Dear Friends,
The Philadelphia of my youth was not a sleepy “second” to New York City. As a kid growing up in South Philly, less than a mile away from where Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian lived, I felt that I was at the center of the Rock and Roll universe. This was underscoreded by neighborhood kids like Mickey Smith and Tommy Doren, who got to carve their initials on the panel of a booth in our family’s candy store to mark their twenty-fifth appearance on American Bandstand. In a TV interview with Jerry Blavat, “the Geator(?) with the Heater,” Mickey and Tommy even mentioned our store, for which they were awarded a free milkshake by my grandmother in gratitude for the free publicity.
A decade later, when my tastes became more expensive, I discovered that Philadelphia was distinguished in other arts, too. Although the jewel in Philadelphia’s cultural crown, Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra, was as staid as they came, the city was considered to be avant-garde when it came to theater, dance, painting, crafts, and photography. Julian Beck and Judith Malina brought “The Living Theater” to the YMHA, in which they obliterated the theater’s third wall. Local dancer Joan Kerr choreographed ‘The Holocaust’ on the stage of the Walnut Street Theater a week after Elliot Feld premiered a dance that proved to be too daring to be performed again. The much-maligned surrealist, Marcel Duchamp, chose the Philadelphia Art Museum to be the repository of his most absurd and arcane works. Philadelphia became a center for the revival of the American crafts movement. Representatives from the Smithsonian came to Philadelphia to buy ceramics by Peter Volcus and Bennett Bean from Helen Drutt’s brownstone gallery, and the Sneidermans sold pottery by Otto Heino and glass by Dale Chihuly from their South Street storefront. Philadelphia numbered two fine-art photography galleries before NYC had one.
Philadelphia was also at the forefront of Jewish renewal and biblically inspired political activism. While institutional Judaism – synagogues and the UJA – was governed largely by both conservative and Conservative Jews, alternative forms of Jewish expression flourished. Philadelphia was the birthplace of the New Jewish Agenda and the Shalom Center. Ira Eisenstein established the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in the city whose students and faculty were shunned by Philadelphia’s Jewish Grandees. The city was a center for Black/Jewish dialogue and for Jewish-based protests against the Vietnam War and spawned Jewish student organizations like “Trees for Vietnam,” founded in response to the ‘napalming’ of that country’s fruit-bearing trees. A Jewish response to the nuclear threat, eco-Judaism, and a Torah-based mandate for economic justice all came forth from Philly. And it was in Philadelphia that talks between Palestinians and Israelis began in July of 1967, just a month after the Six-Day War.
The visionary, organizer, and bandleader of it all was Arthur Waskow, who died at age 91 a week ago. Arthur came from parents who were activists, and who were Jews, but unlike them, and unlike his contemporaries like Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Lee Weiner, Arthur’s commitment to righting (or should I say lefting?) the world was based on his commitment to Judaism and on the teachings of Torah. Having been politically active first on the University of Wisconsin Madison and then on the streets of Baltimore and Philadelphia since his college years, he made his nation debut following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the publication of his “Freedom Seder” in Rampart’s Magazine, which connected the struggle for civil rights and economic justice in America with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Arthur included all the requirements of the traditional seder in his text, but added the voices of Dr. King, of Abraham Heschel, of Gandhi, of Nat Turner, and of Eldridge Cleaver, too, which scandalized the established Jewish community and energized so many young Jews like me and my fellows at RRC. Arthur went on to write many books and essays and newsletters, and articles on a wide range of political and Jewish topics. He was a prodigious writer and, but Arthur was never content to sit and watch from his desk. To the contrary, Arthur served in the trenches. He actively protested and insisted on being at the front of the line. The proof that he ‘walked the talk’ was his proud record of 27 arrests, the last in 2019 outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office. But unlike so many others, Arthur never put himself before the cause. He was irritatingly passionate and dogged in his insistence that none of us settle for the way the world is and work for the way it should be.
Arthur embodied the rabbinic dictum that while we are not obligated to complete the work, but must not desist from it. In a touching eulogy that appeared in the Forward, Rabbi Jay Michaelson wrote about the 2014 NYC Climate March when he rode next to Arthur atop a makeshift Noah’s Ark. After snapping a picture of the crowd, Jay shared the photo with Arthur and observed, “The Rebbe and his legacy.” “What legacy?” Arthur remarked, “I’m still right here!” Indeed, he was until his death, and indeed he still will be, every time we help bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. May we continue to do what Arthur taught us to do and thereby celebrate his life as a blessing.
With gratitude and love,
Lee
