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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