RIP: Rabbi Sherwin Wine

Cleveland Jewish News.com:

"The memory of a good person is a blessing.”

So reads the home page of The Society of Humanistic Judaism (SHJ)‘s website. The site is now dedicated to Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, founder of the movement, who was killed in an auto accident July 21 while vacationing in Morocco.

Wine devoted his life’s work to the principles of Humanistic Judaism, says Roberta Feinstein, executive director of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations (CSJO), a Cleveland based organization that emphasizes Jewish culture and ethics. ...Humanistic Judaism celebrates Jewish history and culture without invoking God. One of its tenets, according to the SHJ website, purports that humans “possess the power and responsibility to shape their lives independent of supernatural authority.”

Wine was raised in a traditional home and ordained as a Reform rabbi in 1956. But according to a JTA article, the self-professed atheist felt ill-suited reciting prayers to a God in whom he did not believe.

In 1963, Wine took what Feinstein believes was a “courageous step” when he established the world’s first Humanistic synagogue, The Birmingham Temple in Farmington Hills, Mich. Wine went on to help found the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969; the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, which trains Humanistic rabbis, in 1985; and the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews, the movement’s international umbrella. ...

The rabbi was vilified by his contemporaries after it was discovered that his congregation had eliminated the word “God” from its services. (For example, “You shall love the Lord your God” became, “We revere the best in man.”)

Other rabbis also didn’t take kindly to Wine’s refusal to recite the Shema, the basic Jewish proclamation of faith in the oneness of God. “He (Wine) stepped right out and said, ‘I don’t believe in these words,’” says Feinstein. “That was amazingly brave.”

RIP: Chris Schwartz of Krakow

:

"Chris Schwarz, founder and director of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, has died. Schwartz, 59, died Sunday of prostate cancer in his Krakow apartment.

Schwarz, a London native whose father was Jewish, founded the museum in April 2004. It was a cornerstone of the rebirth of Jewish culture in Krakow's Kazimierz district, where hundreds of thousands of Jews lived before World War II.

With his modern approach to exhibitions and to depicting Jewish life, as well as an emphasis on education, the museum became a hit with locals, as well as Polish Jews and Jews from abroad."

We visited this small but delightful museum, met and chatted with Chris Schwartz, and greatly admired his work. We had no idea he was ill. We do hope that his legacy will continue.

RIP, immortals of the cinema

Bergman and Antonioni, the same day. What incredible losses.
Memories flood back of seeing their films at Cambridge's Brattle Theater in the mid-late '60s, as a rather provincial young undergraduate came to greater worldliness and sophistication. I don't think I saw any of their films before that, growing up in the Miami area. Were there art theaters then, there? I don't remember.
Bergman, both early (and usually stark) and late (often, but not always warmer), meant much more to me.
Time to take those Criterion DVDs down from the shelf to pay respectful homage, and see how their great work affects me at this life stage.

In a Baghdad Killing, Questions That Haunt Iraq

New York Times: By John F. Burns

The murderous turmoil in Baghdad has reached a point where many families never know the killers of their loved ones, or their motives. Sunni insurgents? Shiite militias? Killers who mimic one or the other, while pursuing more private motives of greed, spite or revenge? Or, in Mr. Hassan’s case, the nature of his employment, which placed him doubly at risk: as an Iraqi journalist, and as an Iraqi working for Americans?

A mournful appreciation of a murdered journalist for the NYT.

Blast Kills Iraqi Peace Poet

Salon.com | News Wires: By SAMEER N. YACOUB (AP)

June 25,2007 | BAGHDAD -- The poet Rahim al-Maliki wrote about his dreams of Iraqi unity in a place where such appeals are drowned out by daily bombings. One of them took his life on Monday.

Al-Maliki -- whose fame grew by hosting two shows on state-run television -- was among 13 people killed in a suicide attack at a Baghdad hotel, where he was filming tribal leaders about their decision to join U.S.-led forces in the fight against factions linked to al-Qaida. Four of the tribal sheiks from the western Anbar province were among the victims. ...

Under Saddam Hussein, he was imprisoned twice on accusations of criticizing the government and expressing sympathy for fellow Shiites who suffered widespread crackdowns after a failed uprising in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He did not publish his work during Saddam's regime, but he read his poems at gatherings -- and they were passed along by admirers who memorized the verses....

Al-Maliki lived in the Baghdad district of Sadr City with his wife and four children.

In one of his poems, he called upon all Iraqis to understand their shared stake in the country. ...

Hank Medress, 68, Doo-Wop Singer on ‘Lion Sleeps Tonight’, Dies

New York Times:

Hank Medress, a founding member of the 1960s doo-wop group the Tokens, whose biggest hit was “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan.

The Tokens’ sole Top 10 hit was a big one, an update in street-corner harmony of a Zulu song from South Africa. The song had become a folk staple in the 1950s after a recording by the Weavers — with Solomon Linda’s original lyric, “mbube” (lion), misheard as “wimoweh” ...

Who knew? Next think, we'll find out that kumba-ya actually means "caveat emptor", and the song is a paean to Chicago-School economics. The culture won't survive...

Kurt Waldheim, Former U.N. Chief, Is Dead. Don't All Cheer At Once.

From The New York Times: By JONATHAN KANDELL

Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations Secretary General and President of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes was exposed late in his career, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 88.

... Although it was never proved that Mr. Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between 1942 and 1944.

Mr. Waldheim concealed his wartime service in the Balkans, saying his military career ended in 1942, after he was wounded on the Russian front.

But more than four decades later, his assertions were controverted by eyewitnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Mr. Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations.

“Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite, or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime,” wrote Prof. Robert Edwin Herzstein... “But this non-guilt must not be confused with innocence. The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes.”...

It was not until he ran for president of Austria in 1986 that his wartime past became widely known. During his campaign, political opponents, investigative journalists, historians and the World Jewish Congress uncovered archival evidence of Mr. Waldheim’s involvement with the Nazi movement as a student and his wartime role in the Balkans.

But the revelations were met by a nationalist, anti-Semitic backlash in Austria that aided Mr. Waldheim’s election. Many Austrians apparently viewed Mr. Waldheim’s life as a parable of their own. They identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and forced into their military service....

Mr. Waldheim was also stationed in Greece just outside Salonika, where more than 60,000 Jews were shipped off to Auschwitz. Only 10,000 survived.

“I never heard or learned anything of this while I was there,” Mr. Waldheim said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. But according to Mr. Herzstein, the historian, Mr. Waldheim prepared numerous reports on the deportations for his army superiors, including General Löhr.

“It is hard to believe,” Mr. Herzstein wrote in “Waldheim: The Missing Years,” a 1988 book on his investigations into the former Secretary General’s past, that “this ambitious young staff officer, whose success had been based in large part on his ability to keep abreast of what was going on, could have failed to notice that most of the Jewish community of Salonika — nearly a third of the city’s population — had been shipped off to Auschwitz.” He added, “As that officer, Kurt Waldheim served as an efficient and effective cog in the machinery of genocide.”...

[As UN Secretary General,] Mr. Waldheim was criticized as being ineffective and too willing to cave in to pressure. Western countries complained that he had failed to pressure Vietnam to abandon its military occupation of Cambodia. The United States and Israel said he was not being even-handed in the Middle East. He endorsed Palestinian statehood without mentioning Israel’s right to exist, and when an Israeli commando unit staged its dramatic rescue of hostages at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976, Mr. Waldheim called the action ”a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state.”...

Mr. Waldheim steadfastly portrayed himself as an ordinary citizen who had been caught up in a maelstrom.

“Waldheim was clearly not a psycopath like Dr. Josef Mengele nor a hate-filled racist like Adolf Hitler,” Mr. Herzstein wrote. ”His very ordinariness, in fact, may be the most important thing about him. For if history teaches us anything, it is that the Hitlers and the Mengeles could never have accomplished their atrocious deeds by themselves. It took hundreds of thousands of ordinary men — well-meaning but ambitious men like Kurt Waldheim — to make the Third Reich possible.”

As readers of these selected excerpts can no doubt guess, I am not a fan of the late Mr. Waldheim, nor do I admire those tendencies within Austrian life that have sought to portray their society as primarily a victim of Nazism, denying the large amount of complicity in their history. To be fair, for all I know, Mr. Waldheim may have been kind to his pets and children. But despite the high offices to which Waldheim was elected, on the public stage of history, these selected excerpts reflect how I will remember this exemplary Austrian of his generation.

Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75

From The New York Times:

Mr. Rorty’s enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.

To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,” Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, “truth is not out there,” separate from our own beliefs and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable thumbs evolved, to help human beings “cope with the environment” and “enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.”

Martin Meyerson

From Inside Higher Ed:

Martin Meyerson, who in the 1960s and 1970s served as interim chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley and as president of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Pennsylvania, died Saturday. Meyerson was widely regarded as a wise leader of complicated institutions in an era of protests and tight budgets. As a scholar, he was a leader in the field of urban planning. As an administrator, he was seen as a pioneer for Jewish academics, who had advanced as students and professors in American higher education, but who had not — prior to Meyerson — run major research universities. Meyerson was also known as a mentor to many who worked for him and who then went on to top positions in higher education, among them D. Bruce Johnstone (who led the SUNY system), Vartan Gregorian (president of Brown University and now of the Carnegie Corporation), the late James O. Freedman (who was president of the University of Iowa and Dartmouth College), Donald Stewart (who was president of Spelman College and the College Board), and Donald Langenberg (who was chancellor of the University System of Maryland).

Rabbi David (Dovid) Zeller

Rabbi David Zeller » Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach Foundation:

Living Judaism is not meant to cut you off from the world around you. It is intended to keep you from getting cut off from the world within you.

Rabbi David Zeller zt”l developed an international reputation as a musician, lecturer, and workshop leader in Jewish mysticism, spirituality and meditation, as well as in transpersonal psychology (the psychology of body, emotion, mind, and soul). Whether singing or teaching, David’s work focused on touching the heart as much as the mind and his quiet presence informed his presentations with a unique power.

Rabbi David Zeller zt”l was an internationally known singer, teacher and counselor. He was a pioneer in Jewish spirituality, meditation and transpersonal psychology, and was director of Shevet: Center for Jewish Spirituality and Meditation, at Yakar, in Jerusalem. Living in Israel, heartspace between East and West, David weaved together the heart and the mind, inner and outer, the spiritual and the material, the theoretical and the experiential, and the orthodox and the pluralistic into a colorful and creative fabric.

In Israel, David led retreats in Jewish Meditation. He is founded Shirat Shlomo, better known as “the Happy Minyan”, where people come to pray with joyous singing and dancing in the style of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. He taught in religious programs including: The Israel Center, IsraLight, Shuva, Bruria, WUJS, Ascent and Livnot, and in alternative health programs and conferences such as Reidman Center for Complimentary Medicine, alternative health and yoga and meditation groups, and concerts and festivals. He was on the board of the San Francisco Federation in Israel.

In North America, in the psychological/spiritual community, David led workshops since 1972 in New York at the Open Center and Omega Institute, Boston’s Interface, Associations of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, American Psychological Association, at various Jungian institutes, Yoga centers, Sufi conferences, inter-faith gatherings and universities throughout the continent. In the Jewish world, David taught at Federations, JCC’s, Hillel’s, synagogues of all denominations, for Etz Chaim in Baltimore; Aish HaTorah in Detroit; the Chabad Renaissance Fair in New Jersey; Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley; Metivta and the Academy for Jewish Religion, in Los Angeles; and the Carlebach Shul, Bnei Jeshurun and Elat Chayyim in New York. He connected regularly with many Jewish Renewal Communities and new Happy Minyans in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boulder, Boston, Miami, New York and more, and with private groups in Canada, Mexico and the U.S.

In Europe, David was the guest teacher/rabbi at Yakar in London; at Limmud, the largest annual Jewish Educational Conference in Europe (held in England); at Sufi and Taoist gatherings in Switzerland; and Jewish Communities in Graz.

David was the associate director and professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology from 1975 (an accredited doctoral program in California); he founded the Network of Conscious Judaism in 1980, for the integration and dissemination of Jewish teachings and practices in psychology, mysticism and meditation. He was a student of R’ Shlomo Carlebach and of Reb Gedaliah Kenig of Breslov.

David produced cassette tapes and CDs of healing, relaxing, and meditative songs, including: The Path of the Heart, Ruach/Spirit, Let Go/Let God, Goodnight My Sweetest Children, and Chai Ani/I Am Alive. He has several teaching tapes on Jewish mysticism, and meditation, as well as 2 teaching tape sets Tree of Life, and the Stories of Rebbe Nachman.

Rabbi David (Dovid) Zeller died on May 24, during the emotional (for me and my family) days between my father's death and his burial. Dovid's beautiful, pure, almost angelic voice and haunting melodies (many drawn from Shlomo Carlebach and the Breslov and Bobov hassidic traditions) have been a source of solace, consolation, and inspiration for me over the past two decades, particularly during difficult times. His music penetrates more quickly and more deeply to the heart (and other spiritual faculties) than any other of which I am aware. I am allowing myself the luxury of listening to him during this shiva, and now his voice will be forever associated with memories of my father.

His death is a great loss to the Jewish world and to the larger world of spirit.
I am so grateful he and his music came my way, and so sorry I never had the opportunity to meet or study directly with him. What a pure spirit.

Learning from 'his own words': Baruch Kimmerling

From Haaretz:
By Yitzhak Laor

In the conclusion to his book The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (University of California Press, 2001), Baruch Kimmerling writes: 'To understand what is happening in the Middle East today, it is necessary to note the existence of a number of social and political limits to Israeli democracy, which paradoxically also serve, by reason of their multiplicity, to present a sort of pluralist facade and thus provide the Israeli state with a veneer of democratic legitimacy.' Kimmerling notes the five limits of Israeli democracy: Jewish law (which the state has embraced); the limitation of Jewish female citizenship (which includes discrimination even against Ashkenazi Jewish women); the limitation of Israeli citizenship (that is, discrimination against Israel's Arabs); the ethnic limitation (that is, Israel's Ashkenazi hegemony); and the limitation of the Israeli control system (namely, the occupation). ...

But what does the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory even mean, after 40 years of wild, unbounded rule, whose defenders like to say that it is "more enlightened than any other occupation," forgetting that this "enlightened" quality has yet to be examined from the Palestinian side of the boot and failing to note that no other occupation in modern history lasted this long? What is it precisely, this 40-year occupation, what is it in historical or sociological terms? ...

Here, for example, we can learn something about Kimmerling's effort and courage; not because he defined himself as being one thing or another, and not because his model of democracy was a state for all of its citizens, in the American style, but especially because he insisted on toppling the ideological house of cards that his fellow Israeli sociologists, those residing in the offices along the same hallway, had built and even took pride in.

What about Weber?

The pattern was provided by the enterprise of Shmuel Eisenstadt, because of the way he undertook to be part of the state's projects, without factoring in that a state, any state, is primarily a control mechanism of the elites. Is it possible to write sociology as though Max Weber never wrote what he wrote, as though Emile Durkheim never studied what he studied? We can't, unless we are the exception. That was the scientific effort Kimmerling made in his sociology: to hold us up to the general rule.

David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author

From The New York Times:
By CLYDE HABERMAN

David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tireless author of books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed yesterday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73, and lived in Manhattan....

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”...

President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.

Obituary: Israeli Judge Moshe Bejski

From Forward.com:

Moshe Bejski, a former Israeli Supreme Court justice and Holocaust survivor who was saved from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler, died Tuesday at the age of 86.

Bejski was born in 1920 in the Polish town of Dzialoszyce, near Krakow. After the Nazis invaded Poland, Bejski’s family was deported to the Belzec concentration camp. He and his brother Uri were saved by Schindler when the industrialist drafted them to work in his factory. Officially, the Bejski brothers were listed as a machine fitter and a draftsman, but Uri was known for his expertise in weapons and Moshe was a master document-forger. Throughout the war, Moshe Bejski created rubber stamps with the Nazi regime’s symbol on them, and forged papers and passports that Schindler used to smuggle Jews out of harm’s way.

In the 1960s, Bejski testified at Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial. Bejski remained close with Schindler for many years, giving him money and defending him against critics who accused the industrialist of alcoholism and womanizing. In 1974, he delivered the oration at Schindler’s funeral in Jerusalem...

Bejski was appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court in 1979, and served there until he retired in 1991.

Obituary: Will Maslow, 99, Pioneer in Fight for Civil Rights

From Forward.com:

Will Maslow, a prominent civil rights attorney who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, died February 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

In an era when the Jewish community relied on largely quiet, nonconfrontational tactics in the fight against discrimination, Maslow was a pioneer in the use of the law as a tool in the struggle for equality. He was one of the people who helped shape [the strategy of] law as an instrument of social change...

After working as a trial attorney at the National Labor Relations Board, Maslow was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943 to be the field director of his Fair Employment Practices Committee, a group that had been created at the behest of black union leader A. Philip Randolph. Maslow filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which desegregated American schools, and in 1963 he was one of only seven members of the administrative team that organized the historic March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He forged alliances with groups like the ACLU on the theory that, at least with regard to civil rights, Jewish interests would be advanced in tandem with the general interest...

Mollie Orshansky, Statistician, Dies at 91

From The New York Times:

Miss Orshansky, whose parents had known poverty in Ukraine, worked for the Social Security Administration from 1958 until she retired in 1982. She was “one of a respected but mostly invisible cadre of women research professionals based at S.S.A. and other government agencies during the postwar years,” the historian Alice O’Connor wrote in “Poverty Knowledge,” a 2001 history of poverty research.

“These women,” Ms. O’Connor wrote, “found job opportunities in federal government and other ‘applied’ endeavors when university jobs were largely closed off to them, although within government they were often clustered in research bureaus focusing on such traditional ‘women’s’ concerns as social welfare, female labor force participation, families and children, and home economics. That experience as a career government statistician, a far cry from systems analysis, was what gave Orshansky the wholly unexpected designation as author of the government’s official poverty line.”
In 1995, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences urged several changes in calculating poverty, but no major changes have occurred, in part because they would have the politically unpopular effect of increasing the poverty rate, probably by a couple of percentage points, which would require an expansion of benefits.

Miss Orshansky, a lifelong liberal Democrat, expressed sympathy with the criticisms of the poverty line. “The best that can be said of the measure,” she once wrote, “is that at a time when it seemed useful, it was there.”

Mary D. Crisp, 83, Feminist G.O.P. Leader, Dies

From The New York Times:

Ms. Crisp also spoke out against a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, which the party had advocated in 1976 and again supported in 1980, and opposed her party’s opposition to federal financing of abortions.

“We are about to bury the rights of over 100 million American women under a heap of platitudes,” she said of those positions....

Ms. Crisp continued her efforts to liberalize Republican stances on abortion and equal rights, often arguing that it was good strategy because polls often showed that a majority of the public favored abortion under varying conditions. She further contended that favoring abortion rights was the logical position for free-market libertarians. “How can we support freedom from government interference on economic issues but not on the most basic personal decision of all?” she asked in 1992.

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut--one more time, from the granfalloon

From Slate Magazine: By Liesl Schillinger

[M]any years later, I came to understand that a number of intellectuals thought Vonnegut was for students—for the kind of immature, emotional readers who get caught up in Dune or The Fountainhead: a 'phase' author. But it's never struck me that there is a mature, dispassionate stance on death, greed, cruelty, and human weakness that sober-minded adults ought to graduate to, after reaching some arbitrary educational high-water mark, that would elevate them beyond Vonnegut's whimsically bleak philosophy. In 1945, as an American POW in Germany, he saw the human carnage of the Dresden firebombing. It shaped his tragicomic worldview; he never 'got over it.' Should he have? Are not some offenses worthy of unending outrage, even once we've accepted the fact that they have occurred and will continue to? Why would the telegraphic, absurdist elements of Vonnegut's books invalidate their originality or seriousness? Who decides that you can't outgrow Catch-22 but you can outgrow Slaughterhouse-Five?

R.I.P.: Remembering former Chief Justice Nathan Heffernan of Wisconsin

Heffernan, J. (dissenting) in the Yoder case, 49 Wis. 2d 430 (1971):

The principal opinion reaches an erroneous conclusion based upon questionable reasoning and a misstatement of the facts. Contrary to the implication of the opinion writer, the Amish were not prosecuted for failing to send their children to a public high school. They were prosecuted for violation of sec. 118.15(1), Stats., which requires attendance at school, whether public or private, until the end of the school period in which the child attains sixteen years of age. The distinction is important and is crucial to this dissent. The principal opinion rests in part upon the misconception that the defendants' only alternative to criminality is public school attendance for their children. Such is not the case. The law makes no such requirement.

The reasoning is faulty, for it conceives the problem as one of religious liberty alone. It completely ignores the personal liberty of the Amish children to avail themselves of educational opportunities beyond eighth grade. In addition, the freedom of these young people to make a religious choice is completely ignored.

That opinion states:

"Since the children are not being sued as truants, we do not reach the question of whether they have an independent right of the free exercise of their religion to be protected here. We view this case as involving solely a parent's right of religious freedom to bring up his children as he believes God dictates." (Emphasis supplied.)

This, of course, is the easy way out. It keeps intact the opinion's oversimplification of the problem and avoids completely the difficult question of the court's responsibility to see that the legislative mandate of universal education is carried out. It purports to strike a blow for religious liberty, but in so doing, it does little for religion and impinges upon personal liberty.

The principal opinion solves the balancing of religious interests with equal ease. Having once set up the postulate that the free exercise of religion cannot be impinged upon by the state unless there is a compelling state interest in the regulation, the syllogism is completed by the unsupported assertion that "compulsory education . . . is not a compelling interest although it is within the state power to regulate."

That assertion is contrary to a reasonable view of accepted law. Brown v. Board of Education stated:

"Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education."

What could be a more compelling state interest than "the most important function of state and local governments."

The very organic act that first set up a political structure for the territory that is now Wisconsin emphasized the compelling public interest in education. Article III, Northwest Ordinance 1787, provided:

"Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." 1 Wis. Stats. Anno., p. 740.

Subsequent amendments to the Ordinance provided that the proceeds of public lands were to be used for seminaries of learning. The enabling act under which Congress authorized the organization of this state directed that section 16 of every township should be granted to the state for school purposes.

Education has been a prime and compelling interest of this state since its very beginning.

This, of course, does not completely answer the question of whether the compelling interest of the state should be paramount to the obviously sincere belief of the Amish elders that school attendance ought not be compelled beyond a grade-school level. On one hand we find a legislative mandate [***31] of unquestionable compelling state interest -- that all children attend school until the age of sixteen -- and, on the other, a constitutional mandate that there shall be no state law that prohibits the free exercise of religion.

A court ought not to make a choice favoring either the particular interest of church or state unless an irreconcilable conflict exists. Thomas Jefferson could not foresee that such conflicts could ever exist. He stated in his reply to an address of the Danbury Baptist Association in reference to the recently proposed freedom of religion amendment to the constitution:

"Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties." Reynolds v. United States.

While Jefferson's words express a hope rather than a realization, the lesson is clear: Conflicts between church and state, i.e., between man's natural right of religious choice and his duty to his organized society, ought to be reconciled where possible, and judicial fiats declaring legislative enactments unconstitutional ought to be avoided except in the clearest of cases and where all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted.

The principal opinion would also hold that the state has no compelling interest in a regulatory measure unless it has a "need to apply the regulation without exception to attain the purposes and objectives of the legislation." The argument, therefore, seems to be that to grant an exemption for such a small group as the Wisconsin Amish would have no effect upon the general policy of the state to further education, and the diminution of Amish children's education by two years is so insignificant as to be de minimis.

This argument misconceives the nature of the state's compelling interest in education. The purpose of education is not alone to provide a mass of educated and, hence, taxable citizens, but is, in addition, intended to educate the individual for life. The government's concern is not with enforcing a regulatory scheme. Rather, the concern is based upon the precepts stated in the Northwest Ordinance, supra, that religion, morality, good government, and happiness are all dependent upon education. This is the compelling government interest.

This difficult problem cannot be dismissed as de minimis.

The state's interest and obligation runs to each and every child in the state. In the context of the public law of the state, no child's education is below the concern of the law. The principal opinion bolsters the de minimis argument by making the unsupported tacit assumption that all or most of the Amish children will forever remain in their communities. This is not necessarily a fact. Large numbers of young people voluntarily leave the Amish community each year and are thereafter forced to make their way in the world.

Those young Amish who leave the group have received no education that equips them for modern American life. By not enforcing the school attendance law, the state of Wisconsin has consigned these young people to a future without any choice or goal except those of the traditional Amish life. They are abandoned without the intellectual tools to survive should they elect to leave the Amish way of life.

The traditional Amish life has its attractions, but ought this court, by depriving Amish children of all but a bare eighth grade education, block for all time all other avenues for them. This is the effect of this decision. On the basis of the religious beliefs of their parents, the Amish children are without a hearing n1 consigned to a life of ignorance -- blissful as it may seem to the author of the principal opinion, who apparently views the Amish as "the noble savage," uncorrupted by the world. The reader is left with a picture of idyllic agrarianism. Unmentioned is the tragic side of Amish life: "Drinking . . . has become problematic" (Hostetler, Amish Society, p. 282); "Rowdyism and stress" (p. 281); "Preoccupation with filthy stories" (p. 282); "Drinking is common in all large Amish settlements" (p. 283); "It would appear that among the Amish the rate of suicide is just as high, if not higher, than for the nation." It is highest among young men (p. 300). Amish society is perhaps but another miscrocosm of society -- some of it is good and some bad. It is a cross-section of good and evil influences that pervade any society. But the children's denial of education ought not be justified on the mythological basis assumed by the principal opinion.

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n1 With our ostensible solicitude for the fate of children who are in other legal situations affected by conduct of their parents, it is surprising that no guardian ad litem was appointed to represent these children's interest. While the religious beliefs of the parents are at stake in this lawsuit, it is apparent that the children's interest is of equal importance. Reason dictates that representation by a guardian ad litem was a sine qua non of the majority's result.


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The above descriptions apply to Amish society generally and are not specifically descriptive of the Amish community involved in this case. The source, Hostetler, Amish Society, is the one relied upon by the majority.

It is apparent, however, that the problem of having these "peculiar people" n2 in our society ought not be solved by fining them or sending them to jail if they choose not to conform to the usual religious mores of the state. While the record in this case is incomplete, it reveals a complete lack of any attempt by local or state officials to deal realistically or imaginatively with a difficult problem. In fact, there is strong evidence that the purpose of this prosecution was not to further the compelling interest of the state in education, but rather the reprehensible objective, under the facts of this case, to force the Amish into the school only for the purpose of qualifying for augmented state aids.

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n2 Deuteronomy, ch. 26, verse 18; Titus, ch. 2, verse 14.


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The points of view, however, are clearly reconcilable. The law requires that all children attend school until they are sixteen. The Amish object to the worldliness of the usual high school. The writer of this dissent believes that both objections can be met by an Amish vocational school which will teach reading, agriculture, and husbandry, and whatever religious precepts the Amish community desires.

In addition, such basic skills as English and mathematics should be taught -- "unpretentious" knowledge that will be useful not only in the Amish community, but would better enable those who fall away from the community to adjust to the outside world and to continue their education if they so desire.

Such plans have been adopted in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa, usually only after gestapo tactics by school authorities outraged the non-Amish community into reaching reasonable alternatives. In Iowa, only the intervention of Governor Harold Hughes brought rationality and compassion to a reconciliation of the problem. The Pennsylvania plan offers schoolwork programs to Amish fourteen years or older who have completed eighth grade. In addition to classwork in English, mathematics, and hygiene, they are required to develop domestic and agricultural skills. In Iowa, schooling is required, but Amish schools need not meet the public school curriculum standards. A similar practice is followed in Maryland. In Indiana, Amish are encouraged by the state superintendent of schools to organize their own schools.

Hostetler n3 points out that the enforcement of school attendance laws has resulted in the "professionalization" of Amish schools and that, as a consequence, nearly 200 Amish elementary schools and 50 Amish vocational schools (for post-fourteen-year-old students) were in operation in 1967. The plans recognize that Amish children will be better suited for the Amish way of life if they are educated to be productive members of the Amish community. They also recognize the state's interest in education that will serve the children if they leave the community.

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n3 This discussion of these alternatives relies largely on Hostetler, supra, pp. 193-203.


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The alternatives, therefore, are not those that are posed in the principal opinion. Compulsory education until age sixteen is not necessarily "worldly" education. No part of our law requires a student to go to a school not of his own religious choice. It merely requires that he go to a school. There is no reason why the Amish community should not establish its own school -- as the Amish have in other states -- that will foster the Amish way of life. They may not, however, ignore the compelling interest of the state in educating their children. They may do as other religious organizations have done and establish their own schools and teach them basic skills and the precepts of their own religious beliefs and be in conformance with the law. Until they do so, they are subject to criminal penalties.

Neither the prosecutorial tactics of the school authorities nor the insensitivity of the principal opinion to the educational policies of the state and the personal liberties of these children are appropriate to the problem faced by the Amish.

Contrary to the conclusions of the opinion subscribed to by the majority of the court and authored by Mr. Justice Connor T. Hansen, I am satisfied that the state's compelling interest in universal education has been abundantly demonstrated.

I would affirm, but would stay execution of sentence for such period of time as is reasonably required to properly organize and to commence operation of an Amish vocational school. At the commencement of such operations, the judgment should be vacated and the complaint dismissed.

Kurt Vonnegut : A Lovely Tribute

From New York Times: By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.

Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.

He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what — as a mild young person — you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith. ...

R.I.P.: Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 - New York Times
By DINITIA SMITH

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84.