Maggie's Farm

Rosh Hashanah starts tonight. My ever-active boys sat still, watched, listened, learned, and had fun with this Lady Gaga inspired Rosh Hashanah performance. Who am I to argue with Lady Gaga anymore!

A few translations:

Days of Awe = The ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, for especially intense introspection, self-correction and launching on better behaviors toward others.

Mahzor = Special holiday prayer book

Shofar = Rams horn, usually, blown from Biblical times to announce holidays, and at Rosh Hashanah to trumpet the Rebirth of the World and of us. In the Bible the day is called Yom Teruah, the day of the sounding of the shofar.

Shanah Tovah = Our greeting to others for a good year, a shortened version of "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year."

Shanah Tovah to all from Maggie's Farm.

The New York Daily News editorial today is titled "Academically incorrect: Brooklyn College book choice makes a mockery of education."

This comes in reaction to my blog posts (here, here and here), which the New York Post, New York Times, and many other blogs have also featured.

Today's New York Daily News editorial:

The faculty at Brooklyn College chooses one book each year that will be required reading for nearly all incoming freshmen. This year's choice, "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," has generated controversy.

Up front and for the record: President Karen Gould and her professorial force are free to assign whatever works they choose - even if academic excellence takes second place to offering students an unchallenging, feel-good bonding experience.

But that freedom comes with the responsibility to provide inquiring minds with the straight goods about the literature they've been ordered to read. Here, by all the evidence, Brooklyn College has failed.

"How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" was written by Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at the school. The book is a collection of seven profiles of Arab-American youths living in Brooklyn after 9/11. Each is a victim in one way or another.

Akram works in his family's East Flatbush bodega, which one resident boycotts because "they support Bin Laden"; Rasha and her family are roused from bed and held in detention as suspected terrorists, then released; Sami, a Marine, deploys to Iraq, where fellow soldiers call him a terrorist because of his background.

College officials say the book is in line with previous selections, such as Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." In their telling, the reading is meant to mirror the diversity of the student body, particularly its immigrant experience.

But to treat Bayoumi's book as nothing more than an anthology of coming-to-America stories is supremely false advertising. This is not a memoir, but a polemic.

Bayoumi chose the profiles to support his argument that social attitudes have combined with the effects of U.S. foreign policy to deprive Muslims and Arab-Americans of civil rights, with the effects felt most severely by the young.

Had he chosen to tell stories of seven other Arab-Americans, people who immigrated from, say, Lebanon or Syria and followed well-trodden paths to success, he could have just as easily titled his book, "How Does it Feel to Live in the Land of Opportunity?"

Bayoumi sees America more darkly. In the book's afterword, he writes that "Muslims and Arabs are scrutinized for sedition at every turn," that Arab-American life includes "substantial government surveillance and repression," that "today, everyone - immigrant and citizen, activist and spectator - has become vulnerable," that "spies and government informants have penetrated Muslim-American communities" and that "torture has been normalized into American culture."

In sum, he asserts, "What we are currently living through is the slow creep of imperial high-handedness into the rest of American society, performed in the name of national security and facilitated through the growth of racist policies."

Bayoumi can hold these views if he likes. And Brooklyn College students would be well-served by rigorous debate over their merits. But that's not about to take place. College officials say that the contents of Bayoumi's afterward are not part of the conversation.

Richard Nixon's bitter farewell after his defeat for governor of California in 1962: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore..."

Now we have President Obama one-upping Nixon, whining that he feels that some critics talk about him like a dog. Maybe he's angling for votes from sympathetic dog lovers. After all, Nixon was elected President in 1968. Smart doggie, that Obama, huh.

My friend Bookie pretty well sums up, "truly bizarre."

This is a Labor Day reprint of a portion of a post I wrote in 2005, when a transit workers strike was pending in New York City.

The New York Sun’s editorial yesterday said should the Metropolitan Transit Authority “reward the union’s illegal behavior” it would send a “message of appeasement” elsewhere. The Sun continues, that’s “how they used to work in the New York of the 1960’s and 1970’s.”  But, the Sun said, “it is not a way to run a successful city in the competitive global economy.”

I laugh, at just 58, at another of my Forrest Gump moments. The Sun’s editorialist missed that this began, actually, back in the 1950’s, and I’m a witness to how.

It was 1958 or ‘59, and my social studies assignment from P.S. 246, Walt Whitman Junior High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was a term paper about how local government works.

Not having much of a clue, I went to New York City Hall to find out and wandered about asking people in the halls. They all rushed by, with puzzled and frustrated looks on their faces how to quickly respond. In a big conference room, the famous, feisty, Irish orator who built and led the Transport Workers Union, Mike Quill, a genuine New York-style colorful character, was in one of his fascinating harangues of the press threatening a strike if he didn’t get what he wanted, and he’d bring the city and mayor to their knees as he beat them with his union shillelagh.

As the crowd cleared, I asked Mike Quill my broad question. He flashed his broad smile and said I looked familiar, probably thinking me Irish due to my red hair and freckles. I told him I’d seen him speak years before at the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, while my grandparents’ cousin, David Dubinsky, founder of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was bouncing me on his knee. I guess that vouched for my membership in the socialist workers movement that Quill had been active in since his youth, so Mike Quill invited me to join him and his crew at lunch, at a neighborhood restaurant on 14th Street that served heaping portions of the best corned beef and cabbage I’ve ever had.

At the table, Mike Quill explained to me how government works: It’s all just politics among friends, all out to make their constituents happy, and to hell with the beancounters, and tories, and other allusions to old enemies and battles.

When I turned in my termpaper, all I got was an incredulous look from my teacher, a shake of the head, and note that I’d missed the assignment’s requirement to discuss the structures and laws. I received a C.

After I told this story to a younger New Yorker last night, I checked my memory online, finding this entry at Wikipedia:

"Quill and the TWU became even more important figures in New York City politics in the 1950s. He was a key supporter of Robert F. Wagner, Jr.’s campaign for mayor of New York and became a lightning rod, based on his radical past, for Wagner’s Republican opponent and unfavorable press attention. While the union repeatedly threatened to take the subway workers out on strike, it managed to settle with the Wagner administration short of a strike on each occasion."

The ground was laid in the 1950’s, as the New York Times reports, that New York City’s current  pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year [2005], triple the amount in 2002. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s director of labor relations summed its negotiation objective: “If you know a tidal wave is coming and you can still play around in the surf because it’s not here yet, anyone would think that’s foolishness.” A two-tier pension plan is offered, trimming costs of pensions for future workers. The current union president says that would “sell out the ‘unborn.’ ” A former NYC labor commissioner reflects the city “might have picked a union that was more willing to consider the subject.”