That’s right.  Brandeis’s Great Place is the very spot the Board of Trustees wanted to get rid of.  And how many frickin’ buildings does Carl Shapiro have to buy before he gets his own Great Place?

Waltham is actually very well represented on the list; in addition to the Rose, four other Waltham sites earned recognition.  They are:

• Gore Place — The “Monticello of the North”, once home to former Massachusetts Governor Christopher Gore and currently hosting an active farm.
• Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation — Located in what were the engine and boiler rooms of Francis Cabot Lowell’s textile factory, which was named the fourth most important development to shape America by Life magazine in 1976.
• The Robert Treat Paine Estate — Also known as Stonehurst, a house designed by famous architects Henry Hobson Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted that serves as one of the earliest examples of modern architecture.
• The Lyman Estate — Built in 1793 by a Boston merchant, now includes a greenhouse complex that contains exotic plants from around the world.

I’ve often heard that the typical Brandeis student doesn’t have much connection to the Waltham community (the awesome work of the Waltham Group and Clubs in Service program notwithstanding).  I know I don’t; I’ve hardly seen any of Waltham besides the BranVan route.  So I’m going to take this as an opportunity to get acquainted with some of the local history and culture.  Over the next semester, I want to arrange trips to see each of our five honorees (including a walk-through of the Rose), and I hope anyone who’s interested will join me.  Each site is open to the public (a condition of being named on the list), and each is less than three-and-a-half miles from the Brandeis campus — we’ll make them bike trips.

If anyone has any other great ideas for exploring Waltham, share them in the comments.  If you want to help plan these trips, or just want to know when they’re scheduled, send me an e-mail at athu...@brandeis.edu.

In response another facebook event, ONE MILLION STRONG AGAINST KILL A JEW DAY, was created by facebook users who found the event to be offensive.  The latter page asks users to demand facebook take down the event by clicking on facebook’s “report event” option, under which a “direct call for violence” is one of the choices that can be selected.   

While I agree that the material is offensive, I searched “hate jews” under other facebook pages and found many similar groups and events. One of the most populat ones is called I Hate Israel and Jews, and has 243 members. However, I wasn’t invited to any groups or events against this page, which has been around for at least a month, whereas the Kill Jews event, which has a mere 52 members attending, already has an event demanding its removal.

(In addition, it is worth noting that the event against the Killing of Jews (the anti-anti-Semitic one) has a staggering 10, 374 confirmed guests.)

So, what is the difference between the event urging people to Kill Jews and the I Hate Jews and Israel? From a legal perspective they are both expressing a matter of opinion, people exercising their freedom of speech. However, the second one could be seen as “inciting violence”, encouraging people to take action against Jews…but is it really doing that? It’s all in the event’s title, but the page itself doesn’t contain information about plans to commit violence, so does it even live up to its hype? I personally don’t see it as dangerous, but I definitely understand why it would offend people and why it’s scary to have sites like that exist. I guess my question is whether there really is a difference between the Kill Jews event and the Hate Jews group. As of now, facebook has removed neither of them, but as more and more people report the sites as offensive and dangerous material, will another decision be made?

Archie Comics, which has been around since 1941, features a group of typical, all-American, “average” teenagers growing up somewhere in the midwest. Archie featured an all-caucasian cast until the 1970′s, when Chuck Clayton, and African American, was introduced. He is now a regular member of the group. His girlfriend Nancy Woods is also African-American, and the two have never been depicted dating outside of their race.

Frankie Valdez, who is Puerto Rican, and his girlfriend Maria Rodriguez, who is Hispanic, only dated each other, in the same vein of that of Chuck and Nancy. Ginger Lopez, a Spanish-American teen, was introduced in the early 2000′s, and Tomoko Yoshida, a Japanese exchange student came in the 2000′s. Raj Patel, who is of Indian descent and the newest minority character, entered the scene in 2007. Now, they will greet Kevin, the first openly-gay character to join the crew, in the upcoming September issue of Veronica, #202.

There exist some minor characters of diverse backgrounds as well, most notably Anita Chavita, who was brought in for a short period ib the 1990s, and who was African-American and paraplegic. According to an article on Wapedia,

“Rather than handling her disabilities naturally, Anita kept bringing them to the surface with comments like “my legs may not work, but at least my brain does”. Ultimately she was jettisoned due to lack of reader interest. However, she is worthy of note because she was a love interest for both Jughead Jones and Dilton Doiley, making her the first instance, in an Archie comic, of interracial romance.”

I’m glad for these additions, although it is always difficult for a series to introduce a minority without making the character into the “token black guy” or the equivalent. However, just think about the fact that kids all across the world read Archie, and hopefully they will embrace people of all different sexual orientations and ethnicities due to these additions!

The wealth gap between white and African-American families increased more than four times between 1984-2007, and middle-income white households now own far more wealth than high-income African Americans, according to an analysis released by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University….

Notably, IASP’s analysis found that by 2007, the average middle-income white household had accumulated $74,000 in wealth, an increase of $55,000 over the 23-year period, while the average high-income African-American family owned $18,000, a drop of $7,000. That resulted in a wealth gap of $56,000 for an African-American family that earned more than $50,000 in 1984 compared to a white family earning about $30,000 that same year.

These results are both shocking and disturbing in today’s day and age, when we have an African-American president and laws on the books supposedly protecting against racism in the workforce, and something has to be done to correct the flaws in the system which are allowing this gap to increase.

Those figures, IASP said, make it clear that higher income alone will not lead to increased wealth, security and economic mobility for African Americans. Consumers of color face a gauntlet of barriers — in credit, housing and taxes — that dramatically reduce the chances of economic mobility, it said.

The institute came to the conclusion that the government has to take action to correct this problem through large-scale efforts to reform the obstacles facing African-Americans in economic mobility, especially reforming the credit and loaning systems. 

“The data suggests we need renewed attention to public policies that provide real opportunities for advancement by reducing barriers to mobility inherent in our tax system and increasing transparency, regulation and access in our housing and credit markets,” said Laura Sullivan, another co-author.

How do you think our government can solve these problems?

This weekend was my first Springfest experience at Brandeis. It was really fun and beautiful, and very interactive.

But, as I am not an artist, I don’t get the opportunity to see student art very often during the school year. I do go to coffee houses, and I was impressed by the very cool cactus sculptures in the SCC earlier this semester. But can’t we have more? It would be great to have different art projects on display all over campus all year round.

Part of the reason Springfest/Festival of the Arts was so empowering for me was the general feeling of creativity that surrounded it, and I think Brandeis has the potential to promote this inspirational environment all the time. This weekend was great, but can we set up a stage on Chapel’s Field and have student music groups perform on some weekend when it’s not too cold? Or, could we put more visual art on display? Couldn’t we have a cappella in the SCC in the afternoons sometimes, or a surprise skit in the Usdan in the middle of the lunchtime rush?

Springfest is an awesome tradition, and I really enjoyed it. But maybe we can incorporate the art that it celebrates into the everyday Brandeis experience.

Pesach break is only in its nascent stages, but Brandeis is already pretty empty. Don’t be mad but it is. Or perhaps I was just in the wrong place. I walked from the quad called East to the dining hall called Sherman and it was a little eerie. I did not encounter a soul until I arrived in the room for dining. On my way out the whole top floor of the building was abandoned and all the lights were off. It was as dark as a darkroom, even though it was in fact a dark lobby.

Walking through Shapiro: the Campus Center, I encounter a vast emptiness that reminded me of my life. All I could see on the horizon were empty chairs and empty Shapiro Campus Center Libraries and empty Great Lawns. It was quite emblematic of how Brandeis fills me with joy, but when it is gone that filling will leave me wandering and empty.

Brandeis is not a place or professors, it is actually the people, and the students. We Brandeisians of this time period have each other all in one place right now. We can come back and stuff but there will be all these new jacks fucking up all our stuffz. There would be buildings but it would not be the same. One time in the movie Annie Hall, someone mentions Brandeis University. Well now I go there, and I also feel things there too, you know? And it is wild. Sometimes people read about Brandeis in a college catalog, and they read the name and stuff. It is weird that there are thousands of people at this college, but people are don’t understand the vast complexity of relationships and experiences there. There are a lot of us at Brandeis and each one of us is precious.

So like I guess that begs the question who is doing all the rape, war genocide, etc? IDK my bff Jill. We are all kind, we are all nice, and we do bad things sometimes, but it is because we are passionate.

However I think that society’s greatest trial is turning that passion to good, not bad.  This is entirely general and therefor not true.  But what is wrong with typing things?  What is the deal with censoring yourself just because it is not interesting?  You are stifling your inner spirit to please others.  It is good to navigate into what is good socially for other people, but always remember your inner spirit.

It’s a pamphlet entitled: The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Antisemitism Part of All of Our Movements by April Rosenblum. The pamphlet is 32 pages long, but it’s an easy and fast read that I really think is worth it. Myself I am a left-wing student of Jewish History and have found this pamphlet highly informative, interesting and useful.

The right wing frequently likes to claim that opposition to Zionism and opposition to Israel’s policies is simply anti-Semitism in disguise. For those of us who are critics of Israel and are active Jews this can be very frustrating. Also frustrating however is when we attend demonstrations that are mostly ideologically in line with our views, only to find ourselves intimated by some real anti-Semitism. We dare not challenge it, lest we be accused of being like those right-wingers who simply paint everyone with that broad brush.

A lot of the problem lies in the fact that people assume all forms of oppression look somewhat alike. Anyone can clearly see that Jews in America have quite a lot of privilege. Most of us are white and upper-middle class. We are overrepresented, proportionally speaking, in politics, business, media, and other fields that have significant impact on society. If we try to compare the experience of Jews in America to blacks in America, it is quite clear who has more privilege in most circumstances.

But not all oppression works the same; oppression against blacks clearly works to deny privilege and power to blacks, but oppression against Jews relies on the fact that Jews have power and privilege in society. Throughout European history, the Jews have been attacked for having “too much power.” To be able to point at that fact that Jews have power in society does not disprove the existence of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it proves that anti-Semitism has the potential to be just as alive and well as ever.

For me, the most important point to take away from this pamphlet is the fact that the ruling class uses anti-Semitism as a shield. They use it as a tool to misdirect the working class. This was true all over Europe for centuries. In medieval Poland, there were no such things as citizens, everyone, Jewish and non-Jewish were subjects of the szlachta, or noble class. The non-Jews were used as peasants, while the Jews were assigned to roles like tax collecting, rent collecting, toll collecting, money lending, inn keeping, and other such occupations. To the peasants, who probably never saw the nobles who ruled them ever in their lives – Jews were the face of power. It is not too surprising then that for hundreds of years Poles believed Jews had too much power in Poland – even in the post-Holocaust era when there were hardly any Jews at all! Even today in Poland, figurines and paintings of Jews counting money or holding moneybags are quite popular – they’re sold as good luck charms.

We must remember that many pogroms so distinctly remembered in Jewish History were actually peasant uprisings. Peasants, fed up with their situation, taking their anger out on the visible face of power, rather than the real oppressors. In that sense, anti-Semitism worked, it stopped people from overthrowing the ruling classes by channeling their anger onto someone else.

Anti-Semitism should serve as a reminder to everyone on the left that it is too easy for us to make enemies with people we really should be in solidarity with. We see other manifestations of this phenomenon in different forms today in America – poor white people are pitted against poor black people who are pitted against Latinos and gays. In Israel-Palestine we see this too – we see two peoples, both victims of capitalist oppression locked in conflict. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism: these are all simply ways to keep people from really seeing what is causing their problems (hint: its capitalism) and then uniting in solidarity to fix it.

Anyway, this pamphlet has a lot of information and a lot of ideas and tips about how leftists should deal with the question of anti-Semitism. A must read for all leftists.

In peace,
Phil LaCombe (’10)