December 10, 2023

For many years, in the late 1960s and 1970s, my father was the president of the teachers’ union in Oakland.  Throughout his career, he was an advocate and activist for civil rights.

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In 1969, for example, he joined four civil rights activists from the African-American community at an Oakland school board meeting for what was supposed to be a protest of the selection of a new superintendent without community input.  Instead, it became a mêlée: at one point, my father swung his briefcase in a high arc onto the back of a police officer who was baton-choking a young black student caught up in the fracas.  He spent the night in jail, and later became one of the defendants of what local media dubbed the Oakland Five.

By virtue of his position as president of an AFL-CIO local affiliate, my father also served on the Alameda-Contra Costa Central Labor Council.  The CLC’s annual Labor Day picnic was a major political campaign stop for Democrats, where national candidates spoke during presidential election years.  If that wasn’t enough, he also served on the board of our local B’nai Brith chapter.  In bringing together these threads of his activism, my father was an intersectional ally long before the term was coined.

Today, he would be in mourning over the death of allyship.  The aftermath of the October 7 attack in Israel has sheared the supposed Progressive alliance.

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In Oakland public schools, on Dec. 6 of this year, teachers defied the warnings of the school district superintendent and conducted a “Teach-In for Palestine,” with a complete curriculum for K through 12 students.  Billed as an effort to give students “counter-narratives” on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the teach-in was initiated by a subset of members of the Oakland Education Association teachers’ union called “OEA for Palestine” and was later endorsed by a vote of the full membership of OEA.  The curriculum makes no mention of the Oct. 7 attacks or Hamas’s role in the conflict.  This is unsurprising, as in November, the OEA passed a resolution that placed full blame for the conflict on Israel.

The fracture lines have deepened over the last several years.  In 2012, QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism!) launched a boycott of Cliff’s Variety, an independent local hardware store in San Francisco’s Castro District, over the store’s carrying SodaStream products made by an Israeli company in its West Bank factory.  In Chicago in 2017, the organizers of the 21st Annual Dyke March ejected three marchers carrying “Jewish Pride” flags — rainbow flags with Stars of David in the center — because the flags “made people feel unsafe,” explaining that the march was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”

Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon joined a New York crowd in chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” before telling the group, “There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.”  The fallout from her remarks included her agency dropping her as a client, after which she issued an apology that implied she simply forgot about the history of anti-Jewish discrimination in the U.S., the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, and the Holocaust.

The fractures have not only shown the hollowness of “allyship” with Jews.  Fissures have caused splits in the LGBT community, the women’s rights movement, and the African-American community.

Andrew Sullivan observed that the gay rights movement has transformed in recent years. 

The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. … Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.”