Beth Schwartzapfel

Audio slideshow to accompany "Earning College Degrees Behind Bars"

2010-01-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

FORWARD>News>Earning College Degrees Behind Bars

2010-01-02T10:55:00.001-08:00

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 30, 2009

Woodbourne, N.Y. — It’s a Friday afternoon in December, and history professor John Fout is leading the students in his course, “Nazi Germany and the Holocaust,” in a spirited discussion.

Every time he has taught this class, Fout says from behind his desk in Room 7, students always ask: “If the Germans were losing the war, why didn’t they use the Jews to help them? If you can answer that question, you can answer the question of Nazi Germany.” He pauses and looks around. “And what’s the answer?”

Eleven students, who are seated in rows of desks with their copies of Christopher Browning’s “The Origins of the Final Solution” propped open, begin throwing out ideas all at once.

“I think it’s the same reason why the United States doesn’t use prisoners,” Antoine Sims replies from the back row. “Because a prisoner is considered an enemy of the state.”

Hands shoot up into the air. Samuel Chung turns from his desk in the front of the classroom to face Sims. “But we’re here because of a crime,” Chung says. “What did they do?”

Sims, Chung and their classmates are students of the Bard Prison Initiative, an unusual program that sends professors into New York State prisons to teach a full slate of Bard College classes. There are 70 students working toward associate’s or bachelor’s degrees here at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility, 100 miles north of New York City.

Woodbourne, a medium-security facility, is one of two “main campuses” of the program; the other is the maximum-security Eastern New York Correctional Facility, just a few miles down the road. Several other prisons serve as “satellite campuses” where students can begin working toward their degrees and then transfer here to graduate.

The students in Fout’s class, History 201, read all the same books that Fout assigns to his students on campus, including a memoir by an SS commandant and a biography of Hitler that clocks in at more than 1,000 pages. “They just respond remarkably well,” Fout said of his students. “I just find the quality of the minds and the work of these students is as good as you could get, for teaching. A lot of days where I’ve had a really good class, I’m thinking to myself: How in the hell did these guys end up there when they’re that smart and that able to understand such complex material?”

The Bard prison program prides itself on its highly competitive admissions process. Executive Director Max Kenner, the program’s founder, said that each year, between 80 and 120 inmates apply for the 15 slots per campus. They are admitted on the basis of an analytical essay that they write in response to a piece of literature and how well they do in an interview.

“My first semester, I was leery,” said Fout, 72, an emeritus professor and European history scholar who retired from full-time teaching seven years ago; this is his third semester with the program. “I thought: What’s going to be the quality of the work? Will it be up to the standards of regular Bard undergraduate students? And what surprised me, and delighted me, was that, in a way, they’re better.”

Whereas typical college students have a full slate of classes and activities, not to mention active social lives, the students in this program have a lot of time and energy to focus on their classes, and are highly motivated to learn. “I was always disappointed by students who you wanted to make that extra effort for the final, and who don’t,” Fout said. “These guys, they do it! They reach for the next level of achievement, or level of sophistication, or level of understanding of the material. They just respond so great to encouragement.”

Since Congress eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners in 1994, access to higher education in prison has been extremely limited. Some prisons offer community college degree programs to students who can pay out of pocket — often a big hurdle, because the jobs available to people in prison typically pay less than 25 cents an hour. Bard’s program is one of only a few that are privately funded; its entire $1.2 million operating budget is privately raised, and covers everything from tuition to books to computers. (In 2009, the Bard program provided seed money to Wesleyan University to start a similar program in Connecticut.) Studio arts and lab sciences are limited because of logistical hurdles, but otherwise, students choose from the same breadth of math, science, social science and humanities classes as do the students on Bard College’s bucolic campus in Hudson Valley, N.Y. When they are finished, the students in prison graduate with diplomas “identical to diplomas we give on campus,” Kenner said.

In today’s class, the men have been debating exactly when the Holocaust began; students mention various pieces of legislation and milestones in World War II, until the discussion turns to the Nazis’ disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union, which many see as the turning point in Germany’s fortunes.

“I can’t be inclined to think that they would use Jews to help them,” Ray Brito said, “because they want to exterminate them.”

“Exactly,” Fout said, clearly pleased. “But why?”

“They saw Jews as being the end of Germany,” Brito responded. “Himmler himself said that we have to destroy the Jews or they will destroy us.”

“Exactly,” Fout said again. “The war in the Soviet Union is a racial war.”

Moises Barrera raises his hand to add, almost as if to himself, “Why would the ‘master race’ use the lowly Jews?”

Barrera has closely cropped hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a thoughtful demeanor. Originally from Queens, he is serving 15 years to life; he is one of seven students in the room convicted of second-degree murder. Barrera applied to the program twice before winning admission in 2005; he completed his associate’s degree and is working toward his bachelor’s. “For me,” he said later, attending the program “was about not being a hypocrite.”

Barrera is very close with his nieces and nephews, and one nephew in particular had not been doing well in school. Whenever Barrera would push him to work harder, his nephew would respond that his uncle hadn’t done too well, either. And it was true: Before being sent to prison 17 years ago, at age 19, Barrera hadn’t finished high school. He had to complete his GED at Woodbourne before he could apply to the program. “I didn’t want him to follow in my footsteps,” Barrera said. “It was showing him with actions.”

Barrera’s thoughtful reflection on the subject is not unique. The men in this room, all wearing variations on the state-issued green khaki uniform (they call it “state greens”), have a remarkable ability to think critically about the choices they’ve made in their lives. In part, they credit their age and their maturity — many of them, like Barrera, came in as teenagers and are now in their 30s — and in part, they credit college.

“I no longer look at myself the same way I did before coming to Bard,” said John Leone, a beefy man from Brooklyn with dark hair and blue eyes. By far the most outspoken and enthusiastic member of the class, Leone reads additional books beyond the hundreds of pages that Fout assigns, and came to class today with relevant newspaper clippings and poems to share with Fout. “When you’re forced to look at literature — you’re forced to go in there and inspect things that you can’t see on the surface — it forces you to develop a mind that thinks critically,” he said.

Leone, 43, was sent to prison nine years ago on attempted burglary charges. “I used to think: I stole some stuff. Nobody’s home, it’s not a big deal,’” he said. “When I developed a critical mind, I couldn’t look at things like that no more. I realized, it has wide and far-reaching consequences. I might be taking somebody’s property, but I’m also taking — I invaded their space. They feel robbed, they feel vulnerable.” College, he said, “changes the way you view the world, and yourself in that.”

Mother Jones>The Green Mile

2009-12-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

The Green Mile
Who's got time to tend delicate prairie wildflowers? Prisoners, that's who.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January/February 2010

[The text of this story is currently available on the Mojo site only to subscribers, but the Sustainable Prisons Project has posted it as a pdf on their blog.]

The Nation>Swapping Politics for Science on Drug Policy

2009-12-25T09:31:00.000-08:00

Swapping Politics for Science on Drug Policy

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 21, 2009

Policy wonks and deficit hawks weren't the only ones paying attention when President Obama signed the Fiscal Year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act last week. HIV activists, public health experts and communities of drug users celebrated--not for what's in the appropriations bill, but for what's not in it: a ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs, which has appeared in the federal budget every year since 1988.

After two decades, this change is a historic achievement. Obama had already missed one opportunity to lift the ban, neglecting to pull it out of his budget in May. Still, that same month former Seattle chief of police Gil Kerlikowske was sworn in as the director of national drug control policy, calling for a new common-sense approach to drug addiction. When the drug czar calls for an end to the war on drugs, it's clearly the start of a new era.

Unlike during the Clinton administration, when there was only mixed support for needle exchange--in 1998, drug czar Barry McCaffrey convinced Bill Clinton to renege on his stated intention to lift the ban--all of the top brass in the Obama administration are on record in favor. Kerlikowske supported Seattle's program of exchanging needles. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and CDC Director Tom Frieden both served as New York City Health Commissioner, and both used that position to actively promote needle exchange. Still, drug policy watchers agreed that the president didn't want to force the question of needle exchange on members of Congress. The White House was "concerned about making sure that when Congress deals with the issue, that they can win it," says Harm Reduction Coalition Policy Director Daniel Raymond.

That left it up to members of Congress to lift the ban themselves, and in November, the House did just that--sort of. In an attempt to broaden political support for lifting the ban, Congressman David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin and chair of the committee whose conference report contains the language, introduced a "thousand-foot rule," which would have maintained the ban on funding for exchanges within 1,000 feet of a school, park, library, college or video arcade. Obey himself acknowledged at the time that the thousand-foot rule was "unworkable"--since it would simply be a ban by another name, especially in densely settled urban areas. He said, however, that he hoped the language could be changed when the House and Senate versions of the bill went to conference committee. That's precisely what happened last week.

The new provision prohibits federal funding of needle exchanges "in any location that has been determined by the local public health or local law enforcement authorities to be inappropriate for such distribution." But because needle exchanges "have been operating for over twenty years with community support and buy-in already," says Jirair Ratevosian, deputy director of public policy for amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, this new language essentially ends the ban. Exchanges "already have support from law enforcement agencies; they already have support from public health groups, from local planning committees," Ratevosian noted.

In addition to the much-needed dollars that will start flowing to needle exchanges, lifting the ban is also of huge symbolic importance to a presidency whose commitment to a public health approach to drug addiction has at times amounted to more talk than substance. But needle exchange is only one intervention among many that have come to be known as "harm reduction"--taken together, this approach to addiction is pragmatic rather than punitive. Instead of attempting to eliminate addiction altogether, it seeks to mitigate the harms--HIV, hepatitis C, overdose and criminality, among others--that addiction can cause. Many harm reduction programs have been studied extensively and are widely understood to be effective but continue to be stymied by politics, even under Obama and Kerlikowske. That, until recently, was the fate of needle exchange itself.

Safe injection facilities, for example, take needle exchange to the next level by offering users a safe place to inject drugs under medical supervision. There are some sixty-five safe-injection facilities in forty cities around the world (none in the United States), and many years of research in those places have demonstrated that SIFs reduce overdose deaths and risky behaviors and lead to other positive outcomes. In 2004, while he was Seattle chief of police, Kerlikowske paid a visit to the only SIF in North America, in Vancouver, and wrote a cautious but open-minded memo in which he said that it would be "worthwhile to continue to monitor the Vancouver drug experience."

Could such a program take shape in this country? Several harm reduction activists in New York City say that it already has, under the radar: much the same way as groups of drug users organized informal needle exchanges in the '80s, long before they were legal, groups of savvy users have become lay EMTs and have stocked what might otherwise be considered "crack houses" with clean needles and medications to reverse the effects of overdose. In May, a coalition of harm reduction organizations in New York City sponsored a conference at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to explore the possibility of opening a legal safe-injection facility in New York. San Francisco's health department sponsored a similar conference in 2007. Given that state legislation to legalize safe- injection facilities is not likely to be forthcoming anytime soon, legal scholars who study the issue believe it would be possible to establish some legal basis for opening such a facility in the United States if a state or local health department were to issue a regulation authorizing it for public health reasons. Or an academic medical center could set up a safe-injection facility as a research project, which would insulate it from certain legal problems.

While research suggests that funded needle exchanges will cut down on deaths due to drug-related infectious disease, neither AIDS nor hepatitis is the leading cause of death among drug users. In fact, overdose has that distinction--and opiate overdoses can be reversed. Inject Narcan--i.e., naloxone--into the muscle of someone who is dying of a heroin or OxyContin overdose, and within seconds he is awake and very much alive. Narcan has been used for decades in ambulances and emergency rooms to reverse opiate overdose. If those with severe allergies can carry Epi-pens with them, advocates ask, why can't drug users themselves carry Narcan? Legally they can, with a prescription from a doctor. And yet, prescriptions are not nearly as common as they should be.

In more than fifty programs in seventeen states, doctors prescribe Narcan to drug users in conjunction with education about overdose. Several states, including New York, have passed Good Samaritan laws that provide legal immunity to physicians who prescribe Narcan and to lay people who administer it in good faith. But the majority of states lack legislation on the issue, so a person administering naloxone to someone else may be vulnerable to prosecution should something go wrong. Still, an overdose-prevention working group chaired by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is looking at releasing best practices on overdose prevention, and states could begin to look there for legislative guidance. Dr. Sharon Stancliff, medical director of the Harm Reduction Coalition--who herself prescribes Narcan--is a member of the group. "I actually have a lot of hope that Narcan will be widely adopted in the near future," she says.

The same cannot be said for heroin maintenance, another public health approach to addiction backed by years of research. At least a half-dozen countries, including the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK, allow prescription of pharmaceutical heroin, known as diamorphine, to users who have failed to improve using all other available treatment options. Diamorphine is prescribed to "people who have been through methadone, been through jail, been through drug free [treatment facilities], been through the whole gamut of things, and for whom nothing was working," says Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), which worked in partnership with a group in Canada to set up that country's first clinical trial of heroin maintenance. (The trial enrolled 250 users in two cities; early results show a significant reduction in participants' criminal involvement and an increase in their health.) As recently as this year, both the German and Danish parliaments voted to allow prescription of heroin to those who have not responded to other treatments. Nadelmann is hopeful that a clinical trial similar to Canada's can be set up in the US in the coming years. but Columbia University associate professor of clinical neuroscience Carl Hart is not so sanguine. "People have been brainwashed [into thinking], 'These awful drugs that are causing so many problems--you're going to give it as a medication?' " he says, citing deepseated public fears.

That precisely describes methadone. Methadone and heroin operate in identical ways on opiate receptors in the brain. They are both "full agonists," meaning they fill up opiate receptors in such a way as to make the user high. The main difference between heroin and methadone is not their chemical composition but their legality. The daily hustle for heroin often forces users into other illegal activity, like petty drug dealing, prostitution and burglary, to support their habit, and creates an expensive, unproductive revolving door between prison and the street. Methadone, covered by insurance, frees people from this cycle. Because methadone is administered by physicians, it can be dispensed in amounts precisely calibrated to someone's addiction to make that person feel "normal," rather than high, and eliminates the craving and withdrawal symptoms that drive people to use. Heroin, sold on the black market, is "cut" with adulterants; at best, the cut (like baby powder or quinine) is itself harmless but causes wide variation in the strength of the heroin--which makes it impossible for a user to know exactly how much he is using.

Still, if a person takes more than her prescribed dose of methadone, she can get a high quite similar to heroin's. And when used in conjunction with other drugs, or when diverted--which is to say, sold on the street--methadone can cause overdose, just like heroin. This is why methadone is so tightly regulated. Unlike most other medications (including OxyContin, also a full agonist), there are almost no circumstances under which a physician can prescribe methadone for home use. Users enrolled in methadone programs must be physically present at the clinic each morning for their dose of methadone.

Over the years, a cottage industry of ancillary services has grown up around methadone clinics. Everything from talk therapy to medical care to Narcotics Anonymous meetings to group picnics and bowling excursions has come to be understood as a necessary component of the treatment of such a psychosocially complicated problem as addiction.

But part of the public health approach touted by Kerlikowske and his boss in the White House is to treat addiction like any other chronic illness. Scientists have been looking for years for a gene or a pill that can treat the disease without all the messy and unpredictable psychological baggage that the meetings and talk therapy are designed to address. The closest thing we have right now to a litmus test for whether such a thing is even possible is a medication called buprenorphine. "Bup," as it's known (pronounced byoop), is a "partial agonist," which means that, unlike methadone or heroin, it can only make a person so high. What's more, the formulation available in the United States is mixed with naloxone--the very same drug used to reverse overdose--so that someone who tries to abuse the drug will go into withdrawal. It's not foolproof--it is possible to abuse bup--but because it's much safer than methadone, bup eliminates methadone clinics' primary reason for existence: safety. So the FDA has cautiously opened the door to allowing physicians in to prescribe bup like any other medication, for patients to take at home. When the drug was approved by the FDA in 2002, it became the only opiate addiction treatment that may be prescribed outside of the tightly policed boundaries of the methadone clinic. A small pill that dissolves under the tongue, bup in the first few days is taken in increasingly higher doses each morning until the user feels "normal," but not high.

What will happen when users can sidestep the counseling and the clinics, and just take the "anti-addiction pill" that their local primary care doc prescribes along with their blood pressure medication? Bup could be providing preliminary answers to that question. But it's not, because it is still tightly regulated in a way that limits its integration into mainstream medical practice.

Nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who do a lot of "on the ground" prescribing, are not allowed to prescribe bup. Rather than encouraging the mainstreaming of addiction treatment, the FDA requires that physicians demonstrate expertise in addiction and attend a day-long training before they may prescribe bup (as of this writing, there were no in-person trainings scheduled anywhere in the country, though online trainings are available). And even then, a single practice--no matter how many physicians are on staff--is limited to a maximum of thirty patients on bup at a time in the first year, 100 in the second year.

Which is to say that instead of treating addiction like any other chronic disease to be managed, the current regulations require physicians to have to jump through enough hoops that they have to really, really want to prescribe bup. And most don't. "Doctors are afraid to treat addicts," says Dr. Stancliff of the Harm Reduction Coalition. "We don't learn anything about it in medical school. It's hard to convince them that it's incredible: prescribe someone buprenorphine today, and they come back in a week and say, 'that's a miracle.'"

When Obama signed the appropriations bill on Wednesday, it signaled that he's serious about his administration's new approach to addiction--and perhaps opened the door for other, more forward-thinking, programs. "If you take Obama's commitment, of no longer subordinating science to politics, and if you apply that seriously to drug policy," says the DPA's Nadelmann, "then there is no legitimate basis whatsoever for the federal government not to be supporting heroin maintenance and safe injection--research, at least--in the way that these other countries have. There's no legitimate basis whatsoever."

FORWARD>News>Rabbinical Student Heads Up the Fight For Gay Marriage in New Jersey

2009-12-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

Rabbinical Student Heads Up the Fight For Gay Marriage in New Jersey

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 23, 2009

Steven Goldstein jokes that his office in suburban New Jersey is “like the Jewish Museum of Montclair.” A sage-looking rabbi peers down from a lithograph on one wall, and a print of Theodor Herzl hangs from another. There are a Hebrew movie poster and a mezuza.

Goldstein, however, doesn’t work for a Jewish organization; he is the founder, chair and CEO of Garden State Equality, the primary advocacy group now pushing for marriage for gay men and lesbians in New Jersey. At the moment, the organization is in the midst of an intense political race to pass a gay marriage bill before the current New Jersey governor, Democrat Jon Corzine, leaves office January 19, 2010; Corzine’s successor, Republican Chris Christie, has said that he will veto any such bill.

Thickset, with a knit yarmulke and mussed gray-black hair, Goldstein, 47, is proud to be gay, he said, but “Judaism is by far the essential part to my identity.” He enrolled in the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2005, one year after founding Garden State Equality. But in 2006, he took a leave of absence from rabbinical school to take on the job of running Garden State Equality full time. He plans to go back to studying for the rabbinate in the fall of 2010.

Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that Goldstein is flamboyant —flamboyantly Jewish, that is.

“How much do you love my tchotchke?” he said in a thick Queens accent, picking up from his desk a little statuette of a man praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the Kotel. Turning at one point to the organization’s political director, a non-Jew, he shouted, in mock exasperation: “Oh, David Smith! Don’t be so treyf.” He put a serious look on his face and turned to a reporter. “Listen to me,” he said, contemplating the statuette. “Do you like my tchotchke?”

For Goldstein, politics and the rabbinate are third and fourth careers; he has also worked as a television reporter and producer, a communications consultant, and a lawyer. With a Bachelor of Arts from Brandeis University, a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a Master of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, Goldstein jokes that he has “more degrees than a thermometer.”

The combination of his background in press, communications and the law has made Goldstein an expert public face for such a hot-button political issue: His spiel is so highly polished, it shines. He is disarmingly frank and charming, but even the most moving personal stories told during an interview turn out to be ones he has told, practically word for word, to other reporters. Goldstein and his staff of 40 are working furiously behind the scenes at the New Jersey State Legislature — but Goldstein won’t say which legislators they’re targeting or what they’re doing.

“The second I’ve said something even a little bit sensitive, the other side sends it to thousands of people on their mailing list and raises money off it,” he said. “Giving away strategic secrets is as close as a Google alert.”

On December 7, the Freedom of Religion and Equality in Civil Marriage Act passed the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee by a 7-6 vote. But sponsors Loretta Weinberg and Ray Lesniak, fearing that the bill didn’t have enough votes to pass the full Senate, asked the Senate president to delay a full vote until the Assembly — widely understood to be more strongly supportive of gay marriage — considers the bill. “We feel momentum is building,” Weinberg told the Forward, “and if we have more time, that would help.”

But they don’t have much time. In order for Corzine to sign a bill before he leaves office, the Assembly and then the Senate would have to pass it before January 12, 2010, when the legislature reorganizes. No one expects any movement before the New Year, so that leaves little more than one week for a vote in the Assembly Judiciary Committee and then votes in the Assembly and the Senate.

A Rutgers-Eagleton Poll released last November found that adults in New Jersey support legalizing same-sex marriage by a slim 46% to 42% margin. Still, the poll found that even those opposed to gay marriage would, by a large majority, accept the legislature’s decision if the bill were to pass. “For most New Jerseyans, this isn’t even a terribly important issue,” said Rutgers political science professor David Redlawsk, who directs the center that conducted the poll. “The people who say it’s more important are actually the ones in support.”

Before Goldstein founded Garden State, he was living in Brooklyn with his partner, Daniel Gross, and running a communications firm. In 2002, Lambda Legal, the national GLBT legal organization, hired him to help build public support for same-sex marriage in New Jersey. (Lambda was the lead counsel in Lewis v. Harris, the then-pending state lawsuit that ultimately led, in 2006, to civil unions.)

“I got so engrossed in this battle that when I worked for Lambda, I wound up firing every other client just to focus on Lambda’s battle for marriage equality,” Goldstein said. “I became so intense, it just became my full-time job. De facto. I dropped everything else.”

The couple moved to New Jersey that same year.

Garden State Equality now claims 64,000 members. It has four offices across the state and 10 paid permanent staff members. Goldstein, however, receives no salary.

“My partner does well,” he said, with a hint of pride. “He was a vice president at Goldman Sachs and then formed his own company. I made money. We’re comfortable enough.”

Goldstein was raised in a “typical secular suburban American family” that attended synagogue on the High Holy Days and held a Passover Seder but was, he said, largely nonobservant. But Goldstein said he has had “a love affair with Judaism my entire life.” He and Gross keep a kosher home, and Goldstein “almost never works on Shabbat,” though he does drive to synagogue. He and Gross were married by a rabbi under a hupah. His political work and his religious life, Goldstein says, are closely linked. “Judaism always resonated as a faith that wanted to have an impact on the world,” he said. “That Israel — not just the country, but the people —could be a light unto the nations? Oh my God, this was just, if I may use this word, the sexiest thing I ever heard in my life.”

So, he says, enrolling in the RRC, which endorsed gay and lesbian rabbinic ordination years ago, was the fulfillment of a “lifelong dream.”

“When I do this work at Garden State Equality, the excitement I feel is hard to describe. But when I was studying to be a rabbi, the serenity I got was unbelievable,” he said.

Goldstein tends to speak in superlatives, and his obvious passion and outsized presence impress even his political foes. “One thing about Steven,” Len Deo, president of the anti-gay marriage New Jersey Family Policy Council, said with a laugh, “He constantly interrupts me when we’re debating on TV. It’s hard to get my point in.”

Goldstein concedes the point: “On my tombstone, if it were to say, ‘loud, gay, New York-New Jersey Jew who made a difference,’ I’m okay with that.”

FORWARD>News>Uncertain Territory: Conservative Judaism’s Pioneering Gay Rabbinical Students Tread Carefully In Israel

2009-12-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

Uncertain Territory: Conservative Judaism’s Pioneering Gay Rabbinical Students Tread Carefully In Israel

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 8, 2009

When the first openly gay rabbinic students came through the doors of Conservative Judaism’s Jewish Theological Seminary in 2007, there remained in the back of everyone’s mind one sensitive, still-unresolved issue:

What would happen when they went to Israel?

All understood that their curriculum, like that of all JTS rabbinic students, would include a third year spent abroad at the Conservative movement’s seminary in Jerusalem, which has so far refused to ordain gay rabbis.

Now, Ian Chesir-Teran and Aaron Weininger — the pioneering gay students — are poring over their Talmuds and arguing the fine points of Jewish law at Machon Schechter in Jerusalem, JTS’s sister seminary. And so far, say both the students and their school, the year abroad is proceeding smoothly, at least on the surface.

“We haven’t encountered blatant homophobia,” Weininger said. “And yet, there’s a history there. There’s that challenge of, a little bit, walking on eggshells.”

This month marks three years since the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards opened the gates for gay rabbis. Thirteen of the committee’s 25 members voted for the landmark responsum, or religious position paper, advocating the move — more than twice the number of votes required to allow individual Conservative institutions to adopt the gay ordination position as their own.

The change, however, was not complete. Another responsum taking the opposite view also garnered thirteen votes, leaving Conservative synagogues and schools free to adopt either position.

The two American Conservative seminaries, JTS and Los Angeles’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, began admitting gay students the semester immediately following the change. But the movement’s two international seminaries—Machon Schechter in Jerusalem and the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires—declined to change their policies.

Despite this disparity, “We certainly anticipated that all of our students would continue to study in Israel, including our gay students,” said Rabbi Daniel Nevins, dean of the JTS Rabbinical School. After opening enrollment to gay and lesbian students, he said, “We promptly commenced conversations with our partners in Israel and were reassured that they would welcome all of our students.”

Still, some of the challenges they would face rose to the surface even during those discussions. Chesir-Teran, a former attorney who entered the seminary at the age of 36, recalled one meeting that he, Weininger and Nevins had in New York with Rabbi Einat Ramon, then dean of Machon Schechter’s Rabbinical School. Upon being assured gay students would be treated equally when they came to Schechter, Chesir-Teran said he told Ramon, “I’m assuming that means we’re going to be allowed to lead services and read from the Torah like everyone else,” Her answer, he recalled, was, “I don’t know. I have to get back to you.”

Ramon later confirmed in an email to Nevins that the gay students would, indeed, be allowed to do so. But the equivocation, said Chesir-Teran, was another “red flag” that made him leery about going there.

Ramon’s public pronouncements against gay ordination also stoked the two students’ concerns. In a Washington Jewish Week opinion piece shortly after the committee’s historic vote, Ramon, explaining her opposition to the change, avowed, “Judaism has always been clear and unambivalent toward the centrality of the heterosexual family.” And in a September 2007 policy statement, Ramon wrote, “If we permit [gay marriage and ordination of gay rabbis], we should, in all intellectual fairness, permit also all other forms of prohibited sexual activity and allow the marriage of brothers to their sisters.”

Ramon, who still teaches at Schechter, left her position as dean this past September. And though no one claims the move was connected to her pronouncements on gay ordination, supporters of the historic change say Ramon’s departure has eased the atmosphere for gay and lesbian students at Schechter considerably.

Ramon declined to comment for this article. “I have written and said what I had to say,” she told the Forward.

Nevertheless, during her tenure, the relationship between the two schools was sometimes strained. For example, Schechter put its foot down in March of 2008, when several JTS students studying there sought to mark the one-year anniversary of the change in JTS’s admissions policy. The students invited Yonatan Gher, then the incoming director of the gay community center Jerusalem Open House, to speak about his experience as a gay man in the Israeli Conservative movement. But after a dispute with Ramon and others in the administration, the students were forced to hold the event off campus.

Nevins cringed when asked about this event. “That was an incident where no one was at their best,” he acknowledged. “It was a very painful moment.”

Heading into their year abroad with this history in mind, Chesir-Teran, Weininger, and several other students lobbied the JTS administration for alternatives to Machon Schechter.

“The very thought, frankly, of being told by my home institution that I have to study at a school that wouldn’t ordain me, that wouldn’t confer on me the title of ‘rabbi,’ is very challenging,” Chesir-Teran said.

But one option JTS never considered was allowing the students to study at another school. This is a route the Ziegler School took when it announced in January of this year that it would end its 10-year relationship with Machon Schechter. The shift, says Ziegler dean Rabbi Bradley Artson, is unrelated to Schechter’s stand on gay ordination. But Ziegler now sends its students to the Conservative Yeshiva, a co-educational, egalitarian school for Diaspora Jews in Jerusalem.

JTS, said Nevins, is committed to sending its students to an Israeli institution, where they can take classes, taught in Hebrew, alongside Israelis. “The other options out there were American environments, not Israeli environments,” he said.

Nevins himself was in a delicate position. As one of the co-authors of the responsum that overturned the ban, he has long been an advocate for gays and lesbians in the movement. But as dean of the movement’s flagship institution, he also had to deal with the fact that JTS’s relationship with Machon Schechter has implications for the Conservative movement as a whole.

Schechter was founded in 1984 as the Jerusalem campus of JTS, and remains the only institution in Israel that ordains Conservative rabbis. The place of gays and lesbians in the movement is only one of several issues, including that of non-egalitarian congregations, that in the last few years have highlighted the growing differences between more traditional and more progressive wings of the movement.

“The relationship with Schechter is very complex, and has far-reaching implications for our overall relationship with the Masorti [Israeli Conservative] movement in Israel, something very precious to us,” said Adam Roffman, a second-year JTS student who is a member of the campus group Keshet (Hebrew for “rainbow”), which advocates for gay and lesbian inclusion in the movement. “Balancing that relationship with students’ needs proved very difficult for our administrators.”

Though Schechter’s policy against gay ordination continues, the two rabbis selected to fill Ramon’s position this past July are seen as friends to the cause of gay students. Rabbi Moshe Silberschein, appointed dean, was ordained at JTS in 1981 and taught for many years at the Reform-affiliated Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, which has admitted gay students since 1990. Rabbi Tamar Elad-Applebaum, appointed associate dean, is a member of Keshet, the Conservative group pushing for gay inclusion.

Among their reasons for taking their new positions, said Silberschein, is a desire “to unite the movement.”

“I’d like to think that we’re bringing a new spirit of conciliation,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new page.”

Nevertheless, Silberschein says, the school’s ordination policy is unlikely to change anytime soon. While Ramon was dean, she also served as Schechter’s posek, or halachic decision maker. When she stepped down, the two positions were split, and Rabbi David Golinkin was appointed posek. Golinkin decided that Schechter would continue to abide by the more conservative responsum. And Silberschein, whatever his personal views, defers to Golinkin. “I took this job knowing clearly that Rabbi Golinkin is the posek for Schechter,” he said. “But I wanted to once again build bridges with the movement and Schechter and the movement with JTS.”

Now that they’ve settled into their time in Jerusalem, both Weininger and Chesir-Teran are taking stock.

“Having lived now in Jerusalem for almost four months, and really having adjusted well with my husband and three kids here, we’ve indulged a little bit in fantasies about what it would be like to make aliyah, to move to Israel, and to make a home for ourselves here,” said Chesir-Teran. “But I know that that’s really impossible, because I couldn’t continue my studies at Machon Schechter.”

That said, “having a place at the table is a blessing and a privilege,” he said.

Both rabbinical students say that simply being who they are and telling their personal stories has had a profound impact on many of their teachers and fellow students. Being at JTS and at Schechter, said Chesir-Teran, has meant “having opportunities to interact on a daily basis with future rabbis, and to let them see how I live my life, just as I see how they live their lives—to show that my life is equally as holy and equally as mundane as their lives.”

The Advocate>Fixing Corrections

2009-12-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

Fixing Corrections
As a U.K. court moves to protect its MTF inmates from rape and assault, America’s transgender prisoners continue to suffer.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 1, 2009

Stefanie Rivera served three years in a New York prison for attempted arson when, after a fight with her boss, she splashed gasoline outside the nightclub where they worked. A transgender woman, Rivera had taken hormones for years and recently underwent breast augmentation, but because she hadn’t had genital reassignment surgery, she was placed in a men’s prison. The terror started as soon as she was taken into custody. “They asked me to strip,” Rivera says. “They wanted a full cavity search. [This search] is protocol, but what isn’t is that they made me do it over and over.”

A story like Rivera’s isn’t unusual for transgender women in U.S. prisons. But across the pond, the High Court of England and Wales ordered in September that a trans woman be allowed to serve her manslaughter sentence in a women’s prison. “Her continued detention in a male prison is in breach of her rights,” the judge wrote in this watershed ruling. Meanwhile, male-to-female inmates in this country’s male facilities wait for similar judgments.

New York State, like almost all states and counties nationwide, lacks any formal policy on housing transgender inmates, so most are placed according to their genitals, not their gender identity. From there, it’s a daily struggle to access hormone replacement therapy, to be allowed to wear bras, or to shower in private rather than in the dormitory-style shower rooms where rape and assault are common. It’s War in Here, a 2007 report by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, documented trans women who were punished with fines or even solitary confinement because their bras were considered contraband. Gabriel Arkles, staff attorney for the law project, represents a client who was “sold” by correctional officers as a prostitute to other inmates.

There is no reliable count of transgender inmates in our nation’s prisons and jails—state and federal corrections agencies simply don’t track this—but advocates working in the field say trans people are vastly overrepresented behind bars. Discrimination makes it harder for them to find jobs, safe housing, and social services, “which forces you to fall into the more gritty stuff you have to do to eat,” Stefanie Rivera says.

Earlier this year, the Washington, D.C., city jail established one of the country’s first policies allowing transgender inmates to be housed according to their gender identity. Similar policies are in place in King County, Wash., and San Francisco. Still, Arkles says, “we’re looking at fewer bad policies, as opposed to [more] really good policies. The biggest overall problem is that trans people are locked in prison so much.”

The Forward>Arts & Culture>Darwin and God--For Kids

2009-11-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

Darwin and God — for Kids

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 20, 2009

Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
By Deborah Heiligman
Henry Holt and Co., 272 pages, $18.95

Children’s book author Deborah Heiligman has been interested in religion since she was a teenager, majoring in religious studies in college. “When you look at a people and its religion, you’re looking at sociology, psychology, history, anthropology,” she said. “You really are studying every aspect of their society.” Meanwhile, her husband, science writer Jonathan Weiner, has always been fascinated by science. His 1994 book, “The Beak of the Finch,” about the ongoing process of evolution on the Galapagos Islands, won the Pulitzer Prize. Heiligman and Weiner’s marriage is, you could say, one of science and religion. Now, Heiligman has a new book about one of science and religion’s most formidable pairings; it was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

In “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith,” readers are introduced to Charles Darwin not as a man whose very name has become a stand-in for replacing religion with science, but as the husband of Emma Darwin, a woman of deep faith who spent her adult life worrying that her husband was going to burn in hell for eternity. The book begins with a young Darwin making a list on a scrap of paper. “Marry,” he wrote in one column. “Not Marry,” he wrote in the other. Under “Not Marry,” he included things like, “Freedom to go where one liked,” and, “Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.” Under “Marry” was the entry “Children — (if it please God).”

Darwin was not a God hater; in fact, as a young man he had planned a career as a country parson and had studied theology Christ’s College at Cambridge University. So when he fell in love with his cousin Emma Wedgwood — a vivacious, tough, smart woman — he understood where she was coming from. And he understood on a deeply personal level what the theory he was slowly developing would mean. “Charles still struggled with religious questions, and with how Emma and other religious people would react to his going against the biblical story of creation. But he felt certain that his theory was right,” Heiligman writes in the book. Emma, for her part, worried about what would happen to Charles after his death, and occasionally wrote him long letters in which she voiced her concerns (“When I am dead,” he wrote on one of these letters, “know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this.”) But Emma rarely pushed. In fact, she read drafts of his manuscripts and helped make them stronger.

The book, aimed at grades eight through 12, relies almost exclusively on primary sources like journals, manuscripts and letters, and so Charles and Emma — their voices, concerns and idiosyncrasies — come alive. The book never talks down to readers and doesn’t shy away from tough subjects like sex or death. “Whenever I write a book, I write it for the ‘me’ at the age that I would have wanted to read that book,” Heiligman said. “When I write my little rhyming picture books about dogs, I write for the 5- or 6-year-old in me. When I was a young adult, up through college, that’s when I wanted to read the books that addressed the big questions: science, life, death, meaning. Also very much the connections between people who love each other. I really wrote ‘Charles and Emma’ for that person in me.”

Heiligman describes her upbringing as “observant Reform Jewish,” and says that her long marriage to Weiner, and the couple’s many conversations about science and religion, have taught her that “you can have both. Charles’s worldview was definitely altered by being married to Emma. Hers was, too. But they definitely held on to what they believed in. They agreed to disagree, really. The take-home message of Charles and Emma’s marriage is, if you talk about it, and you respect the other person’s point of view, there’s no reason you can’t coexist.”

DoubleX>The Court Sentences You To Give Birth in Jail

2009-10-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

The Court Sentences You To Give Birth in Jail

Judges treat pregnant women like children.

Beth Schwartzapfel
October 28, 2009

Quinta Tuleh had been in a Maine county jail for 114 days when she went before federal Judge John Woodcock for sentencing in May. Tuleh, 28, traveled legally to the United States from her native Cameroon on a tourist visa in September but ran afoul of immigration authorities when she was caught in January with fake working papers. “I’m going to do things a little backwards here,” Woodcock told Tuleh at her sentencing, after she pleaded guilty. “Ordinarily, I would give you what is called a time-served sentence, and … your time in prison would effectively end today,” Woodcock said. Federal guidelines recommended a sentence of zero to six months.

But in jail, Tuleh had learned she was pregnant. She’d also found out she was infected with HIV. (The prevalence of the virus is eight times higher in Cameroon than in the United States.) Woodcock went on: “I’m inclined to keep you in jail, given your medical condition and the medical condition for your child, to prevent your child from being born HIV positive.”

Antiretroviral medication, which Tuleh would have access to in jail, can drastically reduce the rate of mother-to-child transmission. And so Woodcock sentenced Tuleh to 238 days—almost eight months—to ensure she would give birth while she was in jail. In other words, the judge kept Tuleh locked up not for her crime, but for her status as pregnant and HIV-positive.

In states across the country—Maryland, New Mexico, Arizona, Kentucky—women in the last decade have been charged with crimes like reckless endangerment for using illegal drugs during their pregnancies. This year, a Florida woman was court-ordered to stay in the hospital against her will when she told her doctor that she could not follow his advice to stay on bed rest. Along with Tuleh’s case, these examples illustrate a disturbing tendency in law enforcement to sidestep pregnant women's rights in order to protect the fetuses they're carrying.

State laws passed over the last few decades have chipped away at the underpinnings for legal abortion by treating a fetus like a person in certain ways. In many states, for example, a driver who hits a pregnant woman and hurts or kills her fetus can be charged twice. But this is different than using the rights of a fetus rights against its mother, says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project and one of Tuleh’s lawyers. In fact, dating back to Roe v. Wade in 1973, the courts have ruled pretty consistently that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy, whether or not she is pregnant. For example, in 2006, Maryland’s highest court overturned the child endangerment convictions of two women who had used cocaine during their pregnancies; if prosecutors’ reasoning was followed to its logical extreme, the judges wrote, the law “could well be construed to include … a whole host of intentional and conceivably reckless activity … everything from becoming (or remaining) pregnant with knowledge that the child likely will have a genetic disorder … to the continued use of legal drugs that are contraindicated during pregnancy … to exercising too much or too little.”

There is one notable exception: South Carolina allows pregnant women to be criminally prosecuted for harming their fetuses. In 1992, Cornelia Whitner was sentenced to eight years in prison for smoking crack cocaine while she was pregnant. Since the state’s Supreme Court upheld that sentence in 1997, at least two South Carolina women who used drugs during pregnancy have been prosecuted for homicide after their children were stillborn.

The more recent crop of cases demonstrates precisely the Maryland judges’ point: From arresting a woman who uses drugs during pregnancy, it’s a short leap to coercing a woman to make certain medical decisions. In the Florida case, a mother of two named Samantha Burton was 25 weeks pregnant when she arrived at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital this March with complications. Her doctor recommended bed rest. But when Burton made it clear that it simply might not be possible to take care of her children without leaving her bed for three months, lawyers from Tallahassee Memorial got a court order that essentially barred Burton from leaving. According to the amicus brief filed by the ACLU, the court order also required Burton “to submit, against her will, to any and all medical treatments, restrictions to bed rest, and other interventions, including cesarean section delivery”—whatever, in the words of the court, the unborn child’s attending physician deemed necessary to “preserve the life and health of Samantha Burton’s unborn child.” After just three days of enforced bed rest, an emergency cesarean section revealed that the fetus had died.

One reason these cases keep coming up, despite their clear illegality, is simple paternalism—overzealous prosecutors and judges think they know what’s best for a healthy pregnancy, as if that’s separate from what’s good for the pregnant woman. This is particularly troubling when judges assume that the woman must be confined or coerced in order to take good care of her child. Tuleh’s case turns out to illustrate exactly the opposite. Tuleh had already arranged with a case worker from a local AIDS service organization to receive housing, medical care from a high-risk obstetrical practice, an in-home support worker, and a public health nurse. Given the medical care in most jails, it’s a pretty good bet that this plan was better than Judge Woodcock’s. And the effect of prosecuting pregnant women who use drugs may be to deter other women with addictions from going to doctors’ offices and social service agencies—precisely the places they need to be. If going to the emergency room might get you arrested, would you go?

Misguided paternalism aside, the general problem Woodcock was responding to, in fact, is very real: a frayed social safety net for women and families. By the time law enforcement steps in, the social services designed to achieve the stated goal of these judges and prosecutors—healthy babies—have often failed. Tuleh was lucky to have a comprehensive treatment plan, but the vast majority of pregnant women and people with HIV don’t. Drug treatment slots are exceedingly limited for anyone and the scarcity is even more acute for women with children and pregnant women like Cornelia Whitner. Affordable child care is another limited resource. If Samantha Burton had had access to it, perhaps the idea of staying in bed with two small children at home would have seemed a little more feasible.

In the end, Judge Woodcock recognized “that the sentence turned out to be controversial,” as he told the Bangor Daily News. “I can certainly understand how some have misinterpreted what the court intended to do in this case.” He released Tuleh from jail in June, just a few months shy of her due date. Tuleh is living in Maine, hoping to stay in the United States; her application for asylum is pending. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy in August.

Brown Alumni Magazine>It's All About Love

2009-07-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

It's All About Love

Hip-hop music began as an expression of the hopes and fears of the inner-city poor. Then greed and violence corrupted it. It's a story that Tricia Rose, one of the first scholars to study hip-hop, believes has much to teach us about our culture and how we treat one another.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
July/August 2009

If you think scholarly research and hip-hop music don't go together, you don't know Tricia Rose '87 AM, '93 PhD. Rose, a Brown professor of Africana studies, knows her Biggie Smalls, and her Eazy-E. She also knows her history. Rap and hip-hop, she believes, are serious forms of cultural revelation that offer a window not only into the streets and basketball courts that spawned them, but into broader patterns of social exploitation and consumer culture.

When, in the first line of her new book, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters, Rose observes that "Hip-hop is not dead, but it is gravely ill," she writes as both a fan and a social critic. Rose believes that what began as a spontaneous form of African American cultural expression, built from the only musical tools available to poor urban youth, has become commercialized into a dangerous commodity. And what a commodity it is: Despite slumping sales in the music industry, last year's top hip-hop earner, 50 Cent, raked in $150 million. In 2004, when rap music and its accompanying cultural accessories—sneakers, jewelry, Pimp Juice—generated more than $10 billion dollars, Forbes reported that the industry "has moved beyond its musical roots, transforming into a dominant and increasingly lucrative lifestyle."

As Rose argues in books such as Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America and last year's The Hip Hop Wars, rap and hip-hop are so important that we underestimate their cultural impact at our peril. She is one of the few scholars to take this music seriously, and in her scholarship and public speaking she has issued a challenge to those on both sides of what she sees as the hip-hop divide. Cornel West has called Rose "the distinguished dean of hip-hop studies." "Above all else," says the African American media maven Tavis Smiley, "Tricia Rose is real."

What the record industry is selling, Rose argues, is not music, or fashion, or television shows like Pimp My Ride or Flavor of Love, it's blackness. It's a very particular and narrow concept of blackness that has little to do with real people and everything to do with valorizing violence, drugs, sexism, and materialism. It's a sort of modern-day minstrelsy: commercial hip-hop artists, with help from record companies, package themselves into what they think white people want to hear, and then sell it to them. "Artists are getting rich", Rose says, "but at what cost?"

One major cost is the message sent to young black people as they learn to understand their place in the world and the options available to them. Rose's husband, Andre Willis, a Yale assistant professor of the philosophy of religion, contrasts hip-hop in this sense to jazz. "When you're talking about jazz," says Willis, "ultimately, on my read, you're talking about something that affirms the fundamental unity of humanity. When you're talking about rap, you're talking about something which accentuates and acknowledges that which divides us." As an African American man, Willis knows what racism can do to the soul of a person and a community. So, yes, he acknowledges, "It moves me. But they're unhealthy ways of moving me. They don't end up reducing my rage, helping me love better."

For Rose, this is the essential problem facing hip-hop: how can a music that has always been an outlet for black aspirations and frustrations, for its joys and sorrows, return to a place where it's also a force for social change? "I come from very F-U stock," Rose says with a laugh. "But you can't just say F-U. You gotta say yes to something." In other words, she wants to know, how can hip-hop make people love better?

Black Noise, published in 1995, is the work of a young, idealistic academic. Adapted from Rose's doctoral dissertation, it is a paean to rap music and all its political possibilities: "Worked out on the rusting urban core as a playground," Rose writes, "hip-hop transforms stray technological parts intended for cultural and industrial trash heaps into sources of pleasure and power.... Hip-hop gives voice to the tensions and contradictions in the public urban landscape ... and attempts to seize the shifting urban terrain, to make it work on behalf of the dispossessed."

The book was a seminal work. Other African American musical forms, such as jazz and blues, had long been taken seriously by scholars, but until Black Noise rap was considered a passing fad, cultural fluff not worthy of scholarly attention. The book went on to win the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Black Issues in Higher Education called it one of the top twenty-five books of the twentieth century. The Village Voice called it "necessary reading ... for those who love hip-hop's rhymes and reasons."

But somewhere along the line, Rose found that the music had turned on her. Take "Gin and Juice," the irresistibly catchy 1992 smash hit by rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. "Once I really listened to the words and thought about the story being told," Rose writes in The Hip Hop Wars, "it was hard to know what to do: Respond to the funk and ignore the words, or reject the story and give up the funk that goes with it. The moment I realized that I was being asked to give myself over to the power of the funk—which in turn was being used as a soundtrack for a story that was really against me—was a very sad day for me."

The soundtrack of Rose's story starts with stacks of 45s. Raised until she was nine years old in a Harlem tenement where her mother had to organize rent strikes to get the heat turned on in the winter, Rose would save up her quarter-a-week allowance money to buy the newest singles by James Brown; Earth, Wind & Fire; the Stylistics; and Parliament-Funkadelics.

Rose is painfully aware that her upbringing could easily be romanticized by those who (to use the name of a mid-nineties rap group) are invested in the Thug Life. But she's not interested in that kind of street cred. In fact, she would rather not talk too much about her childhood at all. "I hate the big violin thing," she says. "I am so not the personal storyteller."

When she interrupts herself to say this, she is talking about her white mother's parents, who cut off contact with their daughter when she married the black man who would become Rose's father. Until the day her grandparents died, Rose says, they were never in the same room as her father, the man who saw to it that his kids had every opportunity that he had been denied. Still, she says, "This is classic. It's really not a big deal."

In 1970, when Rose was nine, the family moved to Co-op City, a brand-new housing development in the northeast Bronx. Her brother Chris, five years her senior, remembers the move as "a revelation." "You could go out and you could actually be safe," he says. "You could ride your bike around without people trying to steal it from you all the time."

This was a pivotal time in New York City history. In the name of urban renewal, cities were using federal funds for slum clearance razing entire neighborhoods and turning them over to private developers to build massive housing complexes. Many prominent voices had been criticizing this approach for years: Jane Jacobs had published her Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, and in 1963 James Baldwin had famously said, "urban renewal means Negro removal"—but the devastating results of that policy had not yet reached their peak. Working-class New Yorkers were still hopeful about upward mobility. Like the Roses when they moved out of Harlem, "everybody who could get out of these bad neighborhoods did," says Chris Rose. "Co-op City was like the first stop. Everybody was pretty like-minded, with similar aspirations and families." The multiracial development was still under construction when the family moved in, and Chris Rose recalls that the residents were all striving together. "Tricia just blossomed in that environment," he says. "This kid's running around, making friends left and right."

To spend a day with the adult Tricia Rose is to see this scrappy, outgoing kid in action. Today she is at the New York City studios of VH1, where she will be interviewed for a documentary about the pioneering black music show Soul Train, which first aired in 1971. Sitting on the set in a director's chair, her face framed by loose brown curls, Rose manages to exude both warmth and toughness. She is exceedingly gracious and never talks down to people—even when she's schooling them. She will learn the names of everyone she meets today, from the makeup artist who prepares her for the camera (Christopher), to the cab driver who takes us to lunch (Donnell), to the waiter who serves us there (Daniel). She has an easy rapport with the documentary's producer (Kevin), even after she discovers he produced several music videos for the slain Los Angeles rapper Tupac Shakur—exactly the guns-and-drugs type of material Rose excoriates in The Hip Hop Wars.

With the cameras rolling, Rose shifts gears easily between her personal memories of Soul Train, the historical and sociological context for its popularity, and the political implications of the first public space on television for black youth culture. She talks about white flight and Negro removal. She talks about Afros, poking fun of her teenage preoccupation with having "the biggest Afro with the least number of dents!" She talks about disco and message music and the significance of the train metaphor in African American history.

"This is really good," Kevin tells her while the cameraman changes tape. "You use some really pretty words, too. I'm going to have to Google some of those words."

Rose just laughs. They had just been talking about the anagram game that was featured each week on Soul Train, and she teases Kevin about it. "We gotta get you a Scramble Board."

As she recalled on the set that day, ten-year-old Tricia Rose watched Soul Train in her new bedroom in Co-op City, and it "just blew your head open." Until Soul Train, African Americans were rarely on television except as a "nightly news problem," as Rose describes it now. There was no Cosby Show. There was no Gwen Ifill, no Oprah Winfrey. "If you saw a couple of black artists on Dick Cavett, it was unusual," she says, but on Soul Train black kids were dancing, hanging out, and making music in the name of exuberance and fun. "It was liberating," she says.

She wasn't able to articulate it quite this way yet, but even as a young girl, Rose was aware that her identity was complicated and life wasn't always as it seemed. Her white mother and her relatively light skin, for instance, had made her the object of suspicion among other children in Harlem. "There were a lot of kids who were mad about what it suggested to them," Rose recalls, "that it was somehow a privilege I didn't deserve. I remember being acutely aware of both the injustice of the interpretation of me, but also that I had advantages because I had two parents. A lot of them didn't."

When their parents secured scholarships for Tricia and Chris to attend the Dalton School, on Manhattan's upper East Side, Rose's sense of herself as both an insider and an outsider—a black, white, poor, rich, prep-school girl from the hood—was solidified. The kids in her neighborhood said she was the lucky kid who goes to prep school. "Scholarship? They could care less. To them I was rich because I went to prep school." On the other hand, "the rich white kids saw me as the scholarship kid."

While many of her classmates could walk to school, the Roses had to rise at 4:45 a.m. to be on the subway by six and at school by 7:30. Once, on a weekend trip to a classmate's country house, Tricia got lost on the way from her bedroom to the kitchen. When she finally found an intercom, "I had, like a rescue team," she recalls with a laugh. To a girl for whom luxury was having her own bedroom, the opulence was "just astonishing."

"It's not a happy thing about your childhood, to say you were always conscious about being on the outside, but there's a sense in which that's true," Rose says. Underlying these early lessons in what it means to belong was Rose's natural disposition, "not really to be in something, but to kind of watch it," as she describes it. "I'd go out dancing and be thinking about the politics of space. It's just how I came into the world." This cerebral, analytic approach, combined with a profound capacity for empathy, underlay her intellectual and emotional development. She does get angry about what she sometimes observes, and she will call people out for their ignorance, but she doesn't blame them for it. She knows that the rich kids at Dalton were just as much a product of the racial and economic system of the time as she was.

While at Dalton, Rose fell in love with basketball. A ruthlessly competitive player—she is a member of the school's hall of fame—she practiced her game during the weekends on the courts near Co-op City. It was here that the soundtrack to her life took its most significant turn. This was the era of the boom box, that plastic-and-electronic behemoth that teenagers would hoist onto their shoulders as they paraded around the neighborhood. They would always stop over at the basketball courts. Equal parts sports venue, community center, and performance space, the courts crowded with "people coming up with rhymes, and people trying to bust a move, and writing in their draft books, Rose recalls."

This was a dire time for New York City. Years of white flight and the decline of the manufacturing sector gutted the city's tax base, leading to a downward spiral: those who could leave, did, and those who couldn't were left with no job prospects and a frayed safety net. (The Daily News's famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead" hit newsstands in 1975.) The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway and decades of slum clearance programs had displaced hundreds of thousands of working-class families, disrupted social support networks, and led to the abandonment of entire neighborhoods and the widespread arson that became the very symbol of the South Bronx.

Out of this wreckage, Rose argues in Black Noise, hip-hop was born. "At a time when budget cuts in school music programs drastically reduced access to traditional forms of instrumentation and composition, inner-city youths increasingly relied on recorded sound.‚Ä¶[H]ip hop artists transformed obsolete vocational skills from marginal occupations into the raw materials for creativity."

As Rose details in Black Noise, rather than work as an auto mechanic, Jamaican DJ Kool Herc used his trade school skills to build his massive Herculords speakers, which revolutionized the kind of backbeats that could be played outdoors. As Rose witnessed on the basketball courts in her neighborhood, without community centers and music venues—which had been shuttered and bulldozed by the thousands—new artists performed outside. "Early DJs would connect their turntables and speakers to any available electrical source, including street lights," Rose writes, "turning public parks and streets into impromptu parties and community centers."

It was at these parties and on these basketball courts that young, urban, poor kids of color—often children of immigrants who watched their parents' dreams of a better life wither on the vine—had their say. With rapping and rhyming and break dancing and graffiti, they turned their pent-up frustrations and anger and hope into something beautiful. Hip-hop culture, born of society's neglect, became a source of "communal pleasure," as Rose writes. It also gave young people the space to talk back, as when, in 1989, the rapper KRS-One used his music to point a finger at the police and ask, "Who Protects Us From You?"

Rose was a senior in high school when the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" climbed to number thirty-six on the pop-music charts, becoming the first major rap hit. Before then, Rose says, "I just thought [rapping] was like Double Dutch or something. You hang out, you talk junk, and you rhyme. Then when 'Rapper's Delight' came out, I was like, 'Huh. It's on the radio.' The radio is like where real music was. How the heck did it get over there? It's like it went through this magical Wizard of Oz thing."

Even after Rose left the Bronx for Yale, she kept a close eye on emerging hip-hop culture. She wrote her senior thesis about rap music. When she graduated and got a job at the New Haven Housing Authority, she would still go to the library after work and read Billboard and think about hip- hop. "Every other music that I had been invested in had a huge history: R&B, classical, jazz, blues, funk, soul," she says. "This thing shows up in my lifetime, while I'm a teenager, and then becomes a huge phenomenon. I was stunned. How did this happen? And what happens to it, in this process? That's what really fascinated me."

Still, after Black Noise, Rose says she felt done: "I didn't want to write another book on hip-hop." It was during this period of intellectual searching that she met Willis, whom she credits with helping her achieve a profound shift in thought, a movement, as she puts it, from diagnosis to vision, "from what is wrong to what is wrong and what is right."

Despite this development, Rose hasn't let go of the anger toward the system that drove her earlier work. "I'm still pissed off about it all," she says. "History and racism and sexism. Economic inequity." The difference is that now she asks herself, "What do you do with that anger? It really will kill you. Yeah, you fight for justice, but you gotta live around in the meantime." How do you do that? "It's all about interpersonal relationships," she says, "how you craft your relationships with other people. That was an intellectual question for me."

Her 2003 book, Longing to Tell, dedicated to "believers of justice in intimacy," is a compilation of the narratives of twenty black women as they talk in their own words about their intimate relationships. Reading the voices of these women—young and old, immigrant and U.S.-born, gay and straight—you can almost watch Rose developing and honing in on her current intellectual preoccupation with intimate black social spaces. "We know that structural oppression—whether it's gendered, class, racial—impacts people as individuals," Rose says. "But the response to that is not always a direct response. It's about how you craft relationships that create buffers. I'm interested in the nexus between how personal relationships can add another corrosive level—how it can be internalized, to some degree—but it can also be a place of healing and safety and alternative comfort." From the stories of Sarita, struggling to make her boyfriend, Malcolm, understand that a man who catcalls on the street should apologize to her, not him ("as if I'm Malcolm's property," she says), and Linda Rae, who was diagnosed with HIV after years of drug addiction and prostitution, the book gives equal weight to the small slights and the big blows, the everyday comforts and the most profound of connections.

As Willis says, "What I think she's asking is, 'How can we do justice, not only in intimate spaces in terms of couplehood, but how do our intimate spaces, our home lives, affect justice in the wider scope? How does love at home affect love in the world, and vice versa?"

In 2001, after the black feminist theorist bell hooks—a fierce academic with a razor-sharp mind—published her book of essays, All About Love: New Visions, the chatter among some scholars, as hooks herself pointed out at the time, was "bell is getting soft." Rose knows exactly what hooks was going through—and why her project mattered. Toni Morrison's 2005 novel, Love, picked up the same thread. "Love is an incredibly political act," Rose says.

These issues also drive Rose's next project, a study of intimate justice in the works of several writers and artists. The book is still taking shape but will include chapters on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, on James Baldwin, and on the music of such neosoul musicians as Michelle N'degeocello and Erykah Badu. Songs like Badu's 1997 "Tyrone," in which Badu takes down an immature boyfriend who doesn't pull his weight, bring to the forefront what Rose calls "the relentlessly personal, intimate black social sphere."

Rose sees works like these as an alternative to what rap and hip-hop have become. The combination of political awareness and musical innovation that Badu embodies in "Tyrone"—the very characteristics that originally inspired Rose about rap music—have been less and less in evidence over the last decade. Hip-hop no longer talks about such politically important issues as police brutality and black power. In fact, it seems increasingly to be doing the opposite: promoting the thug life of selling drugs and exploiting women, of demeaning education and making as much money as possible, no matter the personal cost.

Finally overcoming her reluctance to revisit the subject, in 2007 she sat down to write The Hip Hop Wars. Somebody has to be willing to say these things, Rose says. Someone "who is not getting paid by the industry, who doesn't expect to ever get a dollar from them, who doesn't care if they call me names. I'm old enough, you know, I really don't care. They can hate me. Young people could never talk to me again. But I'm convinced that what I'm saying is in the spirit of love and possibility, and if you can't see it, I love you anyway."

The book levels its criticism at both sides of the debate. Rose certainly holds rappers to account. She sounds profoundly disappointed and sad when she identifies "hip-hop's commercial trinity of the gangsta, pimp, and ho." "Isn't it hypocritical," she writes, "for artists to glamorize their history of drug dealing—deriving their earnings from endless tales about being gangstas who, for the most part, die young or spend most of their lives incarcerated, and pimps who revel in and exploit the objectified bodies of black women strippers and prostitutes—and then use the monies generated from perpetuating these images to support stay-in-school efforts and bone-marrow drives?"

But hip-hop's haters don't get a free pass, either. Rose argues that critics like Bill O'Reilly (who once compared Ludacris to Pol Pot) are short-sighted at best, disingenuous and racist at worst. Their "blatantly selective application of worries about violence" rings rather hollow, she points out, when they reserve these worries almost exclusively for art produced by black people. "A vivid example of this," she writes, was when George W. Bush "said it was 'sick' to produce a record that he said glorified the killing of police officers" and then gladly accepted the campaign endorsement of Arnold Schwarzenegger, "whose character in the movies Terminator and Terminator II: Judgment Day kills or maims dozens of policemen." Again and again, Rose cuts to the quick with the book's key insight: that when we talk about hip-hop, what we're really talking about is "poor, young black people and ... the context and reasons for their clearly disadvantaged lives." Hating hip hop, in other words, is really a way of blaming the black community for its problems, and sidesteps the positive steps that we could be taking to address them.

Despite its bellicose title, The Hip Hop Wars is, in the end, a book about love. But it's a more complicated, grown-up love than the love of hip-hop in Black Noise. As Rose explains in the last chapter of the new book, Black Noise was a work of affirmational love: the kind of unconditional support that "affirms us fundamentally," no matter our flaws. Her new outlook has expanded, crucially, to include transformational love, "a love that pushes us past our comfort zone, that demands we wrestle with standards and challenges growth in the interests of [our] well-being."

More than street cred or violence, more than pimps and hos and guns and drugs, Tricia Rose is here to tell you that it's love that keeps it real.

Ms.>National Reports>Held in Purgatory

2009-07-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

Held in Purgatory

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Summer 2009

The pain and numbness on Catherine F.'s left side was so bad that each morning she asked someone to step on her. "You had somebody step on you?" I asked. "Yeah, to get the sensation back so I can get up walking. I have to pinch myself, or have someone step on me."

For nine months in 2007 and 2008, Catherine was among the 3,000 women held in detention on any given day by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

[Unfortunately the content for Ms.'s current issue is not available online. Read the rest of this piece--and lots of other good stories--by picking up the magazine at your local newsstand.]

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Brown: The Movie

2009-07-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

Brown: The Movie

Away We Go, starring John Krasinski '01 and Josh Hamilton '91; cinematography by Ellen Kuras '81; musical direction by Randall Poster '84; editing by Sarah Flack '89.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
July/August 2009

When John Krasinski first read the script for Away we Go, he thought, "Oh, he's just a nice guy. I've played a nice guy before." But like everything else about this film—which both is and isn't what it seems—Krasinski's character is indeed a nice guy. Just not in the way you'd expect.

A collaboration between novelist Dave Eggers and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, Away We Go is a quirky comedy that will have you laughing so hard your stomach hurts. Yet its heart is as big and as complicated as any drama's. It's a movie about an unexpected pregnancy, but Krasinski recalls Mendes saying, "The one thing I don't want anyone to think is that this is a pregnancy movie." Over the course of the film, Krasinski's character—the big-hearted, just-a-little-bit-dopey father-to-be, Burt—manages to become a wiser grown-up without losing his endearing childlike earnestness.

Several Brown alums known for their work on critically acclaimed art films collaborated on Away We Go: Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) was the cinematographer, Randall Poster (Darjeeling Limited) supervised the music, Sarah Flack (Lost in Translation) was the film's editor, and Josh Hamilton costarred. Kuras finds the Brown connection unsurprising: Brown "is not just academia for academia's sake," she says. "It's about how to create meaning. It's about people, and life, and living in the world." She believes that sensibility meshed perfectly with Mendes's vision of a story that will make viewers laugh and think at the same time. "Sam Mendes must have an inner inclination towards Brown students," Kuras says. "He likes to work with smart people. Smart people who are genuine, good people."

The story follows Burt and his longtime girlfriend, Verona (played by Saturday Night Live star Maya Rudolph), who, upon discovering that they're going to be parents, set off on a journey across North America to find the perfect place to raise their baby. They have a few criteria: they want to live near people they love, and they want the kid's childhood to be, in Burt's words, "Huck Finn-y." And away they go, to Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal, and Miami, where their visits with family and friends—played by Josh Hamilton, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Daniels, and others—provide hilarious comic fodder while raising deeper questions about what it means to belong and what constitutes a happy family.

Although Burt and Verona are in their early thirties, Away We Go is very much a coming-of-age story. Krasinski, who is twenty-nine, says, "These are the conversations I'm having every night with my friends: 'Did I make the right choices? Am I the kind of person I want to be? Am I ready for kids? Why am I not married yet?'" The two characters look tentatively to the other couples they visit as role models (and anti–role models), but ultimately keep coming back to the person they want guidance from most: each other. The movie works because "you really feel the love between the two main characters," says Poster. "I think that the palpability of that is really unique and powerful."

The film has an offbeat aesthetic and an obvious affection for the specificity of places. In each town the couple visits, the movie feels unmistakably there—from Miami's garish lights and riotous green to a sultry Montreal jazz club and Victorian houses. The sound track, which Poster and Mendes developed together, is plaintive without being morose, and includes more than one Bob Dylan song. Poster credits this to his recent collaboration with Todd Haynes '84 on the unconventional 2007 Dylan biopic, I'm Not There.

"None of the people from Brown who worked on this movie tend to work on very cookie-cutter movies," Poster says. "A lot of us have worked on mainstream projects, but we've all also cultivated and supported really artistic undertakings." And even with five Brown alums on the cast and crew, Poster says, "Sam Mendes was really the catalyst. He should really get an honorary degree for this one."

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>A Story Stripped to the Bone

2009-05-27T13:16:00.001-07:00

A Story Stripped to the Bone

As a Friend by Forrest Gander (New Directions).

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May/June 2009

For his girlfriend's birthday, Les, the protagonist of Forrest Gander's first novel, As a Friend, hangs a horse skull from the ceiling, douses it with lighter fluid, and sets it on fire. "It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw," she recalls. "The slow liquid-blue flame in the shape of a horse's skull flowering into a new dimension, turning slowly on a string in the dark." This image is like the whole novel in one stroke: creepy and haunting, lovely and strange.

Les is a poet, a land surveyor, a charmer, and a liar. He keeps a wife on a farm in Missouri, lives with his girlfriend, Sarah, in Arkansas, and seduces barkeeps and folk singers on the side. Still, his childlike earnestness and his wide-ranging brilliance and wit are irresistible. Even those who hate Les love him. His friend Clay feels towards Les equal parts awe, eros, and envy. "It was as if he'd come from a place where excitement wasn't taken to be a reverse indicator of intelligence and where it was normal to mention Cocteau and blue channel catfish in the same sentence," Clay says. "The opal blackness of his eyes was magnetic."

"There's that phrase of Samuel Johnson's that I really love," says Gander, an award-winning poet and professor of English and comparative literature at Brown: "'rammed full of life.' I'm of course drawn to—we're all drawn to—figures like that."

The triangular relationship between Les, Sarah, and Clay becomes toxic, and the story's denouement—Les's suicide by three gunshots—comes early in the story. The fallout from his death and the traces of his life that live on in his friends' memories and in a taped interview with a reporter make up almost half of the book. "What interests me," Gander says, "is what comes afterwards—what's on the side of the stage, those elements of friendship that are so complex: sexual attractions and jealousies and awe and competition and love."

Les resembles the real-life Frank Stanford, an Arkansas poet and sometime land surveyor who died in 1978 after shooting himself three times. Back then, Stanford was living with poet C. D. Wright, who is now the I. J. Kapstein Professor of Literary Arts at Brown and Gander's wife. Stanford's death was "the beginning of the germ of the novel," says Gander, who started it about twenty years ago and returned to it periodically, amongst seven volumes of poetry and other writings. "This was one way of telling [Stanford's] story, and one way of dealing with my complicated relationship with him," Gander says.

As a Friend is a story stripped to the bone—106 pages of gestures and sketches. "All the secondary, tertiary worlds of characters and friends I had to eliminate and focus on a very limited set that I could intensify," Gander says. "That's what poetry does. You can intensify and open up small things."

FORWARD>Schmooze>How Do You Say ‘Charge It’ in Yiddish?

2009-04-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

How Do You Say ‘Charge It’ in Yiddish?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 22, 2009

Chalk it up to the recession; it’s making all of us behave in unexpected ways. The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, a not-for-profit organization founded a century ago by socialist, Yiddish-speaking immigrants, recently launched its own credit card. With the organization’s logo in the upper-left corner, the Visa Platinum card offers new users the standard 0% annual percentage rate for the first six months. The Workmen’s Circle gets $50 whenever someone signs up and makes his first purchase, and then 0.3% of whatever the cardholder spends after that. “It’s such an easy way to share with the Workmen’s Circle/Arbiter Ring and continue our mission of progressive and cultural Jewish identity building,” the Workmen’s Circle’s executive director, Ann Toback, told The Shmooze. “I thought it was a win-win all around.”

The cards are issued by UMB Financial Corporation and marketed by the online company CardPartner, which helps small organizations and not-for-profits create customized credit cards.

What would the labor union-organizing generation that founded the Workmen’s Circle think about this new nod to consumerism? “Times have changed,” Toback said, “and the organization is changing with the times.”

Providence Journal>Books>‘Stealing MySpace’ recounts the battle to control the popular Web site

2009-04-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

‘Stealing MySpace’ recounts the battle to control the popular Web site

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 19, 2009

I thought MySpace was so . . . 2006. Everyone I know has defected for Facebook and left her MySpace profile to molder, un-updated, into obsolescence.

Apparently not. According to the web research firm Hitwise, although Facebook’s numbers are indeed on the rise whereas

MySpace’s are on the wane, MySpace is still the Web’s most popular social networking site, according to several different metrics. In February, more than 70 million people logged onto MySpace to groom their own personal homepages, upload pictures and video, browse through and link to friends’ pages, and post messages.

Which is good news for Julia Angwin, who has written a thorough new book called Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has painstakingly detailed every crucial conversation, every rise and fall in stock price, every lavish party and influential blog post in the history of MySpace, from its start as a side project in a shady Los Angeles Internet company to its current place as the crown jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media. The book is an excellent historical record but a somewhat dry read.

Stealing MySpace opens with the meeting in which Murdoch and the chief executive of Intermix Media — then MySpace’s parent company — sealed their gentlemen’s agreement. As was widely reported at the time, Murdoch’s News Corporation spent $580 million to purchase Intermix. (Angwin reports that when stock options and promised salaries are taken into account, the deal was actually worth more like $750 million.)

Intermix, which had only recently disentangled itself from several investigations into its spyware division, and whose most profitable venture was a wrinkle-cream business, was not exactly a prize. But it owned a majority stake in MySpace, and because of a complicated ownership agreement, Intermix could sell itself out from under MySpace’s feet. Which, in July 2005, is exactly what it did.

Still, the high-stakes backroom dealings between News Corp, Intermix, and other companies (like Viacom) that were angling to buy MySpace, make up only 27 pages of the book. Since Stealing MySpace would seem to be about precisely that dealmaking, its remaining 100 pages feel a little aimless; once the deal is done, there is little narrative tension to propel the rest of the story forward. That the story ends 2 1/2 years after News Corp’s acquisition seems arbitrary.

What’s more, the characters are not portrayed as sympathetic, three-dimensional people with real lives, but rather as game pieces in business deals. People are the beating heart of any story — it’s a heady mix of ego, idealism, greed, ambition, and a million other human qualities that make any deal go down (and that make investors buy stock, and that make an entrepreneur found a company, and on and on), and a book provides an author with the space that a newspaper article does not to showcase these complicated motivations. The fact that Angwin doesn’t do so makes the book read less like Barbarians at the Gate than like, well, The Wall Street Journal.

The American Prospect>Inconvenient Contraception

2009-03-17T07:43:00.001-07:00

Inconvenient Contraception

For millions of women, getting birth control is a laborious process. Would making the pill an over-the-counter drug be the best policy fix?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 17, 2009

Last week, birth control for college students got cheaper. An "affordable birth control" provision in the 2009 appropriations bill, which President Barack Obama signed last Wednesday, restored an incentive for drug makers to offer college health clinics discounts on the pill (the longstanding incentive had been inadvertently eliminated in a 2005 deficit-reduction bill). Still, even when it's cheaper, birth control will continue to be two things: inconvenient and thoroughly tied up with the medical system.

A trip to the doctor. Time off from work. A waiting room. A pap smear. A co-pay (assuming you're insured, of course). A trip to the pharmacy. Another co-pay. Then, finally, your birth control: 28 little pills, packaged in foil and plastic, standing between you and a pregnancy you don't want.

If you are one of the 11.6 million women in this country who relies on the pill to prevent pregnancy, this scenario, or some variation on it, has played out in your life again and again. It may not have to be this way.

"A pap smear is important. The pill is important. There's not really a connection between the two," says San Francisco gynecologist Dan Grossman. "It's a very paternalistic attitude to say, as a physician, we have to hold women's pills hostage -- you can't get your contraception until you get your pap smear."

England's National Health Service recently announced that later this year it will launch a pilot program to allow young women in two London neighborhoods to buy birth control over the counter after a brief consultation with a pharmacist. The London program is modeled after a pilot program that was conducted in Washington state between 2003 and 2005, in which 26 pharmacists throughout Seattle safely provided hormonal contraception -- the pill, patch, or ring -- to almost 200 women without a prescription. A similar study is being planned for California.

Now, a group of doctors, pharmacists, researchers, and advocates have received a grant from the Hewlitt Foundation to fund a working group that studies the feasibility of making oral contraceptives available over the counter: as easy to purchase as aspirin. According to the reproductive-health think tank the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of women will experience at least one unintended pregnancy by the time they're 45, and almost a third will have had an abortion. Part of the reason for this, those in the working group say, is that the barriers to birth control are simply too high.

"It's harder and harder to access contraception care if you want it, here in the U.S.," says Grossman, who is a senior associate at the nonprofit research organization Ibis Reproductive Health, which coordinates the Working Group. "Non-use of contraception is going up among people who don't want to be pregnant, especially among vulnerable populations, like poor women and women of color." The group's hypothesis is simple: If birth control were easier to access -- fewer medical gatekeepers, less inconvenience, and lower cost -- more women would use it. If more women used it, there would be fewer unintended pregnancies.

Fair enough. But is it safe? What effect would a switch to over-the-counter status have on poor women's access to the medication? And if women were no longer required to get birth control from their doctor, would they still go for their annual exams?

The pill has been exhaustively researched, and most doctors agree that it poses almost no risk of serious side effects for the vast majority of healthy young women. But estrogen (one of two main ingredients in most forms of the pill) can slightly increase risk of heart attack or stroke among older women who smoke and women who have high blood pressure, diabetes, and a handful of other conditions -- so doctors prescribing birth control have long screened for these conditions.

"I think the doctor's got to be a gatekeeper," says Michael Cackovic, an instructor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine. The doctor should "not necessarily decide who gets to be on the pill and who doesn't but [should] at least make sure patients understand the risk. I have prescribed [the pill] to patients that are smokers and over 40, but after we've had the conversation."

Grossman instead argues that a clearly worded and easy-to-understand label is enough to let women screen themselves. "If you go through the list of all of the medical conditions that can make pill use dangerous, everything on that list except for [high blood pressure] is information that we get from a woman's history -- from what she tells us," he says. "You don't need a doctor to determine whether you have them." As for blood pressure, "educating women and making that service available," in places like self-screening kiosks in pharmacies, might be a better approach than requiring a doctor's visit as a prerequisite, he says.

"I'm personally convinced that there are not safety issues in taking oral contraceptives over the counter," says Sharon Camp, president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute and a member of the Working Group. "For most of the people in the reproductive-health field, the issue of safety is probably not the biggest one. It really is, will an over-the-counter product be affordable for women who now get low-cost or reimbursed drugs? That remains to be seen." Camp's concerns stem from an earlier fight for over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, also known as Plan B.

Most insurance plans -- including most state Medicaid programs -- only cover prescription drugs. So when the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) finally approved the Plan B switch in 2006, millions of women suddenly found that the medication was no longer covered. At the same time, without insurance companies to bargain it down, the price of the medication jumped from roughly $27 to as high as $50.

"If we don't address that, but [if] we make the pill available over the counter, we will have made it more accessible to women who already have good access to health care, and less accessible to women who don't," says Amy Allina, program director at the National Women's Health Network and a member of the Working Group.

The Guttmacher Institute recently released a policy brief that said that at least 4.2 million women use visits to publicly funded family-planning clinics as their primary source of medical care. Clinics like Planned Parenthood become what the brief called "safety net providers." What would happen if they disappeared? "You don't want to say that you're requiring women to come in and get pills on prescription as a way of forcing them to get health-care services," Allina says. "But if women aren't coming into the clinics otherwise, and don't get those services, that's not good for them and eventually could lead to the loss of the clinics."

Still, an application to the FDA to make the over-the-counter switch is more of a long-term goal than an immediate plan. Grossman is hoping for 10 years, and part of the goal of the Working Group is to identify all the outstanding questions and answer them with research. Before it would approve a switch, for instance, the FDA would require "labeling comprehension" studies, to make sure the average user would be able to understand the instructions on over-the-counter packaging. They would also perform "actual use studies" to see if women would follow the instructions in the real world. Some of the research is either ongoing or being planned. "One of the lessons that I feel like we learned from the long battles over emergency contraception at the FDA," Allina says, "[is] that, if we ask the kinds of questions that we may think are above and beyond what the FDA should require, but are the questions that people in the community are concerned about -- and we can answer them -- it makes it easier to get past the political opposition."

But the precautions may not even be necessary. The Obama administration's proposed overhaul of the health-care system might make for an entirely new playing field by the time enough research has been conducted to actually move the process forward. Perhaps, in 10 years, poor women will have affordable and accessible access to health care, leaving Working Group members and other reproductive-health advocates to weigh the proposal on its merits alone.

Brown Alumni Magazine>I Will Be Heard!

2009-03-13T07:24:00.001-07:00

I Will Be Heard!

For decades Catherine Wolf ’72 AM, ’74 PhD worked as an IBM scientist getting computers to understand better how humans think. Then she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now she must rely on computers to tell other people what’s inside her own head and heart.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 13, 2009

When I first meet Catherine Wolf, she is sitting in the living room of her house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Westchester County, New York. She wears an elegant velour pantsuit with matching brown flats. Nearby are two cats, two dogs and an oversized couch. Pictures of her family are everywhere: framed shots of her with her husband, Joel '73 PhD; their daughters, Erika and Laura; and, most abundantly, pictures of their two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Ellis. There are at least thirty snapshots of him on the wall, and on a nearby table sits a digital frame with a rotating series of images of his smiling face. Outside the windows, the street is blanketed with snow.

On the day I visit her, Wolf is browsing Facebook, to which she recently became addicted. As a successful psychologist and researcher with decades of experience working at nearby IBM, Wolf has always been quick to pick up on new technologies. In fact, she's had a role in developing a lot of new technologies herself, from automated talking bank tellers to gadgets that convert handwriting to type.

But when Wolf clicks through the internet, she must do so with painstaking slowness. Confined to a wheelchair, she sits as still as a mannequin. Of the hundreds of muscles in her body, she can move only a handful. She breathes with the aid of a ventilator. Yet she types, talks, browses the Web, writes poetry, sends and receives e-mails, conducts research, and peppers the local paper with letters to the editor. She does all this using only her eyebrows.

On a tray attached to Wolf's wheelchair sits a laptop, emitting a soft but steady bong, bong, bong. It is the tether that connects her to the world outside her head. The tones it emits are the sound of the cursor moving through rows of letters on the screen. "Hello," the laptop says, shortly after I walk in, and then, some seconds later, "How are you?"

The voice is Wolf's. She recorded the greetings seven years ago, before she lost the ability to speak. In addition to a few key phrases, she recorded the names of her family members as well as some favorite jokes. (Question: "What's green and hangs from trees?" Answer: "Giraffe snot.") She wishes she had recorded more.

Wolf has curly red hair and expressive eyes framed by tortoiseshell glasses. She can still move her eyes and curl part of her mouth into a surprisingly bright smile. Her home-health aide places a chair for me beside Wolf's wheelchair so I can watch her type. It's unnerving to look over her shoulder this way. The image of a modified keyboard, in yellow, is arrayed in front of her. It has six letters to a row, plus punctuation, arranged like this:

e a r d u v .

t o i l g k ,

n s f y x q '

The cursor highlights one row of letters at a time. When it arrives at the row containing the letter Wolf wants, she raises her eyebrows. Click. The cursor then moves along the letters in that row, highlighting one at a time. When it falls on the letter Wolf wants, she raises her eyebrows again. Click. A T appears in a box at the bottom of the screen. Then Wolf starts again. A black band across her forehead lifts each time she raises her eyebrows, triggering an infrared switch mounted near her head. Bong, bong, bong. Click. Bong, bong, bong. An h appears.

After about a minute, Wolf has typed this is a scanning key... I see where this is going and say, "Ah, I see," but Wolf doggedly finishes that last word, typing b-o-a-r-d. She then waits until the cursor arrives at a particular icon and raises her eyebrows one more time, prompting the computer to read the sentence aloud. This time the voice is not hers but that of the computer: female, soft, and kind, but tinny and inhuman.

One of the great ironies of Cathy Wolf's life is that she built her career on the study of human speech, gesture, and handwriting. Compared to computers, humans are messy, complicated communicators, and Wolf's six patents and more than 100 journal articles and textbook chapters are all aimed at teaching computers to understand us better. But since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease—began claiming her ability to speak, gesture, and write a dozen years ago, she has developed a whole new relationship with language. After leaving IBM on long-term disability in 2004, she began writing poetry. Her poem "Words" was published in the magazine Neurology Now in the fall of 2007. In it, she describes how she types:

Very,

Slow,

Ly,

Moving my head to the rhythm of beeps

Thankful for each tiny movement

Concentrating letter by letter

Squeezing each word out with gargantuan intensity

Like an ancient chiseling words in Aramaic

I will be heard!

The ability to speak is a remarkable thing. That we can move our lips and tongues into certain shapes and force air past our vocal cords in a certain pattern, that this will convey the contents of our heart or make another person laugh, is one of those human mysteries we rarely think about. We all instantly understand hullo, yo, hey, hi, or howdy to mean more or less the same thing, but to a computer these words, like the wave of a hand, are just a mass of disparate data. At IBM it was Cathy Wolf's job to help computers make sense of such things.

At the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Wolf worked as a research psychologist, designing and testing the interfaces between humans and machines. Collaborating with computer programmers, Wolf observed people in their workplaces to determine how a machine might be used in real-world situations. She led focus groups and tested mock-ups and program prototypes on potential users. One of the last projects she worked on at IBM was a technology called the Conversation Machine, which allowed users to do their banking by talking to a computer over the telephone. (User: "What's my checking balance?" Conversation Machine: "Your checking balance is $925.00. What else can I do for you?")

Wolf loved her work. She finds language endlessly fascinating, and it was exciting to be on the cutting edge of new technologies. She "was always a person who defined herself by her work," says her husband, Joel, an IBM mathematician. "I work pretty hard, but when I retire, I'll be ready to say, 'I'm done.' But she's the kind of person who would probably have never retired."

Wolf continued to work long after she became ill. When she could not use her hands anymore, IBM supplied an aide to help with many everyday tasks. To type, while she still had use of her neck, "I wore a reflective dot on my forehead whose position was detected by the head mouse," she says. "I pointed with my head to the letter I wanted and dwelled on the letter I wanted for a specific time to select it. At one point, I used a switch under my foot and showed up at IBM meetings with one shoe on."

It was in 1996 that Wolf first began noticing problems with her left foot and calf. "She went to a lot of foot doctors and then orthopedic doctors and then neurologists," Joel recalls. With every possible diagnosis, Joel recalls, they would think, "'Oh God, I hope it's not that.'" Then, "'Oh God, I hope it is that, because if it's not that, it's that.' And then when you get to the end of that string, the worst thing you could possibly have is what she had. She went from being a runner to being barely able to walk within a few years."

ALS is a neurological disease that attacks the motor neurons, the cells that the brain uses to communicate with the body's voluntary muscles. Over the course of three to five years, people with ALS progressively lose the ability to move their fingers and toes, their arms and legs. Then they lose the ability to speak, to turn their head, and to swallow food. When the diaphragm and chest muscles give out, they can no longer breathe. They die.

Although it was identified more than 100 years ago, scientists still don't know what causes ALS. There is no effective treatment and no cure. The only thing that can prolong life is a ventilator, which allows patients to continue breathing. But it does not slow the progression of the disease. To prolong life for too long raises the specter of becoming "locked in," of losing the use of every last muscle until patients are trapped inside their own bodies, fully conscious but unable to communicate, unable to blink yes or no, unable to signal when something is wrong, unable to say, Enough. I'm done.

Wolf is among a tiny minority of patients in this country—about 5 percent—who choose to have the surgery to connect them to a ventilator. The emotional and financial cost, to the patients and their families, is too high for most.

"My wife has a will to live that probably exceeds 99 percent of the rest of the world," Joel says. "Her will to live is more than just the desire to be alive; it's a desire to live a full life. As Cathy herself puts it, "as normal a life as possible despite ALS."

Which is why, after finally leaving IBM, Wolf realized that "something meaningful had to replace work." She became involved with PatientsLikeMe, an online community that provides a forum for people with ALS and other illnesses to share information about their experiences and to keep up with the latest medical developments. PatientsLikeMe offers users the opportunity to assess their condition by taking the ALS functional rating scale, or ALSFRS, at regular intervals. Wolf decided to answer the ALSFRS questionnaire:

Compared to the time before you had symptoms of ALS ... have you noticed any changes in your speech? She could no longer speak. Zero points.

Have there been any changes in your ability to swallow? She hadn't swallowed in years. Zero points. (When saliva pools in her throat, she types cmx with her scanning keyboard. The computer says "coughing machine," and one of her health aides suctions out her mouth and throat.)

And on and on. Cannot walk or move my legs. Zero. She couldn't turn herself over in bed or adjust the blankets without help. Helpless in bed. Zero. She couldn't breathe without a ventilator. Zero.

"I was offended," Wolf explains. "I felt it didn't reflect my abilities."

As a research scientist, Wolf's reaction to her rating was to question the methodology. The instrument, she reasoned, was too crude to provide much insight into a patient's true condition. "There's something in psychological testing called the 'floor effect,' when the sensitivity of the measure isn't low enough at its lowest levels," says neuropsychologist Paul Wicks, the research and development director of PatientsLikeMe. "She was trained as a psychologist, so she asked, 'Can we fix this?'"

She and Wicks teamed up to develop what they call the ALSFRS-EX, an extended version of the rating scale that accounts for the changes that people with ALS experience long after they hit the floor of the standard scale. "Accurate ways to measure ALS are important research tools to help slow the disease," Wicks says. "In traditional clinical trials, which is what the scale was originally designed for, you tended not to recruit people who were very, very sick. Unfortunately that means that people like Cathy, who has lived with ALS for twelve years— who are really the most interesting—are not eligible for the trials" because of their low rating.

Wolf and Wicks recruited more than 200 PALS users to help them devise ten new questions for judging abilities that the earlier scale ignored: computer usage, finger and toe movement, and mobility. On the original scale, for instance, if you require a wheelchair, your score on the walking measure is zero. "For my money there's a big difference between being in a wheelchair you can control yourself and a wheelchair where you have to be pushed around," Wicks says. "And there's a big difference between that and being so weak that you have to be in bed all day."

After analyzing the statistical sensitivity of the ten questions, they settled on three new scale items that focused on the use of fingers, the capacity to show facial emotion, and the ability to get around inside the house. Wolf, Wicks, and a third researcher then coauthored a scientific paper to introduce their new scale. It was published in the March issue of the European Journal of Neurology. "I am most proud of that paper of all my publications," Cathy says.

Wolf's interest in language dates back to her undergraduate days at Tufts, where she read a book by Noam Chomsky proposing that humans are hard-wired for language. "I thought that having an innate capacity for something as complex as language was remarkable," Wolf says. "After all, language distinguishes us from other animals."

Her interest coincided with an early interest in computers, long before they became a ubiquitous part of everyday life. In 1967 she met Joel, then an MIT mathematics student, via one of the two computer services (they squabble over which) that were the precursor to internet dating. "She was very pretty, very intelligent," Joel says. "She had a great sense of humor. She was a very good dancer. I'm a very un-great dancer, but I liked to watch her dance." The couple married in 1968, and both began working toward their PhDs at Brown shortly after, he in mathematics, she in psychology.

Cathy Wolf's interest in language led her to Peter Eimas, the Fred M. Seed Professor Emeritus of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, whose pioneering research demonstrated that infants have a far more sophisticated understanding of language than was previously thought. (Eimas died in 2005.) Wolf's research extended Eimas's findings by comparing the way children of different ages perceive particular linguistic nuances.

Wolf's daughter Laura says her parents remember graduate school as a time of hectic contentment. "Sometimes," she says, "they would share a gallon of ice cream for dinner because they were too busy to cook."

Later, cooking became a favorite family activity—Laura still makes the Thanksgiving apple pie each year under her mom's watchful eye—but Wolf never appreciated it as much as she does now, when she can eat only through a feeding tube. She still remembers in vivid detail her last meal, which she ate in 2001 and described in a poem titled "Last Supper":

chocolate mousse

the essence of chocolate

fresh fruit salad

with sweet blueberries, tangy raspberries

and mellow cantaloupe

pumpernickel roll with raisins

and sourdough French bread

baby asparagus sautéed al dente

mashed potatoes spiked with piquant garlic

poached fillet of salmon served with creamy dill sauce

my last supper

food!

aromatic!

textured, tasty on the tongue!

now bypasses my mouth and nose

a bland substance for survival

In "First Snow," a poem she wrote in 2006, she recalled Sneaking cafeteria trays out under bulky parkas/To slide down College Hill/The trays navigating by the avocado moon. In the same poem, she fast-forwards many years, to Rolling soggy snow with husband and daughters to build a teetering snowman/The tallest on the block.

The outdoors was another Wolf family passion. Cathy and Joel often took their daughters into the mountains and to the sea. "We have a lot of good adventure stories," says Laura, now twenty-eight. "Like getting caught in our tent during a lightning storm, and the dog capsizing our sailboat." Cathy also loved to run; on her fortieth birthday, she took first place in a 10K race, her first. Her daughter Erika, who is now thirty-two, went on to become a professional ballet dancer. She still remembers practicing waltz steps down the hallway with her mother.

Here is a day in Cathy Wolf's life, in her own typewritten words: "I get up at ten thirty. At the computer usually by one thirty. Read email, check PatientsLikeMe, work on various projects until nine or ten, watch PBS News Hour and Daily Show, go to bed at midnight." Her aides lift her from her wheelchair with a mesh-and-metal pulley and settle her in a hospital bed in what used to be the family room. (I sleep alone now/Not by choice but by disease.) She has to sleep with her bed at a forty-five-degree angle to keep from choking. A nurse must watch her closely all night; if Wolf wakes up and needs something, the only way the nurse will know is to see her eyes moving.

Wolf's family says she is angrier than she often lets on. And sadder. How could she not be? "There have been times in her life when things have been low," Erika says, "but there's always been something big coming up to live for: somebody's graduation, the birth of my son.

"Now it's all about my son."

Erika doesn't know exactly what her son, Ellis, understands about what's wrong with his grandmother, but he loves to sit on her lap. He is exceedingly gentle with her tubes and machines. He calls her "grandcat." His favorite pants are the ones she picked out for him. He calls them his "grandcat pants."

One day Erika visited her mother with her son. Outside, the sky was overcast. The familiar bong, bong, bong of the laptop was the sound track to the conversation between Erika and her mom.

"It's grey outside," she painstakingly typed, "but Ellis is the sun."

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Doing It the Hard (Right) Way

2009-03-13T07:21:00.001-07:00

Doing It the Hard (Right) Way

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 13, 2009

Jeff Prystowsky '06 started his music career riffling through Providence dumpsters for cereal boxes. He and Ben Knox Miller '06 would cut and fold the cardboard into CD covers and then silkscreen them. The art fit the rustic, handmade ethos of their band, the Low Anthem. "People would write us e-mails—'I ordered your record today, and I got Apple Jax! That's my favorite cereal! How'd you know?'" Miller recalls with a laugh. "We did everything the hardest possible way, but it was an aesthetic choice."

Those choices are paying off. Without shedding its homespun aesthetic, the Providence-based band is building a sizeable audience; it won the Boston Music Award for Best New Act in December, and NPR broadcast Low Anthem's "To Ohio" as its Song of the Day in early January. In February, Rolling Stone featured the band in their "Breaking Artist" column, which introduces musicians on the rise.

Band members Miller, Prystowsky, and Jocie Adams '08 met in Brown's music department, where they studied composition under Professor of Music Gerald "Shep" Shapiro. Before Adams joined the band, Miller and Prystowsky put out Low Anthem's first full-length CD, the 2007 What the Crow Brings. It revived themes as old as American roots music itself and gave them a modern story: "Sawdust Saloon" is about a soldier leaving not for the Civil War, but for Vietnam. The eleven intimate tracks sound as if they might have been recorded on the creaking porch of that sawdust saloon, or at the senior prom in a dying coal town. Miller practically whispers the lyrics, making even rock songs sound like lullabies. You can hear Prystowsky's fingertips walk the neck of his upright bass. The CD was voted Best Album in the Providence Phoenix's 2008 Music Poll, which gave it a leg up in the Boston polls.

Adams joined Low Anthem in late 2007, and in September 2008 the trio released Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, which has the same authenticity and heart as Crow, but a wider musical range. Gospel influences are apparent, and an occasional Tom Waits–like growl complements plaintive folk tunes. Miller sees Charlie Darwin as a more interrelated collection than What the Crow Brings. "We think of it like a book. All the songs are leaning on each other," he says. Vin Scelsa of the influential New York City folk radio station WFUV listed Charlie Darwin as one of his dozen favorite albums of 2008 (alongside works by Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson).

Miller, Prystowsky, and Adams play guitar, bass, and clarinet, respectively, but on Charlie Darwin each plays at least half a dozen instruments, including such obscure, old-timey ones as the pump organ and the rack harp. Miller usually brings to the band a musical idea, or a sketch of some lyrics."Always the songs come as just this little skeleton," he says, "and then they become what they are when these guys get involved."

So far, the band members have continued to do almost everything themselves, from booking shows to recording, producing, and promoting their albums. They recently hired a manager, Kate Landau '08, but Prystowsky still goes to the post office each morning to mail out the CDs people have ordered from the band's website. The covers are still hand-silk-screened—each copy of Charlie Darwin is part of a numbered series—only now they're done by an independent printing outfit, and, no, they're no longer made from cereal boxes.

The success of Charlie Darwin has drawn the interest of record companies, and the band's next album, which they're working on now, may be the first one that they don't release themselves. "It would have to be a record company that basically acknowledges the success that we've been able to achieve on our own," says Miller. "What are they going to say? 'We'll get you such and such.' Well, we already got that. It's a good position to be in."

New York Times>Green Inc>Greening the Prison-Industrial Complex

2009-03-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

Greening the Prison-Industrial Complex

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 3, 2009

Instead of reporting to the laundry or the kitchen or the boiler room, a Washington state prison inmate, Robert Knowles, reports to the compost heap. Mr. Knowles is taking part in a “green work” program at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center. Inmates grow organic produce, compost the prison’s food waste, take part in ecological research projects with a nearby university, and even produce honey from the prison’s own hives.

The Washington State Department of Corrections boasts 34 LEED-certified facilities, with 923,789 square feet of LEED-certified space added in fiscal year 2008 alone.

Washington is not alone. It seems several states are busy rethinking the old concrete-box approach to the nation’s prisons — home to more than two million Americans — and high on the agenda are energy efficiency and other “green” upgrades.

This fall, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced 16 new green retrofitting projects, which they estimate will save $3 million in energy costs each year. The state already has solar power fields at two facilities, and plans to build six more in the coming year. A new $176 million juvenile detention facility in Alameda County — home to Berkeley and Oakland — recently became the country’s first jail to receive LEED gold certification.

Other green projects — from wind turbines to biomass boilers — have been announced by Departments of Corrections in Virginia, Nevada, and Indiana.

Mike Callahan, the physical plant director at the Putnamville Correctional Facility in Indiana, says the facility’s biomass boiler alone, which burns scrap wood from the prison’s pallet industry, has saved $6,300 a day in gas bills.

And the opening, in 2005, of Federal Correctional Institute No. 3, in Butner, N.C., marked the first LEED-certified federal prison. Scott Higgins, chief of design and construction at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that all new projects — including new federal prisons in the works in Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia — will be LEED certified, “unless some really weird things show
up.”

Ken Ricci, of Ricci Greene Associates, is currently working on a new $120 million detention center in downtown Denver, which the company plans to submit for LEED certification.

“There’s a recognition that sustainable, or ‘green’ design, is actually a plus for a population that’s confined 24 hours a day,” Mr. Ricci said. “Environment cues behavior. If you treat people like animals, they behave like animals.”

Mr. Ricci, who heads a sustainability committee as part of the American Institute of Architects’ Justice Architecture group, says design elements that earn LEED points, like daylighting and access to views, also improve security. “If you treat them like human beings — that is to say, there’s daylight coming in, the noise level is at a normative level — therefore your adrenaline level goes down, therefore your stress level goes down, the inmates feel safer.”

Still, not everyone thinks the new trend in prison design goes far enough.

Raphael Sperry, a San Francisco-based architect and green design consultant, is heading up a Prison Design Boycott Campaign at Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. “Sure, saving 50 percent on energy when you’re locking people up is a savings,” he says. “But not locking them up at all would be a larger savings — and would also address social justice concerns.”

Ms.>National Reports>Lullabies Behind Bars

2009-02-23T14:43:00.000-08:00

Lullabies Behind Bars

In a few innovative prisons, babies find a safe haven with their moms.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Fall 2008

Reprinted in Utne Reader, March/April 2009

It's midday on a recent Tuesday, and Rachael Irwin, 27, scurries across the floor on her hands and knees, playing peekaboo with her 10-month-old daughter, Gabriella. The baby’s big blue eyes dance with delight. Like many children her age, Gabriella is in day care. Unlike most children her age, though, Gabriella is in prison. She and her mother are participating in the Bedford Hills (N.Y.) Correctional Facility’s nursery program, one of only nine programs in the country that allow incarcerated women to keep their babies with them after they give birth.

Nationwide, nearly 2 million children have parents in prison. The number of those with incarcerated mothers, in particular, is growing exponentially: A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the number of minors with mothers in prison increased by more than 100 percent in the last 15 years.

“These children are sort of victims by default,” says Paige Ransford, research assistant at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston, and coauthor of the recent report “Parenting from Prison.” Most of the children go live with grandparents or other relatives; one in 10 is placed in foster care. About half are separated from their siblings. These children are prone to a whole host of social developmental difficulties, and are more likely than their peers to be in trouble with the law later in life.

In the case of women who enter the system as mothers-to-be, the usual excitement of pregnancy is replaced with a sense of dread. The choices that, on the outside, are understood to be a woman’s right—such as where and how to give birth, and whether or not to breastfeed—are transferred from the woman to bureaucrats and officers at the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Of the 115,308 women incarcerated in the U.S. as of 2007, some 4,000 women—4 percent of women in state custody and 3 percent in federal— were pregnant when they entered prison. In the vast majority of cases, babies are removed from their mothers immediately after birth and placed with relatives or in foster care. However, a small but growing number of states are recognizing that the mother-child bond formed in the first few months of life is crucial to the child’s development, and that the bond need not be broken.

“We’re definitely seeing more states grapple with what it means to send women to prison, some of whom are pregnant,” says Sarah From, director of public policy and communications for the Women’s Prison Association (WPA) and coauthor of the agency’s forthcoming report on prison nurseries. Eight states now have some sort of program to house female offenders together with their newborns, the newest being Indiana. The West Virginia legislature recently passed a bill establishing a program in its correctional facility for women, which is slated to open in 2009.

These programs vary widely in the length of time babies are allowed to stay with their incarcerated mothers and in the services provided while they’re in prison with them. South Dakota’s program allows babies to stay for just 30 days—with the mother in her regular cell—while Washington state allows children to stay for up to three years with their mothers in a separate wing of the prison. The Washington facility offers a federal Early Head Start program for prenatal health and infant-toddler development, and partners with the nonprofit Prison Doula Project to provide doula services to the women during and after pregnancies.

Originally started way back in 1901 when the prison was a state reformatory, the Bedford Hills Program is the oldest and largest in the country, with its own nursery wing and space for up to 29 mother-baby pairs. Women live with their babies in bright rooms stuffed with donated toys and clothes. During the day, while the women attend DOC-mandated drug counseling, anger management, vocational training and parenting classes, their children attend a day care staffed by inmates who have graduated from an intensive two-year Early Childhood Associate vocational training program.

Although the idea of babies living the first months of their lives behind bars is sad to contemplate, many experts say that the alternative—separating them from their mothers—is far worse. “If a woman is serving a short sentence and can look forward to a life with her child…so much research addresses the importance of that early bonding relationship,” says Sylvia Mignon, associate professor and director of the graduate program in human services at UMass Boston and coauthor, with Ransford, of the “Parenting from Prison” report. “The reality is, an infant does not know that she is in prison. All she knows is that she’s getting the warmth and love and attention of this wonderful being called mom.” Among women serving sentences of more than a decade, however, there is no clear consensus on what’s best for the child; the Bedford Hills program generally only accepts women serving sentences of five years or less. “We don’t want to create a bond that’s guaranteed to be broken,” says the children’s center program director, Bobby Blanchard.

Unlike in the general prison population, doors in the program are never locked; inmates must be able to come and go freely in order to warm bottles, do laundry and comfort crying children out of the earshot of other sleeping babies. Rooms are decorated with photographs and handmade posters that say things like, “Loving yourself is something to be proud of!” Danielizz Negron, 23, rocks her 4-month-old son, Jeremiah, while he naps in a stroller. She was six months pregnant when, after a year of fighting burglary charges, she accepted a plea deal and turned herself in. “If I had not known about this program, I would not have came in. I would’ve been in Mexico somewhere by now,” she says, only half-joking.

As the number of prison nurseries continues to grow, some caution against becoming overly sanguine. Prison nurseries are wonderful programs, says the WPA’s Sarah From, however “we shouldn’t be looking to build more prison nurseries, but rather work in the community to put less women in prison.”

The Nation>Your Valentine, Made in Prison

2009-02-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

Your Valentine, Made in Prison

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 12, 2009

With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps you're planning a trip to Victoria's Secret. If you're a conscientious shopper, chances are you want to know about the origins of the clothes you buy: whether they're sweatshop free or fairly traded or made in the USA. One label you won't find attached to your lingerie, however, is "Made in the USA: By Prisoners."

In addition to the South Carolina inmates who were hired by a subcontractor in the 1990s to stitch Victoria's Secret lingerie, prisoners in the past two decades have packaged or assembled everything from Starbucks coffee beans to Shelby Cobra sports cars, Nintendo Game Boys, Microsoft mouses and Eddie Bauer clothing. Inmates manning phone banks have taken airline reservations and even made calls on behalf of political candidates.

Still, it's notoriously difficult to find out what, exactly, prisoners are making and for whom. Most of the time, inmates are hired by subcontractors who have been hired by larger corporations, which are skittish about being associated with prison labor. Paul Wright, an expert on prison labor with sources inside many prisons, has broken many labor stories in his newspaper, Prison Legal News. It hasn't been easy. "As a general rule, you'll have an easier time finding out who Kim Jong Il's latest mistress is than finding out who these guys are working for," he says. (Starbucks, Nintendo, Eddie Bauer and Victoria's Secret did not return requests for comment; Microsoft declined to comment.)

Advocates of prison labor programs describe the arrangement as win-win: inmates keep busy and stay out of trouble, and employers get low-cost labor with little or no overhead. But critics, from labor unions to prisoner rights advocates, raise a host of concerns about exploitation and unfair business competition.

In 1979 Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE), which provides private-sector companies with incentives to set up shops in prisons using inmates as employees. States offer free or reduced rent and utilities in exchange for the decreased productivity that comes with bringing materials and supplies in and out of a secured facility and hiring employees who must stop working throughout the day to be counted and who are sometimes unavailable because of facility-wide lockdowns.

Prisoners are often grateful for the work; when the system is working, they can learn marketable job skills and save money. "It provided a sense of independence," says Kelly DePetris, who worked for eight years in California state prisons at Joint Venture Electronics, doing everything from assembly to administrative jobs to materials control.

"You don't have to ask people for things," she says. "I have a son, so it was nice to send home money to help with little things--school clothes, things like that." As a Joint Venture employee, DePetris made about $1.74 per hour after deductions, compared with the thirty cents she estimates she might have made working in the prison laundry. When she was released last May after serving fourteen years, she had saved $16,000, with which she bought a used car, clothes and health insurance. "It's really come in handy," she says.

Relatively speaking, PIE accounts for a tiny fraction of the number of inmates in US prisons and jails. Some 5,300 of the 2.3 million inmates nationwide work for private-sector companies. "It's a small piece, but it's a significant piece" of the overall prison labor system, says Alex Friedmann, who served ten years in a Tennessee prison in the 1990s and worked making Taco Bell T-shirts in a PIE silk-screening shop.

PIE rules stipulate that work must be voluntary, that workers be paid a wage comparable to what free-world employees doing similar work are paid and that the program not compete unfairly with companies on the outside. But labor unions and companies on the outside have argued that this is impossible: there is no way for a company that pays no rent to compete fairly.

Talon Industries was a Washington State-based water-jet company whose competitor, MicroJet, had a PIE shop inside a state prison. Rick Trelstad, a partner at Talon, contended that his company shut down in 1999 at least in part because MicroJet consistently underbid him for work. (He and an association of his colleagues successfully sued the Washington State Department of Corrections to shut down the local PIE program, but voters reinstituted it last year.) Lufkin Industries, a Texas-based maker of tractor-trailer beds, claims it was run out of business because its competitor, Direct Trailer & Equipment Company, paid only one dollar per year for factory space in the local prison and so was able to offer much lower prices for the same product.

David Lewis, vice president and general manager of Joint Venture Electronics and Kelly DePetris's former boss, acknowledges that the setup has been great for his business. "They get no holiday pay. They get no vacation pay. There's no medical, dental: all that's paid for by the state," he says. What's more, if the company has to downsize, as it did recently, laid-off prison workers have few other places to look for work. When business picks up again, employees who on the outside would have found other jobs are still in prison, just waiting to be rehired. The waiting list for work at Joint Venture is up to 200 people long.

Advocates for prisoners' rights take issue with what they see as an inherently exploitative situation. Courts have consistently found that prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they may not unionize. They can't agitate for better wages or working conditions, because any threats to walk off the job would ring hollow--where would they go?

What's more, by law, as much as 80 percent of PIE employees' paychecks is deducted for room and board, taxes, family support, victims' compensation or charity. The National Correctional Industries Association, the nonprofit organization that certifies PIE programs, found that participants kept only about 20 percent of their wages in the past two quarters. Friedmann, for instance, worked for two years in the late 1990s in the silk-screening shop. He estimates that after deductions for fines, fees and other charges, he left prison with $30. "So while businesses get rent-free space, prisoners are paying for their 'room and board,'" says Prison Legal News's Paul Wright, who himself served seventeen years in a Washington prison. "Prisoners pay their boss's rent."

So this Valentine's Day, if your shopper's conscience leads you to check labels, don't bother looking for "Made in Prison." Of all the hundreds of goods and services produced by prisoners with taxpayer subsidies, only one is labeled as such: a line of jeans and denim work shirts made at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. It's called Prison Blues.

New York Times>The City>Composing Songs for the One That Got Away

2009-01-31T15:09:00.000-08:00

Composing Songs for the One That Got Away

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 1, 2009

SOMETIMES the songs are plaintive. Other times they are fuzzy and electric. One song is described as a “carnivalesque rock song.”

In all, there are 16 tracks and counting. And when Patrick Shea, a 31-year-old singer-songwriter from Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, lays them down, he is thinking about one thing: “Moby-Dick.”

This is Callmeishmael.org, a blog that Mr. Shea began in October. His goal was to write one song for each of the 136 chapters in “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville’s sprawling 1851 classic, which tells the story of the ship captain Ahab and his haunted hunt for an elusive white whale.

Combining literary analysis with eclectic musical taste and a dark, clear baritone, Mr. Shea posts a new song each week.

Among the fans of Mr. Shea’s creations are Meg Guroff, the editor and publisher of the annotation Web site Powermobydick .com.

“I think it is a completely awesome thing to do,” Ms. Guroff said, “and I really like his music. People have written music about ‘Moby-Dick’ before, but I haven’t heard of anyone writing one song per chapter. It just seems like a very apt and obsessive response to this book about obsession.”

Another possible fan might be President Obama, who lists “Moby-Dick” as one of his favorite books on his Facebook page.

The song about Chapter 112, titled “The Blacksmith,” features an eerily echoing electronic heartbeat; the accompanying commentary is a 500-word reflection on labor, communal life, death and rebirth.

“As industry collapses, the very fabric of domesticity crumbles,” Mr. Shea writes. “Workshops and factories are the basement foundation of family life; the labor within its heartbeat.”

By contrast, the song about Chapter 2, “The Carpet-Bag,” is a sweet acoustic pop number with a catchy hook and the recurring lyric “I’ve never had the money you got/ To be on the inside,/ To find me a home.”

Mr. Shea, a sixth-grade teacher and the frontman for the Brooklyn-based duo the New Fantastics, said he came up with the idea for the blog over the summer. He had set two goals for himself over the break — to read “Moby-Dick” and to write a new song every day — and as time passed, he said, “the tasks slowly merged.”

Though he began with Chapter 1, he has otherwise chosen chapters at random. Melville in many ways was “the first postmodernist,” Mr. Shea wrote in his first post, “so I think he’d approve.”

The author might also have approved of a New Yorker seeking to keep his most famous work alive. Melville was born in the city and he died here, and worked for a time as a customs inspector on the New York docks.

More than 150 years on, during stormy economic times, Ishmael’s advice in Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” still resonates. Stay close to shore only during good weather, he warns; a ship near the shore during a storm will be dashed on the rocks. Mr. Shea writes: “Distilled to a pop song, I think this is all a way of saying enjoy the fair weather but let it go when you need to. How better to enjoy good times than to dance? How better to dance than to dance ‘The Lee Shore’?”

New York Times>New Jersey>From Bluegrass to Swing, a Jam Where Everyone Dives In

2009-01-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

From Bluegrass to Swing, a Jam Where Everyone Dives In

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 1, 2009

LIVINGSTON

AS Mo Menzel sees it, those who attend the monthly concert and jam session at her violin shop here can be divided into two groups: pickers and grinners.

Pickers arrive at the shop, MoFiddles, with instrument in hand, ready to play. Grinners just sit back and listen. Ms. Menzel, 51, with her irreverent sense of humor, is a grinner.

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, the fiddle-and-guitar duo who Ms. Menzel invited to kick off last month’s MoJam, are definitely pickers. Once a month, the MoJam attracts those who play and love traditional music to this shopping center. The forums are usually free but occasionally carry a charge, in this case $20.

On a frigid Thursday last month, Mr. Ungar and Ms. Mason, of Saugerties, N.Y., best known for their “Ashokan Farewell,” the musical cornerstone of the PBS documentary “The Civil War,” began with an hourlong performance. They played Irish reels, klezmer music, waltzes and love songs, and often they invited the sold-out audience of about 50 to sing along. “If you don’t catch on to the words we’re singing, use your own,” Mr. Ungar said in his introduction to his swing tune, “Backyard Symphony.”

Connor Dugan, of Madison, a virtuosic fiddler at only 16, joined them during several songs. He recalled that he befriended the couple when he was 10 years old; he knocked on their dressing room door during intermission at one of their performances with his violin in hand. “Hi, I’m Connor,” he said. “Want to play some tunes?”

Bluegrass jams and Irish sessions are as old as the music itself, with friends and neighbors usually gathering informally in a local pub to play together. But New Jersey has few such regular jams, and none that take the music as seriously as this one, several people at the MoJam said. Usually, Ms. Menzel said, “they’re run by some guy who likes to play and drink.”

“At mine, they like to play,” she added. “Because I bring in these special guests, they hone up on their skills.”

Ms. Menzel had lived in Houston for 25 years, and was working in cardiac research at the Texas Heart Institute there when her father, Richard Menzel, died suddenly. Mr. Menzel founded Menzel Violins, a repair shop, in 1973, and his daughter, who said she plays fiddle and mandolin only enough “to demo an instrument,” moved back to her native New Jersey in 2000 to take over the family business. But she had a hard time finding her place in what she described as the insular world of classical music. So in 2003 she created MoFiddles, a subsidiary of Menzel Violins dedicated to traditional music.

Strictly speaking, a violin and a fiddle are the same instrument. But according to Ms. Menzel, the difference is in attitude. “Do you want a vahhhse?” she asks, drawing out the word with a laugh. “Or a vase?”

“With classical music you have to train somebody,” she said. “ ‘No! No! No! Arm up up up!’ Traditional is however it goes, just so long as the story gets passed on. It’s extremely important for traditional music to be passed down from person to person.”

Which is where the MoJams come in. After the performance, around 20 audience members pulled out their guitars, upright basses, fiddles and mandolins, and pulled their chairs into a circle. The youngest member was 16; the oldest, 81. They were musicians, engineers, dentists, psychologists, professors and lawyers, like Richard Crossin, of South Orange, who had come with his fiddle and his fiddle teacher, Dan O’Dea, of Linden. “Most of the people here are just dedicated amateurs who would otherwise not have a forum to kick back and play,” Mr. Crossin said.

Ms. Menzel stood up to announce the start of the jam. “Who would like to lead the first tune?” she asked.

“Who knows ‘Fisher’s Hornpipe?’ ” Mr. Ungar asked. “In the key of D, perhaps?”

And off they went.

Surrounded by hundreds of instruments, in rows of rich reds and golds, they played “Arkansas Traveler,” “Angeline the Baker,” “Tennessee Waltz.” When a song was unfamiliar, Mr. Ungar played the melody one phrase at a time and the fiddlers played it back, while Ms. Mason showed the chords to the guitarists and banjo players.

Mr. Dugan suggested a rollicking bluegrass tune called “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” and before the plink of the mandolins had died down, Mr. Ungar called out the next one with a twinkle in his eye: “Key of G! ‘Temperance Reel!’ ”

FORWARD>Education>The Next Generation: Organizers and Activists Learn the Ropes

2009-01-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

The Next Generation: Organizers and Activists Learn the Ropes

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 21, 2009

By 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, a dozen bleary-eyed idealists were already milling around, chewing absently on bagels and sipping from little orange juice cartons. Sunlight streamed into the windows of the fifth floor of the brownstone on East 10th Street in New York City, where they had gathered to talk about leadership development and oppression. Later that day, they would use such words as “invisible-ize” and discuss systems of power and the best approach to knocking on doors on the Lower East Side. But they began the morning with an invocation of sorts, a reading from Grace Paley’s short story “Midrash on Happiness.”

“For happiness, she… required work to do in this world,” read 29-year-old Alissa Wise, who serves as the education director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a Manhattan-based group that provides organization, education and advocacy. JFREJ had convened the Saturday meeting. “By work… she included the important work of raising children righteously up,” Wise continued. “By righteously she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm.” The 14 community organizers, seated in a circle, went around and read until the story ended. Then there was silence. Wise spoke first. “I love Grace Paley,” she said.

This was the fourth meeting of the inaugural class of the Grace Paley Organizing Fellowship, which JFREJ launched this year to train a new generation of organizers and activists. The fellows are mostly in their 20s, but they range in age from 19 to 45. Their religious observance runs the gamut from secular to Modern Orthodox. About half of them were already involved in JFREJ when the fellowships were announced, and they applied so that they could take their involvement to the next level; the other half used the fellowships as their way of becoming involved in JFREJ.

Rob Browne, a dentist who lives on Long Island with his wife and three children, had given money to JFREJ in the past, but otherwise had not been involved. Then one day, he heard some of his neighbors mention that they were looking to hire someone to clean their houses. “I said, gee, well, that’s a dynamic,” Browne said. “There seemed to be no rules. How much is paid, what the standards are in terms of hiring and firing people. It was all done differently from person to person. I thought, I know that’s what’s done, but there’s got to be something more organized.” Browne’s research into what Jewish law has to say about domestic workers led him to JFREJ and, shortly thereafter, to the fellowship.

Founded in 1990, JFREJ organizes its members to act on behalf of progressive causes in New York, such as labor and immigrants’ rights. In 1994, for example, JFREJ worked in support of the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association in the association’s efforts to unionize a restaurant in Chinatown. For the past several years, two of JFREJ’s major campaigns have been Shalom Bayit, which aims to pass statewide Domestic Workers Bill of Rights legislation, and a Housing Justice campaign for affordable housing.

The six-month fellowship began in September 2008 and runs through February. In addition to attending these monthly training sessions and retreats, fellows commit to spending 16 hours per month working on one of the two campaigns, and to raising $500 toward JFREJ’s work. In addition, each fellow is assigned a seasoned organizing mentor from progressive groups around New York City, such as the not-for profits Jewish Funds for Justice and the Bronx Defenders. JFREJ received a grant from the Elias Foundation to help administer the fellowship, but participation is on a volunteer basis; no one is paid, including the fellows and the experts who lead workshops or conduct training at the fellows’ retreats.

JFREJ’s approach to training leaders is not simply to teach them concrete organizing skills, such as how best to knock on doors, make phone calls or organize a rally. The fellows certainly do learn these types of skills, both at these retreats and on the ground, in their work on the campaigns. At the recent Saturday meeting, for example, Yasmeen Perez, leadership development director of the group FIERCE, which is by and for gay and lesbian youth of color in New York City, taught a workshop on leadership development. But building of concrete skills is paired with theoretical and cultural analysis so that the fellows will have a context within which to understand the work they’re doing. On this particular afternoon, JFREJ’s executive director, Dara Silverman, and community organizer Danielle Ferris taught a workshop on anti-Jewish oppression. Some other topics have been imperialism and white supremacy, Jews and class, and gender and sexuality.

“The more knowledge I have as an organizer about how these systems work, the more power I have to affect positive change,” said Zach Scholl, 21, who has been involved with JFREJ for a year and a half, first as an intern and now as a fellow. “I really need to understand the ways that these systems of oppression affect us and divide us.”

After the Grace Paley reading, the fellows spent some time studying musar, or Jewish ethical practice. Wise is a fifth-year rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and has, over the course of the fellowship, led discussions and study on taking responsibility for the “other.” The group reflected together on a passage from Exodus in which Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, asks Moses to allow others to help him: “Why do you act alone, while all the people stand about you from morning until evening? The task is too heavy for you…. You cannot do it alone.” The group then broke into pairs to discuss what it means to be a good leader — when to ask for help, and when to take on tasks themselves. Most of the fellows are students; many work full time. Balance is a big issue.

After musar study, the fellows discussed the readings assigned to them that day, which included “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships Between Black and Jewish Women,” written by feminist icon Barbara Smith, and “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Anti-Semitism Part of All of Our Movements,” a self-published pamphlet by Philadelphia activist April Rosenblum.

The fellows are mindful of the fact that they are rarely affected directly by the issues for which they are fighting. The question of what it means to work on behalf of, and in solidarity with, others is one that occupied much of the day’s discussion.

Vered Meir, 26, has been involved with the Shalom Bayit campaign for three years. She chose to apply for the fellowship even though she moved to Boston last fall. She has been commuting to New York once a month for training, and doing as much work as she can on the campaign remotely. “What’s hard about organizing as allies is that we have a choice to be involved or not, whereas somebody who’s being abused by their landlord, let’s say, doesn’t really have a choice,” she said. “I want to feel like my liberation is tied up in the liberation of [Domestic Workers United] members. I don’t want to feel like, yeah, I moved, so I’m not going to be involved anymore.”

Grace Paley, writer, activist and longtime JFREJ member, died in 2007. Wise says that the organization was looking for a way to honor her, so when the idea for the fellowships first emerged, it seemed like the perfect fit. Paley’s daughter, Nora, agreed. “This JFREJ fellowship is the right ship on the right sea to continue in her name,” she told the Forward. “How wonderful that these shining young people are on earth and willing to continue the human race in adamant decency. My mother would have been honored to meet each of them and work beside them, too.”

After Perez’s workshop, the fellows broke for lunch. They told stories, laughed, teased each other and chatted about their plans for the holidays. Before they reconvened to talk about oppression and what it means to be “out” as a Jew, they stood in a circle in the sunlight for a post-lunch warm-up. Lane Levine, community organizer for the Shalom Bayit campaign, had devised an “organizer stretch” — kind of like the hokey-pokey, but more grown-up. Sort of. “Stretch up for high goals!” he said, and all the fellows reached their arms to the ceiling. “Reach down to your grass roots!” They followed Levine’s lead, touching their toes, leaning left and right, touching their heads and wrapping their arms around themselves. As they finished, the room filled with flailing arms and legs: “Shake it out for social change!” Levine said, and they did.

FORWARD>Education>A Teacher’s Toolkit for Tackling Tough Issues

2009-01-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

A Teacher’s Toolkit for Tackling Tough Issues

Jewish Educators Learn To Address Bullying, Harassment and Eating Disorders

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 20, 2009

On a recent Sunday morning, the third graders at Congregation Brothers of Israel Religious School, in Newtown, Pa., had just settled in for a snack. “There’s this little girl who’s adorable, 8 years old,” recalled Joan Hersch, the school’s principal. “And this boy in her class said: ‘You’re fat. You don’t need that doughnut. I’m going to eat it for you.’ And the girl said, ‘Okay,’ and pushed it over to him.”

Welcome to what Shira Epstein, assistant professor at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, calls “an educational Jewish moment”: an opportunity to connect students’ everyday decisions and actions to Jewish teachings.

This past summer, Hersch attended a workshop run by Epstein and her colleague, Naomi Less, called “Addressing Evaded Issues in Jewish Education.” In the classroom, “what happens is, often it’s done with the best of intentions, but the socio-emotional issues get boxed off” in favor of traditional religious school curricula, such as preparation for b’nai mitzvah, Torah study and Hebrew-language lessons, Epstein said. The “Evaded Issues” workshops aim to integrate such issues as harassment and bullying, sexuality and relationships, sexism and gender identity, eating disorders and body image, and substance abuse into teachers’ educational “toolkits,” so that moments like the one in Hersch’s religious school don’t go unaddressed.

“A critical incident is a moment — as educators, we have 400 of them a day — when we have to decide how to respond, what to do,” Epstein said. “In the actual moment, you have things coming at you really fast. You don’t have time to think.” The workshops are a chance to “hit the pause button on the DVR. When we’re live with our students, we don’t have time to do that. If we can practice, and get better at it, then you’re better in the actual moment.”

Funded by the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, the Hadassah Foundation and the Dobkin Family Foundation, the “Evaded Issues” project eventually will entail a series of three two-hour workshops for educators. The first, launched last fall, encourages teachers and school administrators to look closely at their own gut reactions when uncomfortable subjects come up in the classroom. Maybe a teacher overhears one student calling another student a homophobic slur. Or perhaps during break time, a group of kids talk about how drunk they got last night. “There might be very real reasons that an educator might not intervene” at a moment like this, Epstein said. “The first thing we need to do is examine those reasons: Here are my own fears and discomforts. Let me put that under a microscope.”

Perhaps a teacher thinks it’s none of his business. Perhaps she doesn’t feel equipped to respond appropriately. Perhaps she doesn’t even realize there’s a problem that needs addressing. “It’s very difficult,” said Hersch, who also worked as a public school teacher for 40 years. In a different setting, she might have thought, “I’m opening a Pandora’s box, or, it’s going to get me in trouble. It’s not my job, I don’t have time and I don’t want to go there, because it will open up a whole other set of issues.” But in a religious school, Hersch said, responding is essential. “As Jewish educators, we answer to a higher authority,” she said. “We’re teaching values. And sometimes the kids don’t see how these little things add up to a big picture.”

The second and third workshops are currently being piloted and are slated for launch by June. Building on the first session, the remaining two will use role-playing, brainstorming, writing and other activities to help Jewish educators feel better prepared to respond when “evaded issues” come up in the classroom. This month, Epstein and Less held the first of what they hope will be a series of “train the trainer” sessions: Three students at the Jewish Theological Seminary (one rabbinical student, one cantorial student and one student at the Davidson School, which is a division of JTS) will participate. They, in turn, will a conduct schoolwide training session for other JTS students this spring.

As part of the “Evaded Issues” project, Epstein and Less also assembled a resource guide that includes listings of programs and resources that educators facing these issues might use, as well as a blueprint for those who would like to replicate some pieces of the “Evaded Issues” training in their own schools.

The trainings and the resource guide are aimed at teachers and administrators in all spheres of Jewish education, whether weekend religious school, Jewish day school or Jewish camp. “It’s not just that you’re teaching Jewish values,” Less said. “You’re teaching life skills. You’re teaching them how to be good human beings.”

As for Hersch, after that Sunday in religious school, she called the young girl’s mother to have a conversation with her about encouraging her daughter to love her body. Hersch is also planning a series of “pep rallies” for parents, “to give them ways to address body issues, when they’re dealing with ‘nobody likes me, everybody hates me.’”

These are both steps she admits she might not have taken had she not attended the “Evaded Issues” trainings. And in the moment? There were a million things she could have done. She could have said nothing. She could have engaged the boy about why he said what he said and how that might have made his classmate feel. She could have taken away the doughnuts. Instead, she looked at the girl and said, “Don’t let him tell you you’re fat; you’re gorgeous!” A drop of water in a wide sea, perhaps, but an educational moment all the same.