Yesterday I was driving (to Cape Cod, for my mother’s birthday) when I caught On the Media on NPR and heard Brooke Gladstone interviewing Calvin Trillin about his coverage of the Freedom Riders 50 years ago. The segment was a bath of moral affirmation. Trillin reflected on the tension between being an objective reporter and knowing that what he was covering was wrong, and Gladstone extended the civil rights movement to the victory of gay marriage in New York, saying in essence, this is the same struggle and gosh, we have been on the right side both times. Though Trillin said that when he was in high school people made anti-gay slurs without thinking about it. And now we know that was wrong. And then he took a shot at the wicked Murdoch reporters hacking telephones.
The tone of the segment was self-congratulatory: look at the progress our society has made, and we have been in the vanguard. But of course there was not a word about the Palestinians. If you ask why I am injecting this concern into a show about domestic moral questions– well, this is an American Jewish question, that’s why. This is our inheritance. Near my head on the bookshelf of the bedroom I got last night in my parents’ (second) house, there is a book of stories, Gates of Eden, by the director Ethan Coen that includes a 1967 remembrance of a Hebrew School teacher gathering the entire school in the lunchroom during the Six-Day War to talk pugilistically about the Jews taking on the Arabs; and that’s it. The Israel issue of dispossession and second-class citizenship on a racial basis is a live moral question and it’s our inheritance. It is Trillin’s and Gladstone’s too (Trillin said that he had grown up in a family of Yiddish-speaking immigrants; Tablet reports that Gladstone is Jewish (sorry, no links, bad connection)).
I imagine they’d both say, Well that’s complicated. But I bet privileged whites in the Deep South said that was complicated, too.
Trillin said that geography was destiny back then; if you were from Louisiana you were a racist, couldn’t help yourself. And I wonder, To what extent is Jewish geography destiny? If you are a mainstream liberal Jewish media person, you are doomed to paralysis on the great human rights issue of our time and place.
