We had a story from JTA last week which addressed a controversy: whether a male should be the rabbi-in-residence of a woman’s magazine, Women’s Day.
Opponents were aghast. One female rabbi wrote: “We need to be doing the job of lifting up more marginalized voices and there are tons of women that could have been approached.”
The male rabbi said: “I would hope that women rabbis who are questioning the appropriateness of my appointment would read my columns and consider my words rather than my gender; granting me the same equality and respect they themselves seek and deserve as rabbis.”
One woman rabbi responded that “our male colleagues have obligation . . . to ask more thoughtful questions about why they are being selected and then doing the correct things of recommending a female collegue.”
The male rabbi felt constrained to assert a marginalized status of his own:
“I suspect the majority of rabbis in the Reform movement are women. So one could actually make the case that I’m representing the minority of Reform rabbis.”
Women for women. Men for men. And it hardly stops there.
We had another story from JTA about whether non-Jewish actors should portray Jewish figures.
With reference to blackface — the repugnant Vaudville practice of white actors painting their face black and imitating what were then called Negroes — with some saying that if a non-Jewish actor plays a Jewish figure, this is “Jewface.”
Jews for Jews. Non-Jews for non-Jews. And it hardly stops there.
Minorities for minorities. Majorities for majorities. Medical educators say that medical students should learn about the environmental factors that affect people’s health, i.e., racial and other inequalities that degrade their health care. Certainly a logical and wise step. But then, the educators make an illogical leap: Minority physicians will be the best physicians for this population.
Similarly, the racial composition of everything from school boards to city councils to coaching staffs to the Supreme Court must be scrutinized because every imaginable minority group must be represented, and mathematically so, in precise relation to population.
What, in fact, does “representation” mean? We have just lost Dennis Gallagher, a beloved Denver civil servant.
For years this Irish Catholic represented, among others, the Jewish community on Denver’s West Side.
How out of date with the spirit of the times! But oh how so right. The best person was put forward — gender, religion, race to the contrary notwithstanding. Representation is what a person does, not what a person is by way of personal faith, of race or of some other immutable characteristic.
When Federico Pena was elected Denver’s mayor in 1983, this Hispanic represented a mostly non-Hispanic community. In the spirit of the current climate, this would be called a triumph for “equity.” Pena, however, made it a point not to run as a Hispanic, not to be “the Hispanic candidate.” Same for Wellington Webb. A majority white population elected a black mayor. Same for Michael Hancock.
Translation: race didn’t matter. “Equity” was not the issue. Only competence. That defined representation. Who was “minority” and who was not did not matter — and it need not and should not matter in medicine, either.
I am proud to be a citizen of a city like this. It’s not “live and let live.” It’s so much more than that.
And it’s not a dismissal of the importance of one’s roots, whether mine or others’. It is usually easier to honor others’ roots if one is comfortable in honoring one’s own. I am proud to stand up for Israel on her 74th birthday. Secure in my own roots — the land of Israel being integral to Judaism since the time of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs some 4,000 years ago — I can better honor people of other faiths and nationalities, and can better feel the pain of those whose faith or nationality are, or have been, brutally suppressed.
Does it really matter whether a male writes for a woman’s magazine or a female writes for a men’s magazine, or whether a Catholic reresents a Jewish district or a Jew represents a Catholic district, or whether a Jewish actor plays a non-Jew or a non-Jew plays a Jew, or whether a black represents a white community or a white represents a black community, or whether a physician treats a white or a person of color —or whether a Jewish state exists in a Muslim region, or whether a Muslim community seeks its religious freedom in a Chinese region? I don’t think so.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
