Awesome Woman: Gerda Lerner

Today's AWESOME WOMAN is GERDA LERNER (b. 1920), a founding pioneer of the fields of Women's History and African-American History. She is currently a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University. She wrote the screenplay for Carl Lerner’s film Black Like Me in 1966.

Prior to her work, women figured in history books and courses only for their ritual status as defined by a patriarchal society (wives of Presidents), as spoilers (witches of Salem), or for their sacrifices and caregiving (Florence Nightingale). Even when portraying women who had contributed tremendously to society's advancement and consciousness-raising (Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt), the radical substance of their work was routinely ignored.

At graduate school at Columbia University in 1963, Lerner defied her mentor's objections and chose to write her dissertation on the Grimké sisters, 19-century Quaker educators and social activists. She taught what is considered to be the first women’s history course at the New School for Social Research in 1963, and helped to develop Women's History programs at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and other institutes of higher learning.

Beyond developing the critically important fields of study of Women's and African-American History, Lerner also contributed a new, rich paradigm for researching history by organizing her work around principles that would illuminate the lives of her subjects, focussing on the experience of people as opposed to using the patriarchal historical framework of military actions, alliances, wars, and territorial domination. For example, for her 1972 book "Black Women in White America," Lerner traveled throughout the South, visiting churches, schools and families.

Gerda Lerner was born in Vienna, Austria and was forced by the Nazis to leave her country of birth for the United States. She had to learn English and held a series of "typical women's jobs" before moving along into her life of political and intellectual trail-blazing, and also of creativity. She married Carl Lerner, a Communist theater director, and in addition to her activism and scholarship she also collaborate with Eve Merriam a musical called "Singing of Women", and she wrote the screenplay for the important film "Black Like Me".

Lerner not only made an immediate difference in communities and politics, and not only established and legitimized the study of women's and blacks' experience, but she improved forever the way we look at history and raised the bar for authors and teachers who have come after her.

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]

D'oh of the Day

Foreign profits of U.S. firms could help at home, economists say: "As policymakers desperately search for ways to give the sputtering economy a jolt without deepening the nation's budget deficit, some economists say an answer lies with the more than $1 trillion in U.S. corporate profits that reside overseas."

Feel-Good Friday: The Dog and the Orangutan

[Thanks to my friend Nina who shared this vid on her FB Wall!]

I'm hoping to start a tradition of finding something to warm my heart every Friday morning ... apologies in advance if this idea, like so many, gets swept away in the headlong rush of life.

NY Republican Lemmings

I understand disgust with Albany, I really do. But my biggest issue is with voters who are impressed by multi-millionaires who come on with lots of fiery rhetoric but who, if one takes even two minutes to research (and — gosh — THINK) for oneself, are clearly despicable candidates.

So you vote for someone because you heard them say they will take a baseball bat to Albany. I can see how this violent allegorical threat to shake up the entrenched legislature has its appeal. But you make zero effort to really look into the guy.

Well, this is who you just nominated, NYS Republicans:

[Carl P. Paladino's win over Rick Lazio] was a potentially destabilizing blow for New York Republicans. It put at the top of the party’s ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally’s comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.”

Paladino's victory speech is one of the funniest things I've ever read. He poured his own money into his campaign, outspending Lazio 3 to 2. Yet this guy who had a cool $3 million with which to buy this election portrays himself as someone ready to lead the "people" against "the ruling class."

“We are mad as hell,” Mr. Paladino said in a halting but exuberant victory speech in Buffalo shortly after 11 p.m. “New Yorkers are fed up. Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people’s revolution. The people have had enough.”

Congratulations, 'Pubs. I cannot wait to fill in the little dot next to Cuomo's name, knowing that I will get my wish while you all follow Paladino off the cliff.

Has the G.O.P. gone socialist?!

No, but it looks like that boner Boehner has finally seen that the vast majority of Americans are on the lower fringes of what we still call the "middle" class and seriously need money more than the folks who take bonuses (paid for with bailout money) while everyone else eats white rice and beans six nights a week. Maybe someone finally explained to him that the median income in this country is only 29% of his own $174,000 per annum Congressional salary.

Or, more likely, his new willingness to allow the tax cuts for the rich to expire is more about the self-interest of Republican Congressional reps to hang onto their power. I can just see Boehner slapping his forehead. "Oh, right. We're elected by majority vote, and the huge majority will never make $200,000. D'oh." Thanks to Obama for bringing this up now that we're fast approaching midterm elections. On the other hand, now it becomes harder to paint the GOP as the obstructionists and elitists that they are. But, then again, Obama finally gets some cred as someone who can achieve results across the chasm we call "the aisle."

Dog Training

In his new NYT column "Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back" Frank Rich recommends that Obama forcefully illustrate the class warfare that has been waged for decades in the U.S. You know, the redistribution of wealth that has resulted in the decimation of the middle class and the concentration of 25% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 1% of its people.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

 Word.

All forms of terrorism, some thoughts on 9/11/2010

• On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 people died in the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on five hijacked airplanes. This was a horrible, shocking display of the hatred of one group of humans for another. And many thousands of family members of the victims continue to suffer under the memory of what happened.
  
• On September 11, 2001,  about 24,000 children died on our planet, most from preventable causes, with undernutrition contributing to about one-third of these deaths and vaccine-preventable disease causing another 14% of those deaths.
  
• In 2001 there were 6.13 billion persons in the world. The United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 arrived at an average of 1 person in 1,000 -- or 613,000 -- being raped each year. This would indicate that on September 11, 2001 around 1,700 persons were raped on the planet, most of them women.

I find  research into unfair deaths and egregious injustice and personal crime statistics to be spiritually exhausting, so I need to stop now. Therefore I will not be providing handy little statistics re the number of children and women sold as sex slaves within their own countries or shipped in containers around the globe,  the number of women beaten each day by their husbands, the number of people who did not have clean water to drink, the number of girls denied an education, the number of children and teens forced to make our rugs, sneakers and other commodities, the number of women who are genitally mutilated and/or forced to marry ...

There are all kinds of terrorism. Human beings can be very twisted in their actions towards others, and in their inactions as well. 9/11 was ONE day. Every single day on this planet the above statistics replay themselves, except for the first one covering 9/11. Every day 24,000 children die of preventable causes and every day 1.7 million people are raped.

If you are one of those who get all riled up by what Al-Qaeda did on 9/11, do you get equally fired up about all the other horrible fates imposed by humans upon their fellow man? Upon children? Did you take even one small action this year to help a victim? Give five bucks to a homeless person? Did you help serve even one meal in a shelter for battered women and their children? Did you even give a small scared child a loving smile?

A Jew Speaks Out Against Islamophobia

Finally there is a line of thought getting put out there drawing the all-important parallels between the climate that led up to the Nazi Holocaust and the anti-Muslim screaming (and actions) going on right now. Anya Cordell speaks out in Tikkun Magazine in her article Lighting the Anti-Muslim Fuse:

When I hear the presumptions about all Muslims these days, I, a Jewish woman, silently substitute “all Jews” and then I know how terrifying and incendiary this language is, because we’ve already seen how these scenes play out, in all too horrific reality. Will those who are screaming the stereotypes the loudest take responsibility when people accept their cues and assume they have license from society to target innocent Muslims in hate-crimes, or worse?

Mandatory Clusterfuck Analysis

Nobody breaks it down like James Howard Kunstler.

The toils of summer are bygone now. The days grow shorter and America stands in the darkling road of its own prospects like a dumb animal frozen in the blinding light of approaching fury. The White House must be a strange place these days with the management of the USA turned over to astrologasters, alchemists, prayer-wheel spinners, fakirs, viziers, necromancers and other visitors from occult realms unaffiliated with the dominion of reality.
One of these characters, Ms. Christina Romer, at a luncheon celebrating her departure as chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (i.e. readers of spilled goat innards) even blurted out that she had no idea what's been going on in banking and business and how come America can't be more like it was in 1999. Don't cry for Christina. A cushy chair awaits her at the Hogwarts Berkeley outpost where she can repose in a trance of unknowing until California slides into its own tar pit of default and disintegration....

Opposition to the Synagogue Mosque

Brandeis Professor Jonathan D. Sarna draws the same comparison that has been on my mind between the opposition to the Cordoba Center at 51 Park Place and the shameful history of synagogues being banned in our country despite the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Mayor Bloomberg likely had some of this history in mind when he asked “should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?” In distancing himself from Peter Stuyvesant and the many others who have defined American religious liberty in narrowly restrictive terms, he reminds us that if today’s target is the mosque, yesterday’s was most assuredly the synagogue.

Even in the original 13 purportedly freedom-loving states, "religious freedom" was interpreted to apply only to Christian denominations, with Connecticut maintaining its ban on Jewish places of worship as late as 1856.

Why is the weekly Jewish Forward, a publication of relatively minor reach in this country, the only place I have noticed the parallel drawn?