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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