Views
10 | NOVEMBER 21 • 2019
opportunity does little to culti-
vate genuine, lasting relation-
ships. Instead, The Well con-
nects those who attend their
gatherings to their larger net-
work by facilitating introduc-
tions so that Metro Detroit’
s
Jewish young adult and young
family population can build
ongoing relationships of sub-
stance and meaning.
If The Well’
s success is any
indication, Parker’
s book has
many insights to offer Metro
Detroit’
s Jewish communal
institutions as they seek to
adapt to the 21st century and
meet the needs of emerging
generations.
Chelsea Landry is program partner
at the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher
Foundation.
GATHERINGS from page 6
MARCHES from page 8
make ourselves feel virtuous,
useful and in the right?”
Norman Mailer, novelist and
liberal political activist, later
reflected on those years and
asked whether the anti-war
protesters were fully commit-
ted or were just affluent kids
looking to be “revolution-
aries-for-a-weekend.
”
In recent years, there have
been some notable mass
demonstrations in America,
including the Million Man
March, the Women’
s March
and Occupy Wall Street. But,
however successful or inspiring
they may be, their frequency is
spotty and irregular. They come
and go and leave behind no
real, palpable “legs” that propel
their cause. They don’
t seem
to establish prolonged pressure
on lawmakers to change things,
and they don’
t seem to plant a
permanent seed of activism in
our collective social conscious-
ness or in that of our children.
That wasn’
t the case 50 years
ago. The protests of 1969 and
that era, however flawed, were
loud, steady and impossible to
ignore. They had legs. They
kept people motivated. They
kept the heat on the politicians.
Are Americans still capable
of staging protests that are
loud, steady and impossible to
ignore? Or are we, for a myriad
of reasons, too beaten, weary
and distracted for anything like
that?
Outside of the U.S., mass
protests are alive and well. Last
month more than 1 million
people in Chile protested eco-
nomic inequality, about 1.7
million people in Hong Kong
attended a rally last August
and about 1 million anti-Brexit
protesters took to the streets of
London in October.
A few years ago, millions of
Egyptians held marches and
demonstrations to demand
the ouster of President Hosni
Mubarak, and in the Arab
Spring of 2012, tens of millions
of protesters took to the streets
throughout the region, often at
great personal cost. Say what
you want about these protest-
ers or the causes they espouse,
but no one can accuse them of
apathy.
The anti-war protesters in
America 50 years ago didn’
t
have all the answers. They
weren’
t always organized, uni-
fied or even successful (the
Vietnam War lasted another
six years after the Moratorium
March). But those passionate
Americans can teach us some-
thing today. They refused to sit
idly by and complain about the
causes they cared deeply about.
They converted their convic-
tions into actions. More impor-
tantly, they injected hope for
millions of Americans during a
time of profound despair and,
in doing so, they set the gold
standard for social activism that
we should honor and seek to
emulate today.
Don’
t these current times
demand nothing less?
Mark Jacobs is the AIPAC Michigan
chair for African American Outreach,
a co-director of the Coalition for Black
and Jewish Unity, a board member
of the Jewish Community Relations
Council-AJC and the director of
Jewish Family Service’
s Legal Referral
Committee.
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