10 | AUGUST 20 • 2020
Views
Thoughts On
Henry Ford
I found Rabbi Spolter’
s
op-ed suggesting that Henry
Ford’
s name be taken out of The
Henry Ford museum complex’
s
name (Aug. 6, pg. 9) very
disturbing.
I am well aware of Henry
Ford’
s bigotry and its world-
wide impact. As past president
of the Zionist Organization of
America Michigan Region, I am
very sensitive to antisemitism
and anti-Zionism. I have
addressed the University of
Michigan Board of Regents
numerous times on double
standards applied to Jewish
students when the rest of our
community was silent. I am
a longtime member of the
Henry Ford, a proud retiree
of Ford Motor Company and
a volunteer helping to restore
Ford’
s Piquette Avenue Plant as
a Model T museum.
People are complex, and
there is good and bad in all
of us. Henry Ford changed
society for the good by putting
it on wheels, creating the
moving assembly line and by
introducing the $5 a day wage,
which was revolutionary at the
time. He employed hundreds
of thousands. He built the B-24
bomber plant and made more
jeeps than Jeep to help defeat
Hitler. His museum complex
is a Detroit-area and world
treasure. His architect was a Jew,
Albert Kahn, and he personally
awarded Ed Levy Sr., another
Jew, a slag hauling contract
that was the foundation of the
Edward C. Levy Company. He
gave his neighbor, Rabbi Leo
Franklin, a new car every year.
The Ford family has done
their best to make restitution
for Henry Ford’
s antisemitism,
and a Jew recently was president
of Ford Motor Company. We
need to remember Ford for his
greatness without forgetting
his bigotry. Living with hate
is destructive as is obliterating
history.
The Bible is made up of
flawed characters and we learn
moral lessons from them.
Would the rabbi consider
canceling their names from our
Bible in this new woke world?
A forthright plaque at the
base of Ford’
s statue can tell the
story. There can also be a display
at the museum on antisemitism
in Detroit. We learn from
history and we should not erase
it. While I get deeply depressed
thinking about Henry Ford’
s
antisemitism, I am proud to say
I am and have been part of what
he created. I am also proud of
The Henry Ford.
— Eugene Greenstein
Farmington Hills
These days it’
s difficult to
remember what day or even
year it is. So, when I started
reading Mr. Spolter’
s essay
about The Henry Ford, I had to
double-check that it was 2020
and not 1950 because there
is nothing in the column that
hasn’
t been commonly known
for decades. The bigotry of
Henry Ford has been covered
from several angles in the
Jewish News, the Forward and
many other publications. The
Edison Institute, incorporated
in 1929, is the private nonprofit
letters
tions.
Learning pods may signal a
viable future but will fall short
without partnership from insti-
tutions to meet the full scope
of children’
s learning and social
emotional needs. We will learn,
as we already have, that we are
a society in progress who is still
finding solutions. When we
center children’
s mental health
in these conversations, we will
ask, what matters most?
WHAT CHILDREN NEED
Even in a pandemic, children
need opportunities to leap. They
need chances to build their
identities, both in response to
their individual lives, and in
response to the color in the
world around them. They need
to solve problems with oth-
ers, learn from interpersonal
differences and make sense of
their developing sense of self.
They need creative expression.
They need to know they have
strengths inside them to con-
front challenges, and they need
to know who to ask when they
are without the right skills.
They need their parents to
notice the best in them, practice
joy and make this shared con-
nection the basis for who they
will become. They need their
parents to be well.
For generations, group-based
education and care have served
as an important setting for these
areas of development, though
research shows they are only
one context in which children
develop. We know that early
childhood education, in par-
ticular, helps children make
significant gains across areas
of development, with impacts
identified into adulthood.
However, with the world of
education changed so drastically
during COVID-19, it’
s time
to drill down on what matters
most for children and consider
how to deliver the supports and
resources they need in the cur-
rent environment. One-size-fits
all approaches will fall short.
Relationships are at the heart
of all learning outcomes. When
families must adapt and help
children practice important
social skills within a more
restricted set of interactions,
those interactions must be pri-
oritized and given maximum
support. Individuals, organiza-
tions and communities must
partner to identify local needs
and come together in ways that
make the relationships in which
children will thrive as healthy as
possible.
Our children’
s lives will be
different from our own and dif-
ferent from what we imagined
for them. It’
s our imaginations
that hold us back from the kind
of solutions that will grow with
them into the world they occu-
py. If the buildings and the com-
puters inhibit their growth, we
must give them opportunities
and resources to leap into the
next liminal space where cri-
sis, coping and solutions form
adaptation.
Erika London Bocknek, Ph.D., is a
licensed family therapist and associate
professor of educational psychology at
Wayne State University in Detroit. She
directs the Family Resilience Laboratory
at Wayne State, is associate editor of
the Infant Mental Health Journal and
serves on the editorial boards of the
journals Infancy and Adversity and
Resilience Science.
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