Beacon Broadside

recent posts

about

  • Observation Post:Reflections on the Fall of the Berlin Wall

    By Philip C. Winslow

    Berlin Wall from the West side on November 7, 1989 (All photos by Philip C. Winslow)

    Berlin Wall from the West side on November 7, 1989 (All photos by Philip C. Winslow)

    Between 2009 and 2011, journalist Philip Winslow offered us a dozen of his insightful “Observation Posts,” pieces which opened our eyes to international issues with original reporting. Over a career that has spanned more than thirty years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean’s magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of two of our books: Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War. He has been living and working in Asia for several years. I’m delighted to welcome him back to Beacon Broadside with this remarkable remembrance of one of the most significant events of the past decades.

    —Helene Atwan

    Reporters will recall few “news conferences” during their careers that yielded anything like exciting news. The ritualistic event commonly is staged to drum up publicity for one of these: a revelation everyone already knows (the latest iPhone); denial of wrongdoing (desperate celeb); confession of wrongdoing with weepy apology (ditto); or imminent government crackdown on something or other.

    The short-notice summons to reporters by the rump government of the German Democratic Republic on the evening of November 9, 1989 was not mistaken for one of those. As dull as GDR routine news conferences could be, no Berlin-based correspondent was going to skip this one. But no one I knew predicted the drama that was about to unfold.

    (more…)

  • Friday Reads: The Latest Paperbacks from Beacon Press

    FallPB

    Here in Boston, the air’s been taking on the distinct chill of winter. Which is to say that reading season is coming into full swing. And since nothing beats getting cozy and having some quality time with a new paperback, we put together a list of seven recent releases that you can lose yourself in, forgetting all about the nipping wind, the coming snow, or the long, slow wait for spring…

    (more…)

  • Between Nothing & Infinity: Poland’s Evolving Jewish Remembrance

    By Louise Steinman

     

    Visitors discover an exhibition in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw. The museum officially opened last week.

    I remember the confusion I felt when I visited my family’s town, Radomsko, on my first trip to Poland in the fall of 2000. What was I looking for? I had no idea. I didn’t know anybody there. My relationship to the town, where my mother’s family had lived for over a hundred years, had been obscured by time, emigration, and trauma.

    In the Radomsko Regional Museum, located in the lovely historic town hall, I accompanied a guide past collections of pottery shards from archeological digs, displays of nineteenth-century butter churns, exhibits of roof thatching and farm implements.

    There were photos of Radomsko citizens deported to Siberia under Russian rule, infantry helmets from the First World War, and gruesome pictures of Polish partisans from the town, standing in front of pits before their execution by German soldiers. Where was any mention of the town’s Jewish citizens, nearly 55% of the town before World War II, almost all of whom perished under the German occupation?

    (more…)

  • Why Billionaires Are Bad for Democracy

    By Linda McQuaig & Neil Brooks

     

    NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 05: Activists hold a protest near the Manhattan apartment of billionaire and Republican financier David Koch

    Today is Election Day and, whatever our political affiliation, we can be sure that big money players with deep pockets will play a large part in the outcome. Which is exactly how they want it. Between 1980 and 2008, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans grew by a meager 1 percent compared to a whopping 403 percent for the top .01 percent. In an excerpt adapted from their 2012 book, Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality, Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks explore the real origins of the Tea Party’s “grassroots” movement, and the secret world of the Koch brothers’ conservative money machine fueling America’s escalating inequality.

    Barely a month after Barack Obama had been sworn in as the forty-fourth U.S. president, riding a wave of immense popular support with his “Yes, we can” rallying cry echoing around the country and the world, a voice seemed to appear from nowhere saying, “No, actually you can’t.” Ostensibly, it came first from Rick Santelli, a relatively obscure investment manager-turned-commentator on CNBC, who denounced Obama’s plans to help struggling American homeowners as “promoting bad behavior.” In a wide-ranging rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, Santelli said, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.” Within hours, a protest movement had swung into action on the Internet, talk radio, and cable TV, and rallies were scheduled across the country for the following week.

    To Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, journalists who had written for an expatriate newspaper based in Moscow, there was something fishy about the whole affair. “As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it.” Ames and Levine noted that, only hours after Santelli’s rant, a previously inactive website called ChicagoTeaParty.com, which had been registered six months earlier by a right-wing activist, sprung to life, declaring itself the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. Whether or not Santelli was part of deliberate plan to launch the Tea Party—he denies that he was—Ames and Levine quickly pointed out what other journalists have later confirmed: that the apparently spontaneous outburst of disaffected Americans was greatly helped along by an organized and sophisticated campaign ultimately funded by two of America’s richest men, Charles and David Koch. In many ways, the emergence of the Tea Party as a potent force in American politics can be seen as the culmination of almost four decades of behind-the-scenes effort on the part of the billionaire brothers.

    (more…)

  • Viktor Frankl: A Life Illuminated

    Frankl in 1945

    Viktor Frankl in 1945

    When Francine and David Wheeler lost their son Ben in the Sandy Hook tragedy nearly two years ago, one book they turned to for guidance was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Speaking with Oprah Winfrey last year, David Wheeler said he connected with Frankl’s message because “so much of what he writes resonates with me . . . . Because man’s salvation—and he means that not only in the religious sense, but actual survival—is found in and through love.” The Wheelers were able to take that spirit of love, and turn it into force that nurtured them through immense grief. It is a story as powerful as it is familiar to followers of Frankl’s teachings.

    Fifty-five years after the original US publication of Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl’s timeless wisdom has helped generations of readers cope with hardship and overcome adversity, and his life-affirming vision continues to resonate today. In 1991, the book was listed by the Library of Congress as one of the top ten most influential books in the US, while more recently, Amazon listed it as one of its 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime. Writing in The Atlantic, Emily Esfahani Smith notes that Frankl, an Austrian Jew who survived a prolonged ordeal in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, devised wisdom there, “in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, [that] is just as relevant now as it was then.”

    (more…)

  • Remembering Mayor Menino: Boston’s First Italian American Mayor

    By Stephen Puleo

    Boston’s first Italian American mayor, Thomas M. Menino, addresses a crowd at Faneuil Hall. (Courtesy of Pam Donnaruma and the Post-Gazette)

    Boston’s first Italian American mayor, Thomas M. Menino, addresses a crowd at Faneuil Hall.
    (Courtesy of Pam Donnaruma and the Post-Gazette)

    It was with great sadness that we received the news today of Mayor Tom Menino’s passing. An enormously popular public servant, Menino was not only Boston’s first Italian American mayor but would become its longest-serving mayor in history. To remember him, we’d like to present the following passage from The Boston Italians, Stephen Puleo’s tribute to the vibrant Italian American citizens of Boston who, like Menino, transformed the city around them. First published in 2007, some of Puleo’s facts might seem dated, even poignant in hindsight, but we think it captures the spirit of Mayor Menino, a man who ushered Boston from the troubles of the last century and into the promise of the new millenium.

    An enormous mural in Mayor Tom Menino’s outer office virtually covers one wall and beckons visitors to study its details. Painted by Menino’s cousin, the scene depicts the mayor’s grandfather sitting in his Italian village, awaiting passage to America. Across a wide body of water that dominates the painting is the skyline of an American city, its shores a two-week voyage away in real life but just a few inches away on the canvas. The mayor describes the painting with pride; it is, he says, the beginning of the Menino story in the United States. Without Thomas Menino’s monumental decision to leave Grottaminarda, Avellino, and travel to a strange country, his grandson would never have had an opportunity to make his own special history in Boston. Thomas Menino settled in Boston’s Hyde Park section, at the far western corner of the city, a neighborhood his grandson still cherishes and lives in today, and from which he built the political base that has enabled him to lead the city for more than a dozen years.

    (more…)

  • A Judaism That Is Special, Not Chosen

    By Alan Wolfe

    "Welcome to the land of freedom" from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, July 2, 1887, pp. 324-325

    “Welcome to the land of freedom” from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 2, 1887, pp. 324-325

    The following article is excerpted from Alan Wolfe’s new book At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews, available now wherever books are sold.

    One thing I had noticed about the academic study of religion is that scholars invariably study their own. I do not just mean that Mormons write books about Mormons or Catholics about Catholics. It goes deeper than that: mainline Protestants typically observe people much like themselves, as do Orthodox Jews. My membership in none of the above, it turned out, had given me something of an academic advantage. I may have lacked the insights that come from lifelong involvement with one particular faith. But in return I was widely viewed as someone writing about religion with no particular axe to grind. When a referee was needed, there I was. Those I studied generally treated me as an outsider but also as one making a special effort to understand them. Far from feeling excluded from their world, I felt, if anything, a bit wary about the warm embrace they offered.

    Yet the fact that I had spent so much time among deeply religious Christians made me increasingly aware of two ways in which my differences with them were insurmountable: I was Jewish by background and nonreligious by conviction. For me, the two had always been intertwined. My parents were not themselves religious, nor for that matter strongly committed to any ideology. (I recall my father telling me that when he grew up, everyone he knew was either a socialist, a communist, or a Zionist, but that he had managed to avoid all such identification.) Nonetheless my parents felt Jewish enough to arrange a bar mitzvah for me, and so without much conviction on their part or mine, I did my religious duty at the age of thirteen. That has pretty much been it. I do at times read the Old Testament—the prophets in particular appeal to me—but I cannot say that the angry God pictured therein is one I find especially attractive. It is not just that I have a hard time envisioning God creating the world and then meddling with it when we human beings displease him. The religious side of Judaism is as much about practice as it is about belief, and even in this realm I feel no urge to honor the tradition by following rules that at best seem arbitrary and at worst absurd. Although I know my share of rabbis, and even though I admire their learning and commitments to social justice, I cannot bring myself to regularly attend the synagogues of any of American Judaism’s major branches. The only times I enter a shul are when I am invited to speak in one. I study religion but do not practice it, not even the one in which I was ostensibly raised.

    (more…)

  • Shelf Promotion: Trading Commerce for Art

    By Christine Byl

    Christine Byl reading from Dirt Work late last year, photo courtesy Mollie Foster

    Christine Byl reading from Dirt Work late last year, photo courtesy Mollie Foster

    Near top the list of my greatest riches is the gang of artists I call friends: poets and painters, musicians and quilters, collagists and photographers. Our conversations, across medium and genre, stimulate me to consider the world at angles skew to my default impulses, and push my work to places I would not know how to take it on my own. We talk about books we’ve read—the new or the old, the overrated, the flat-out brilliant—and music we’ve rediscovered (’80s REM, anyone?) We talk about art that makes us wince, shiver, flounce or rage. We talk about the process of making, and our tools (words, paint, sound) and the tasks the tools are applied to—elegy, play, witness, and praise.

    Over the past year or so, one conversational theme has recurred among us more than any other, rivaling even the old standbys, “Balancing Procrastination and Discipline” & “Does Art Really Matter?” Over beers, walking the dog and in stolen asides at conferences, we return again and again to this: How to negotiate the terrain that up-thrusts when art abuts commerce? We vent and bemoan how it seems you can’t be a writer any more without also being a spokesperson. We worry that we spend too much or not enough time shepherding work through the world. Even as we celebrate each other’s external triumphs—this prize, that grant, a fundraiser goal met, a book contract signed—we admit, in bit-off sentences, to a vague internal shame that underlies moments when a thing we make becomes a thing to buy. Because a thing to buy is necessarily a thing someone must sell. And more and more, we’re told, that someone is us.

    (more…)

  • Whitey Bulger, Boston Busing, and Southie’s Lost Generation

    By Michael Patrick MacDonald

     

    BOSTON, MA September 12, 1974: A large crowd gathers in South Boston's Columbus Park to protest federal court-ordered busing of black students to all-white neighborhood schools. A prominent sign at right reads 'Whites Have Rights' while militant anti-busing members of the 'South Boston Information Center'—an anti-busing organization—are visible wearing white caps among the crowd.

    This essay originally appeared on SchusterInstituteInvestigations.org.

    Busing was the best thing that ever happened to Whitey Bulger.

    In the years leading up to the 1974 busing plan, my neighborhood—South Boston—was perceived as the bastion of white supremacy and privilege in Boston. After all, some of the city’s most powerful politicians were from South Boston, and the most egregious symbol of white supremacy in Boston, school committee member (later city councilor) Louise Day Hicks, was a resident of the affluent and beautiful shoreline of South Boston’s City Point. Although the reasoning behind the State Board of Education’s busing plan will forever remain a mystery, I have had to presume that this was the motivation for a plan that—disastrously—included busing students from predominantly black Roxbury to Irish-American South Boston and vice versa, even though both groups were desperately poor with desperately underfunded schools.

    (more…)

  • How to Live a Lie in Mercury, Pennsylvania

    By Amy Jo Burns

    Images: "White County Beauty Queen..." by Al Stephenson (Wikimedia Commons) & "Dancing Lights" by Onceuponatime13 (DeviantART)

    Excerpted from Cinderland

    As if Mercury itself somehow knew how badly I wanted out, Thursday night of Spirit Week was the last town fire I ever took part in. At dusk, the homecoming amoeba prepared to parade through town. Its course had already been set, and it was an expanded version of the path all the students took the day of the explosion at the McCandless car dealership: starting at the elementary school and ending at the high school where a homecoming bonfire waited to be lit.

    In the elementary school parking lot, someone handed me a bucket of candy, and I had to pull my hands out from the cuffs of my sweater to hold it. The air was getting colder now. Inside the bucket, I found peppermints, Smarties, and butterscotch in golden cellophane, all the hard candy flavors I used to collect as a child when I’d stood on the side of the road, watching the floats as they passed by and dreaming of the day when I would get my turn.

    (more…)