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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