Friday, March 29, 2024 -
Print Edition

Understand, not erase

As a high-schooler in the Washington, DC area, weekend outings meant museums and monuments, and the Jefferson memorial was one of my favorites. It’s beautiful and peaceful, a rotunda on the banks of the Potomac, in which Jefferson takes center stage.

I was saddened and troubled to read that a Jefferson statue — donated by a Jewish naval officer, no less — is being removed from the New York City Council chambers due to Jefferson being a slaveholder.

Our Founding Fathers were brilliant, revolutionary individuals. They rode the wave of the Enlightenment, synthesizing and manifesting groundbreaking philosophical ideas of equality and representation. They, like all human beings, had shortcomings. One of these was engaging in the widespread practice of human bondage. Some realized the immorality of their actions. Others opted for cognitive dissonance.

Ironically, it is the Founding Fathers who created the framework that allows us to reexamine their behavior. Yet some have the impulse to do away with them wholesale. Jewish tradition teaches us that the greatest of people are flawed. Not only does that not negate their accomplishments, it provides a lesson to us about human limitations and the desire and capacity for betterment.

Many years ago, I was at a fascinating exhibition in Derry/Londonderry about the Plantation, which occurred simultaneously with the founding of Jamestown. It was when the British Crown imported Scottish and English people (Protestant) into Northern Ireland (Catholic) to settle land confiscated from the Irish. It is the inception of the religious bifurcation and violent conflict that have plagued the region ever since.

There was an interpretive section, featuring local residents. I’ll never forget one woman, a Catholic, no rancor in her tone, saying how she wants Catholics to make the Plantation part of their education, their identity. Not as an inherently oppositional force, but as the pivotal event that informed her community’s history and identity. This was a radical statement. For Catholics, the Plantation is an evil on par with slavery.

I was profoundly impressed. In Northern Ireland, segregation and ethnic violence, though much abated, continues. Some neighborhoods are separated by barricades and walls. But her impulse was to try to understand.

Removing historical artifacts is the opposite of this. It may feel purifying, but it’s not real. Thomas Jefferson penned one of the seminal progressive works ever written, and he also owned slaves. Ignoring him changes neither of those things. Recasting complex figures and historical events as a good-or-evil binary, will only limit and diminish our understanding of the past.

Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Avatar photo

IJN Assistant Publisher | [email protected]


Leave a Reply