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President Lanny
Morrison's Message for January 2012 Who Are We? I come from a generation where it was common for Jewish adults to ask Jewish children if they knew what religion a certain person was. The answer to the question was almost always "Jewish," whether it as an athlete, entertainer, politician, scientist, etc. Sid Luckman, Dolph Schayes, Dinah Shore, John Garfield, Marcel Marceau, Jacques Offenbach, Moses Wolf Goldberg, Ayn Rand, and the list went on - so many names, so many questions. It was a way for Jewish adults to convey the pride in the accomplishments of fellow Jews and to try to get us to aspire to be like them. Rarely the focus of the question was something else as when the person in question did something of which one should not be proud - people like Bugsy Siegle, Leopold and Loeb, Dutch Schultz, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Then, it brought forth the Yiddish phrase a shanda fur die goyim, meaning something embarrassing to Jews which non-Jews could observe. That phrase was also directed at children preceded by "Don't be" in order to get them to behave in a manner the adults wanted. As my own children began to grow, I did the same thing with them. Of course, they caught on right away. Now, I hear them imparting the same question to their young children. Sometimes, the questioning goes in the other direction with unexpected results. Take the following recent conversation between Joshua, age five, and Lynne:
Joshua: "Nana,
you're Jewish, right?" Mort and Chloe are our dog and cat, respectively. And I guess they are Jewish, if for no other reason than dear Joshua has declared them so. Curiously, he left out the horses and chickens, maybe because they reside out in the barn and not in the house. In any case, Jewish identity matters to Joshua - as it does to us. Those who go before us provide us with examples of the kind of people we can be. They can be people we strive to learn from and emulate. They can be people we do not wish to learn from, at least in the sense of not emulating them. If, as the Torah says, we have free will, the choice is ours. And how we live our own lives will provide examples for those who follow us. I am always on the lookout for Jews of whom I have not previously known to see what I can learn. A good source for inquiry is the blog This Day In Jewish History. I found Caroline Klein Simon, who on January 1, 1959, was sworn in as New York's Secretary of State as part of the administration of newly-elected Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Born in 1900, she earned a law degree at New York University in 1925. According to the blog: "Unable to find a law firm willing to hire a woman, she worked for free for a year in order to prove that a woman could be a lawyer. At the end of the year, her law firm offered her a permanent job, but she chose to work for family planning groups and indigent clients instead. That choice marked the beginning of a lifelong dedication to public service. In addition to volunteer work with the League of Women Voters, the Women's City Club, and the National Council of Jewish Women, Simon held paid positions as the executive director of the New York State Council of Jewish Women and as editor of the Birth Control Review. Simon was also active in city and state politics. In 1937, she spearheaded a campaign to allow women to serve on juries and became among the first women called to serve. A registered Republican, she worked on the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, and Fiorella LaGuardia. Simon took up her first government post in 1943, when she became a member of the State War Council's Committee on Discrimination in Employment; later, she was the only woman member of the State Commission Against Discrimination, a position she held for more than ten years. In 1957, she became the first woman nominated for citywide office when the Republican party made her its candidate for president of the New York City Council. Although she lost the election, she ran some 100,000 votes ahead of the rest of the Republican ticket. Less than two years later, Nelson Rockefeller appointed her Secretary of State, a post she held until 1963; she then served on the New York Court of Claims until 1971. Simon continued to practice law into her nineties. . . Simon was a strong voice for strengthening laws against discrimination in jobs and housing. She helped draft the first U.S. state law barring employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or nationality. Later, she led the way in barring racial "block-busting," a practice in which real estate agents exploited fears of racial integration to incite sales. Living out her credo of being simply 'against discrimination in any form,' Simon spent a lifetime working to bring down barriers. She died in July 1993, at age 92." Now there is a person to emulate.
B'shalom -Lanny Morrison, President |
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