Fellows and Fellow Travelers:
Thanks for your great work this week, culminating today. I'm so
very, very proud to be connected to you. I had a last minute thought --
tomorrow night, Saturday night, to go see the play Beth is directing,
"Cherry Docs," at the Minnesota Jewish Theatre on Ford Parkway. 8PM,
about 90 minutes w/o an intermission. It's about racism, engagement,
and transformation. Please let me know if you'd like to join me and
we'll make it a MMUF outing.
Love and Solidarity,
Peter
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Comrades:
Beth Cleary is directing /Cherry Docs/ at the Minnesota Jewish
Theatre. The run opens this Saturday night, October 13, and continues
through November 4, typically on W, Th, Saturday nights, and Sunday
afternoons. Please see www.mnjewishtheatre.org for more information.
Please see Beth's director's notes, below, for more information about
the play. I hope you'll see it!
Love and Solidarity,
Peter
David Gow is a Toronto-based playwright whose 1998 play, /Cherry Docs/,
had its U.S. premiere in Philadelphia at the Wilma Theater. The
powerful conflicts at the center of the play inspired filmmaker Mark
Adam to collaborate with David Gow in re-rendering the play into a film,
/Steel Toes/ (2006), which screened at the Minnesota Jewish Film
Festival in 2006.
/Cherry Docs/ pits an ambitious and talented Jewish attorney, Danny
Dunkelman, against a young defendant who kicked an Asian Indian man to
death wearing cherry-colored Doc Martens, the /de rigeur/ footwear of
neo-Nazi skinheads. The play shows Danny and Mike shadow-boxing with
each other in the prison interview room and in their dreams, over the
course of many months, preparing for sentencing. Issues of class and
educational attainment separate the men, as do their respective
trainings in moral combat: one through law school and legal practice,
the other through streetfighting and movement indoctrination. But it is
also the training Danny received in Hebrew school and as the son of a
WWII refugee that he draws on in making Mike a credible witness.
Danny's background, as he calls it, has taught him that society would
rather lock up its demons than look them in the eye and pledge to
understand them.
As /Cherry Docs/ suggests, tens of thousands of young people worldwide
are signed on to the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of hate, in their
search for revenge against entitlements for "the other," and because of
their needs for community and ideals. White supremacy is a rallying
cry, a war whoop, based on the flimsy markers of "race" and
"whiteness." In his excellent book, /Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far
Right Network/ (1994), Warren Kinsella traces the roots of Canada's
contemporary hate group activities back to the 19^th -century rise of
the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, and the Klan's recruiting
activities in the northwestern U.S. states and western Canada in the
1920s. The Klan plowed the ground of disaffection among many rural and
eventually suburban working-class youth throughout the 20^th century on
both sides of the border. From the 1970s onward, Nazism's particular
strain of genocidal white supremacy found embodiment in several
charismatic leaders, in the U.S. and Canada, who gave fervent recruiting
speeches for the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the Aryan Nations, and
other cross-border groups. Kinsella deftly links the reorganization of
Canadian energy policies in the 1980s (the "NEP," or National Energy
Program) and the resulting massive job loss, and the liberal
government's move away from constitutional affiliation with Great
Britain and its celebration of the "Canadian mosaic" in the 1990s, to
the rise and increasing militancy of race-based and anti-Semitic crimes
by white supremacists since the 1990s.
David Gow marks the deepening conflict between attorney and client
through references to the passing of seasons and to the Jewish calendar
of practices and observances. Gow suggests that performing a /mitzvah/,
however difficult, links one to greater mysteries of sacred time and
historical forces. Even as understanding is born, stability dies. Gow
suggests that the individual benefits of the /mitzvah/ may be fleeting
in this lifetime, though its rewards redound long-term to the common good.
Selected Bibliography for this Production and Further Reading:
Bialystok, Franklin (2000). /Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the
Canadian Jewish Community/
Kinsella, Warren (1994). Web /of Hate: Inside Canada's Far-Right Network/
Mackey, Eva (1999). /The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and
Nat'l Identity in Canada /
Ryan, Nick. (2004). Into /a World of Hate: A Journey Among the
Extreme Right/
_______________________________________________
Mellon Myers Undegraduate Fellowship Program at Macalester (http://macmmuf.org)
[email protected]
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html
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