one discussions on the theme of Confronting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. I’ll be posting more on the Weekend of Twinning during the days ahead. But I’ve missed doing the blog and my batteries feel re-charged, so without further ado---I’m back.
What can I say about the election victory of Barack Obama that hasn’t already been said? It’s an overwhelmingly powerful moment for me. I was there in Chicago in 1968 as an 18-year-old volunteer for Eugene McCarthy watching with horror as the Chicago police in Grant Park beat the shit out of young people who had turned out to protest Hubert Humphrey’s getting the nomination without winning one primary—and thus destroy the Democratic Party that year and help Richard Nixon to the presidency, the beginning of 40 years of Republican political domination—my entire adult life. Sure, there were breaks in the GOP control for Carter and Clinton, but they managed to win only because they were southerners who did not dare to challenge the basic Republican assumptions, mainly that government cannot do too much on behalf of people in need.
And suddenly, here were Barack and hundreds of thousands of jubilant supporters in the very same Grant Park celebrating the victory of an unabashed northern liberal who also happens to be a black man. 40 biblical years on the wilderness were at last over. Crosby, Stills and Nash wrote in their song Long Time Gone back in 1970 about the Nixonian conservatism/quasi-fascism of the time that it had been “A long time coming, and it will be a long time gone…a long, long time before the dawn. Unfortunately that turned out to be prophetic. And I feel deeply blessed that I was privileged to live long enough to see the dawn—and that night watching Grant Park with tears running down my cheeks, I found myself, a confirmed non-believer, reciting the Schechiyanu prayer, "Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion."
I remembered too being nine years old, having just arrived in Virginia on a family trip from our home in Pittsburgh to Tennessee, heading for the bathroom and being flabbergasted to see four bathrooms marked “white men”, “white women”, “colored men”, “colored women”. This was in 1959, not 1859. And then I recalled all the memories of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960’s, including a heaven-sent opportunity to hear Martin Luther King speak at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Chicago in 1966. To have lived through all of that and then witnessing something I never expected to see in my lifetime; a black man elected President of the United States. It is powerful and profound in ways I can’t begin to articulate. This event somehow validates the struggles of my entire generation—often seemingly in vain—to make this country a more just and kinder place. History works in amazing ways.
Not only do we have a young African-American president, but someone who is incredibly bright, disciplined and committed to all the ideals that have been trampled into the mud for 40 years. Obviously, he will be initially limited in the changes he can make because of the terrible economic crisis the country confronts. On the other hand, the very depth of that crisis and the need for results, may force him to choose a course that will be more New Deal than New Democrat a la Bill Clinton. He can rescue the auto industry by jump starting a massive effort to build green cars and get us off fossil fuels. Obama can’t afford to delay health care, because the absence of decent heath care for tens of millions of Americans deepens the economic crisis. Obama faces an enormously difficult set of challenges, but he can’t hope to succeed by following conservative council to slow down and take half steps. He has to go for it. Wed can only pray he and his team are up to the occasion.
On a local note, I was happy to witness recently the joint press conference of Alec Brook-Krasny and Ari Kagan announcing their reconciliation and new partnership. It was great to see this belated coming together two years after their bitter Democratic primary battle barely won by Alec, who subsequently went on to win the State Assembly seat. He has done a first rate job since then bringing money into the district and Ari was wise to see that there was no point challenging him further and perpetuating a bitter rift in the Russian community. Reconciling, as I urged them in a whole series of postings on rubyjewsday two years ago will likely give Ari a political future—although probably not next year because of the shabby deal Bloomberg and the City Council made to give each other another term in office.
The Russian community is blessed to have two such capable and fundamentally decent political leaders. What I would like to see the two of them do now is to ‘educate’ that section of the community that responded to Obama with horror—sometimes in openly racist language, more often in coded racist language—that he represented a death threat to Israel and that his victory would inspire young black thugs from Coney Island and elsewhere to launch violent attacks on elderly Russians in Coney Island and Brighton Beach.
Brook-Krasny was careful not to endorse Obama even though I understood from an interview with him a few weeks back that he was inclined to support him but could not say so because of the intense antipathy in the Russian community, whereas Ari told me he would likely vote for McCain out of fear for what Obama might mean for Israel. Still, neither Ari nor Alec are anti-black (They have both worked hard to form alliances with black political leaders and community activists in Coney Island) and they now need to step up efforts to educate the community to stop hunkering down fearfully in its Brighton-Manhattan Beach bunker and start reaching out to the communities around them, black and Pakistaniu Muslim among others.
A Russian Jewish friend said to me recently that he and his ancestors were not guilty of causing slavery in America and therefore he is not responsible for healing the racial divide that has existed in America for 400 years. My response is that healing the racial divide is a responsibility of all Americans, not only those whose ancestors were here in 1865. The Russian Jews living here chose to move to America and become American citizens (they could have stayed in the FSU or moved to Israel) and by doing so they and their children inherited not only all the good things about America, but also a responsibility for helping heal our country of its injustices. I very much hope Alec Brook-Krasny and Ari Kagan will use their soapboxes to challenge the Russian community to change attitudes that are frankly, bigoted and anti-American. One Russian Jewish man in his 60’s I interviewed on the Boardwalk in early October told me, “I am voting for McCain because the President should be nastiyashe Amerikanetz—a real American”. Ari, Alex, please tell the community that Barack Obama is nastayashe Amerikanetz, just as much as any white person, or any Jew. And make the same point to those who listen to you that Colin Powell made recently; that while Obama is not a Muslim, so what if he were? An American Muslim is every bit as much an American as an American Jew or Christian. And we have a moral imperative as Jews to reach out to them and build connections—just as we do to blacks.
Anyway, it’s a moment of great happiness for me to welcome Obama’s election. I only hope more of my Russian Jewish brothers and sisters will come to understand how wonderful a day it is to see a person of Obama’s intelligence and moral integrity win the presidency.