Sunday night, the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines marked its 100th anniversary at a dinner gathering downtown. The gala was unusual in several respects. For one thing, I don’t recall seeing such a large and bipartisan group of Iowa politicians at any non-political local event before. Attendees included Senator Chuck Grassley, Governor Terry Branstad, State Senator Jack Hatch, Lieutenant Governor nominee Monica Vernon, Representative Bruce Braley, State Senator Joni Ernst, Representative Dave Loebsack, IA-03 candidates David Young and Staci Appel, State Senator Matt McCoy, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, State Representatives Helen Miller, Marti Anderson, and Peter Cownie, and several suburban mayors or city council members. (Insert your own “a priest, a rabbi, and an Iowa politician walk into a bar” joke here.)
The keynote speech was even more striking. It’s standard practice to invite a Jewish celebrity to headline major Federation events. This year’s guest was award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss. But other than a “Borscht belt”-inspired opening riff about learning to nod and say “Yes, dear” to his wife, Dreyfuss left obvious material aside. He didn’t dwell on humorous anecdotes from his Hollywood career, or talk about how being Jewish helped his craft. Instead, Dreyfuss reminisced about a cultural place and time that could hardly be more foreign to his Iowa audience, regardless of age or religious background.
Dreyfuss grew up in a Queens, New York housing development built primarily for veterans of World War II. Many of the heads of households had fought against General Franco’s fascists in Spain before returning to Europe to fight Hitler’s army. The community was uniformly Jewish; in fact, the idea that Jews were a minority in the United States was a mere abstraction to kids like Dreyfuss. They had a Jewish Federation, but they didn’t need the Federation to support the community. The community was large and cohesive enough to sustain itself.
Only a handful of Jewish people in central Iowa grew up in Chicago, New York, or New Jersey neighborhoods like the one Dreyfuss described. Most Midwestern Jews have been aware of being part of a small minority almost as long as they can remember. Even a preschooler notices when just about everyone is celebrating Christmas but your family. The student body of my elementary school was perhaps 5 percent Jewish during the 1970s, and that was considered a lot for the Des Moines area. We had one or two other Jewish kids in our class most years, which is more than many Iowa Jews could say.
Listening to Dreyfuss describe his hometown atmosphere was touching, but also a little disconcerting. When I hear people look back fondly on a time when everyone in the neighborhood shared the same cultural values, I tend to get creeped out. In the Iowa context, that comes across as nostalgia for the days before minorities were welcome. (In 2007, Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo drew applause from Iowa audiences by asking whether they were tired of hearing, “Press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish.”)
Did the Jews of Des Moines tend to cluster in a few neighborhoods during the middle part of the last century? Sure, but that was partly because only a few neighborhoods had an abundance of housing without restrictive covenants. We needed synagogues and the Jewish Federation to run religious schools and other programs for kids (like the basketball league my brothers played in), because you couldn’t just absorb a Jewish identity the way Dreyfuss did in Queens.
To be clear, Dreyfuss wasn’t extolling segregation or saying a lack of diversity makes a neighborhood great for kids. The customs he described–people looking after each other, sharing late-night conversation over coffee and ice cream–could happen anywhere in theory, whether or not neighbors have a common religion or ancestry. In practice, Americans don’t live like that anymore. We don’t socialize primarily with our neighbors. We may not even know our neighbors. Dreyfuss conveyed a sense of feeling lucky to have grown up when personal social networks were stronger.
Although Dreyfuss took immense pride in being Jewish as a child, he wasn’t raised in a religious household. He was what’s known in Jewish circles as a “red diaper baby.” His parents and their contemporaries were “fiercely proud” Americans and proud veterans of the war against Hitler. They also happened to be Communists or socialists. They expressed their Jewish culture through left-wing politics rather than religious observance or spiritual beliefs. They admired the U.S.S.R. and socialist experiments in the new state of Israel, because in their “misguided” view (according to Dreyfuss), socialism would be more fair for the little guy.
This part of the keynote was riveting for many people in the audience. Iowa Jews of Dreyfuss’ parents’ generation tended to be FDR Democrats, with a few Republicans mixed in. Socialists were thin on the ground in the Midwest, to say nothing of Communists. A Marxist looking at the Iowa Jewish community of that era would see mostly “petty bourgeois” striving to succeed in business.
Fear-mongering politicians scored points against “un-American” activities during the 1950s. In Dreyfuss’ rendering, these citizens were the ultimate American patriots and heroes, not only because they fought for this country, but also because they believed in government by and for the people.
Dreyfuss sees things starting to get off track during the 1960s, as do many conservative commentators. But he comes at the big change from the other side of the political spectrum. His beef isn’t with “sex, drugs, rock and roll,” or with the civil rights or anti-war protest movements that upset the establishment. On the contrary, Dreyfuss sees this period as the beginning of the end of American commitment to popular sovereignty and questioning authority. During the late 1960s, he began to notice the media bolstering the government line. During the 1970s, he saw a country more and more divided.
At several points Sunday night, Dreyfuss spoke of the non-profit he founded, which is “as dear to my heart as acting.” The Dreyfuss Initiative’s mission is to “teach our kids how to run our country with common sense and realism, before it’s time for them to run the country.”
Listening to Dreyfuss talk about what made this country great, I was frequently reminded of tea party rhetoric. There was his apocalyptic warning that if we don’t get real civics education back into American schools, the country we love will cease to exist by the end of this century. There was the skewed rendering of history, which credits the U.S. for bringing “Enlightenment” values such as free speech and due process to the world. (Our founding fathers borrowed those and other ideas from British and French thinkers.) From the Dreyfuss Initiative’s website:
We start with no apologies, devoted to the country that declared war on the curse that the world thought eternal:
“You and yours will never rise. You are a serf, you will always be serfs and our heel will always be on your neck.”
Until America said, “Wait a minute. If you can get here, if you are strong and lucky willing to work and can take what life throws at you, you might rise.”
That is the most important political message in the history of civilization. The whole world heard it. That is why they came here, why they come here and why they will always come here. America is a miracle, and only Americans don’t know that anymore, because we don’t teach it.
The country doesn’t happen by itself. It takes patience, respect, and creativity. We’ve abandoned that for too long, and its time to get serious about learning to understand and maintain this nation, or it will continue this inescapable decay.
The story of making and keeping America is the most noble of stories. Let’s start telling our story with candor and honesty to ourselves again. Who we are and why we are who we are, will go far to regain our devotion to the true gifts we have given mankind.
“American exceptionalism” has become a catch phrase on the right in recent years. While Dreyfuss didn’t use those words, he encapsulated their spirit. He even raised his voice when reminding the audience that the federal government should play no role in education. We should take back local control of our schools to ensure they are teaching our kids their own history.
Yet the spirit of his lefty parents came through in Dreyfuss’ remarks too. A longtime activist for freedom of expression and media reform, he warned that we are in deep, deep trouble when the Supreme Court equates money with political speech. He recited the preamble to the Constitution verbatim, urging the audience to send him e-mails signing on to it. His goal is to collect 250,000 e-mails supporting the “We the People” concept, before declaring a 30-minute general strike of sorts. In his vision, people would not talk, work, shop, buy, or do anything for a half an hour–not enough to damage the economy, but enough for the powers that be to take notice that the public demands change.
Only a red diaper baby could come up with such an idealistic and impractical plan, I think.
Dreyfuss indulged in some hyperbole by claiming that all of this country’s problems stem from a lack of civics education, and all of the same problems can be solved by improving education. A Marxist might remind him that economic inequality in the U.S. is now at its highest point since the late 1920s. Teachers know that the world’s best curriculum won’t sink in if students are too hungry or sleep deprived to learn.
Then again, talking with those who lingered as the event wound down, I got the impression that whatever our political leanings, we can all get behind Dreyfuss’ goal of improving how kids learn American history. As the Dreyfuss Initiative puts it, “Civic education is the founding mandate of public education. Free public schools were developed in America for the express purpose of raising up good citizenship. This purpose has been abandoned and must be regained.”
No one would have complained if Dreyfuss had spent his whole speech telling stories from the sets of “American Graffiti,” “Jaws,” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I appreciate that he brought something more substantive and memorable to the table.