Suffs and the Jews and Everyone Else

We took one of our granddaughters to Fort Worth this summer. Fort Worth in August? It was insane. When we went to the stockyards to see the famous drive of the longhorns we found out that it had been cancelled for the day. Apparently, the authorities check the temperature of the asphalt. If it’s too hot to trot, they pass on the event. I wish that I had known that beforehand. Watching longhorns in their stalls was no substitute for the parade.

But the real purpose of the trip was to see a production of Suffs, a Broadway musical about the enfranchisement of women. It’s a lively evocation of the early twentieth century, when progressive women managed to secure the vote. As a theatrical experience, it’s good, not great. With a couple of exceptions, the music isn’t memorable, and the book is more instructive than moving. I learned a lot, but it didn’t pierce my heart.

Unless we’re talking about the last fifteen minutes. At that point, the wins have been won and totaled, and the heroines have either died or said their goodbyes. Only one is left—Alice Paul—and she is feeling ruminative, nostalgic, disconnected, until she is visited by an effervescent young black activist. This woman is no worshipful nostalgist, but eager to get on with a new surge of activism. She wonders aloud why her predecessors were so deferential. What kept women like Alice Paul from escaping the bonds of sexism?

The point is that the battle will have to be fought again, that there is no final destination in political struggle. I thought deeply at that moment about my own naivete. I grew to my maturity in a period of abundance: respect—even love—for American Jews and international support for a Jewish state. Many late-century Jews experienced anti-Semitism, but it was almost entirely absent from my life. To this day, at least in Tulsa, I feel the power of philo-Semitism, the sense that we are an essential component on the American circuit board.

But that status is eroding in other places, replaced by suspicion and nearly satanic antagonism. It’s real, malevolent, and dangerously alive, much like the polarization in American life. The flag in the hand of Zohran Mamdani is an unfamiliar banner in American politics, and it is mirrored in the tiki-torches of white supremacists in Charlottesville. I think I know the difference between them, and I know that one is more dangerous than the other, but I can’t help feeling surrounded and beset.

But that doesn’t mean that this story is over. The Torah of Suffs is that things move in cycles, that the battle must be fought in each generation, that we will not emerge into a sunlit valley with all the rigors of the real world behind us. The real world is relentless in its challenges and disappointments, but it is the only world in which we can play out our lives.

If that sounds like a sermon, I suppose it is. I will not be speaking over the High Holidays next month, but I seem to be channeling my rabbinic selfhood. I could spend the rest of my life in dreamy nostalgia or come together with you in productive struggle.

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Like every entry on this blog, this was written without the use of artificial intelligence. It is the actual product of a struggling human mind. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. Hope that’s OK with all of you.