Dear Fellow Teachers,
 
This week, I’m heading to NCTE, the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. (#NCTE19 is in Baltimore, this year, so send your local eating and touristing recommendations.)
 
One of my presentations at NCTE will share some research on what happens when teachers write. I plan on discussing the top two or three themes that came out of my research. I thought I’d use my blog to post the full top ten I worked with, for anyone who’s interested. I’m hoping it will spark some discussion, so please comment at the bottom of this post.

Best,
Eve

What the heck. If I'm going to move my blog over here, I may as well include the feather in my cap. When I was notified (by email!) that I'd won a Pushcart, I thought one of my students was playing a trick on me. I hadn't even known I'd been nominated.

Published in The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2010
Reprinted in 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses

My father sits at the edge of his bed, insisting on his shiny concert shoes. Their lack of traction on a polished floor is treacherous for a man who can no longer stand up on his own, a man who has seized and used every moment of living left to him. But the shoes are not negotiable, nor are the button-down shirt or the pants that need to be safety pinned to secure them to his wasted frame. In an hour or so, my father will find the weight of his clothes unbearable. In a few hours, my father will be dead. But first there is a final concert to play, and there is the proper attire in which to play it. I watch as my mother helps my father get into his clothing for the last time.

Earlier in the day, I held my father’s mottled hand, the baggy skin flaking away, but the grip still sturdy from a lifetime of scaling the strings of his viola. For much of his career, my father was the assistant principal violist of the New York Philharmonic. “You have to know when he’s going to start,” my father whispered from his pillow. He took a noisy, shallow breath in, and released a long, rattling exhale. “You have to know when he wants you to play the beats.”

Well, of course! I thought. Not a black-hooded hooded figure with a scythe, but a conductor with a baton. “You know when to play the beats, Dad-ling,” I said gently, though I hadn’t been a gentle daughter.

“But you don’t!” he said, with more strength than I thought he had left. He hadn’t been a gentle father.

“Well, I’m not the musician,” I said evenly.

He took several percussive but unhurried breaths. “It’s deceptive. It begins with a rest.”

“Oh. A rest.” I pronounced the word lingeringly, softly. “That sounds like a good

​Re: Brief Encounters with White Men ​by Claudia Rankine, NYT magazine, 7/21/19
 
Dear Ms. Rankine,

I don’t have enough fingers to count the diversity events I’ve participated in over the last decade where a White person, struggling to understand their privilege says, “But I grew up dirt poor,” or “But I’m a wheelchair-user,” or “But I’m gay.” The word “privilege” in White Privilege is so easy to conflate with social privilege, economic privilege and other forms of benefits and opportunities. The word “privilege” often puts one more hurdle in the way of White people understanding our White Privilege. I agree with you that the term “White Dominance” might have been a better choice than “White Privilege” for engaging White people in our critical examination--and self-examination--of systemic racism in this country.

In nearly every diversity event I’ve attended, facilitators anticipate the issue of White people who don’t feel privileged. They frequently use as an example Italians or sometimes Irish to address pushback from White Ethnics to acknowledging and understanding our White Privilege. “Your ancestors might have been impoverished, but you still…” or “They may have fled famine…” they begin. But in exactly zero diversity events I’ve attended has any facilitator ever used Jews as an example. Several articles I read recently, while attending a conference at Teachers College, Columbia University on equity, race and pedagogical practices, similarly used examples of Irish, Italians and Slavs, but skipped the Jews. And yet White Ethnic pushback at the events I’ve attended is nearly always from people who, like me, are Jewish. I’ve heard an Irish person cite their White Ethnicity once in a diversity session, while struggling to understand White Privilege. And I haven’t heard a word about it from an Italian.

Not so we Jews. As victims of White Supremacy and hate crimes ourselves, more newly White in this country than many other White Ethnics, Jews who are new to doing work on race and equity are sometimes the folks who have the hardest time understanding that we are both marginalized and reviled, and fully possessed of White Privilege. That they’re not mutually exclusive. And that they intertwine in complex ways.

Blacks and Jews in this country have a complicated history. No more so than now, when being an American Jew is dangerously and erroneously conflated with the Israeli government’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and Israeli PoCs (there, I said it), and when Trump and company use Jews as a battle tool for their reactionary positions without our participation. It feels like we are now as hated by some on the left as we’ve long been by the extremist right. Yet Black universities gave sanctuary and jobs to Jewish professors escaping the Holocaust. We founded the NAACP together. We marched together in Selma. Our allyship has deep roots. But that allyship deteriorates further, each time we leave the messy relationship in the closet.

Every time I hear facilitators talking about Italians, or read scholars on White Supremacy citing the same, I find myself thinking, “Oh, they’re talking about Jews again, but are afraid to name it.”

Why? Are we too much of hotbutton topic? Do we hijack the podium too often? (Talking is in our blood.) Is the subject too incendiary? Just too complicated? It certainly is that. Various politicians and public intellectuals of color have recently cited fear of reprisal from American Jews and their allies for their silence on Israeli foreign policy. But leaving Jews out of the discussion on White Ethnicity is—dare I coopt this term?—a kind of fragility.

I get it it, though. I used to speak up about the particular issues of my dual identity as a Jew and a White. These days, when doing work on race, I often, like you, don’t mention it at all. I’m afraid to. Afraid of being seen as the Jew. Afraid of muddying the waters in an acute discussion. And it makes me ashamed. And less of an ally. I’m remembering a professional development session at my school, where I listened to a White-Jewish colleague protest that he was not from a privileged group. And I listened to the facilitator respond by talking about Italians. And I said nothing.

Ms. Rankine, you are one of my literary luminaries. I’ve read work by you with students, and discussed work by you with friends and colleagues. You’re a stunning writer. And brilliant. And deeply important.

So it was with a certain element of disappointment that I read your essential piece. Published in a periodical read by some of the same White guys who skip you in the airport line. And some of the same White friends of mine, authentically trying to look within, who still speak of being “color blind.” And I got to the line asking, “How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white?” and then, quoting Matthew Frye Jacobson, “…Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.” Hebrew? I’m not Hebrew. And I thought, “Et tu, Claudia Rankine?”

I have a shameful confession to make. When Jews were murdered at The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, I was grieved and outraged, like so many people across racial and ethnic and socio-political lines. I tabled my day’s lesson plan for my 7th grade ELA classes, and worked with the Social Studies teacher to quickly create an interactive, culturally responsive lesson on hate crimes. I was deeply grateful that I work in a field where I had a productive outlet for my anger and fear, and where I like to think I make a difference. But there was a little part of me—and I’ve never said this to anyone before—that thought, “Oh, good. Now the country will actually believe that we are victims of White Supremacists, too.”

Because of our White Privilege, we aren’t afraid, when we leave the house, of being stopped and frisked, stopped and shot. Unlike you, we can choose to reveal our identities or not. Step into the exhausting Work or step out. That’s why we had to wear yellow stars on our clothing. To identify ourselves. That’s why most of the hate crimes against us take the form of graffitied swastikas, instead of injury to our bodies. (The exception being observant Jews in religious dress.) But our role in The Work is informed by our hyphenated identities.

I’d like to end this letter by quoting the last lines of your article. Because you said it better than I possibly can. “I was pleased that he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation—random, ordinary, exhausting and full of a shared longing to exist in less segregated spaces.”

​When discussing White Ethnicity in Whiteness work, please let’s not erase the Jews.
 
Yours in Allyship,
Eve Becker

Painting: The Beggar of Prachatice by Conrad Felixmüller (1924)

P.S. Please read Greg Thrasher's comment, below. I don't know the guy, or how he found this post, but he calls me out for using Jew to mean White, American Jew. And he's right--that's exactly what I did. I stand corrected for normalizing whiteness. Most Jews are white, with the issues of hyphenated identity I discussed above. But we are, as he notes, a diaspora community and come in different shades and nationalities. I still have work to do and always will. 

Teacher Appreciation​

Teacher appreciation week
With donuts
Can’t thank you
Enough
A roost of confidence
A welcoming pheasance
In the early warning
When you put your chairs
In a circle
Everything you touch
You change.
 
You open the shades
Sunshine shimmies in
 
The child in the clock
Talks
For the burst time
Moved
By a book that you
Read out cloud.
My own mother, he says
Gave me away
In the dropsicle
And
 
And
 
You speck in
Half a screp
Because he can’t
Finish
 
But you can’t
Fuse the word
Abandoned
A slice of a knife
In a stace with
His peers
 
So you say
The sense
Of being left.
 
(You think bereft.)
 
There’s a hot of love in this kreese
But the writer
Feels
And you feel
Left.
 
Yes
He says.
 
His classmates
Nod. Hold
The moment
Before
Venturing and adventuring
Breaking and entering.
 
At the end of the day
The custodians
Put the desks
In rows
That never were
 
Pull the shades down.
As if overnight
Someone from a laboring building
Might sprook into your classroom
And speal some knowledge
Or your weft
Or donuts
 
On off hours.