July 13, 2022

As an adolescent I loved everything American. I listened to American Rock and Roll; Elvis, Dion, Buddy Holly, Neil Sedaka and Leslie Gore. I loved the Motown music by the Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes and Mary Wells. The best movies came from the U.S.A. Think of “Casablanca”, “Rebel Without a Cause”, “Twelve Angry Men”, “The Ten Commandments”, or “Blackboard Jungle”. I grew up watching American TV. Ed Sullivan, Bonanza, Bugs Bunny, The Dick Van Dyke Show and I love Lucy were some of my favourite programs.  I was fascinated with American automobiles from the 1950’s and 60’s with their two-tone paint, large chrome grills and wide white wall tires.

My parents often took me to Plattsburgh, New York, a lazy little U.S. border town on the shore of Lake Champlain, and about an hour’s drive from my home in Montréal. We would go to Grand Union for groceries. Well just the cereal aisle alone was enough to make a young boy cry with joy. There were so many different brands and boxes that I had only seen on Saturday morning cartoon shows, Trix, Kix, Coco Puffs and so many more. My mother always bought a jar of U-Bet chocolate syrup with a soda fountain pump, a product called Twist that was a mixture of peanut butter and jelly in a single container, those little sandwiched Nabisco crackers made with “cheese” and peanut butter, and these crazy drinking straws that had some kind of powder in them that would magically turn regular milk to chocolate milk.

When I was twelve years old, my dad took me to New York City. We stayed at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. We went to the Carnegie Deli where I had my first Pastrami sandwich, the size of a compact car. We went to the Empire State building, Macy’s department store, and the Central Park Zoo. We had lunch at the Automat and dinner at the once famous Lindy’s. Between the sites, the sounds and the food, I was overwhelmed with awe from this remarkable city.

My love of all things American extended into my adult life. I often thought of moving to Florida or Vermont and opening a small business there. Many of my friends moved to New York, California, Texas or Florida and they all seemed to be successful and content with their new lives.

I viewed the United States with rose-tinted glasses. I understood that people of color were often victims of prejudice and hate. I didn’t really understand the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, especially having met several “draft-dodgers” who escaped to Canada. As I grew up, I started to notice differences between our two countries that weighed in favour of my own nation.

Let us all work together, Americans and Canadians, to find the right balance between unbridled personal freedom and the safety, protection and the right to a peaceful existence for all our citizens.

Why does the “richest country on earth” not have universal medicine? Why is gun ownership such an important right? Why are there so many mass shootings at schools, universities and shopping malls? Why are American colleges so expensive? How do injured individuals end up suing and winning enormous sums of money, when it is their own negligence that caused them to be hurt in the first place? Why are public schools so terrible, downtowns so run down and drug overdoses so common? And lastly, who made the President of the United States the “leader of the free world”?

I am not sure when it happened, probably a gradual degradation of society brought to fruition by a combination of events, tragedies and scandals. The British music invasion, the Vietnam War, the gradual take-over of the American car market by Japanese imports, the Watergate scandal, “reality” television, the Columbine shootings, police brutality aimed at African Americans, and finally, the election of a president whose actions and speeches served to divide, rather than unite this great country.

Today’s America is more hype than content. The rich get richer, while the homeless population continues to grow. A plan by a former president to introduce universal health care was rejected by many Americans and the final outcome was just a small slice of the original proposal. American values, especially for many of those who lean to the right, encompasses unlimited individual freedom with little regard for the effects on their fellow citizens. On the other side, left-leaning individuals tend to support a “woke” movement that scrutinizes every action and speech to ensure that no identifiable group is even slightly criticized regardless of the context.  The current “leader of the free world” appears to be asleep at the wheel.

I don’t want to be labelled as an individual who hates America. In fact I love to travel in the U.S. I have many close friends and family who live in America and who represent all sides of the political spectrum. It has saddened me to see the anger and hate that has been generated by both sides and propagated through biased news reporting and unverified social media platforms.

But most of all, I don’t want Americans messing with my own country. Recent protests in Canadian cities by citizens who were fed up with Canada’s harsher COVID-19 health restrictions were rumoured to be financed and supported by American right-wing groups. If this is in fact true, I urge Americans to please mind their own business.

No politician is perfect, neither are the policies and laws of most nations. Canada too, has its share of homelessness, random shootings, poverty and racism. While there is less flag waving and we tend to win fewer Olympic medals, we are still proud of our country. Canadian freedom to me balances individual liberties with communal limits. This means when the free actions of one group or individual are injurious to another, that activity cannot be boundless. No one really knew what COVID-19 could do. Canadian politicians decided to be more cautious, preventing citizens from taking part in group activities, shutting down some venues and invoking plans and incentives for getting most people vaccinated. It may take several years to evaluate whether or not these policies truly benefitted the population at large.

To see our beautiful capital of Ottawa taken over by a group of rebellious truck drivers and their supporters last winter made me both sad and angry. To a much smaller degree, it reminded me of the brazen attempt of some American citizens to invade their own seat of government on January 6, 2021. That’s an image I hope I never see in my country.

Both Canadians and Americans have a choice, the choice to elect a democratic government, to expect that their elected officials will make policies and laws that benefit society, to freely criticize these individuals when they disagree with these policies, and to vote them out or impeach them if they violate the public trust.

Let us all work together, Americans and Canadians, to find the right balance between unbridled personal freedom and the safety, protection and the right to a peaceful existence for all our citizens.

Paul J. Starr is a recently retired systems analyst who has lived his entire life in Montréal, Canada. On Sunday mornings he is “living the dream,” hosting a two-hour Internet radio show featuring music from the 50s and 60s called “Judy’s Diner.”

The following was delivered as a speech at Temple Beth Am’s annual gala on May 18.

How does one sum up the essence of two very strange years?

We started it at home.  We learned something new called “Zoom.” We struggled with technology in every aspect of our lives.  

There were elements of this pivot that were unquestionably positive, especially at first.  Many of us had never spent so much time at home.  We could stay in our pajamas all day. We wore sweats 24/7.  We baked bread. We watched Netflix. In the quest to stay isolated and therefore healthy, we discovered a new calm — never leaving our houses.

At Temple Beth Am, we made a very quick transition to remote access for services.  The job of synagogue president, pretty much from Sinai to the beginning of the pandemic, requires physical presence each week in services, to do announcements and give the B’nai Mitzvah gifts.

It was pretty darn seductive to do none of that, to wander vaguely from my bed to my couch on a Saturday morning, and passively watch the clergy lead and chant services for us, online.  And do nothing.  

But like most things seductive, or passive, it was also unsatisfying.  And, over time, increasingly unsettling.  

What does it mean to interact with community solely online?  In times of crisis, it is necessary, of course.  But over time, it’s lacking.  Missing something. And increasingly dystopian.

Early on, we understood that the unavoidable shift to remote access meant so much more to the course of our lives than a short-term solution to a pandemic emergency.  It raised fundamental questions not only about the role of synagogue in our life, but its intersection with the nature of home itself.  

Our synagogue leadership was deeply aware of the transformative nature of the moment.  So last August, at about the halfway mark of my term, we convened a one-day retreat to explore that question.  What is our essence — who are we?

It wasn’t a surprise what we came up with.  

Community. But what is that?  What does that mean?  In fact, across the synagogue world, that seems to be the $64,000 question.

These are days of generally declining synagogue membership, merging communities and lots of hand wringing in the Jewish press over the future of synagogues.  So at this, the end of my two-year term as president, I’ll offer my own observation in response to the big question: What does “community” mean? What does it mean to us, at Temple Beth Am?  What is the value of a traditional synagogue to a 21st century life?  

First, I’ll suggest to you what community isn’t. We’re told sometimes that what we really need to do to make synagogues thrive is to make them more fun.  Look — Las Vegas is fun. Baseball is fun.  Galas are fun.  But if fun is what we’re looking for, and we certainly do need lots of that, synagogues will rarely compete — no matter how many poker nights, movie nights or concerts we try to put on.  

We all — children and adults alike — need something far more fundamental and grounding than a simple good time.  We call that community. And synagogue life, at its best, provides it.  

Synagogues provide identity: We learn (no, we feel) how we, personally, fit vertically into a 2,000-year narrative that has brought us all the way from the Land of Israel right up to this day.  We learn how we fit horizontally into a people that spans the globe, belonging to a people that will welcome us into any similar synagogue tucked into every corner of the globe.  

That’s identity.

Synagogue life provides inspiration.  Through the repetitive practice of synagogue attendance, we cannot help but absorb the moral and ethical lessons that form the core of the Jewish story.  There are moments — whether as a child, a teen, or an adult — where something that the rabbi says in a sermon, or a passage from a book, or something a teacher says, strikes us in just the right way, and makes us feel something close to inspiration.

That’s worth the price of admission any Shabbat morning.

Synagogue life provides a break.  A pause.  We all say we crave a couple hours off the spinning wheel of life, every now and then.  Our tradition, somehow, fully anticipated that 21st century need two millennia ago. At 8 am on a Saturday I am never — ever — motivated to roll out of bed and pop on over for Shacharit.  But by 1 pm, I am almost always happy I did — and feeling spiritually refreshed as well.  Sometimes from a moment in the service, but also almost always from an interaction with a fellow congregant.

Synagogue life provides a break.  A pause.  We all say we crave a couple hours off the spinning wheel of life, every now and then.  Our tradition, somehow, fully anticipated that 21st century need two millennia ago. 

There’s more. Synagogue involvement elevates us to be our better selves. It supports us when we falter. As the parents of twins, we emblazoned on the benchers that we provided at Maya’s and Jonah’s B’nai Mitzvah: “Tovim Ha’Shnaim Min Ha’Echad. Ki im yi-folu haechad, yakim et ha-chaver.”  “Two are better than one. If they should fall, one can raise the other.” 

That, in a nutshell, is the tagline, if you will, that we tried to instill in our children about the wisdom of Jewish communal life.

Synagogue life is comfortably repetitive. It’s not flashy, and it’s decidedly unsexy in a Tik Toc digital age way.  And, to be totally honest, it takes work. For each member. It takes effort to build community, and the best way I found to do it was to get involved.  To serve on committees.  To lend expertise, whatever that might be.  

And we all need to be way, way better at welcoming all who wish to live this life, to find a meaningful way into it.  And to continue to do so across that increasingly divisive political line.

That’s all hard to market.  Sacrifice always is.

But if all goes right, and if you embrace that culture of service, you find a cocooning sense of belonging that is as fundamental to human satisfaction as food or drink.  It’s the opposite of the fun of Las Vegas. It’s about giving, not taking. What happens at shul doesn’t stay at shul.  In fact, if you’re lucky, it travels with you forever.  It becomes part of who you are, and defines you.  Shul attachment lends us a quiet contentment and satisfaction that stays with us, always.   

What happens at shul doesn’t stay at shul.  In fact, if you’re lucky, it travels with you forever.

And that, at the end of the day, was what felt so jarring, so unsettling, so dystopian about the atomized “homes” that we were forced to use as remote sanctuaries beginning in March 2020.  They provided comfort, but were devoid of the social color that community lends to our lives.  They ensured safety, but lacked the almost equally important unpredictable vagaries of human interaction.  This is the essence of the human experience and, for me, it gets me through the week.

There’s a reason that we all devote endless hours to the maintenance of our homes — doing the laundry, hassling with the finances, renovating rooms, and hosting guests.  Because it’s worth it.  It’s inconceivable not to have the refuge of a house.  It’s what it means to have a home.  

I think that’s the same reason that synagogue leaders spend the time they do on the maintenance of their communal home.  Because that’s what it is.  It’s fundamental to who we are. 

It’s home.

Stuart Tochner concluded his two-year term as president of Temple Beth Am on July 1.

In May of 2021, over 200 scholars of Jewish and Israel studies, many teaching at prestigious universities, signed a letter responding to Israel’s recent operation in the Gaza Strip. The statement decried Israel’s foundations of “settler colonialism” and “Jewish supremacy,” placed the vast majority of blame on Israel for conflict in the region, and then cautioned against labeling economic and academic boycotts of Israel “antisemitic.” 

Jarrod Tanny, Associate Professor of Jewish History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, argues that the statement was the antithesis of all that the academy is meant to stand for. The letter replaced scholarship with activism, he says. It failed to empirically characterize the realities of the Middle East. It also placed the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement  under the umbrella of “academic freedom,” what he calls another egregious mistake. As Professor Menachem Kellner, Chair of the Philosophy and Jewish Thought Department at Salem College, writes, “The concept of academic freedom is meant to enable academics to research and teach evidence-based truths in the fields in which they are competent. It is not meant to protect academics who introduce their personal politics into their research and teaching in order to browbeat their students and foment an atmosphere of prejudice and hate designed to silence rational inquiry.” 

But the controversial letter, signed by some of his friends and colleagues, was not the only incident that has unnerved Professor Tanny. 

Professor Tanny was once a member of the “Jewish Studies Activist Network” (JSAN), a community of Jewish academics opposed to the Trump Administration’s agenda and the rise of extremism in America. He became disillusioned when he alerted the group to a recent incident where a left-wing, anti-Israel organization harassed a group of Jews marching in an LGBT Pride Parade, only to have his concerns fall on deaf ears. Tanny hypothesizes that JSAN was unwilling to speak out because the antagonizers were not the “right kind of antisemite.” Some members claimed the anti-Israel organization was only “attacking Zionists, not Jews.”  

I reached out to Professor Tanny to discuss this persistent problem of anti-Zionist activism on college campuses, which seems to only get worse. A resolution to boycott Israel, a Jewish student being bullied, another effort to pull funding from Jewish organizations, have become regular occurences. There are occasional moments of reassurance when sensible faculty members do indeed confront antisemitic language circulating in their departments, but they are usually upstaged by Jewish professionals chastising Israel and failing to condemn antisemitism when it does not come from a white supremacist. 

“Many have pointed out the fact that anti-Zionist activism on campus is by and large faculty-driven,” Professor Tanny says. “Such activism requires the presence of a number of vocal, anti-Zionist professors to truly radicalize the student body.”

The social pressure to conform to Israel-hatred is not just a problem for Jewish students, but Jewish faculty as well. The pressure is so strong that many will either join the crusade to label Zionism racism to strengthen their progressive bona fides, or will at least become ambivalent to the issue, thinking it best not to place oneself in controversy.  

The social pressure to conform to Israel-hatred is not just a problem for Jewish students, but Jewish faculty as well.

“There are many of us (Jewish studies academics) who believe that the anti-Zionism being propagated on college campuses is a serious problem and that it’s leading to the marginalization of Jewish students. But the Jewish studies professors who may be ‘closeted Zionists’ … don’t want to speak out, if they are still expecting their career to advance. They are genuinely worried that their politics will be held against them. What if they submit an article to a journal, and among the peer reviewers are this cohort of radical anti-Zionist professors?”

We discussed the symbiotic relationship between anti-Zionism on the quad and anti-Zionism in the teacher’s lounge. Activists denouncing what some outrageously call Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinians feel emboldened by professors who are willing to, if not support their agitation outright, then at least justify it, especially if they are Jewish and can use their Jewishness as a shield against accusations of antisemitism.

These disturbing trends inspired Professor Tanny to launch the Jewish Studies Zionist Network (JSZN), a new initiative of scholars and educators in the field of Jewish studies who believe “that Zionism is a legitimate movement for the national self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland.” 

With over 150 signatories, including notable academics including Dr. Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Gil Troy at McGill, the network seeks “to defend the legitimacy of Israel in the academy, to fight attacks against Israel that are motivated by ideological rather than scholarly pursuits, to foster an environment where multiple perspectives and approaches are welcomed and encouraged, and to ensure that a ‘safe space’ exists on college campuses for Jewish, Zionist faculty and students.” 

The goal of JSZN is noble. The question is whether it will be effective. Millions of dollars and countless initiatives have been raised by the Jewish community to find solutions to this problem, yet so far, things are only getting worse. On this, Professor Tanny is a realist. He understands that the anti-Zionist movement is well organized, well-funded and well-strategized with decades of malicious propaganda under its belt. 

But there is strength in numbers. By growing the number of signatories to new statements affirming the Jewish people’s right to a state of their own even during conflict, amplifying the work of academics who recognize the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, and creating an online presence where scholars can refute biased research, the JSZN hopes to become another crucial voice in the demand for an even playing field when discussing Israel on campus. Consequently, Jewish students experiencing antisemitism will have a professor’s desk to come to for support, and Jewish professors will have the confidence to stand up to their respective departments when other groups unify to attack Israel. 

“At the very least, I wanted to get together with many Jewish studies scholars who are not afraid to say, publicly, that they are Zionists, and that they are not afraid. Hopefully we can promote scholarship that will further the understanding of what Israel means to the Jewish people, how politics operate in Israel, the history of Israel, and the history of how we’ve gotten to where we are today.” 

One goal of JSZN seems to be community. Rather than embark on a campaign to challenge anti-Israel speakers or organize pro-Israel rallies on campus, the network strives to be an intellectual support system for Jews all over the country. “If we ever are in a position like we were in last May,” says Tanny, “where the entire academy essentially gangs up on Israel and its supporters in the Diaspora, I can assure you, anti-Zionist Jewish studies professors will not be speaking on behalf of all of us. I will assure you, the Jewish Studies Zionist Network will be ready for that. We are here, and you will notice us.” 

Despite passionately believing in this project, Professor Tanny acknowledges its contradictions. We discussed the delegitimization of academic institutions in this country, most commonly blamed on the introduction of activism into the classroom, and how if one seeks to defend the foundations of liberal education — impartiality, teaching students how to think rather than what to think — the pursuit of a “safe space” for Zionist students and staff as written among the goals of the JSZN may raise eyebrows. I asked him if the thinking behind the concept of a safe space — the heightened sensitivity, leftism, and political correctness on campus — contributes to the environment he seeks to combat, and therefore, if an initiative like JSZN can be counterproductive.  

“If the trends continue the way they are,” he answers, “where every identity group has a place to feel empowered and protected, and the Jewish people on campus, who use Zionism to express their peoplehood, are left out of this, it will lead to the marginalization of Jews. It will lead to non-Jews telling Jews who they are, and what they can be. If this is the playing field we have to engage in, then yes we need to do it.” 

I look forward to seeing the endeavors of the Jewish Studies Zionist Network, and I hope more academics will sign its mission statement. We must have confident Jews in the academy who are not afraid to challenge hegemony and scholarly malpractice. My strongest hope is that a renewed sense of pride, of dignity, and certainty in Israel’s right to exist among the professors will trickle down to the students as well.

If you are a Jewish Studies professor and would like to learn more about the Jewish Studies Zionist Network or sign the statement, please visit https://www.jsznetwork.org/about.html.

Blake Flayton is New Media Director and columnist for the Jewish Journal.