The Hora

The Hora is a traditional Jewish celebratory dance, common especially at weddings and at Bar or Bat Mitzvah receptions. It's a simple, inclusive and extraordinarily fun dance that has its origins in the globetrotting history of the Jewish people and perfectly reflects its dedication to community.

Like many cultural hallmarks of Jewish society we know today, the Hora grew out of the traditional exchanges that regularly took place between Jews and people of many other backgrounds during the 18th and 19th centuries. The celebratory circle dance as a form has been around for thousands of years and arose in multiple cultures, though the styles we see in Eastern Europe and the Levant descended from an ancient Greek dance whose name essentially translates as “circle” and would manifest as everything from the Balkan Kolo to the Romani Oro, and of course the many different iterations of the Hora.

The Jewish Hora is simple enough that anyone, from little children to newcomers unfamiliar with the dance, can participate with no problem, but open to enough variation that more practiced dancers can perform impressive maneuvers. The basic version of the dance has all participants holding hands in a circle and moving counterclockwise to increasingly fast, lively music. Occasionally, the circle moves inward as the dancers raise their hands in the air.

It is traditional that the sideways steps of the Hora be in a grapevine pattern (left foot stepping over the right, the right passing behind the left, then then left passing behind the right followed by the right stepping over the left) and especially athletic dancers include high kicks and jumps through an exaggeration of the grapevine.

During celebrations in which there is a guest of honor (a bride and groom at a wedding, the Bar Mitzvah at the event of the same name), that guest is traditionally lifted by at least two of the strongest dancers while sitting in a chair at the center of the circle. Other dancers may occasionally move to the center to perform more difficult and impressive maneuvers whenever the mood takes them.

The Jewish Hora is a cheerful and delightfully exhausting dance. People of any age can enjoy it and it's a great mitzvah to invite a non-Jew into the circle to share the fun as a member of the community. This is why Jewish culture embraced the circle dance. It is a dance of family and friends, and of equality. The purpose of the Hora is to create a moment of pure, unbridled joy shared among as many people as possible. As the years pass, its power to do so has yet to diminish.

Social Norms: They have them, and we don't

What can we say about social norms in our poor amalgamation, America? What can we cling to in this place that was built from nothing but fractured ideologies? Do we ever know how to behave properly or do we have a sense of shaky awkwardness imbued in us from our first playground mistakes?

All you had to do to distinguish yourself was wear a piece of purple silk in Ye Good Olden Days of Shakespeare’s England. Gentlemen were gentlemen and ladies were ladies then. If you had money, you had a golden spoon popped into your mouth and a guidebook on how to behave properly placed into your hands. With a five course feast of hare, pork, cream, and wafers, you married off your fourteen-year-old daughter to her twenty-one year old cousin. If you were poor, you made sure your mother didn’t throw you out with the bathwater and you learned your place through a rough and rabble childhood. You stood in the floor of the theater so that the smarter higher classes could practice patrician paternalism and figuratively pat your stupid little head from their private boxes, high above you. Social decorum came straight from Queen Elizabeth. Social customs were drawn in stone.

Modern Europe also has solid social customs because it has the histories, or nostalgic renderings of history. They have Before-Dinosaurs customs, dusty books of fantastical fables and feasts, and Moses-wore-white-only-before-Labor-Day standards of behavior.

In Austria, the age old customs and attitudes are still heaped with reverence, even as new innovations seep in. The Viennese were appalled and protested the arrival of a Starbucks into their Mecca of Kaffeehaus Kultur. White-haired ladies and young people in tall boots know how to behave in the intellectual atmosphere, how to play up opportunities to see and be seen, and how to drink little coffees off silver platters. They preserve the dreaded Austrian stare (all Austrians acquire it at birth)-- an unsmiling, cold stare that makes the unlucky recipient drop dead (or want to). The stare exemplifies their haughty, reserved attitudes and is used to keep the Viennese who know the cultural standards (quiet, refinement, appreciation of tradition) in and the foreigners who don’t, out. Their social platitudes may not be as cut and dried as they once were, but they have hard and fast rules which once existed or they believe once existed on which to cling.

We tried to build unified cultural and social norms in the 1950s. An America rocked by World War II clung to traditional ideologies, creating for itself a conservative American ideal. Religion gave everyone a grand narrative, a stable rock in the storm to counter the uncertain future of war-- “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and people fought Communism through Christ. Girls played with epitomes of femininity, the Barbie doll, while boys played with her perfect counterpart, the man’s man Davy Crockett. Teenagers “pinned” their sweethearts and perhaps grabbed a quick smooch at drive-ins. Families piled into their Frank Lloyd Frank family homes. Men could talk about the latest TV around the water-cooler at work; everybody could yuck-yuck about I Love Lucy because everybody watched it.

Men were men and women were women then, or, perhaps we like to think so. In our modern society grasping for behavioral straws, the ease of men knowing how to behave like men and women knowing how to behave like women in any situation seems quaint to us today. Surely it isn’t anywhere near a whole truth. This nostalgic retelling of history attempts to give American social behaviors a historical basis. Some even offer these norms as behavioral standards to follow in the modern day. 

Still, America is a place of ever more fractured factions built with the pieces of already fractured factions. How can anyone learn how to behave with a group of philosophy majors, stay-at-home mothers, when you were fifteen, in an independent movie theater, at a museum? Each arena one enters has its own ever changing set of rules and potential pitfalls. I know I never got an Emily Post etiquette book for anyone of them. America’s fragmented culture has its own historically ambiguous, often-unspoken rules that we each try and master again and again, hoping for a degree of improvement with each failure.

Do you think Americans will ever learn how we are supposed to behave? Or are we better off without a system?

Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn

The Author of ISHMAEL Explores Sustainable Societies

    Last week I posted on the topic of New Tribalism, a philosophy that has been given essence and form by author Daniel Quinn. His first novel, Ishmael, which was published in 1991, has become standard reading in many college classrooms and sparked a conversation that was virtually unheard of in the previous 1000 years of human progress: What if "civilization" is a bad idea? In Ishmael, Quinn describes the history of human progression through the unique perspective of a literate, psychic, virtually immortal silverback gorilla. Meant to be understood in a Socratic sense, the narrative advocates for humanity to return to a more tribalistic existence because civilization doesn't work. In Quinn's rhetorical framework, civilization is the hierarchical organization of humanity built upon the accessibility of goods, namely food.By contrast, Quinn defines tribalism as an interdependent group that rely on one another for the survival of the whole. New Tribalism, by the same respect, organizes human endeavor in small communities whose members are interdependent yet exist within the modern technological, environmental, and geopolitical landscape.

     In 1999, after a series of other novels centering around the concept of his New Tribalism, he finally released a work that directly addresses the concept and its practical application, Beyond Civilization. This slim volume (in comparison to other books of its genre, it's only 200 pages) is arranged in very short vignettes, only a page or so, that articulate the progression of each idea as he develops his argument for a new tribalistic society. Due to the organization of his book, his arguments often seemed to me to be too simplistic, even naive. However, it's obvious that he meant the book to be accessible to everyone, and to provide a realistic, true-to-life platform for developing a tribalistic society within our modern framework. To do this, he employs the example of the circus.

     Circuses come in many shapes and sizes, but Quinn is not talking about Barnum & Bailey or Ringling Bros. who have become big businesses. Rather, he refers to the small traveling circuses that are all but obsolete anymore. He points to their organization and philosophy; that every person that is a part of the circus community contributes to the community somehow, and everyone that contributes has a place. (Thus, an interdependent community) Those of you that read Ishmael may remember the gorilla, Ishmael, making a similar reference. Quinn also references honey bees, to illustrate the modern structure of civilization; the masses working tirelessly for a few beneficiaries, living and dying no better off for their efforts.

     I found all of this, though appealing, much too simplistic. Quinn sprinkles statistics and science throughout his books, and I was much more interested in that. Show me the proof, then talk to me about a solution. It wasn't until I visited his website, www.ishmael.org, that I found the substantive evidence for which I was looking. In fact, there's a fairly persuasive study (a 124 page monster) called The Unsustainability and Origin of Socioeconomic Increase, that provided some serious academic light on the problem of unsustainable patterns of social organization, mainly our modern concept of human civilization.

     However, if you want a provocative and inspiring book about how we need to adapt and create a new social paradigm, Beyond Civilization is a great handbook. As the internet continues to impact and shape our societies in unexpected ways, I believe that there is an inherent tendency toward modern tribalism. Online communities, modern extant eco-villages and settlements, even social organizations all take on tribal characteristics. We are slowly evolving a value system that promotes interdependence rather than isolation, and socially-conscious endeavor over profit. It's with these basic building blocks that a New Tribalism will become a standard part of our civilization. Will we ever part with the centralism and economic models of today? It's hard to say, but if Quinn's philosohies are any indicator, we may not have to.

 

Photo from Amazon.com

New Tribalism - Not Your Ancestors' Campfire

     There’s no question that people in modern societies are unhappy; unhappy with their partner, with their jobs, with their income, with their families, with their friends, with their lifestyle….many aren’t even sure WHY they’re unhappy. They just are. There are any number of explanations for this, from distorted cultural perceptions of what makes one happy, to the increasingly isolated and superficial nature of modern social relationships. However, out of this general social malaise has grown a number of theories, some fairly radical, that address the problem of so much perceived discontent in the contemporary model of civilization. But we’re living this way to be MORE content, right?

     An emerging concept in sociology and organization of human populations is the idea that we weren’t actually made to live as we do now; one worker ant in a colony of millions quietly doing our part so we can retire to some gated community in Florida (I’m being facetious but you get the idea). In fact, for the vast majority of human existence (roughly 99.8%) people have existed in small, interdependent communities that create micro-cultures based on the cultural framework of their neighboring tribes and common heritage (as opposed to, say, multi-national corporations trying to sell you something). These communities, or tribes, were the fundamental social pattern for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a bit of a return to the “noble savage” concept of the 19th century, but with some socio-psychological underpinnings.

     New Tribalism (or “neo-tribalism”) has been around for a few decades but with environmentalism becoming a stronger part of our social consciousness it has gained serious ground. The ideology promotes a marriage of modern society and conveniences with the tribal organizational structure. Promoting modern values and progress while maintaining a culture of interdependence and environmental sustainability (i.e. small, low-impact communities).

     Carl Sagan first gave credence to new tribalism in writing, “hunter/gatherer lifestyles have served mankind well for most of our history, and I think there is unmistakable evidence that we are in a way designed for such a culture.” However, the writings of Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael, and Story of B) have given the New Tribalism movement a narrative and context. Eco-villages, online communities, and urban revitalization projects are all manifestations of the growing prevalence of New Tribalism in our modern society. A study even linked the gaming communities of Massive-Multiplayer Online Role-playing games to aspects of New Tribalistic culture.

     One issue with any emergent social philosophy is the political posturing that takes place among the many interests that would like to co-opt it. Neo-nazis, for instance, have used some of the ideas behind New Tribalism to justify an increasingly isolated community where prejudices and racial hatred could fester unhindered by greater social controls. This, of course, is not the intent of tribalism, which is to create greater interdependence between individuals without regard for race or creed. On the other hand a number of extreme environmentalists (Deep Ecologists, eco-warriors, etc.) have similarly adapted New Tribalism to advocate a return to old tribalism, forsaking established social structures and technologies in favor of a return to the primitive. Again, this is not the point. New Tribalism’s genesis was in the marriage of modern and primitive, in creating a new social order rather than recreating an old one.

     The New Tribalism ideology will no doubt evolve as it continues to manifest itself in our society (most likely the very name “New Tribalism” will change to something less evocative). However, as we become a more fully integrated and pluralistic community the natural tendency seems to be something tribalistic in nature. The internet has impacted modern society in the ability for individuals to establish communities of sharing (sometimes over-sharing) and improving awareness across cultural boundaries.  Environmental sustainability has gone from a buzz-word to a cultural value, and there are near daily advances in green technology. Our current economic recession has greatly improved people’s investment in their national, state, and local governments as well establishing a work ethic of “everyone pulls their own weight”. These principles are at the core of tribal cultures, and will continue to be integrated into our modern social structures in surprising ways.

 

Photo from laist.com

Yiddish theater in America was a halfway point between old country and new

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new immigrants often kept to themselves in separate ethnic enclaves.  Naturally with this separatism came ethnically-specific culture in different parts of the same cities.  From grocery stores and radio stations to places of worship, immigrant groups could find amenities similar to those they would find in their home countries.  One such type of ethnic transplantation was the Yiddish theater, which originated in Romania and was transplanted to popularity in American, especially in New York City, from 1888 to the 1920’s.

Yiddish theater was created in Romania and came to New York six years later. Yiddish theater most often included over-the-top representations of Jewish characters—the pining lover, the devout cantor, the husband with the wandering eyes—in exaggerated situations. Following the model of vaudeville, Yiddish theatrical productions included melodrama, operettas and pieces inspired by the European stage. Nearly every act in the Yiddish theater included singing.  Performers were usually immigrant Jews and traveled throughout the country performing their acts.

Some historians of the Yiddish theater claim that it was more of a meeting place, and a place to see and be seen, in the American Jewish community than synagogues.  In New York City, this is not surprising in that nearly 3.5 million Yiddish-speaking Jews settled here during the same time as the popularity of the Yiddish theater.

The Yiddish theater was not isolated in New York City, however, and included houses throughout the country.  In 1927, after immigration to the United States had slowed, New York had eleven theaters, Chicago had 4, Philadelphia had 3 and Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark and St. Louis had one each.  In 1937-38, perhaps influenced by nostalgia, Yiddish theater sold 1.75 million seats in New York, nearly ten years after its prime.

Yiddish theater was particularly significant because it began blending American popular song with Yiddish, particularly Eastern European, historical and language-based specificity.  Popular performers quoted songs and phrases from more mainstream American music, as well as used popular English phrases in songs sung mostly in Yiddish.  So, immigrants who went to see Yiddish theater were following their homeland culture while, at the same time, beginning to amalgamate into the homogenizing American whole.

Two of the most famous American immigrant Yiddish theater performers were Ludwig Satz and Aaraon Lebedeff.  Satz, born in Austro-Hungary (currently Ukraine) was called the greatest comedic Yiddish actor by the New York Times in 1925.  This nod alone showed that by this time, Yiddish theater was becoming more well-known to non-Jewish audiences in New York City.   Lebedeff was born in Russia and made a name for himself there, as well as in China. He came to America in the 1920’s, performing, directing and composing many of his own comedy routines.  He toured the entire country—he was particularly popular in the Midwest—and combined Jewish religious song with vaudevillian style. These men are largely forgotten, but provided a template for comedic characters and for the combination of old-and-new that is still used in entertainment today. 

Cultural amenities like the Yiddish theater that blended old country language and tropes with mainstream American culture served as a crossroads for new immigrants to retain their old-country identities while simultaneously becoming Americanized.  Yiddish theater, and its eventual demise, represented a halfway point for Jewish immigrants and their descendants to retain their heritage, but also learn how to be Americans. The next phase in Jewish-American entertainment was Yiddish film, starring many of the same actors that became famous on the stage.

Sources and further reading:

http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=1411

http://aaronlebedeff.free.fr/anglais/codage/biographie.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Satz

The Murder of Helen Jewett speaks about anonymity in 19th-century NYC

These days, most Americans live in cities, those humming beehives of culture and filth, where each person straddles a changing role between anonymity and responsibility as he goes about his day.  In the 19th century, however, cities were new in the United States and peoples’ place in them was in flux.  Anonymity was everything in these early cities—poor girls flocked to them to be sought-after courtesans, men cultivated fake names, people of modest means courted like they lived in a Bronte novel.

But sometimes all of the changing roles and huge amounts of freedom could turn more dangerous. The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen tells the story of what happens when freedom and anonymity combine to more sinister ends.

In 1836, two poor New Yorkers, one a young prostitute named Helen Jewett and the other, her client, a young clerk and writer, Richard Robinson, took on roles greater and outside of who they really were.  Jewett, a beautiful young maid who served in Maine and lost her virginity out of wedlock, moved to the big city to claim a new name and identity as a literate prostitute.  Robinson, too, pretended to be courting Jewett in a proper New England code of propriety—he wrote her letters and brought her presents. 

One night, though, their high-class courting turned violent when Robinson stabbed Jewett and then set her bed on fire. Robinson was eventually acquitted, however, and moved to Texas.

The Murder of Helen Jewett is, at its core, a mystery novel. Cline Cohen brings up new evidence and writes in a way that by the time readers finish the book, it is still a mystery if Robinson was really the culprit in this murder.

The book is also a surprisingly in-depth piece about the conditions and the surprising freedoms available in New York City in the early 19th century. New York police officers were an ungoverned group of volunteers during this time, so New Yorkers could file complaints, but more often than not, little was done about them.  Journalism, too, did little to corral people and to reprimand their questionable ethics—sensationalist penny papers, the city’s only source of news, wrote stories to sell papers, not than to provide fact-based information.

As for men and women, many of the roles of New England, like courting etiquette, were still in place, but the large degree of anonymity in the city didn’t provide much infrastructure to enforce it. Men moved to New York City to learn a trade with a master teacher and lived in boarding houses without many ties to other people, including their families.  If women became pregnant in New York City, unlike in New England, there was no close-knit town to socially pressure her beau to marry her.  In New England, men were the only ones with a sexual appetite—they were the ones to ignite physical passion in women.  In New York, however, prostitutes were already awakened and alive with sexual fervor.  

Helen Jewett is a fascinating account of a murder that has enticed America for almost two centuries, but is an even better portrait of cultural attitudes and the freedom in anonymity in early 19th century New York. 

 

Sources and further reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/cohen-jewett.html

http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Helen-Jewett-Patricia-Cline/dp/0679740759#reader_0679740759

Chuang-Tzu: Basic Writings, Burton Watson, Translator

To my mind, Burton Watson’s translation of the Taoist (Daoist) classic the Chuang-Tzu remains the definitive English language version, and this “Inner Chapters” abridgement makes for the easiest and highest-quality introduction to the work.

 

While many people are familiar with the number one Taoist classic—the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, one of the most-translated books in the world—far fewer are aware of this classic.  Like the Tao Te Ching, the work is attributed to an ancient Chinese sage, but most scholars agree that it is a compilation of works by different authors.  Unlike the Tao Te Ching, though, the Chuang-Tzu is not a series of pithy but mysterious and short poetic statements, but a strikingly diverse selection of prose, “hard” philosophy, episodic wisdom and poetic allegory.

 

Despite the fact that the Chuang-Tzu is regarded as a compilation of numerous authors’ works, the philosophical and religious ideas contained in the book are remarkably cohesive—this is in part due to the skill of the original compilers of the text and in part because this abridgement represents only a portion of the chapters; known as the “Inner Chapters,” these have long been attributed (realistically or not) to Chuang-Tzu’s own hand.  In any event, the writing vibrantly conveys the philosophy of the early Taoist sage, from rhapsodic attempts at describing the ineffable patterns and all-encompassing power of the Tao (roughly the “Way” the universe operates) to descriptions of sages whose understanding of the Tao affords them supernatural skill in their chosen fields to wistful ruminations on the nature of life and the most spiritually practical and spontaneous way to live it.

 

Readers unfamiliar with the Chinese language might be a little disoriented on first encountering the Chuang-Tzu, as the short episodes often include quite a few transliterated Chinese names, many of which appear to never reappear for the rest of the book.  Additionally, the text is organized in the same way it has been for about 2000 years—although there are discrete chapters, each one contains numerous short passages which are often totally unrelated to each other.  Despite the potential for confusion, it’s a relatively short book (around 120 pages) and the writing is relatively simple; repeated readings will reward you exponentially.

 

In fact, the genius of the Chuang-Tzu is often to be found in its writing style—even in translation, the authors’ literary skill shines through, bristling with puns, clever wordplay, comedy and poetically rich language.  For example, Confucius appears a number of times throughout the course of the book—rather than directly trash on a rival philosophical school, Chuang-Tzu often puts his own decidedly non-Confucian philosophy in the mouth of his competitor, subverting the moral philosopher’s influence like a merry prankster.  Throughout, Watson’s translation (even though it’s about 50 years old) manages the text’s intricacies with a natural voice, neither making the philosophy overly technical nor dumbing it down as other translators have done.  Most importantly, Watson seems to intuitively understand the book’s ideas better than others, which is ultimately almost as important as word choice.

 

The Chuang-Tzu is not an easy book so sum up, idea-wise, but its carefree blend of anti-establishment individualism, humility, skepticism, common sense, mysticism and humor still remains fresh after millennia, waiting for you to discover it for the first time.

“Dixie” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic": Civil War song poems in the American repertoire

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During the Civil War, both north and south used the song-poem to advance a nostalgia for their regions in order to create a willingness to fight.  As evidenced by “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the true specificities and historical contexts rarely mattered, but instead interacted in a conversation with feelings about older tunes to advance new views on abolitionism. The poets or those who “claimed” these two song-poems created often false contexts for the song-poems in order to advance their causes.

Messages and tunes mattered more than specificity of language in 19thcentury song-poems. The individuality of the poem, specifically its unique language and the identity of the poet, mattered less than the message the poem tried to convey. Song-poems often used the language of other genres—blackface “dialect”, declamatory language, Romantic images—to convey a message, rather than to innovate.

Often sung in large groups, song-poems focused on collective experience, nostalgia, and familiarity with tunes and words in order to create an “us” vs. “them” atmosphere to engage sympathies to enact change. 

Dan Emmett, a northern blackface performer, used blackface dialect for his performance of “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land,” but this true historical context was subverted by both the north and south to promote regional nationalism. Emmett’s language mimicked the dialect of blackface minstrelsy, much of it for comic effect. A white man in the north playing the part of a black slave who missed his southern slave home—“I wish I was in de land ob cotton,” probably picking the cotton himself—surely would have been met with laughter from the audience.

In fact, much of the nostalgia for Dixie land both in Emmett’s performance and the later repetitions seems to rely repeat of the refrain—“Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.” In this way, the specificity of the poem seems to matter very little in contrast with the ease in singing the refrain and the catchiness of the song-poem. In other words, ease in performing a song-poem to foster a group unity was more important than the song-poem itself. Or, in the case of “Dixie,” catchiness was more important than the original intention for the song-poem. Instead, “Dixie” was used to foster a regional nationalism in both the north and south, and, the tune and the words of the refrain mattered more than the song-poem’s original purpose in using it as a nostalgic battle cry.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe uses Romantic imagery to speak about the war, but also uses “John Brown’s Body,” a song full of call-to-action implications, and her own mythologized account of how the poem came to her to suffuse this call-to-arms poem with layers of meaning. Romantic images of the land in particular, like “[God] is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,” as well as lines about God being around on the North’s side—“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps” give the poem a feeling of poems of the past, a nostalgia for the pre-war north, and a reassurance that God has blessed the northern land.

Howe builds on this idea of God being on the side of the North by mythologizing—purposefully or not—the way that the poem came to her like a dream in the night. This idea of waking with the stanzas already in place implies that God planted the stanzas in Howe’s head, adding to the idea that God was on the side of the North. Also, Howe’s use of “John Brown’s Body” added another motivating impulse for those who listened to the song—John Brown was a man of action, so the listeners could take action as well. This meaning, coupled with the double implication of God on the North’s side, made this a very effective call-to-action song-poem.   

The Internet Generation and Social Learning

...or trying to move with the target

   Americans love labels. You put a label on it and you give it an identity, you humanize it. One of the most elusive things we've attempted to label is generations; those loosely related groups of individuals born in the same relative time period and disposed to the same relative cultural experience (notice how it's all relative). Visit any number of publications and you'll get relatively (again) similar accounts of the generational periods, qualities, and ranges of dates in which its members were born.

- The Greatest Generation from 1901 - 1925, came of age during the Great Depression and was involved in one or both fo the World Wars. (Dubbed by Tom brokaw in his book of the same name.)

- The Silent Generation from 1925-1945, comprised those individuals that came into the world during the Great Depression and sandwiched between two world wars.

- The Baby Boomers, 1945-1960’s were products of a suddenly prosperous country on the heels of a World War that catapulted the U.S. to the top of the global charts.

- Generation X, 1960’s to 1980, were children of the Baby Boomers that are known for their need of individual uniqueness and resulting counter-culture movements. X'ers are generally thought to have ended right around 1980.

     After that it gets a little hard to discern where the generalities fall because people born after 1980 really have yet to make a mark upon the world and we have yet to determine what exactly their "cultural experience" would be in the context of our national narrative. People born between the early 1980’s and the early 2000’s are more characterized by their adolescence in a world of fast-paced change than any cultural imprint made by their age demographic. There have been attempts to label by people trying to get a jump on the nomenclature: Generation Y, or Z, the I Generation, the Nintendo Generation Y, the Internet Generation, Millenials, Generation @...the list goes on.

     I was born in 1980, came of age during the advent of the internet, and now arrive in the second decade of the 21st century at the age of 30. I latched on to the grunge movement of the early to mid nineties, a cultural hiccup it seems, and cemented my identity around the turn of the latest century which will forever be characterized more by the cultural fallout of 9/11 than by anything else. I feel like an outlier, caught between the cynicism and independent self-reliance of the X Generation, and the confident optimism and comfort with ambiguity of the next generation (often referred to, appropriately, as Millenials).

     Giving credence to this type of generalized characterization, businesses and organizational theory has been attempting to integrate generational identity into their workplaces and human resources considerations.  In a post published on Forbes.com, Rawn Shah examines the implications of five different generations together in the workforce (older generations working longer and the upcoming “Millenials” entering now). According to one source, half the global workforce will be so-called Millenials by 2015. For organizational and business leaders, as well the diverse workforce, it becomes increasingly important for people to work in an inter-generational environment. Some organizations even provide a questionnaire to determine with which generation you best fit. This kind of “social learning”, Shah says, is integral to keeping an agile, dynamic, and interconnected workforce.

     Members of previous generations will be required to adapt more to meet the changing landscape of the 21st century business model. Baby Boomers and some Gen X’ers may need to learn to adapt as quickly as Millenials, that have come of age in a world that is constantly changing. Millenials feel a comfort with uncertainty, with the ambiguity of whether the “next big thing” is really a thing, or just a passing phenomenon. Millenials thrive in the gray. However, Millenials, by the same right, function poorly alone, having grown up in a very interconnected world. A bit like a rower without their crew, they flounder in the water on their own. (Perhaps a reason another label of the Millenials has been “Tweens”, twenty-something that, even out of college, end up living with their parents for lack of self-motivation.)

     Gen X’ers need to unlearn some of their stoic independence to be productive in such an agile work environment, with constantly changing demands and constantly collaborating with other professionals. The interconnectedness works against many stolid Gen X’ers that grew up in an environment wanting to make their own mark, and distrustful of “the establishment.”. Baby Boomers, likewise, have much to learn in the realms of technology and the modern landscape of business, but make up for it in work ethic and quality production.

     On a bit of a side note, I feel the cultural divide between generations is, in the U.S., often perpetuated by formal education. Every person in the nation, without exception, has some experience within the educational system. The way the system is set up, however, favors an industrial widget approach where children are grouped by age. Rather than putting children with like abilities and developmental levels together, children spend most of their formative years mostly interacting with people of their own age (not even generation, but specific year of birth!) Where else in our lives are we daily surrounded only by people of the same age cohort? Never! This may sound strange coming from a public school teacher, but if we really want to address issues of 21st century competencies and academic achievement, we need to look at the basic approach in how children progress through school.

     Though I may feel like somewhat of an outlier in terms of my generational identity (The PRC questionnaire would disagree, I got a 96% like a Millenial rating…) I understand that those characterizations mean nothing on an individual basis. Individuals are dynamic, changing, thinking beings no matter the year they were born. A person may embody some characteristics of a generation or may abandon them entirely. At any moment those ahead of, or behind, “the times” are outliers in their own right. Attempting to measure one’s place in society is like shooting at a moving target. In a rapidly changing world, the only people left out are the ones standing still.

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Passover and Hope

This week is the holiday of Passover for Jews all around the world. Passover is one of the few religious observances that comes directly from the text of the Torah. In those passages it is known as "The Feast of Unleavened Bread" and it is prescribed as a time when Jews should perform certain rituals to commemorate the release of their ancestors from captivity in Egypt. This festival evolved into the modern Seder, the meal of storytelling and prayer that recounts the highlights of the Book of Exodus and presents many symbols of slavery and freedom in the form of foods as a lesson for all those in attendance. Appropriately enough, President Barack Obama has made it a habit to conduct a Seder at the White House. I say this is appropriate because one of the major themes of Mr. Obama's election campaign is also one of the major themes of Passover. Namely, hope.

The concept of hope is central to Judaism in general, but it has special significance on Passover. The story of Passover itself is one of a desperate, downtrodden people overcoming what was, at the time, the most powerful empire in the world to achieve autonomy and come to understand the freedom they hadn't known for many generations. According to the text, the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt for several hundred years. Given the average lifespan of a person in that time and place, and also the likely reduction of a slave's lifespan due to malnourishment, fatigue and general hardship, it's clear that the concept of freedom would have been thoroughly alien to the generation of Hebrews who were finally freed. It would have been so many generations since anyone remembered freedom that their entire ethnic identity would have been as slaves.

The difficulty of grasping freedom is actually depicted in the Torah. When Moses finally returns to Egypt to demand his people's release from captivity, he asks his fellow Hebrews to join him in prayer and they refuse out of fear and a sense of responsibility to their tasks as slaves. Their bodies aren't just enslaved, their minds are as well. Indeed, it is an entire generation's struggle after the release of the Hebrews to even grasp the concepts of self-governance and personal responsibility.

Despite the overwhelming odds against the freeing of the Hebrews, let alone their ability to understand the need for order that freedom requires, Moses draws certainty from hope. Hope is central to the story and so it is central to Passover as a holiday. We are reminded that it isn't just an observance to remember our own escape from physical and mental slavery, but an example of freedom and justice being possible for the downtrodden in general. The lesson is that if we, a people with no country and no military power, can prevail over the greatest political entity in the world, then justice is possible for everyone regardless of their circumstances.

At the end of every Passover Seder, we say the phrase, "Next year in Jerusalem". In Jewish philosophy, it's said that Jews will return to Jerusalem to a rebuilt Temple when peace is achieved throughout the world. The phrase implies that, difficult as it may seem, we have hope for the repair of all that is wrong with the world. If homeless slaves can become masters of their own destinies through only faith and will, then no problem in this world is insurmountable.

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