In honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., here’s an annotated version of his “I have a dream” speech, highlighting Judaic references.
“I have a dream…”
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Category Archives: Culture
Confessions
Knox was sweet enough to get me the new Madonna CD last night. So far, Confessions on a Dance Floor strikes me as, well, disappointing. The first track, “Hung Up”, is catchy and danceable. But the other tracks? They’re just not getting me.
It pains me to admit this, since I am a big Madonna fan and have been since I first heard “Like a prayer.” I’ve consistently liked her albums, even if some songs here and there took a while to become familiar and likable.
Maybe this album will grow on me, too.
Palimpsest
The Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and West Roxbury once hosted thriving Jewish communities. The people there were mainly orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who immigrated in the late 1800s and moved to the area from their first Boston homes in the tenements of the North End. This southward displacement criss-crossed that of earlier Jewish immigrants from Western Europe who, having reached middle class, were already moving from their homes in the then-South End to Brookline and Newton.
Knox and I learned all this today as we were biking around the city with Dick, a guy we met through the folks at Hub on Wheels, who is also interested in designing a bike tour of Jewish Boston. Dick has already thought a lot about what such a tour would include, and today was all about going to see the sites on his list.
It’s amazing how much history one can glean if one looks in the right place. These neighborhoods are currently populated by working-class African-American communities. Many of the churches, however, were once synagogues, and magen Davids and menorahs still adorn the façades. Hebrew schools have found new life as parochial schools or community centers. The G & G Delicatessen, once the hub of neighborhood life and local politics, is now a hardware store, yet its old name is still laid out in a floor mosaic at the entrance.
I’m just beginning to learn about this whole topic; at the moment I’m working my way through Hillel Levine‘s and Lawrence Harmon’s The Death of An American Jewish Community: A tragedy of Good Intentions, a book that appears to lay blame for the fragmentation of the Jewish neighborhoods on the notorious policy of redlining and unscrupulous practices by some real-estate brokers. I’d also like to read Gerald Gamm’s Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed for a different take on the same subject.
If you have any ideas for sites and history we can include in this bike ride– and particularly if you can recollect what Jewish life was like in these neighborhoods– we’d love to hear from you.
Boston’s Jewish Renaissance
The Boston Globe Magazine has a cover story on the Jewish renaissance in Boston:
To be sure, Greater Boston’s Jewish community is as diverse as any and its newfound unity relative. In addition to Reform and Conservative congregations, Orthodox and Hasidic synagogues can be found in Brookline, Allston, and Brighton, where thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews have settled. And no one expects Boston to supplant New York as the hub of American Jewry. But a remarkable string of recent events has helped Boston position itself to be the country’s capital of Jewish academia.
Reinvention!
I finally went to see a Madonna concert!
I’ve never really cared to keep up much with popular music, but I do remember the summer of ’89, when Like a Prayer was playing on the radio. I loved it! As I learned more about this provocative singer who irritated the straitlaced, I liked what I saw and what I heard. “One day,” I promised myself, “I will see her in concert.”
I tried to get tickets to the Drowned World Tour in 2001, but I couldn’t get through to TicketMaster on the phone nor on the web. And boy, did I try.
This year, though, when I heard she was touring again, I was able to snag tickets. My first rock concert, ever! (Yes, I’ve had a sheltered life.)
I have to say, it was fun. I’d never been inside Madison Square Garden before, and Madonna did put on a wonderful show, with a bunch of her old and new hits and dazzling visuals that borrowed heavily from her recent Kabbalistic inclinations. I was in the middle of the floor section, which would normally mean a good seat, but I thought I was too far away to really see her clearly. I just saw a body dancing on the stage most of the time. What was nice was that at two points during the show a platform descended from the ceiling and hooked onto the stage, extending partway into the floor seating section, just over the audience’s heads. During those two numbers, she was pretty close to me. That was exciting, I will admit.
Nah, I’m not star struck. Well, maybe a little. I like her music and her shows, and I’ve always wanted to tell her “Thank you.”