The Olympians competing in the inaugural breaking exhibition event at the Paris Games are sure to perform incredible feats of acrobatics while music plays. But you won’t catch them doing actual rhythmic dance outside of a few shuffle steps.

It’s a shame, but it’s also not a surprise. Within the alleged success of the breaking or breakdancing craze is a story of innovation hijacked by a cancerous commercialization—as the Bronx street dancers who were part of its creation and evolution know all too well.

Back in late 1974 or early ’75, teenagers from two Bronx neighborhood dance crews, the all-Puerto Rican Salsoul and the all-Black Zulu Kings, pioneered a freestyle form of dance that they called rocking. They began by performing a salsa-like style of dance to rock music, which they called “top rock.” When the right beat came on, they used a drop move to transition down to “floor rocking,” which involved innovative footwork while the dancer’s hands were on the ground. They finished in a “chair-freeze pose,” freezing their entire bodies in a shoulder stand with their legs crossed in the air.

These two dance crews inspired the next generation of rockers or B-boys—short for beat boy—the name these Bronx kids were starting to call themselves by 1976. New dancers would add their own innovations to the dance, such as a local Puerto Rican teen named Luis “Trac 2” Mateo. He used his tumbling background to incorporate gymnastics into the dance and invented a unique floor rocking move called tracks—spinning on his head in a circle while switching hand positions. Other dance originators and innovators in the Bronx included Lein “Spy” Figueroa, Santiago “Jojo” Torrez, Raul “Bos” Olavarria, Norberto “Blue Eyes” Morales, Jimmy Lee, and Jimmy Dee.

Rocking soon spread out among the boroughs, and by 1977, teens in Bushwick started doing their own variation of the dance they called “up-rock,” a move that involved a simple hop shuffle step that emulates fighting against another dancer.

The first rocking competition took place in 1978, during a local dance contest at St. Martin of Tours hall in the Bronx. Trac 2 made it to the final battle, only to under-rotate a back somersault. But then, after using his hands to break the fall, he kicked himself into a headspring. The crowd erupted. He won first place and still has the trophy, inscribed not for rocking but for “B-boying,” the earliest record of rocking being referred to that way.

Rocking or B-boying only lasted for a few more years. By 1982, it was considered played out in the Bronx, with other forms of street or urban dance like popping becoming popular.

That’s when Hollywood came around.

In 1983, the movie Flashdance found a few next-generation B-boys (along with a truly inept local New York popper) to perform. Their spinning moves captured the imagination of audiences around the world and in the process revived the dance. Kids started copying the spinning moves of floor rocking but dropped the actual dance element. California kids who did these tricks called them power moves, which included windmills, turtles, tracks, and backspins.

The media, while reporting on these spinning moves, didn’t bother to do any research. Instead of referring to the dance as rocking or B-boying, they took the term “breaking” from my own dance group, Chain Reaction, based in Reseda, California. I had originally coined “breaking” in 1973 to describe the bent-arm freeze position of our style of locking, a dance form made up of multiple rhythmic body arm extensions and bent arm hesitations or freezes combined with knee drops, splits, and twists danced to the beat of funk music. By 1976, we used the word breaking to describe the act of dancing in general. So instead of saying, “Go dance against someone” you’d say, “Go break on ‘em.” The term eventually spread in the Los Angeles and New York dance scenes.

Soon, the media made breaking a generic umbrella word to refer to all street dance or urban dance forms, including locking, popping, boogaloo, and rocking/B-boying—each of which demand their own OG funk music, rhythm, and tempos. Their sloppy reporting would eventually blur all these together, homogenizing unique dances into one jumbled dance craze with no concern for their individual histories.

By the time I saw Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble “breakdancing” in a TV commercial in the early ’80s, it was clear that the American street dance of rocking/B-boying, created by Black and Puerto Rican teens a decade earlier in the Bronx, had been reduced to a corny fad. Now every kid, it seemed, was walking around with a headband, wearing a nylon tracksuit, and carrying a piece of cardboard around to do back spins on.

Meanwhile, culture vultures predictably flooded in, both to take credit and profit from the commercialization of the dance mania, further erasing the true origins of locking, popping, boogaloo, and rocking/B-boying.

In 1993, I got tired of people telling me about a history that I had lived. So I began interviewing the street dancers who were there at the beginning, the ones who created and innovated everything the world now calls “hip-hop dance.” (Never mind the fact that this history predated hip-hop. As Trac 2 told me in an interview, “Hip-hop was not a scene in which I grew up in. I am not a hip-hop. I do not have any part of hip-hop. You cannot … expect me to label myself in a term that was being used in the ’80s.”)

The B-boys in the early Bronx scene I interviewed told me that they never intended the style to be about all acrobatic or gymnastic ability; the magical part was the rhythmic dance, which they reflected even in their ground moves.

That’s why in 1998, when I produced the first Underground Dance Masters tournament, the rocking/B-boying category had a 16-beat dance requirement, which meant each competitor had to rhythmically dance to the correct number of beats or else they’d lose points.

I have worked diligently for over 20 years to bring attention to these unique American dance forms along with the creators and innovators by verifying facts and exposing fiction. Still, with rocking or B-boying, even the World DanceSport Federation, the international governing body of competitive dance, chose to absorb a fragmented remnant of the dance dominated by big tricks or power moves that can easily be seen and learned through videos online.

Judging in DanceSport’s standardized version of breakdancing appears to be purely subjective and not based on any form exactitudes like gymnastics. That’s why the Bronx dancers see it as a watered-down and one-dimensional version of rocking/B-boying.

In 2018, DanceSport’s version was included for the first time in the Summer Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It debuted to big fanfare, which created a path for it to come to the Olympic Games this year.

When competition starts in Paris, the only pseudo-dancing that will happen will be on the memory and history of this American street dance form, not to mention the contributions of the original street dancers, who remain unheralded for their creations and innovations that changed pop culture.

The post The True Story Behind Olympic Breakdancing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court ushered in a new era of gun regulation when it struck down New York’s century-old concealed carry law. The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision paved the way for the right to carry a concealed firearm in public to become the law of the land.

Debates around right-to-carry pit the argument that a “good guy with a gun” can prevent crimes against concerns about an increased threat of gun violence, with research generally supporting the latter.  Many policymakers have framed right-to-carry’s danger around the threat posed by individuals carrying their own weapons into public spaces. But new research I co-authored with John Donohue and Matthew Bondy of Stanford Law School and Phil Cook of Duke University found that while right-to-carry may indeed increase violent crime by 20% in large cities, it’s in fact dangerous because it reduces police effectiveness and increases in firearm thefts.

In 1979, nearly all U.S. states either prohibited the concealed carry of firearms, or required anyone who wished to carry a concealed firearm to be evaluated before obtaining a license, which enabled states to screen out individuals who had no specific need for the permit. But by 2000, over half of the states had passed so-called “shall-issue” laws, which mandate that authorities grant a concealed-carry permit to virtually any individual who applies. By the time Bruen arrived before the Supreme Court last year, only six states, one of which was New York, did not have a near-universal right-to-carry system in place.

Our research began by conducting a review of state statutes and media coverage to determine what year each state adopted right-to-carry. Then, we obtained police agency reports on various crime statistics, which we used to compare crime trends in cities that adopted right-to-carry to those in cities that never did. (We also accounted for other city characteristics researchers find to be correlated with crime, such as the percentage of people who are in poverty or are between 18 and 24 years old.)

Like most researchers, we found that right-to-carry increases violent crime, especially in large cities. But our findings were novel because they probed the mechanisms behind this increase. It wasn’t simply a matter of people with right-to-carry permits committing more violent crimes. Rather, we identified two particular causes of increased crime: declines in police effectiveness and increases in gun thefts.

To investigate right-to-carry’s impact on police effectiveness, we studied the police “clearance” of violent crimes—the number of violent crimes that police were able to identify a perpetrator for. We found that right-to-carry caused a 10% total reduction in police clearance in the U.S. cities where it was adopted. Nationwide—using the FBI’s 2019 estimate that 1 million violent crimes take place annually in the U.S., of which about half are cleared by police—this could add up to an extra 50,000 crimes going unsolved every year.

There are a number of reasons for this decline in police effectiveness. As my co-author John Donohue has outlined in previous work, the most straightforward is that right-to-carry takes a toll on police time and resources, whether because of the need to investigate accidental shootings or simply to process permits. Additionally, in constrast to the logic of the “good guy with a gun,” the intervention of bystanders with firearms during crimes—particularly those who are not well trained in firearms safety—can make it more difficult for police to catch criminals.

Another concerning possibility is that right-to-carry makes police more fearful of the people in their community. In some cases, this could cause police officers to shy away from investigating suspicious behavior; in others, it could make officers more likely to escalate their use of force.

The other key way that right-to-carry increases violent crime is by creating more opportunities for firearm theft, inadvertently causing permit-holding gunowners to provide firearms to criminals. Reports from police agencies suggest that firearm theft, particularly from motor vehicles, is a large and growing problem across the country. And a 2017 survey from Harvard University estimated that there are 400,000 firearm thefts in the U.S. every year—more stolen guns than are even in civilian hands in Ireland or Japan. We found that right-to-carry may increase gun theft by a staggering 50% in large cities.

Much of the public attention on right-to-carry has been focused on the deliberate actions of permit-holding gun owners: whether they commit many crimes, and whether they stop many crimes from being committed. In fact, they do neither. Instead, as our research shows, the unintentional actions of concealed carry permit holders may be fueling violent crime by providing a flow of firearms ripe for theft and weakening law enforcement’s ability to apprehend criminals. Beyond the “good guy with a gun” versus “bad guy with a gun” narrative, the “good guys” can unwittingly end up helping the “bad guys.”

The Bruen Supreme Court decision has cemented what has become increasingly clear for the past few decades: at least in the short term, guns are here to stay in America. Now, it’s up to lawmakers across the country to enact pragmatic policies to curb the worst public safety impacts of a permissive gun-carrying culture.

Teaching responsible gun ownership may be the most feasible reform that goes the furthest to promote public safety. Research suggests that making firearm safety training a requirement of receiving a concealed carry permit has been effective at ameliorating some of the rise in violent crime. While there is no conclusive explanation for why these trainings reduce crime, it is quite plausible that gun-carriers who undergo training are more careful with how they store and use their firearms, resulting in fewer firearm thefts and accidental discharges.

Safety training is no panacea to gun violence. But if the “good guys with guns” know how to safely store firearms and when to fire them, they have the best chance of promoting public safety.

The post Why ‘Good Guys with Guns’ Don’t Make Us Safer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…” opens Maggie Nelson’s book, Bluets, a study devoted to the hue that spurred a Picasso period, the blues of the Deep South, and Yves Klein, the artist who even turned urine blue.

I, too, have fallen in love with a color—it was a bit obsessive. For me, Brown has always been everywhere, is everywhere. But to truly love it, I had to learn to see it anew, to meet it again and again in various forms, own it, and honor it. Only then, in Brown, I found a place to define myself and grow.

What is Brown? We brown-nose, we bake brownies, we live in brownstones, we have brownouts, and to quiet the clamor we listen to brown noise.

For me, Brown was first Queens, New York, aka the World’s Borough. Home to 130 different spoken languages—Spanish, Russian, Korean, Greek, Urdu, and Tagalog, to list just a few—my hometown represents over 120 countries. On 107-17 64th Road, 11375, Brown was everywhere, so like the fish in the sea that doesn’t know water from air, I didn’t know how special it was.

Still I remember being a kid faced with the dilemma of coloring myself on a blank sheet of paper, and I couldn’t color myself in: “None of these colors look like me.” I mean, of course, if I wanted to, I could use the peach crayon indicated for “flesh”—but whose flesh? So instead I opted to make myself green and purple and orange. Like when you go out to get a Band-Aid and it doesn’t match your skin—so you go with the colorful ones, with cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny or the Flintstones on them.

Brown exploded into my life in 2018. I was living in Los Angeles, doing the Hollywood thing, and one night I was invited to see Ta-Nehisi Coates—a person many have called our modern-day James Baldwin—speak at the public library in downtown Los Angeles. I’d never heard of him before. But my friend insisted he was a big deal.

Coates spoke about Black and white, and then he spoke some more about Black and white. Everybody was filled with awe, and the occasional “Yes, yes, brother.” And it was well-earned; it was intellectual church.

When it came time for questions, I hesitated. I really didn’t want to say anything, because at the time, I wasn’t a raise-your-hand kind of person. I didn’t trust I had anything of value to say. But I knew I needed to ask him a question now or I would regret it forever. So, I asked: “Black and white, that’s all I hear, Black and white. As a Brown man, a Dominican, Colombian, Latino in this world, where does that leave me in the conversation?”

Coates took a short breath and responded, “Not in it.”

“Not in it?” I asked.

“Not in it,” he replied.

The moderator snatched back my microphone. They moved on to the next question, and I sat down like a child reprimanded for asking a stupid question with a simple and obvious answer.

I was dumbfounded. I wasn’t in this conversation? What a curse to be told you do not exist in such a vital conversation in America, I thought.

And so my obsessive journey with Brown began. I was a baby learning to walk again, tripping and falling all the way across the room.

After the talk, I was supposed to go to dinner with some friends, but too keyed up, I went home instead. I stared up at the ceiling of my small, Little Armenia studio, wondering: “Not in it? Why am I not in it? Where am I? Where are the Brown bodies? Where are our stories and our voices? Where are my father and mother? Where are the people I love?”

These questions began to consume every inch of my life.

For a while after, I could no longer do anything without the weight of race in it, without seeing or hearing this not-in-it-ness. It was exhausting, I couldn’t watch a movie, or go to the park with all the joggers and dog owners, or read the news, or get a cup of coffee, or go on a date. Even a haircut paralyzed me. If I cut the curls off, am I losing my identity? If I go traditional crew-cut, will that make me more ethnically ambiguous, and is that what is wanted of me by Hollywood, by media, by culture? Will that push me closer to some sort of “success”? To cut or not to cut? 

Then, some six months later, I saw a solo performance by the Salvadoran American playwright Brian Quijada. It was called Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Brian tells the story of a question he once asked a teacher when his class was learning about Rosa Parks during a Black History Month lesson. Looking around his public school room, he saw white kids and Black kids and wondered, first to himself, and then, out loud to the teacher: “What about Brown Hispanic people? Where were ‘we’ when all of this was going on? Where did we sit on the bus?” The teacher told him, “You weren’t there.”

This got at exactly what I’d been feeling—it’s impossible that we weren’t there. On August 28, 1963, when MLK led the march on Washington, out of the 200,000 to 300,000 people who attended, thousands were Latinos—many of them Puerto Ricans from NYC. This is largely because MLK asked Gilberto Gerena Valentín, then president of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, to get the Latino population to turn out. For King, having a Latino presence was necessary. He said to the masses, “There is discrimination not only against Blacks, but also against Puerto Ricans and Hispanics.”

We were there when there were white water fountains and Black water fountains, white bathrooms, and Black bathrooms. We, Latinos, Native, Indigenous, Mixed, Middle Eastern, Asians, and other underrepresented communities were there, facing our own discrimination, somewhere in the middle of Black and white.

America is becoming Browner every day. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in about 25 years, the nation’s population will become “majority-minority.”

Each and every one of us wants to be a part of something. We want to walk into a room and know: I belong here. But there isn’t a sense of cohesive Brown identity.

Being in this middle, fluid space can feel at times like there is no separation between up and down, right and wrong, fail and pass, this and that, his and her.

Because it is such a wide category, so vast, for a time, my own individuality, my own specificity, my own “Christopher Rivas-ness” felt lost.

But since I have become obsessed with Brown, and have started to see it for what it truly is, now I embrace the millions of complex shades it holds. Because to say, “I am Brown,” is to say, in this Black / white world, I am somewhere in the middle—a space beyond dualistic and binary thinking. There are no fixed endpoints. Nothing is ever set in stone. In Brownness we are always becoming.

Looking back to that night in 2018 when I was told I existed outside of the Black/white conversation of race in America, I still feel like Coates wasn’t wrong: there is still a very clear line in the sand, a clear divide in our binary world between Black/white. Though that conversation was shocking and hurtful, it helped me engage with the alchemic power and privilege of my Brownness, and how to best use my privilege of being able to navigate the middle and sometimes play both sides.

Now, when I think about Brown, I think about it as both color and concept. It is the color of roots. So many pigments of Brown come from and indicate dirt—from which everything grows; our sustenance, the trees that give us the air we breathe.

I can now celebrate my cultural, ethnic, and racial identity and bring to light some of the issues and problems we face. In short, I can now put myself in it and carry my Brownness proudly.

The post What Does Brown Mean? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These questions might seem strange, but they’re not. Gov. Gavin Newsom broadcast his first re-election TV ad not in California but in Florida, appealing to Floridians to either join California’s fight against the policies of Florida Republicans, or move to California. In response, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted California policies and accused Newsom of treating Californians “like peasants.”

The tussle has been dismissed as partisan trolling, and evidence of both governors’ presidential ambitions. But its import is broader than that. Unwittingly, Newson and DeSantis are opening the door to a novel democratic idea with global implications.

The idea has been called “reciprocal” or “consociated” representation.

The dictionary definition of “consociated” is “brought into association.”  In democracy, “consociated representation” would give people the power to vote for representatives in places with which they might feel association, but are not their own cities, states, or nations.

The idea should have appeal because, especially in a hyper-connected world, the decisions of governments other than our own can have profound effects on our lives. Consider how trade and manufacturing policies in Mexico or southeast Asia have changed the economies of American communities. Or think of your home region, and how the decisions of a big city government can have profound effects on the economic prospects, transportation options, or safety of those who live in surrounding suburbs.

Or—in the context of the Newsom ad, which says that Florida’s educational and health policies threaten basic freedoms—consider how the politics and policies of big states like California and Florida can affect each other, and other states’ and national policies as well.

Florida under DeSantis has led a nationwide attack on teachers’ freedom to say what they want in classrooms. The state has also limited the rights of women and transgendered people—so much so that California is changing laws and starting programs to make itself a sanctuary for people who must leave Florida—and other states—to exercise their rights. Meanwhile, California routinely uses its size and leverage to try to shape laws elsewhere, on matters from climate change to immigration.

In such a context, Californians deserve to have more of a say in what Florida does—and, yes, vice versa.

But how? A smart and coherent proposal for consociated representation comes from Joachim Blatter and Johannes Schulz, political scientists at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, writing in the European Journal of International Relations.

Blatter and Schulz argue that globalism has allowed international corporate elites, powerful national leaders, and unaccountable international organizations like International Monetary Fund to have undemocratic influence over people in other countries. This, in turn, has inspired populist backlashes that polarize politics, threaten the unity of federal systems like the European Union or the United States, and undermine democracy.

Their answer to this major threat is to expand democracy, and link voters in different nations and states. Specifically, Blatter and Schulz argue that governments whose policies overlap should “mutually grant their citizens the right to elect representatives not only in their domestic parliament, but also in the parliaments of ‘consociated democracies’.”

Under their proposal, these “foreign” voters could not elect many representatives in other places—only a handful, a tiny fraction, of your parliament or Congress or legislature would represent people from other places. And they say legislatures should expand to accommodate these new “consociated” representatives—no one would lose representation in the process.

It’s a modest step, but one that could “channel popular dissatisfaction into productive lines” including actual conversation and collaboration between states, Blatter and Schulz write. Systems of what these two scholars call “horizontally expanded and consociated democracies” could offer at least a little defense both against internal authoritarianism and against external enemies (like Russia and China) that seek to exploit divisions within democracies.

Consociated democracy would be a natural for California, which sees itself as a future-shaping nation-state. To start, it would be easier for California to negotiate with other Western states that are already political allies—Oregon or Washington—to form a consociation of democracies. A harder step would be to form another consociation with other large states with which it sometimes quarrels—imagine California, Texas, Florida, and New York agreeing to allow their citizens to elect representatives to each other’s legislatures.

But such arrangements, while novel, are not entirely new. Blatter and Schulz note that as more people have multiple national citizenships, it’s become more common to vote in multiple countries.

Elements of consociated democracy are already present here in California. The city of Los Angeles allows people to vote in local neighborhood councils even if they don’t reside in that neighborhood—having even a tiny interest in a place (even if it’s only stabling a horse there) gives you democratic rights. And the state of California allows people and groups from other states to sponsor and qualify ballot initiatives that enact laws and amend our state’s constitution. California’s legislative term limits and animal rights protections were brought to us in this way by non-Californians.

For California, it might be easiest to introduce consociated representation at the local level.

Your columnist, for example, feels strongly that he should be able to vote in Los Angeles city elections even though he lives in a small city that borders L.A.

Here’s my logic: The media non-profit where I work is based in Los Angeles. I spend most of my leisure time in L.A. (shopping, eating, enjoying sports and other entertainment), and pay local sales taxes. And for transportation, I depend on roads and trains overseen by L.A. officials.

So why shouldn’t Los Angeles empower me—and residents of other surrounding cities—to vote for a couple of additional members to represent us on the L.A. city council?

The post Is It Time for Californians to Vote in Florida and Texas? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My dad, Norman Horowitz, had no engineering training, just a love for the beauty and symmetry of bridges. Using an old World War I Army Manual, steel from the local junkyard, and cobblestones he foraged near his home in the Bronx, he spent four years building the bridge. When it was finished, it connected the camp’s main campus with the manmade “Animal Island,” which, back in the day, housed a petting zoo.

The bridge that the author’s father built at Camp Pontiac. Photo by Janice Benjamin.

My dad, whose favorite book was Profiles in Courage, dedicated his bridge to the late President John F. Kennedy, installing at its foot a podium with a bust of JFK that was a replica of the famous Robert Berks sculpture at the Kennedy Center. JFK’s inaugural words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” captured the public service spirit my dad wanted the children of Camp Pontiac to live by. The Kennedy bust became a literal touchstone for generations of campers, who paused to pat the head—and, my dad liked to believe, to think of others—when crossing the bridge.

My dad was an elementary school teacher in the Bronx. The middle of three boys, he was handsome with blue eyes and thick, jet-black hair. He was also shy, probably due to being severely asthmatic as a child. Camp Pontiac was his favorite place, both as a teenager—he was 15 when his father bought the camp in 1945—and as an adult, when he and his brothers inherited it. I spent summers at Camp Pontiac, often passing my dad, who’d smile and wave, usually busy fixing something, his clothes and hands too dirty to hug me. I was proud to be Norman’s daughter.

My father’s life goals were simple: to take care of and educate his family, and the children entrusted to his care at school and camp. He supported my every pursuit, from academics to theater—and also cheered on every other young person, including my college and law school friends, who crossed his path. My dad and I were so close he picked out my wedding dress—without me present—when my punishing hours as a young attorney left me without any spare time.

Sometime in the 1980s, when I was in my 20s and after my father had sold his share of the camp, we learned that the JFK head had mysteriously disappeared. I saw how the news disturbed my dad, even in his stoic, quiet way. I made it my secret mission to find the statue, knowing how much it meant to him. I visited the auction houses around Copake, where my father used to take me as a child, thinking maybe the thief would try to sell the bust. Decades passed. I took to searching on eBay. The bust was still lost when my father died in 2016, at age 86. I kept looking, wanting to find the statue for myself, as a memory of my dad.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, I saw a post on the Camp Pontiac Alumni Facebook page, written by a woman who’d been a camp counselor in the 1980s. She reminisced about a silly prank, lightheartedly describing how the JFK head had been stashed in a camper’s luggage trunk. My stomach dropped. As others chuckled about the “funny” antic, I seethed with rage.

I privately messaged the woman who’d written the post, who apologized and took the story down. I called my sister and my cousins to vent. As the night wore on, my rage settled into a profound sadness. I missed my hardworking, noble father more than ever. I talked to him out loud. I went into the room in my house where he’d stayed during his final months, sat on his bed, and cried bitterly. After decades of looking, I finally realized that the statue was irretrievably gone—and with this came a larger reckoning I hadn’t wanted to face: so was my father.

The next day, something inexplicable happened. My cousin Janice, who’d moved back to Copake, walked to camp to take a picture of my father’s suspension bridge, thinking it might cheer me up. Instead, she texted me a picture of the JFK head, lying on its side on a stone slab.

I was driving, and swerved to the side of the road. “Huh? Is that an old picture? I’m confused,” I texted back.

It wasn’t an old picture. My father’s brother Eddie took off in his golf cart to retrieve the head. Amazingly, the bust was perfectly intact, with the post where my dad had mounted it still attached.

We all thought that whomever had been in possession of the head saw the Facebook posts, felt guilty, and furtively returned it during the night. But as details came together, the truth was more remarkable: The camp site manager had been crossing my father’s suspension bridge when his dog started digging at something. Buried deep in the dirt, with only the post poking out, was the JFK head. With no knowledge of the statue’s history, the manager brushed it off and set it on a nearby stone slab. Not long after he left, my cousin walked over and discovered it.

The JFK bust with the spindle sticking out lying on the stone. Courtesy of author.

It had been over 30 years since the JFK bust had gone missing. The day after I raged in sadness over what seemed its permanent loss, the statue had, magically, appeared. My father was a strong-willed man, but I never expected to get a message from him after he died. It was as though he’d felt my despair and unearthed the single most meaningful symbol of his character.

The bust, on a new mount, now sits in my home in California, and every day I am astounded to see it there. Recently, to mark what would’ve been my dad’s 90th birthday, I posted on social media about the statue’s reappearance. Comments from Camp Pontiac alumni poured in.

“I was but a little kid, some 60 years ago when I watched your dad build that remarkable suspension bridge,” wrote Ronald J. Krowne, a camper in the 1960s. “It symbolized so much to us … & the JFK bust was the crowning anchor of it all.” Robin Bernstein, a camper throughout the ‘70s, wrote that the statue “reminded us of the larger world around us and of doing what we can to make the world a better place.”

This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Camp Pontiac. In celebration, the current owners have revamped the camp logo—it will now be the image of my dad’s suspension bridge.

The post The Bridges My Father Built appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Max Greenberger, a U.S.-born, middle-aged father, did not fit into any of the classic stereotypes of name-changers. He was not an immigrant coming through Ellis Island, he was not a young man seeking to escape his Old World roots, nor was he a movie star in need of a stage name. Instead, he was explicitly seeking white-collar jobs for his family members. As he laid out in his petition, “[t]he name Greenberger is a foreign sounding name and is not conducive to securing good employment as a musician”—the chosen profession of his daughter. Additionally, he noted, “the name Greenberger … is not helpful towards securing an appointment as intern in a hospital”—the chosen profession of one son.

Thousands of similar-sounding petitions dating from the 1920s through the 1960s can be found today at the Civil Court (which was created by the merger of the City Court and the Municipal Court in 1962). The people filing these petitions were disproportionately members of a growing Jewish middle class. In their petitions, as well as letters and oral histories, a narrative of exclusion and isolation emerges—and explains why an often-misunderstood generation of Jews in the mid-20th century sought to change their names.

Name changing reflected Jewish American families’ interrelated experiences of upward mobility and antisemitism. Filing a name-change petition was predominantly a behavior of the middle class. This was true in part because it was expensive to change your name officially—you had to hire a lawyer and pay administrative fees, among other expenses. More subtly and more significantly, New York state law in the middle of the 20th century—just like today—made clear that you did not actually have to file legal papers in order to change your name: All you had to do was use a new name consistently and without any intent to commit fraud, and your new name was legal. The decision to file an official petition signaled concern that someone would be or had been scrutinizing your name on paper.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was primarily middle-class people who worried that someone might be scrutinizing their names. Working-class jobs, like domestic service or loading cargo, were more typically given to individuals based on recommendations of family members or appraisals of their bodies; because their names were not being monitored by employers, most working-class men and women who changed their names probably did so unofficially, rather than through official petitions. It was white-collar workers—students seeking to get into professional school, businessmen hoping to impress clients, and secretaries applying to employment agencies—who had to worry about their names, and Jews were beginning to seek out those positions at rates higher than other ethnic groups. While New Yorkers with Slavic, Greek, and Italian surnames also changed their names in City Court during this era, Jews changed their names in numbers far disproportionate to their presence in the city.

Institutionalized antisemitism blossomed in employment and education in the interwar years. Jews were increasingly seen as undesirable in American middle-class society, and those with more Jewish-sounding last names found themselves under an increasing amount of scrutiny. Beginning with Columbia University in 1917, colleges and universities throughout the country began establishing quotas on the numbers of Jews they accepted. In order to limit Jewish students, schools created new, lengthy applications that asked questions about the candidate’s parents’ origins, occupations, and even their names: where was your grandfather born, what is your father’s occupation, what was your mother’s maiden name? The questions were purposely designed to identify and exclude Jews.

The same types of techniques began to proliferate in the work world, just as Jews began to seek white-collar employment. According to one 1937 American Jewish Congress report, 89 percent of large New York companies told employment agencies that they “preferred Christians” as employees, demanding that those agencies use their application process to filter out Jewish candidates. Employers also increasingly posted advertisements throughout the 1920s and 1930s noting that they were “Christian,” “Anglo-Saxon,” or “Christian firms.” Using these techniques, industries such as banking, insurance, and public utilities all maintained small quotas of Jewish employees, while rejecting virtually all other Jewish applicants. These techniques remained consistent, or even increased, throughout World War II and its aftermath.

Petition after petition lodged at the City Court darkly hints at the forces of antisemitism that limited the livelihoods of those who filed them. Dora Sarietzky, a stenographer and typist, testified: “My name proved to be a great handicap in securing a position … In order to facilitate securing work, I assumed the name Doris Watson.” Bertram Levy, president of a mail chute corporation, found that “his name [had] been a hindrance to him in his efforts to gain an entrance to various firms and to secure business from them.” He sought permission from the court to adopt “an American name”: Bertram Leslie. Jews rarely stated openly that they experienced antisemitism, but they made clear that as they sought white-collar jobs and higher education, their names had inspired “embarrassment” and proved to be a “hindrance.”

The intertwined search for upward mobility and experience of antisemitism affected men, women, and children. As they sought pink collar labor in higher numbers, for example, Jewish women faced ugly stereotypes in the workforce that they were “loud and harsh or shrill” or wore over-sexualized clothes or too much makeup, while Jewish teenagers were typecast as “clannish” or as “grinds,” unsuitable for the athletic and social world of college men.

As all members of Jewish families faced discrimination in their efforts to get jobs and education, group name-changing became a phenomenon, with entire families all changing their names in concert, sometimes putting as many as nine people on one petition. Parents like Max Greenberger filed for underage children; adult siblings and spouses filed together. Family members viewed themselves as one economic unit, and they filed name change petitions together to allow the unit to thrive.

Although only a small minority of New York Jews changed their names, the practice became a commonly acknowledged and accepted one. Jews described being counseled to change their names by family members, employers, teachers, and mentors; one New York Jewish author remembered that it had been a matter of course for Jewish college students to change their names upon graduation in the 1930s. A 1950 study of Bronx residents reported that virtually all of the 181 Jews surveyed knew someone who had changed their names. Some of the most famous examples of American Jewish culture of the mid-century—from Jo Sinclair’s Wasteland to Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement to Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar—featured name changing as a basic part of American Jewish life.

Yet, just because name changing had become a part of Jewish life does not mean that it was universally embraced. Indeed, novels and movies like Gentleman’s Agreement and Marjorie Morningstar popularized portraits of name changers as shallow social climbers who hated themselves and other Jews. Memoirs, oral histories, and reminiscences from New York Jews of the era recorded contempt for Jews who changed their names. Physician and author Sherwin Nuland, for example, remembered his gym teacher insistently mocking his newly changed name, while historian Daniel Horowitz remembered his father’s anger at Jews in his neighborhood who had changed their names. The 1950 survey of Bronx residents found that about 50 percent of those 181 Jews defined name changing as “a shame” and a reflection of “a lack of pride.”

In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Jews in New York at least recognized the antisemitism that impelled their neighbors’ petitions to the City Court. Later on, that wouldn’t be the case. Jokes about name changing at Ellis Island (a myth that most historians agree never took place) emerged in the 1960s, as New York Jews moved to the suburbs, farther away from the painful experiences their parents and grandparents encountered every day in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. By the 1970s and ’80s, a decline in institutionalized antisemitism (in part, the result of civil rights laws passed after World War II) led to a substantial drop in the numbers of Jews changing their names in Civil Court, and negative portraits of name changers exploded as American Jewish culture became largely divorced from the real circumstances of antisemitism that had led so many to change their names in the first place.

In a post-Roots era, where ethnic diversity and authenticity was suddenly becoming more valued, popular culture pilloried Jews who seemed to have abandoned their heritage in their quest to “become American.” Popular movies like 1982’s My Favorite Year or 1991’s Avalon portrayed Jewish name changing as an inauthentic effort by Jewish men to fit in, and rarely acknowledged the struggles of native-born American Jewish men, women, and children to find work or education in the middle of the 20th century.

In this new world, name changing became an embarrassment, something that an American official did to your ancestors a long time ago. The challenges faced by ordinary men and women like Max Greenberger and Dora Sarietzky faded from public view, and their painful choices to erase their Jewish names were largely forgotten, hidden inside the stacks of petitions warehoused at the New York City Civil Court.

The post What the Jewish Name Changing Narrative Gets Wrong appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If Goldberg was drawn to “Star Trek” because its cast included a powerful black woman of the future, in crafting a character for Goldberg on “TNG,” creator Gene Roddenberry conjured a name from the past. He named the bartender who blended mysticism with shrewd wit “Guinan,” after the once legendary Texas Guinan, a larger-than-life Texas girl turned emcee of some of the most exclusive speakeasies in Prohibition-era New York City.

Although Guinan may be forgotten today, her name was once as familiar as Whoopi Goldberg’s. Born Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan in 1884, Guinan took vaudeville by storm in her 20s, she starred in silent films in her 30s, and in her 40s, she was an influential impresario. An entrepreneur and a business woman, who ran nightclubs considered hubs of political and cultural power in New York City, Guinan alleged she was once thrown out of France for being too hot to handle.

Guinan grew up in Waco, Texas, where her parents ran a grocery before turning their hands to running a horse and cattle ranch. Her childhood consisted of riding horses, roping cattle, and shooting guns, skills that prepared her for a world of entertainment—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, pageants, and spectaculars—that was already beginning to disappear, just as she mastered it.

Promotional picture of Texas Guinan. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

After a brief stint in Colorado, Guinan moved to New York City, where she quickly found work in vaudeville. When a get-rich quick scheme involving a weight-loss scam went sour in 1913, Guinan left for Hollywood, performing in two-reelers, generally of the Roman-riding, gun-toting variety. Buxom, outspoken, already in her 30s, and by the standards of the day, old, it was hard to imagine Guinan as a damsel in distress. Judging from the look on her face and the set of her jaw in films and photos from the era, it was more likely that Guinan would make the outlaws rue the day they’d set eyes on her.

Guinan emceed in L.A. before returning to New York City, where she partnered with bootlegger Larry Fay, conducting business in their speakeasies perched at the center of the room, armed with a clapper and police whistle. While rumrunners sold pricy pints of whisky from back hallways, Guinan’s patrons listened to “her girls” sing and dance. Guinan, meanwhile, greeted customers with her trademark “Hello, suckers” or zippy one-liners like “You may be all the world to your mother, but you’re just a cover charge to me.”

Guinan flaunted Prohibition-era laws. Busted for violating the Volstead Act on more than one occasion, she defiantly wore a necklace made of tiny gold padlocks around her neck, an in-your-face statement against federal investigations and harassment. After she was found not guilty of violating the Volstead Act in 1927, federal agents—who had already condemned her as a “moral pervert”—dogged her footsteps, arresting her again the next year for violating a new curfew law.

Like many professional women, Guinan hungered for financial independence. Ambitious and independent, she refused to play by the rules of her era. And she wasn’t shy in expressing this desire. Of an actor she was involved with in Hollywood, Guinan recalled: “I should have taken him like Grant took Richmond. … I was the one woman who could take [him] and leave him where I found him. I was out to take not be taken. He taught me one thing, though, that the sweetest things in this life are obtained by the work of one’s own hands.”

At the time, men who were creating and curating media legends only saw the boobs and the busts and the bucks. But there was far more to Guinan’s story than that. An animal lover who refused to eat meat, Guinan was a teetotaler who never drank alcohol, preferring coffee. Despite her risqué reputation, she only married once, to newspaper cartoonist John J. Moynahan. When she wasn’t on the road, Guinan lived with her mother, father, brother, and pets in Greenwich Village.

To be sure, Guinan was no saint, but she was no “blonde bombshell” either. She was a New Woman, not in a Mary Pickford, girl with the curls kind of way, but with the moxie of a devoted New Yorker. Until Guinan broke into the nightclub business, emceeing was pretty much the exclusive province of men. Guinan opened doors for other women in burlesque and vaudeville, admiring women who also struggled to control their images and make headway as managers and owners. Guinan met Mae West in the teens, when they were struggling performers in New York’s vaudeville stagehouses, and they remained friends for the rest of Guinan’s life. She was frenemies with evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, alternately admiring and antagonizing her, and wanted to play McPherson on the big screen.

At a time when few women stood up to theater owners and producers, Guinan fought for pay equity. In 1928, she won a $26,000 award from Duo Art Productions, when the company was ordered to pay her the difference between the wages promised her for starring in the revue Padlocks of 1927 and the amount they actually paid her. When Guinan joined protests against the Mastick Law in 1930, which eliminated overtime for women working in factories and department stores, she told the crowd “the law was intended to keep women out of jobs in which they competed with men.” At 46, Guinan knew a thing or two about laws intended to exclude women from jobs reserved for men. When Guinan died unexpectedly of dysentery in 1933, 12,000 funeral goers came to the Campbell Funeral Church on Broadway. Women who came from very different walks of life but shared the experience of being paid less than men gathered to comfort each other.

Because of her outsized reputation and early death, there were some halfhearted efforts to turn her life into the stuff of legend. Shortly after she died, Guinan served as the basis for the character Maudie that Mae West played in Night After Night (1932). A film biography of Guinan’s life, starring Betty Hutton and titled Incendiary Blonde (1945), characterized her as a rough and tumble starstruck tomboy, enamored by the prospect of wearing a white gown with a sequined head dress, with two silver pistols at her side. Martha Raye starred in a musical flop based on Guinan’s life—Hello, Sucker!—in 1969. In 1995, Bette Midler said she’d been cast in “a star vehicle directed by Martin Scorsese about the legendary New York saloonkeeper Texas Guinan.” Mostly, these versions made Guinan’s story fit into one Hollywood loved to tell about women caught in its hungry star machine: they loved the sexism of Hollywood, they’d sell their very souls for stardom, they wanted it, they asked for it, even if what they were said to want ended more like Sunset Boulevard than It Happened One Night.

But in the mid-1950s, Guinan’s story had a chance at a different kind of telling when Vera Caspary began shopping a project based on the Texas girl turned emcee of some of the most exclusive speakeasies in Prohibition-era New York City. If Caspary’s name also has you scratching your head, that’s because hers is another that few other than film buffs or historians would recognize today. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, Caspary enjoyed successes of her own, as a bestselling novelist and prolific screenwriter. In fact, one of her trademark novels about independent-minded working girls was made into the Academy Award-winning film Laura.

Caspary was drawn to stories about women who had come before her, whose struggles had in part paved the way for her own successes. That made Guinan a natural choice for a project. Caspary, a fan of live entertainment, had, in fact, been a regular at Guinan’s clubs in the late 1920s, where she watched as Guinan “bawled at patrons to give each little girl a big hand.”

Though Guinan had been dead for nearly 25 years when Caspary started working on her story, she remained a touchstone for women eager to tell stories about women who had opened doors before them. In Caspary’s script, Guinan figures as a boss who refuses to let her “girls” be sexually harassed—“In my club no gentleman pulls a girl’s fringe without a license.” She wants love, but on her own terms. And she’s a “hard-headed business woman” who, when asked why she “can’t be a normal woman,” launches into a tirade:

Normal, huh! Listen, Mister, where I grew up the neighborhood was full of normal women. Good, normal women. Worked like dogs seven days a week. For what? On Saturday night a kick in the teeth from the drunken bums that called themselves normal husbands. No, thank you.

But by 1957, Caspary was forced to give up on the project. All her efforts to get a formal contract for “the Texas Guinan story,” she told producer Hal Stanley, “have been in vain.” At a time when film and television were narrowing the definition of what counted as a normal woman, it would hardly have done to have someone like Caspary—who held unorthodox views of her own—make a film celebrating another woman who had refused to put up with someone else’s definition of normal.

It’s a shame Caspary never had the chance to make her version of Guinan’s story. And while Roddenberry’s shout-out to Guinan in 1987 was a sweet Easter egg of a tribute for those who got the reference, this oblique nod to a hidden figure doesn’t really satisfy those who’d like to see more stories appear on the screen about those who struggled against sexism in the industry and onscreen in the past and who—even if it was for a fleeting moment—enjoyed some measure of success.

So when Guinan appears, perhaps behind the bar of the Ten Forward, on the next season of “Picard,” raise a glass in tribute to Texas Guinan and Vera Caspary and tell the person next to you about them. And while you’re at it, think about why—nearly a century later—we still know so little about Guinan, Caspary, and women like Gertrude Berg, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hazel Scott, Fredi Washington, Lois Weber, and others who worked to transform media industries and, in doing so, change the stories we tell about the past and the future.

The post The Legendary Saloonkeeper Who Was the Real-Life Inspiration for Star Trek’s Guinan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That changed in 2002, when Independence National Historical Park was undergoing renovations, and a freelance historian named Edward Lawler Jr. published an article about the house and its residents—including nine enslaved people Washington had brought with him from Virginia. An intense dispute broke out about how to tell the story of the people who lived and worked in the house. National Park leadership said it would confuse visitors to tell the story of slavery a stone’s throw from the new Liberty Bell Center, with its emphasis on freedom. Local citizens groups, including one called the Avenging The Ancestors Coalition, historians, and city officials disagreed, and fought back.

Many people in the Philadelphia area were surprised by the discovery. They mistakenly believed that slavery had always been illegal in Pennsylvania, and that the state’s large Quaker population had always been abolitionists. In fact, slavery was commonplace in Pennsylvania during the colonial period, and until the 1770s Quakers, who were among its wealthiest citizens, were also among its largest slave owners.

I, too, was taken aback. How was it possible that I had no awareness that slavery had been widespread throughout the American North? I had attended public schools in New York, a state in which 12 percent of the population—about 20,000 people—were enslaved on the eve of the American Revolution. I was a professor, and had read widely on race in the U.S., teaching courses such as “Race and Ethnicity” and “Ethnic and Racial Conflict.” I had recently written a book examining cultural conflicts in which material interests take a back seat to symbolic gestures of identity formation, including the Confederate flag controversies in three Southern states, the headscarf battle in France, and language conflicts in Quebec and Spain.

This new conflict, only a short distance from my home, looked similar to me. It was also part of a larger puzzle about why slavery in the North almost completely disappeared from collective memory, virtually invisible in its museums, monuments, memorials, school curricula, public discourse, or historical sites until recently. Most of the people who spoke of slavery here were some historians and Southern white heritage groups who viewed it as evidence of Northern hypocrisy. The dispute over how to tell the story of the first president’s house became the full focus of my research. I wanted to understand why we had forgotten this part of our history—and I discovered I wasn’t alone. In recent decades, many Americans in the North, black and white, have begun to rediscover the history of the slavery that once was common in the region.

Despite the widespread belief that slavery in the United States was almost exclusively a Southern phenomenon, the institution existed in all the early colonies and first states. Slavery first arrived in New York in 1626, in Massachusetts in the late 1630s, and in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1645. Before 1700 there was no colony where it was absent. Tens of thousands of enslaved people in the North lived and worked on small farms or in towns and cities, where they were skilled craftsmen, laborers and domestic workers. On large farms in the Hudson River Valley, the Narragansett region in Rhode Island, and eastern Long Island, enslaved people grew food crops and raised animals that were traded to islands in the Caribbean to feed the enslaved people there who grew and processed sugarcane on large plantations. Between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, Northerners from Rhode Island, New York, and Boston were the largest North American slave traders, and the wealth they earned produced the country’s early elite and funded the region’s first industries and universities.

Slavery ended very gradually in the American North, tapering off after the Revolution and only fully disappearing in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment. Northern gradual abolition laws typically freed the children of enslaved women born after the laws’ passage but only after those children had worked for their owners for between 21 and 28 years. Once out of bondage, free blacks in the North were hardly equal citizens. Few could vote. Whites often refused to work with them in factories, and many of the formerly enslaved lacked the skills for jobs in the emerging industrial economy. They suffered from discrimination and racist violence, and frequently had little choice but to accept long-term indentures from their former owners. In many cases, their lives often hardly changed from when they were enslaved.

In my earlier academic work, I had studied collective memories, arguing that they are built and transmitted through three elements: narratives people tell about the past; ritual expressions and enactments of these stories through public holidays, monuments, and culture including movies, literature, and music; and public and commemorative landscapes that range from simple historical markers to elaborate memorials and historical sites. When it came to the history of slavery in the North, all three of these were almost completely invisible until recently.

There is no single reason why the collective forgetting took place. Likely explanations include attrition of memory, where people with direct memories of Northern slavery died without passing the stories along; the modification or destruction of sites once associated with slavery, like President’s House; and the reframing of narratives about the past in ways that omit elements that made people and communities embarrassed or uncomfortable.

It is hard, too, to pinpoint the moments when the collective forgetting took place in different communities. In many places in New England, there was an explicit effort to downplay slavery’s significance. Political leaders and authors often argued that the enslaved in the North were always few in number, and that they were not treated harshly. Sometimes their existence was erased. In Little Compton, Rhode Island, for example, mid-19th century town officials who recopied town records sanitized and omitted evidence of slavery. After the Civil War, Northern politicians continued to emphasize slavery as a Southern institution—rarely, if ever, acknowledging its earlier existence in the North as well.

Similarly, there’s no single best explanation for why and how Northerners like me “rediscovered” slavery in their past. In a kind of snowball process, discoveries about the past in one place have motivated people in other places to examine their own local histories, turning up evidence of once forgotten people and communities.

Until very recently, for example, no one knew about the 18th-century African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, located outside the city walls at the time, which is estimated to contain the remains of 15,000-20,000 enslaved and free people. It was discovered in the early 1990s, during the mandatory archaeological excavation prior to construction of a new federal General Services Administration building. The area had been actively developed and redeveloped since the early 1800s, so archaeologists assumed they would turn up little of historical significance. But soon after they began, the dig found intact human remains; archaeologists removed those of 419 people for further study.

The black community in New York, alarmed by the way the remains were handled, demanded that further excavation end so that “the ancestors could rest in peace,” and asked that a team of African-American archaeologists take over the project. After a battle that included threats from the Congress to end funding for the GSA building, they got their wish, and forensic archaeologists from Howard University spent more than a decade analyzing the remains. They discovered that the enslaved New Yorkers probably came from West Africa, and noted the large number of infants and small children buried at the site. They documented damage to the bones and muscles of adults who had clearly eaten poorly, and worked very hard, during their short lives.

In 2003 a cortege bearing the remains of the 419 people returned to New York from Howard, stopping for ceremonies at African-American churches in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York. The remains of the deceased were carefully reinterred on the memorial site, and in 2006 President George W. Bush declared the site a national monument. Today it is filled with art, and incorporates a magnificent memorial and a National Park Service Visitor Center that recounts the story of slavery in New York. It took the GSA, the National Park Service, community activists, and the city almost 15 years to decide how to memorialize the site.

The process of rebuilding a collective memory of slavery in Northern states through commemorative landscapes has continued throughout the Northeast. Old homes where enslaved people lived and worked, such as the century Royall House in Medford, Massachusetts, and Cliveden in Philadelphia have been transformed into public historical sites that now recount the story of past enslavement. Abandoned and overgrown burying grounds where enslaved people—and later free blacks—were buried were also restored. The slave market that operated on Wall Street in New York is now commemorated with a historical marker, as is one in Philadelphia

When it came to the site of the President’s House in Philadelphia, the House of Representatives directed the Park Service to find a suitable way to commemorate the enslaved members of Washington’s household in 2003. However, the process produced raucous public meetings, prolonged fundraising efforts, a competition for site designs, an archaeological excavation, and intense disputes about the content of the information panels to be placed on the site, which finally opened to the public in 2010. The conflict showed how unresolved Americans remain about the darker elements of our past—especially when past heroes, such as Washington, peer out of the shadows.

The post Can the North Acknowledge Its Own Role in American Slavery? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This poses a problem not just for the city but also for those who want to create the broadest and most complete understanding of Jewish heritage.

As the cradle of the Jewish history in America, New York City, and especially the Lower East Side, represents that breadth. Advances in literature, comedy, café life, politics, and labor can all be traced to the Jewish experience here. The city’s popular culture—from Fiddler on the Roof to Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld—has mainstreamed a nostalgic version of “schmaltzy” New York culture as a wellspring of American culture.

Yet all this heritage hasn’t drawn Jewish heritage tourists in large numbers—a predicament that reflects a profound shift in Jewish heritage tourism over the past few decades.

In the mid-1970s, in the wake of the blockbuster TV series Roots, people rushed to participate in destination travel around the world in search of their heritage. Cities began looking to tourism, including heritage tourism, as an alternative economic engine for their deindustrializing urban economies.

The United States, which provides the greatest number of heritage tourists worldwide, shows how big this trend was. The U.S. State Department reported the number of passports issued grew from 7 to 113 million between 1989 and 2013, an extraordinary 16-fold increase in a quarter of a century.

But all these passports didn’t help New York. To the contrary, the passport surge showed that Jewish Americans were leaving the country in search of their heritage. And New York City lacked what many Jewish Americans wanted to visit: Holocaust sites.

This shift in sensibilities first drew attention at a 1999 conference in New York. The conference had been called to commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of Irving Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history World of Our Fathers (1976), which chronicled the heyday of Yiddishkeit and Jewish socialism among the millions of Jewish immigrants who peopled the Lower East Side after 1880.

At the event, the critic Kenneth Walzer noted a troubling new consensus about the shifting terrain of Jewish heritage: “Yiddishkeit, socialism, and Jewish labor have been displaced by the new centrality of the Holocaust, Israel, and new forms of Jewish particularity.” The historian Peter Novak attributed this new focus to an increased Jewish self-conscious commitment to witness the Holocaust in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War.

Since then, other scholarship and my own travels around the world for a book on Jewish heritage and tourism have confirmed the truth that a nationalist redemptive Holocaust narrative has come to dominate Jewish heritage tourism. Cities such a Budapest, Berlin, Krakow and Warsaw are hot destinations that can sate Jewish appetites for Holocaust remembrance.

The irony is that New York’s Jewish history, while broad and varied, has heritage institutions that for all their strengths don’t match the moment.

Today, the City has three major Jewish museums, but its oldest, the Jewish Museum, is an art museum far removed from the Lower East Side. Founded in 1904, since 1947 it has been located in the former home of the banking titan Felix Warburg on the Upper East Side at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue. While it displays its vast collection of fine art, Judaica, folk art, and ceremonial artifacts to depict Jewish culture and identity around the world, the Museum primarily focuses on Jewish artists, many of whom are New Yorkers of the contemporary era.

The two other major Jewish museums do address Jewish history more directly, though again, with special attention to the New York experience and limited attention to the long and worldwide story of Jewish heritage. Both emerged as part of the major growth of Jewish heritage at the end of the twentieth century. One, the Jewish History Center, opened in 2000 on 16th Street. It is home to five partner Jewish research institutions—the American Jewish Historical Society, the Yeshiva University Museum, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. But the Center is less a museum than a major site for historical research.

Each institution within the Center mounts small temporary exhibits. And these exhibit spaces, in a nod to demand, do tend to draw more upon the German and Polish historical archives of the institutions than on records for the history of Jews in New York. Exhibits hosted by the American Jewish Historical Society, often in conjunction with another Center institution like Yeshiva’s Museum, are the exception. They address themes in Jewish history and occasionally detail Jewish heritage in New York. But despite the high quality of the programming, the site is not a major stop on the heritage trail.

Neither is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located on Orchard Street. At first glance, it would seem to make the ideal center for Jewish heritage tourism. Founded by two Jewish women, Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson, with strong senses of their own heritage, the Tenement Museum is however, by design, a museum dedicated to the story of American immigrants. A series of rooms have been outfitted to reflect how individual families of particular ethnic groups including the Irish, the Germans, Jews, and Italians lived in the tenement during different eras. The museum’s cause is not Jewish heritage per se, though the framework adds an illuminating comparative perspective.

Would a direct appeal to interest in the Holocaust work in New York? For tourists seeking sacred ground for a ritual of mourning and remembrance, the answer is a frustrating no. The Museum of Jewish Heritage, opened in 1997 and located in Battery Park, has a focus reflected in the first part of its title: “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” The museum’s core exhibit is principally dedicated to the story of the Shoah. But this museum has struggled to turn a profit and match the crowds that visit the uptown Jewish Museum and the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. Its 41,000 walk-up visitors per year are one-quarter the number who visit the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Museum.

Beyond the museums, the staple of Jewish heritage tourism in New York remains the walking tour. But such tours in the Lower East Side stick to the Tenement Museum’s broader focus on immigration. To be sure, Jewish themed tours exist. The Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy advertises a roster of nine different tours, but during the eight months between April and November 2016, they advertised public walking tours on just 11 days. In contrast, the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn offers daily—except on the Sabbath—bus and walking tours of its specific Jewish New York experience: the Chabad synagogue, a mikvah (ritual bath), a matzo factory, and a Torah scribe/repairs shop.

Joyce Gold, described by CNN as the “doyenne of walking tours in New York,” typically offers about 20 public walking tours each year, only one of which (offered each fall and spring) on Jewish Colonial Manhattan is Jewish. And so forth. In sum, Jewish tours are few, and the trend finds them increasingly folded into the kinds of edutainment tours about moguls, scamps, artists, and food lore that can win guides a favorable TripAdvisor review.

In the last decade, I took several tours with Big Onion Walking Tours, whose president Seth Kamil legitimately claims it to be “New York City’s premier walking-tour company.” The company leads over 2,000 tours a year for upwards of 40,000 customers, offering a “rotating roster of thirty history-based neighborhood tours.” A few include Jewish history sites, but only one, “Jewish Lower East Side,” has Jewish heritage as a focus. Most of Big Onion’s LES tours begin in Kleindeutschland, the one-time German immigrant area, and move on to Little Italy, Chinatown, and then northward to the Jewish rialto on Second Avenue.

Others reverse the order and begin at the northern end of the area near Astor Place. Both starts allowed guides to reference the earlier history of the Irish and German immigrants, with stops at the site of the notorious Five Points Irish slum visited by Dickens or the site of the Astor Place Riots of 1849. The Italian, German, Irish, Chinese and other immigrant sites are interspersed with old Jewish sites.

It was not always so. When Kamil began giving tours in 1990, clients wanted to learn about Yiddishkeit and the life of the Lower East Side; twenty years later, this history was eclipsed by interest in the Holocaust, about which the Lower East Side has little to say. Big Onion’s Jewish tour business has now been reduced to about 15 tours a year, 20 percent of what it had once been. As of 2013, the “Original” Big Onion Walking Tour, “Immigrant New York,” had once again become the bread-and-butter of Kamil’s business.

Kamil roots New York’s declining Jewish heritage tourism to the opening up of tourism in eastern and central Europe after 1989. As part of the rise of Holocaust tourism, third- and fourth-generation American Jews identify with the Holocaust, not the Lower East Side, as the core Jewish heritage experience. Increasing numbers want to “go back” to homelands in which grandparents and great-grandparents perished or from which they fled.

Remembrance though has become a religious experience and Holocaust tourism commodified, a ritual of atonement. As important as this is, the focus on concentration camps and memorial sites narrows Jewish identity to a devastating moment in time and space, ignoring the long, lived history of a vibrant Jewish culture.

Kamil’s tourists commonly ask to meet Holocaust survivors in the neighborhood. While measuring his words carefully, Kamil playfully echoes this view.

“If the Germans had invaded Brooklyn and established a concentration camp there,” he quips, “I’d be making a fortune.”

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I live there.

The evidence is strong, if circumstantial, that Seneca Falls, New York—where I’m executive director of the historical society—provided the basis for Bedford Falls. Our town and Frank Capra’s mythical town share geography, appearance, and stories in ways that are uncanny, and reveal how thin the line can be between matter and myth.

Both Bedford Falls and Seneca Falls are in the same place—in upstate New York, and near Rochester and Elmira, both of which are referenced in the movie. There are other geographic clues. At the time the film was made, Seneca Falls had a train going to Buffalo, just like the film town. Bedford Falls also had Genesee Street as one of its main streets. Seneca Falls’ main street, called Fall Street, is part of the old Genesee Turnpike that once ran across New York State.

History also binds the two places, real and fictional. Both were mill towns with a canal. Prior to the Second World War, Seneca Falls was a town of factories with many employment opportunities which drew Italian immigrants, including my own grandparents, here. New housing developments had to be constructed for these new arrivals. In the movie, Bedford Falls seems to share a very similar story.

But it is in the appearances of the two town’s buildings where the similarities seem positively eerie. Photos of the Seneca Falls main street from 1940 might have been taken from the film itself, even though the scenes in “Bedford Falls” were actually shot at the RKO Ranch in Encino, California.

At the time of the movie’s filming, Seneca Falls’ downtown had a building and loan company, and a department store, as well as globe street lamps and a median running down a portion of the main street. And the old New York Central Railroad Passenger—recently converted into the town hall—is the spitting image of the small station where so much drama takes place in the film. The old Victorian mansions on the residential streets of Seneca Falls resemble those of Bedford Falls. Some here say the Partridge house at 54 Cayuga Street is a dead-ringer for the old Granville House where George and Mary Bailey settled, and where the movie’s famous climactic scene takes place.

The bridge may be the most obvious connection. As in the movie, we have a steel truss bridge over our canal; the two might be hard to tell apart in pictures. And our bridge even has its own angel, a human nod to the “Clarence” angel who intervenes as George Bailey contemplates suicide. Today, a plaque honors the memory of Antonio Varacalli, who died in 1917 when he jumped from the bridge to save a suicidal woman.

Other important residents from Seneca Falls history have their cinematic equivalents.

Norman J. Gould, the owner of Goulds Pumps, the largest pump manufacturer in the world at one time, resided in Seneca Falls. He bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Potter, the main antagonist of It’s a Wonderful Life, who was also a wealthy business owner in his community. Just as Mr. Potter had his initials on his carriage, Norman Gould drove around with the license plate NJG1. We also had a George Bailey in John Rumsey, a local manufacturer who loaned his employees money to build homes—a section of Seneca Falls they called Rumseyville.

Perhaps such people are small-town archetypes, but another human binds Bedford Falls and Seneca Falls: Frank Capra himself.

The film director visited Seneca Falls in 1945, as he had family in Auburn, New York. A local barber, Tom Bellissima, recalled cutting his hair and joking about their names (Capra in Italian means goat and Bellissima means pretty one). Tom had just immigrated to America, so he was not familiar with American cinema and didn’t know who Frank Capra was. It would be several months later when attending the movies that he saw Capra’s name and remembered the man who had his hair cut in his shop.

None of this proves that Bedford Falls is based on Seneca Falls. Capra never mentioned Seneca Falls in his memoir, and Philip Van Doren Stern, author of the short story “The Greatest Gift” that inspired the movie, said he had no specific place in mind.

But the link has since been reinforced in the real world, by actual exchanges between the film’s cast and the town’s people. Karolyn Grimes, the actress who played the Baileys’ daughter Zuzu, has been coming to Seneca Falls since 2002 for annual It’s a Wonderful Life celebrations, held the second weekend in December.

“Coming to Seneca Falls is like coming home… I think it is the real Bedford Falls,” said Karolyn when she first arrived in 2002. In more recent years, other actors who played children in the movie—Jimmy Hawkins (Tommy Bailey), Carol Coombs Mueller (Janie), and Jeanine Ann Roose (Young Violet)—have started attending the celebration.

Why don’t you come to Seneca Falls, walk the streets, examine our architecture and bridge, meet Karolyn Grimes, and attend the “Dance by the Light of the Moon” (a nod to a dance and a song from the film) at our local high school? Then you can decide for yourself whether Seneca Falls is the real Bedford Falls.

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