(Illustration by Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Nick Anderson, of the Reform Austin News.)
I’ll be looking at Donald Trump during Thursday night’s debate, in all of his smug flatulence producing crapulence, but thinking of John Gotti.
No, not because Gotti was as physically grotesque as Trump, nor as gargantuan in his ignorance and stupidity.
No, because I can see Gotti (a former associate of my brother’s) and a gathering of the Gambino gang seated around a small television at the Ravenite Social Club as they ridicule the repulsive and ridiculous Republican candidate for President of the United States—just as they mercilessly mocked him as a mushy mobster wannabe in New York for years.
“Look at that hair, “ I could hear Gotti say. “He looks like he stuck his fucking tiny little fingers into some putana’s mattress, grabbed a handful of whatever wiry shit was in there and pasted it on his head.”
Everyone else around the Boss burst out laughing.
“Check out his shoes, “ offered Angelo Ruggiero, a childhood friend of Gotti’s, pointing at the TV. “Does he have any toilet paper stuck to them bottoms again this time? You’d think a guy with as much fucking money as he says he has wouldda learned to wipe his own fat ass the right way, by this time.”
Ruggiero did an imitation of Trump tipping over while he tried to twist his torso to see his own backside. The others roared.
John Cody, former head of the NYC/LI Teamsters’ and a prodigious Gambino Family earner who gave Trump fits on multiple construction sites, shook his head, once he stopped shaking from laughter.
“Money?” That loser don’t have no money,” Cody said. “That’s all bullshit. Everytime we shook him down for more, or threatened to hold up one of his construction projects if he didn’t pay up, he squealed like the overstuffed pig he is.”
Cody continued: “Trump talked tough. But as soon as you confronted him, he cowered like a frightened little girl. All talk, no action. When I got my cumada Vernia Hixon a penthouse in Trump Tower—right below the bullshit artist’s own place—he was like a little lap dog, covering himself with drool.”
“Whadya need, John, Whadya want. Anything! Anything! The puffed up patsy pleaded with me and Vernia ,” Cody said. “He was a pathetic wimp; literally begging us to grab him by his pussy and wring him dry. Anything, John. You name it.”
They all sneered, while Cody made the motion of being jerked-off.
“Imagine this fucking wimp comparing himself to Al Capone,” Gotti said. “Did you hear him bragging before a bunch of his red-hatted guffoons last week, that he was indicted more times than Capone?
“What a bunch of jadrools those dumbfucks are,” Gotti continued. “As if that whiney wannabe was tougher than Capone because he got 34 Criminal indictments, and Capone only got 22. What does that make me? The fuckin’ feds only got me on 13 counts of murder and racketeering. Does that fat fuck-face think that makes him almost three times as tough as me? What a stinking pile of shit. I didn’t see him taking out McBratney or Paul Castellano….”
Gotti motioned to the TV as Trump was blabbering on about the FBI, and the DOJ.
“That fuckin’ gasbag wouldn’t even last 60 seconds in Otisville, the goddamned Taj Mahal of Federal Prisons, “Gotti said. “If someone farted near him, he’d asphyxiate himself on it to grovel for favor.”
Cody picked up on Gotti’s cue and staggered to his feet, imitating Trump gasping for air: “Ugh, ugh, anything for you, John; anything, you name it. Suck the stink out of your fart? You got it.”
Gotti and his entire crew doubled over with laughter. Trash-talking Trump did that to them.
“I gotta give it to him– although it was probably the Russian Mob which deserves the credit for it,” Gotti said. “They figured out that the best way to get a lot of their guys out of jail was to prop up the fucking pansy in the White House, so he could roll over and give ‘em everything they wanted, and pardon his friends who committed felonies for him.”
“Jeez, why didn’t we think of that?” Gotti asked, waving his hand at the TV. “I coulda been the First Felon President, and walked in 1992, instead of getting a life sentence from the fucking feds 32 years ago this week.”
“Just think, “ Gotti said, standing up, and motioning his arms in a big sweeping gesture. “MAGA woulda meant: “Make America GOTTI’S Again!”
They all stood, clinked their glasses of wine and said “Salut,” in unison, as Trump drifted off into a rhapsodic riff about another multiple felony-committing role-model of his, Hannibal Lecter.
No, not because his birthday is coming up on June 19; a birthday he did not live to see in 1941, when he would have turned 38 years old but didn’t, because of a progressively debilitating disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or more commonly known now as, “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”
Gehrig gave his farewell address to baseball—after playing 16 spectacular seasons with the New York Yankees—on July 4, 1939, before a packed house at the old Yankee Stadium, two weeks after his diagnosis with the disease.
The Yankees’ “Iron Horse,” who set Major League Baseball records for consecutive games played and grand slam homeruns which stood for decades, told the nearly 60,000 people in attendance that “ I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot of life to live for.”
Then, speaking in a strong and steady voice at a stand-up microphone behind home plate, Gehrig spoke the words etched into the minds of millions of men, especially, when repeated by Gary Cooper portraying Gehrig in the movie “Pride of the Yankees,” just one year after Gehrig’s death:
“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
No, Gehrig’s been on my mind, because I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
At age 75, I’m not battling against a serious disease, which many good friends are at much younger ages; I’m not mourning the death of a spouse or partner, as several of my college friends have found themselves doing over the past few years; I’m not caring for a precious family member with dementia, watching helplessly as his or her mind just slip slides away. I am grateful each day for still standing, as we walk through the eye of many storms each day, and mindful of my responsibility to use my mental and physical health to help those I love. I am acutely aware, that although I may feel like one of the “luckiest” men on earth right now, there are countless others without such good fortune.
Preternaturally optimistic, I was raised by a mother who lived her 92 years with Polio, and was ever grateful that her paralysis wasn’t much worse, and that she didn’t “end up in an iron lung,” like many of the other children she saw on her visits to Polio wings of hospitals.
I also suspect that having both of my parents take their last breaths in my arms has something to do with perspective. Every time I am about to complain about a personal issue, I think of that. It has a great leveling effect. So many other people have so many more daily life-and-death issues weighing on them—whether in war zones, or just struggling to survive—than I do.
Still, there are certain things that knock me for a loop, and remind me clearly why I have thus far been, largely, spared. Sure, I attempted suicide when I was a college freshman, but I survived, determined to do all I could to save others from being sucked into the belly of that sandworm, like in Dune.
I wrote about my suicide attempt seven years ago in my book, Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo and My Brother,” and then again, just a few years back on both Substack and Medium, in an article entitled, “Reflections of Suicide: Living toWrite About It.” My purpose in writing about my suicide attempt was to show other young people struggling with questions of their own existence, that things can get better; that you can survive and grow, help others live their lives, and improve the lives of other humans around us, by sharing your story, and listening, listening, listening to theirs.
Little did I foresee that the greatest test of my own experience with depression and attempted suicide would come from our oldest granddaughter, a brilliant, compassionate and beautiful child, born with her own unique set of health challenges. On the nights we kept self-harm watch for her, and held her hand to comfort her to sleep, I understood clearly that my own experiences had simply been preparation for that moment. No matter what she did or said, I saw and heard her with great clarity, and understood that despite a lifetime of professional achievements and high level personal connections, this was what I had been put on earth for: this moment, this child, this circumstance, this role—to save and nurture this child’s life. I saw myself as clearly as I saw her. We were, as she would frequently say, “soulmates.”
This weekend, after six months away, my granddaughter, now 15, came home from a residential school out of state, where she has shown enormous personal growth, courage and tenacity. For her, for her father, and for her grandmother and me, it’s been a long six months.
I missed taking her “thrifting”, and standing back and observing her get lost in the pleasure of meticulously picking through rows of clothing, kibitzing with the sales people with the wildest hair styles, until she found just the right piece to try on. When she fell in love with vinyl records, I delighted in taking her from record store to record store, in search of the newest releases from Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Boy Genius, or Taylor Swift. To me this was Nirvana, and for her, there was such comfort in the soothing rhythms of the search. We both loved it, and part of me wanted it to last forever.
Yet, we both knew, this routine could not substitute for a school/learning routine, in a supportive environment that could accommodate her unique talents, personality and needs. We talked about anything that crossed our minds, without judgment, knowing that there was nothing either one of us could ever do, that would jeopardize the other’s love. We created a very safe space, and we both cherished it.
Through all of her ups and downs, my “soulmate” always expressed a strong desire to go to college, to be a therapist—since so many had helped her—or, an animator or artist, because that gift came so naturally to her, and often served as a great elixir. We knew that as 9th grade began, things would need to become more structured, and targeted toward her academic and therapeutic best interests.
When she left for school, which we both agreed was best, I was lost. For weeks, I struggled to find my purpose again, immersing myself in my writing, fiction and non-fiction; learning the music of her favorite groups, and scouring the news for items about everything that interested her. Still, my son, our granddaughter’s father and a writer as well, sensed that I needed something more.
He came up with a tangible “project” for me, to redesign and re-landscape his front and back yards—something I had been badgering him to do for years. I proposed doing a desert landscape, knowing that, once completed, it required the least care for him and that my granddaughter, when she returned, would love the succulents, cacti and rock-gardens I was envisioning.
Gardening had always been a great stress reliever for me, from my long days of working in government, media and public health, and from the excruciating tension between my brother’s life and mine. To get lost in the simple pleasure of gardening connected me back in time with my mother, who also loved it, but was unable to actually garden because of her Polio paralysis in one arm. In practice, I became her “good” arm in the garden.
Serendipitously, at the same time I began this project, the New York Times ran an article on “Why Gardening is So Good For You.”
The article focused on the good exercise results of gardening (“Gardening gets you moving again,” and the mental health benefits (“Gardening does wonders for your mental well-being.”) For me, the effects in both cases were terrific and tangible.
Over the course of my six-week landscaping project (timed to culminate over Father’s Day weekend), I lost five pounds, dropping to my lowest weight in a decade. Each day I moved shovel by shovel of blue/grey gravel—12 Cubic yards in all—to give me the clean desert palette I needed to design from at my son’s Sonoma County, California home.
While I started the project as a Father’s Day Gift to him (which came in ahead of schedule and way under budget) it morphed into a fun and creative design project to have finished in time for my granddaughter’s first visit home from residential school in six months. Each Blue Agave I planted in a symmetrical line, was intended to bring a smile to her face when she saw it, since she previously found their weed-wounded yard to be “sad.”
I repurposed thousands of dollars of unused “river rocks,” strewn on the side of my son’s home, finding enough of them to create several rock gardens, including a Pride-colored Rainbow of Rocks, at the lower bottom of the front yard. Since my oldest granddaughter proudly identified as part of the LBGTQ+ community, I knew this would make her smile.
To add to the joy of doing our “Rainbow Rock Garden”, our youngest granddaughter, aged 8 ½, spray-painted most of the rocks for me, and came up with the inspired notion of placing the Rainbow on a “cloud” of white rocks, since she said, “whenever there are rainbows, there are clouds.”
For days after, I was humming Jim Henson’s “The Rainbow Connection,” a song which he wrote for Kermit the Frog, in The Muppet Movie, in 1979, just ten years after Stonewall, and four years after our son was born. Over and over again, the Spotify in my mind kept playing the lyrics to me, in Kermit’s pure innocent voice, while our youngest granddaughter and her grandmother worked on the colorful masterpiece:
“Someday we’ll find it,
The Rainbow Connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me…”
I could not stop looking at our finished Rainbow Rock Garden, laughed at the sight of our youngest granddaughter draped in a smart-looking smock carefully spraying-painting each one, and smiled when I thought of the look of wonder our oldest granddaughter would have when we welcomed her home.
I am, without question, the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
(Martha Ann Alito’s Flag of preference for Flag Day, and every day.)
Supreme Court Justice Samuel’s Alito’s wife, Martha Ann Alito, has become so obsessed with making America more “Godly,” that she’s taken to designing Flags in her head, to be flown when her husband “is free of all this nonsense” — of being one of nine US Supreme Court Justices. Yes, she actually said that.
Martha (Alito, not Mitchell) let all the world see the worm holes in her head at a Christian Nationalist cult-meeting, when asked what kinds of Flags she’s thinking of:
“They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and it has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word VERGOGNA.” (Editors’ note: “Vergogna” means “Shame” in Italian, and has been used on flags protesting Italy’s “shameful” immigration policy, to movie titles by Enrico Morricone, for “Vergogna Schifosi,” literally translated as “Disgusting Shame.”)
While her husband Sam has cast a crazed Savonarola-like spell over the Supreme Court on matters of personal autonomy, women’s rights, sexuality, racist reapportionment, and matters of “godliness,” and faith, Martha has been dreaming of becoming America’s new Betsy Ross.
Here are some of the Alito’s real and imagined flags they’ve either already flown, or are dreaming of flying once Sam’s Supreme Court “nonsense” is over, and he has made America “godly” again. That is, of course, in the image of the fundamentalist Christian God, not the God of Jews, Muslims, progressive Christians, or of any other faith.
(NB: The Swastika flag may be on loan from Right Wing Billionaire Harlan Crow, benefactor of Alito’s fellow Far-Right collaborator on the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, and collector of Nazi paraphernalia.)
(Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., age 14, in the foreground, stands by his father’s casket in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in early June, 1968. TV Talk Show Host Jack Paar stands behind the coffin.)
Dear Bobby:
I know life has been hard for you since I was murdered 56 years ago, after I just won the California Democratic Presidential Primary. I’m sure it’s been difficult for the entire family.
But, I’m writing to you now, because I believe you’ve taken your grief over my being taken from you at such an early age, in some incomprehensible and unconscionable directions. It’s time for you to reflect on the enormous damage you are doing.
I was glad you weren’t there to witness me being shot in the head. It was bad enough your mother had to see it. The fact that you were asleep in your dorm some 3,000 miles away at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md., and had to be awakened in the middle of the night by a priest to hear the news, has always been of some comfort to me. For a 14-year old to have watched such gun violence in person, being perpetrated against his father, would have been traumatizing.
I can only imagine how terrible it was to be rousted from a sound sleep to learn the news. I will be forever grateful to Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for flying you, Kathleen, and Joe out to LA on Air Force Two, so you could all be at my bedside in Good Samaritan Hospital. Hubert personified what being a “good samaritan” means.
Even though Last Rights had already been administered to me, I felt you grab my hand tightly and pray for me to survive and for my soul. I shall also never forget how brave you were to stand by my casket, day-after-day, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, while millions of Americans were able to come by and pay their respects. I felt you trembling, but still, you stood there, strong and erect like a soldier of Jesus Christ. For that courage, I shall always be grateful.
However, in pursuing the path of public service, to which many in our family have devoted themselves, you seem to have gotten lost along the way. So, as a deep believer that eternal change for the better is possible, I am offering you the kind of guidance I wish I was able to give you in person:
First, you’ve harmed millions of children with special needs—the same children whose lives our family championed in the Special Olympics, and to whom you Aunt Eunice, your cousin Maria, and I dedicated our lives to serving—with your decades long laundry list of lies about the link between Vaccines and Autism.
Those bold-face lies — disproved by dozens of medical studies — resulted in the loss of the medical license by Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who originated and propagated the destructive anti-vaxxer propaganda. You knew that at the time you started peddling that pernicious propaganda, and you certainly know it now. To continue to spread those lies, and grotesquely try to repeat them concerning COVID-19—a disease which killed 1.2 million Americans—is unconscionable. Stop it.
I am ashamed that you knowingly disseminated and profited from peddling such widely disproven, and damaging, lies about a non-existent link between standard, childhood MMR vaccines and autism, blocking legitimate research and treatment for autism for many years. By intentionally spreading such ignorance, you personally caused direct harm to many of the same marginalized communities — communities of color, the poor, and the disabled — that I spent my lifetime championing. Didn’t you learn anything from our dining room table conversations about the special responsibilities we had?
Secondly, your candidacy for President is of grave concern to me, as it it to every other member of our family, who have all solidly backed Joe Biden. Biden, a good, fair and compassionate man, has governed in a conciliatory, pragmatic progressive tradition to benefit working families—much as I would have done—and, right now, he is a necessary bulwark against the anti-democratic, nationalistic, nihilistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-women, anti-gay, and reactionary forces in this country and around the world. He may well be the last best hope for Democracy, and for decency. How could you undermine that, and play into the hands of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn—all convicted felons, by the way—and of Vladimir Putin?
Your mother and I taught you respect for the Rule of Law, for Democracy and for the dignity of every human life. How could you not see that by taking even one-vote away from Joe Biden, you are pushing this country into the abyss of darkness, and turning it over to the forces of Fascism your Uncle John and I gave up our lives fighting? Why are you trashing all the good work we tried to do during our brief time in public office?
And, while I have your attention, that choice you made for your running mate is completely looney-tunes. She met a billionaire at a Yoga Retreat, had his baby, took some of his money and then dumped him when she had sex with another billionaire? And she used her multi-millions to spread more lies about vaccines, and to purchase a place on your national ticket? Really, Bobby? What are you doing? I can understand your wanting to act out a bit of a subconscious Oedipal plot aimed at me for abruptly leaving you at such a tender age, but do you really want to send your 96-year old mother to her grave? Snap out of it!
Third, that cringe-worthy book for which you wrote the forward, entitled, “The Real Anthony Fauci”, has been adopted as gospel by the John Birch Society, Q-Anon, and every other anti-government wacko on the extreme Right Wing, including the Republicans running the present House of Representatives. Do you really believe that the life-saving work of Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates was meant to “ put humanity under totalitarian rule,” and “must be stopped? Who ARE you?
The Craig Newmark Center’s Poynter Institute—which has done some outstanding work in public health and public policy I would have strongly supported— reported that you are “one of the biggest sources of anti-vaccine rhetoric today.”
Worse, McGill University’s Office of Science & Society —at one of Canada’s leading Medical Universities—has called you “one of the princes of the anti-vaccine movement, if not its king.” What have you become?
As if all of this deeply damaging behavior on your part wasn’t enough, Bobby, you gutted me when you testified before the Louisiana House Oversight Committee during the height of the COVID pandemic, and opposed a proposal requiring public school students to be vaccinated. Your reckless actions took by breath away: my son, my namesake, crusading against a proven public-health measure that has historicallyprotected people of color.
You had to know that more than 50% of the public school students in Louisiana are students of color — precisely the demographic that had the highest rates of COVID infections, and death. Were you consciously undermining everything your mother and I taught you to fight for? Everything shred of public service and the public good that the Kennedy family has stood for?
Didn’t it matter to you, Bobby, that the rabid Right Wing groups you are now working with are the very same pernicious people who have always opposed more funding for health care for the poor, for working families, for mental health services, and for the disabled? Doesn’t it matter to you that those actions are costing the lives of the most vulnerable among us?
I know you have questions about whether Sirhan Sirhan acted alone in murdering me, Bobby, but whether he did or not, your unhinged actions and life-threatening lies against the people for whom I fought, are doing a far more thorough job of assassinating my legacy than Sirhan ever could.
I will always love you, my son, and will always believe in the power of redemption, and in your ability to turn toward the light, instead of pulling the country down into a wormhole of darkness and despair.
I converted to Judaism 44 years ago today, drawn to a set of beliefs not threatened, but strengthened, by rational questioning and debate; that found beauty in acts of faith and generosity, small and large; that understood, from centuries of experience, the insanity and inhumanity of exclusion and demonization; and was built on the bedrock of fundamental human decency, dignity, love and the preciousness of life.
Which is why, despite the current collapse of democracy in Israel and the careening of Israeli leadership into a fundamentalist, nationalist chasm not unlike those in history responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, I was shocked by the depth of hatred aimed at me for criticizing the Netanyahu government’s abandonment of the fundamental principles of Judaism and human rights.
Early last month, I wrote on an Instagram posting by Chris Cuomo of News Nation, that:
“I am a Jew. Netanyahu’s extreme Right Wing government is an attack on all of us. A fundamental tenet of Judaism is advancing humanity; the present Israeli government is setting humanity back. On Holocaust Memorial Day when we Jews say “Never Again,” we meannever against usagain, nor against any other people—including non-combatant Palestinians. We are not attacking Israel; we are attacking inhumanity…”
While more than 250 readers/viewers agreed with my statement (including a reminder that the IDF’s own Code of Ethics, prohibits a disproportionate response to an attack) respondents from Israel and the United States alike (some of whom may have been Bots) piled on. A sampling of some comments:
1. “Whose side are you really on?”
2. “You’re calling for the death of your own people.”
3. “Thanks for showing us what the ‘Judenrat,” did. Jew.”
4. “Sad to see a fellow Jew who is product of Hamas propaganda.”
5. “Here we go with the “as a Jew” comment.”
6. “So, you’re one of those ‘Self-Hating Jews? You’re a fraud.”
7. “Palestinians must be slaughtered. We are dealing with psychopaths.”
8. “You’re not a Jew. Villano is anything but a Jewish name. Putz.”
9. “You probably love US garbage pails like Biden & Schumer.”
10. “Why don’t you just Convert—OUT of Judaism?”
The Judaism I converted to 44 years ago, was a far different Judaism than the false faith being practiced by some Extreme Right Wing and Ultra Nationalist Jews in Israel and the United States today. It was the Judaism articulated by Israeli writer and activist Fania Oz Salzberger, daughter of the great Israeli writer Amos Oz, who writes that:
“God does not belong as a political entity telling us what to do; what to teach; where to invade.”
Menachem Begin was Israeli Prime Minister at the time I converted, and while he was more conservative than Israel’s Labour Party leaders of the previous 30 years whom I revered, he had just, 2 years earlier, been a signatory to the Camp David Accords, along with US President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—an historic peace agreement which earned all three leaders the Nobel Peace Prize.
There was a flicker of hope in the air, that a nearly 30-year constant state of War between Israel and Arab nations could be taking a pause, and could, perhaps, lead to a more permanent peace in the region. Centuries old and seemingly irreconcilable differences over geography, demography, faith, ancestry and ancient rights of land ownership could be navigated if there was a willingness on each side to reach some livable accommodations with the other—and if the humanity of each side was respected.
If Menachem Begin, a leader of Israel’s armed revolutionary group for Independence the Irgun, who was labeled a “terrorist” by the British forces he fought for freedom, could shake hands with a sworn enemy of the State of Israel like Sadat, who led Egypt in the 1973 Yom Kippur War to retake the Sinai Peninsula which Israel had occupied since 1967—anything was possible.
There was great hope in the air for peace between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors, in the Spring, of 1980. And, there was great hope in my life, that, after years of searching, I had found in Judaism, a set of ethical, humane, spiritual teachings and practices, in which I could believe, and rationally act upon.
I was a father of a five-year old son at the time when I chose Judaism as my new faith, the faith of his mother. The hierarchy of my previous faith, Catholicism, had long since turned away from me by blindly supporting the American War in Vietnam, opposing equality for women, insisting that the promise of life was more important than life itself, discriminating against individuals because of their sexuality, and refusing to accept AIDS patients into their hospitals, and hearts, because of an outdated, and inhumane, concept of “sin.”
I spent years studying other faiths, and gravitated toward Judaism because of its grounding in reality, as well as spirituality; its’ fundamental commitment to repair the world (Tikkun Olam), and its’ insistence on refusing to wallow in darkness, and always, always work toward hope and the better side of human nature.
Converting to Judaism is not done on a whim; Jews have certain requirements for those they choose to let in.
After reading an article in the late 1970’s by the great Reform Jewish leader, Rabbi Alexander Schindler (the founder of ARZA, the American Reform Zionist Association) welcoming non-Jewish spouses in interfaith marriages to become Jews, I decided it was time to accept his invitation, and begin my journey toward Judaism.
It was a decision which did not make my mother, a devout Catholichappy. In fact, when I informed my mother I was converting to Judaism, she wrote me a letter in which she expressed how “heartbroken” she was; and that the announcement of “your becoming a Jew is not something I am proud of.”
“I will never accept your decision to change your religion,” my mother wrote to me six months before my Conversion to Judaism took place, on May 20, 1980. In reality, it took years for her to become “comfortable” with my becoming a Jew.
We joined a large Reform Jewish Congregation in Albany, N.Y., and I came under the tutelage of a leading Reform Rabbi, Rabbi Martin Silverman, a disciple of Schindler’s, who guided me in my readings on Jewish history and Judaism.
Rabbi Silverman, whose wife, Phyllis, taught with mine in the Albany Public Schools, was already a remarkably courageous figure within the American Reform Jewish Community. In the late 60’s and early 70’s before the Roe v.Wade US Supreme Court decision which declared abortion to be a fundamental privacy and healthcare right of women, Rabbi Silverman had a secret compartment behind the sacred Torah Scrolls in the Chicago-area congregation he headed. In it, he kept files of illegal abortions he’d helped women obtain, as well as a list of doctors willing to perform them.
Along with many other rabbis, ministers and priests across the nation, Silverman was a member of the Clergy Consultation Services, an underground network of fearless clergy, dedicated to protecting the life of the woman, first and foremost. That was, after all, an essential teaching of Judaism—that the woman’s life was of paramount importance, and even if an abortion was necessary to protect the life of the woman, up to the moment of birth, abortion was a required medical procedure under Jewish Law, as well as in the Old Testament.
Rabbi Silverman’s daughter, Amy Cohen, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Adoption Agency Adoptions with Love, and an advocate for women’s reproductive rights,told the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston:
“If someone was pregnant and couldn’t have or didn’t want the baby, he counseled women of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds about their predicament, explained what an abortion entailed, and then he’d refer them to where they could get a safe abortion.”
Cohen described her father as a “liberal, forward-thinking person, always involved in people’s rights.”
After my guided, independent study with Rabbi Silverman, I was considered to be ready to participate in a “Conversion class” sponsored by the Capital District Board of Rabbis, with Rabbis of all denominations of Judiasm—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform—participating.
Teaching the Conversion course, was the diminutive Susie Isser, no more than five feet tall–who was trained in the law and had escaped from Austria just before the Nazis made it impossible to leave. An immigrant to the United States in the late 1930’s, Isser—a Jewish, female attorney– found the door to the American legal profession slammed shut to her, a similar story to the one recounted decades later by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
So, for 20 years, to help support her family, the brilliant Susie Isser scrubbed floors, and taught Hebrew Sunday School, one day per week. Her son, Dr. Raymond Isser, went on to become Chair of the Judaic Studies Department at SUNY Albany, my undergraduate alma mater, where my wife and I met.
Word of Susie Isser’s passion for teaching and her commitment to a humanitarian Judaism—and to the State of Israel—spread throughout New York State’s Capital District. In her class, the Jewish spouse was required to take the six-month long conversion class along with the spouse converting to Judaism. Among our fellow students, was an Iranian Jew, and his non-Jewish spouse—both of whom had just escaped from Iran before the Ayatollah and a cabal of fundamentalists had taken over that country.
In her lessons on Jewish history, Susie Isser cried when she spoke of growing up with a Tzedakah Box, found in Jewish homes throughout Europe, being filled with pennies each day, year after year, to support the development of a homeland for Jews—with the promise of no discrimination against any faith, and legal protections and respect for all human rights. In fact, those human rights protections, became key elements of the UN Charter which created Israel in 1948.
That was the Judaism I converted to in 1980, and it’s mission to advance humanity and repair the world, while not perfect, was carried out in spirit and substance by a succession of Israeli governments, from Begin’s to Yitzak Shamir’s, to Shimon Peres’, to Yitzhak Rabin’s.
That Judaism was violently attacked with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, by an Ultra Right Wing Nationalist disciple of convicted Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane, who was himself killed by an assassin’s bullet.
That Judaism began its slow slide toward assisted suicide, with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, for the first time in 1996, and his repeated pandering to and enabling of the poisonous growth of Ultra Nationalist & Extremist groups throughout Israel by placing them in key Israeli government positions of extraordinary power—including power over religious matters, such as questions of “Who Is A Jew?”
Many of Kahane’s ultra nationalist adherents are now, nearly 30 years later, in key Israeli government positions, including Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Finance Minister with oversight responsibility for the West Bank, arrested on terrorist charges in 2005 by Israel’s Shin Bet for plotting to block Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations, and according to The New York Times investigation on Israeli extremists, published on Sunday, May 19, 2024, threatening the life of Yitzhak Rabin “ in front of TV cameras in 1995,” two weeks before Rabin was murdered.
Rabin was murdered at a Peace rally, where he was speaking on behalf of the Oslo Accords—the US brokered peace agreement in 1993 between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization—which advanced the long held US foreign policy objective of a two-state Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement.
My Judaism, like Rabin’s, is one that believes in diversity, equality, inclusion, humanity and love, and a sacred obligation to repair the world. My Zionism, like David Ben Gurion’s, Theodore Herzl’s, Amos Oz’, Susie Isser’s, and Yitzak Rabin’s is a Humanist Zionism, in which a State of Jews could only be a liberal democracy, NOT an exclusionary Nationalist Zionism.
As Fania Oz Salberger has so eloquently said:
“Ben Gurion, the child of Socialist Zionists and of old Labour, and Theodore Herzl, a liberal, BOTH believed that Arabs AND Jews had to be part of Civil Society.”
That was the fundamental premise upon which Israel was founded; that was the basis of the international agreement which created the State of Israel 75 years ago; and that was the pluralistic, humane, loving, generous and intellectually honest faith to which I converted 44 years ago this week.
