On Thursday, June 3^rd, The Pierce County Arts Commission will celebrate its 25^th Anniversary.  Though it may all but be defunded (currently facing a proposed budget for 2011 that will comprise a mere 10% of the funds it received in the year 2000, effectively ending Artist-in-Residence programs in Pierce County Schools and annual community grants to deserving Pierce County non-profits) the commissioners have nevertheless decided to celebrate yet one more year of public funding for the arts – at least in theory, if nothing else.

Therefore, Commission President Bonnie Egbert is organizing an awards ceremony – using funds from the commissioners’ personal bank accounts, to honor some of the individuals and organization that over the past 25 years played a crucial role in the rise of Pierce County’s cultural economy.  Dubbed, The President’s Awards, the recipients include: Pierce County Councilwoman Barbara Gelman (A Founding Member of PCAC), Elida Kirk Lathrop (PCAC’s first president), Arts Downtown (Puyallup’s Outdoor Gallery) and more.

Artists and Arts Advocates who have already RSVPed include: Tacoma Sculptor Larry Anderson (whose works can be seen at places like Slovonia Hall, Fireman’s Park and Union Station), Melanie Kirk Stauffer (Vice Chair Dance Theatre Northwest), Judy White (President of Arts Downtown) and Becky Condra (Chair of Valley Arts United).

The Ceremony will be held at 3602 Pacific Avenue, Suite 200 in Tacoma at 5:30.  We would like to invite any and all interested members of the media to attend this very special occasion.

Like many of our readers, I’m currently struggling to find a job.  This means that I spend most days on the web, where I recently found the following Merritt for Mayor YouTube commercial, Jim Merritt A Leader We Can Believe In, with current school board candidate Jerry Thorpe providing the voice-over.

Viet Nam is a quickly changing nation; one employee at the U.S. Consulate told my class that the assessment of the country she was giving us was completely different than the assessment she had given to another group six months earlier. I intend my comments here, then, to be a snapshot of the nation, limited not only to the early months of 2009 but also limited by my experience as a monolingual American student. I intend what I write here to be merely descriptions of my experiences rather than positive or negative judgments (unless explicitly stated).

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For the past four months, I have studied issues of development and culture in Viet Nam. I wish to share my observations with The Melon community in a three-part series. The issues included are education, gender, and the government.

The Educational System: A Hot Topic

Everyone agrees the educational system is seriously messed up and needs to be fixed if Viet Nam wants to become a leader in, well, anything in the near future. But giving truth to the phrase “the devil is in the details,” how exactly the problem should be addressed is making the debate arduous and the progress tortured.

Teachers

The first issue here, as everywhere, is low teacher pay. University professors with terminal degrees in their field (usually earned abroad) can expect to make no more than $10,000 a year, while most other professors earn between $3,000 and $4,000. For comparison’s sake, the average annual income in Viet Nam is over $5,000. Teachers at lower levels make less, forcing them to moonlight as tutors.

The ones most forced to find outside income – the youngest, least experienced teachers – also have the greatest workload. In public universities, each department is assigned a certain number of class hours to teach, which are divided up within that department. More experienced professors with more seniority are able to choose a reasonable number of hours to teach, and they also choose their own areas of interest and expertise. However, the younger professors must teach any additional hours left over once the department’s seniors have chosen theirs, which are usually too many to adequately prepare for. They do not necessarily get overtime pay for this. The departments are pressured to have a lot of classes because the demand for them is so high; currently Viet Nam’s higher education system particularly is struggling to meet demand. Every year more students want to go to university, and since the government intentionally keeps education on the cheap side, more students apply than the infrastructure can possibly support. As a result, teachers are flooded with huge classes at every level, distancing them from student outcomes.

In high school, teachers may feel superfluous. Grades in high schools do not necessarily matter for university admissions (though private universities have different admissions standards). Instead, at the end of the year there is a standardized National Examination which high schoolers take. This is the government’s one tool for lowering the number of university applicants. It is extremely difficult and stressful – newspapers report things such as the number of students who faint from the stress of taking them. However, cramming for this test, rather than longer-term learning throughout high school, seems common. Everyone hates the test, but no one knows how to replace it for university admissions. As a socialist state, Viet Nam is loath to deny education to anyone that wants it. In fact, Ho Chi Minh once declared that the two major problems of the country was occupation by the French and illiteracy. There are plans for each city to have its own public university so as to reduce the travel costs of students in the nation.

Even with those stresses, many people may choose to become teachers from a sense of altruism and the prestige being a teacher brings in Viet Nam. There is one major drawback that stops even these people: the societal attitude toward how teachers must conduct themselves. Teachers are thought of as serious and intellectual people. Education students must wear sober clothing – the women wear ao dais, the national clothing, which is hot and restrictive. Moreover teachers cannot act in ways that compromise this image. If they joked too much in class, students would not take them seriously. And if a student saw them drinking in public – well! Combined with low salary, an overwhelmed infrastructure, distance from student outcomes, and no fun in one’s personal life, it is no wonder that Viet Nam struggles with a teacher shortage.

Last Saturday, May 16th, my bookstore sold books at a Michael Pollan event in the Central Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland. Over 1,100 people showed up for this question and answer session with the author of (most recently) In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’ve only read an earlier book of his, A Place of My Own, but since I’ve been studying his precursor, Wendell Berry, it’s only a matter of time before I get to his other work. I’m always behind on the latest trends.

Tony Geraci, the new Baltimore City Head of School Lunches, interviewed Michael Pollan. I didn’t take these questions and answers down verbatim, so these are not direct quotes by Michael Pollan, but they are the content of what he said.

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Last week over at The Melon, my friend and old classmate Elliot Trotter wrote an interesting piece on how he views the evolution of media. In a nutshell, FOX News embodies an emerging new type of media, one that represents a certain perspective (in this case America’s conservative wing). Although grossly biased and slanted to the right, Elliot comments that a “fair and balanced” state will result from a counter-balancing perspective, meaning that something akin to FOX should emerge on the opposite side of the spectrum. He considers The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as potential candidates for this role.

Given most people’s vehemently negative attitude towards FOX, this is a very interesting and rather fresh perspective on how media is changing. However, it is incorrect to assert that mainstream media has only figured out that entertainment sells better than news in the last few years. While things may have become more slighted in recent years (a claim that is by no means beyond dispute), it is undeniable that the disproportionate fixation on entertainment value – usually represented by “blood and guts” aspects of news stories or some form of dramatized human suffering – is very much a product of the modern communications revolution. The first mass communications revolution is usually considered to be the invention of the steam-powered printing press in 1830 which allowed news to be much more timely. Within a few years the first mass-circulation newspaper was being produced in the US.

The second great revolution – which initiated the shift from news to “infotainment” – began in 1968 when the US launched the first television satellite. With this technology, stories could be transmitted from local studios back to network news headquarters for editing and broadcast far more rapidly than previously possible. This was further supplemented by three critical pieces of TV equipment available by the early 1970s: the Minicam (a portable, lightweight video camera), a battery-powered video recorder (also portable), and the time-base corrector (by which video footage was converted into transmittable output to be broadcast over the airwaves). With this combination, live TV could be made directly from remote locations and transmitted instantaneously into the homes of viewers across the globe.

These advancements had consequences for the content of the news. The ability to beam a breaking story live gave rise to intense competition among rival networks to “scoop” one another. There were basically two ways to do this: being the first on the scene or being the first to report some hitherto undisclosed information. Although the first is perhaps the most sought-after prize and honor of journalism, it is also inherently evanescent as an advantage. Since the dawn of modern communications, the trick to keeping ratings up has been not-so-much capturing attention by breaking a story, by rather holding it with equally gripping follow-up reports.

The result has been a world of sound bites and “spin.” Dramatic footage and pointed phrases specifically designed to grab viewers’ attention have gradually displaced detailed analysis (or at least the former has become more synonymous with “good journalism”). The concrete effects were easy enough to see. Eleanor Randolph of the Washington Post pointed out in 1985 that the mainstream news coverage of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking was driven purely by a rush for ratings, at the detriment of important substantive coverage. As TV increasingly became the primary source of news for most Americans, the relevance of this bias correspondingly became more influential.

To some degree, the shift towards “infotainment” is independent of increased politicization of news networks. There are arguments that the US as a whole has become more divided along party lines. This may or may not be true since it is hard to disaggregate the reality from the filter of the media where most people get their information. However, especially in the last decade or so, major news networks have gradually recognized that politicization is a good source of high ratings. While many people roll their eyes when they hear Al Franken or Sean Hannity, it is important to realize that there are many others who flourish listening to these programs. Most people prefer to listen to commentators and news reporting that more-or-less validates their already established viewpoints. It is much rarer to find someone sincerely open to a variety of different opinions.

This last point is somewhat along the lines of what Elliot is identifying in the emerging new media: news sources that embody particular values and principles. Elliot argues that counter-balancing from the liberal side of the spectrum will establish “fair and balanced” amongst a variety of biased sources because each side will be roughly equal in their bias to the left or right. This is problematic for a couple reasons. First, it is improbable that most programs will accurately embody a person’s entire belief set. There are many people in the US who have a variety of views that do not neatly fall under ideological (much less party) lines. Of course there are those who are extremely liberal or conservative – and it is these people, not the moderates or those with mixed views – that tend to capture more nationwide media attention.

Second, the notion of biased networks balancing against one another places too much emphasis on the capacity of conventional news programs to maintain themselves in the future. Personally, I think that most signs are pointing to a decline in major centralized news agencies. Internet-based and open-source resources are revolutionizing the ability for broad mass-movements to communicate, inform, and organize. This is clear in the variety of effects such technology has had on protests in New Zealand, Moldova, Thailand, and at the G20 summit in London. The impact is particularly pronounced in Egypt where Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other online networking mediums were used in organizing the food riots last year and establishing the April 6th Youth Movement (their blog can be viewed here). Newspapers, radio, and TV will remain important sources of news for many people. But since their traditional territorial power is being slowly eroded by these new sources of information, it is difficult to imagine this scenario of biased counter-balancing news networks being the embodiment of new media.

This emerging trend may, however, become more pronounced before it sputters out. But that it is happening is a different issue from whether or not it is desirable. For me, the role of journalism and the news has always been to attempt to report the truth as objectively as possible – making this new media (as Elliot envisions it) an unwanted development. Of course there has always been, and will always be, bias in reporting. But Elliot’s conceptualization is purposely biased to the preferences of a particularly viewership. Such flagrant disregard for any standard of objective reporting is not only detrimental to the quality of journalism – which has already suffered in the mainstream due to the impacts of the communications revolution – but also contrary to any notion of a greater public good. A polarized arena of news agencies split along ideological lines and competing over who can “scoop” one another the best will only serve to divide the country.

It may be that the supposed fracturing of American society along political lines is more a result of media portrayal. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how this imagined politicization would not become a clear reality should new media be truly defined by ideological media wars.

A Jack Handey Saturday Night Live quote puts it best: “I’d rather be rich than stupid.”

Sometimes, I wonder if being stupid wouldn’t also be helpful at this point in the game.  Alas, I am neither rich nor stupid, just partly naive.

Last fall I lost my job, and since I was already feeling the pressure of jumping into a higher paying bracket but seeing no options opening up with a degree in History, the same day I was laid off I enrolled at Tacoma Community College, an ethnically diverse campus with mostly a single-degree focus: nursing.

Nursing is something I vowed to never get near nor even discuss as a career possibility, but as the field becomes more open, and the pay scale is jumping high, I cannot help but look as a real opportunity.  My brother’s friend earns $56 an hour in Hawaii as a nurse.  I lust after that kind of pay.

On the first day of my evolutionary ecology class, we formed a circle and practically held hands as a support group while listing off our majors.  I was one of two that listed Doctor of Physical Therapy as an intended goal.  The rest were either nursing or pharmacology.  A few of the older students (yes, older than me) had lost their jobs as well, and figured that since billboards and job hiring ads around Tacoma are begging for nurses, they might as well bite the bullet and jump right into Microbiology and the Anatomy and Physiology sequence.

One of my best friends, Kenneth, lives in Portland and is going to be graduating as a certified “Murse” this coming June; one of the few Male Nurses that was attracted to the field before the economic bust of October, 2008.  Since then, a growing population of males are enrolling at community colleges around the United States, such as my very own brother and 54-year-old father, who both have business degrees and were, at one time or anther, decently successful in the business world.  My dad competes with 18-year-old kids, studying twice as hard to learn the same material, but is focused to get the next two years out of his life so he can obtain the Aztec City of Gold that a nursing degree promises.  Heroism comes in varying packages, and while nursing might be my second choice, according to my brother “it takes a nurse hero to wipe ass” — and who doesn’t want to be a hero?

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I wonder, if everyone is going into nursing, will there be a glut of nurses within the next five years?  Tacoma Community College’s enrollment office told me most laid-off people are enrolling here as nurses–what happens when there are too many of them?  Kenneth already knows the answer, because in Portland, with the highest unemployment in the Union, nurses aren’t finding jobs in the metropolitan burbs.

I have only been out of college a few short years, but already I feel the “Sluggish Brain Syndrome” and early-onset of old age dementia flushing throughout my system.  What was once an easy all-nighter of frantic working due to a high level of procrastination is now a methodical listing of “to-dos” in an organized calendar book and an early bedtime of 10 p.m. in order to get up for that 7:30 a.m. outdoor biology lab of identifying the flora and fauna of Tacoma.  It hurts going back to school, but I also feel my brain being sharpened as I force her to recall, remember, and retain new scientific notations that have never previously stuck around for more than five minutes (remember, I was a history major, for gods’ sake!).

I glow with jealous fervor whenever I hear of other successful friends who still have jobs and are financially bringing in anything over the national poverty level.  Even my boyfriend, who is trapped in a scholastic sweat shop of grading standardized tests of middle school children, has a paycheck for the next three weeks.  Yesterday he told me some young boy gave a big middle finger to standardized testing by writing one short paragraph, stating his friends were honest lenient hearts, and he hoped the grader of that essay would be a lenient heart as well, and he had nothing more to say.  My advice to this particular child?  Good job on trying to stay in middle school for as long as possible!  I admire you!  I wish I could take afternoon naps and have mom’s snacks after school, and go to soccer practice with my girlfriends!  Lucky!

By the time I am done with a DPT degree (assuming I get accepted into the program next fall) I will be 30 years old, and will have missed a historically established prime age of wage earnings from my 20s to my 30s.  I question the future of my retirement funds, which as of now, has been halved since last year, leaving me nothing but a small pittance of saved Christmas and birthday money from by-gone years–perhaps I should have spent it on a new car instead of investing my hoarded goods.  How many other young 20s are out there in a similar predicament, and what will our retirement futures be?  Even if I wanted to settle down with the white picket fence and really get into the breast-suckling scene of kiddies, I don’t have the financial resources to do so.  After Obama won the election, many people went on a procreating binge–I wonder how they feel now, five months later?  “Oh, shit!  We’re pregnant!” has got to be hitting their psyches right about now.  This isn’t the booming 90s.  This is the slumping of the twenty-first century, with Obama feeling smug on reminding us that he wasn’t the one who got us into the mess.  Will the population growth slow-down in developed countries and see the rise of alcohol consumption peak at pre-prohibition era standards?

My parents’ phrase, “I told you so!” clangs in my ears.  Yes, I should have gotten a more practical degree, or at the minimum, a teaching certificate to accompany my history degree.  My impracticality kept my head in the clouds until my bank account screamed expletives at me, pulling me back to the reality of stereotypical brunt jokes that ring true: “What do you call a history major?  A burger flipper.”  I never smile anymore when someone says that to me.  In my brain, I am giving them the middle finger.

All I know is, I feel grateful to be in school and not home banging my head against the wall.  Something has to force me out of bed every day at 7 a.m.  and if a solid steady paycheck is the golden ticket to lure me onwards, so be it.  It is tough going back to school, but if my experiences have taught me anything, it’s that life itself is tough, but worth it.  I’m too curious about what’s around the next corner to stay in bed forever.  Now is the perfect opportunity to get an internship or volunteer for Parks Recreation Day on April 18th, or attend a noxious weed seminar at Snake Lake, or plant a garden with other community members and write for The Melon.  Or, become a nurse.

Last week, in my home state of Iowa, the Iowa State Supreme Court ruled that the state could not place marriage restrictions on same-sex couples, echoing centuries of history of court enforced equality in the state:  slaves, Jim Crow laws, and women practicing as lawyers. Vermont’s Congress recently overruled the Governor and said same sex marriage.

A State Senator from Iowa put it best when he described something his daughter told him about some older males she heard discussing gay marriage:  ”You don’t matter anymore. We’ve all already decided.” And that’s more true than anyone who opposes gay marriage, that true about those who oppose abortion rights, that true about those want to restrict the usage of stem cells. You don’t matter anymore. Those of my generation, we’ve gone elsewhere. These are not the wars we will fight. We’re beyond that. We’re already on to the next great culture war:  The War on Drugs.

When someone asks me about gay marriage, my opinion is really easy:  marriage is a church institution and civil unions should be a state/federal institution. But no matter what we have, equality should be extended to any two consenting adults. That’s the most important. But I like to relate a story about my baseball team. I play with a  group of guys and we’re all about 25-35 years old. We’re mostly athletically fit, but its a pretty wide spread culturally, we have about three guys that graduated from college about four guys who spent some time in college, and about two guys who didn’t make it through high school. We have about five immigrants from Latin America playing with us. They come from nice neighborhoods of Tacoma, they come from Olympia, and they come from the crazy ass parts of Tacoma where I won’t go at night. We have guys who live in high rises in Bellevue and guys who have spent multiple years under bridges.

We had a barbecue last year and our coach, who’s a construction foreman, originally from Eastern Washington said “everyone bring your wives, girlfriends, or boyfriends, its all cool,” and it was a little joke, because obviously everyone on the team was male. I believe everyone on the team is straight, though I don’t know for sure. But it wasn’t a joke at homosexuality, it was a joke the thought of people being homophobic. The joke is post-ironic; we joke about being gay not because being gay is cool, but because homophobia is uncool. But more than uncool, its just ridiculous.*

*Dave Chapelle had skit a couple years ago about a blind, black white-supremacist. Its inherently funny because it is so ridiculous. That’s what my culture thinks of these people. Clayton Bigsby is a satirical character who doesn’t represent what most racists are like. To our generation, these bigots who want to restrict equal rights are inherently caricatures. And yet, they are real people. That is why to us they are so ridiculous.

This is not bunch of people who went to liberal arts colleges, cocooned for years away from society and creating a fabulous world in their mines of communism and atheist taking over the world (and yes, many conservatives do believe that’s the purpose of liberal arts colleges). These are construction workers, hydroelectric engineers, warehouse forklift drivers, and bartenders. These are blue collar as blue collars gets. This team represents what the conservatives need to target if they are to re-brand themselves: and this team doesn’t give a shit about any of the opinions the conservatives hold so dear.

That’s why over the next 10 years, across the country gay marriage will become more and more common. Because the people who will be voting, the people who make the decisions and give the money and the people who will be running for state reps and state senators, they have already decided that the culture warriors don’t matter.

Nate Silver already has a very interesting statistical regression (seriously, you expected him to throw up something different) in which he calculates when each state will have the right population makeup to vote to legalize gay marriage. Within 12 years gay marriage should be legal everywhere. I hope he’s correct.

But, sadly as I like to think, its not the end of the culture wars. There is a new front opening in the culture wars, and I don’t think any of the politicians really understand it yet: the War on Drugs. We got a hint of that in Obama’s press conference in which he was asked about legalizing marijuana. He basically shrugged off the question with a snicker, as did most of the reporters in the room. Sadly, they do not realize how many adults who otherwise live normal lives regularly use marijuana. These are not pot heads who can’t hold down a job at McDonald’s. They are your bus driver, the coach of your kid’s little league team, your boss. This is the next culture war. Drugs is where we go from here, because much of the younger generations hasn’t made its mind of up on the legalization of drugs so they will still fall into the varying camps. But drugs will take over from Gay Marriage, Guns, Abortion, and Stem Cells, and that is a very very good thing.

Having starved my body enough of its vital nutrients, I cracked the other day when handed a free sample of a basic staple of life: Starbucks new instant VIA coffee, named after the man who invented their own brand: Don Valencia.  This new VIA coffee has been in development for 20 years, and was finally released this year, two years after Don Valencia’s death.

Consumer ethics is hard to follow these days with so many super mega store options.  The aisles are full of canned crap, where consumers are becoming more distant from their food sources, many of which are made under slave-like conditions or are practically stolen from the host country, never paying a fair wage for a top product.  After attending Seattle’s Green Festival last weekend, I decided to never again buy chocolate that is not Fair Trade certified after watching a film of Guyana boys being beaten and forced to work without wage to support us.  The ending line that blazed in my brain was of an African boy stating, “You eat my flesh.”

Starbucks is Fair Trade certified.  Has been for years.  They are kind of a pioneer in that field.  Currently, they are one of the largest buyers of Fair Trade coffee, doubling their purchases to 40 million pounds this year alone, making them the largest purchaser of Fair Trade certified coffee in the world.  Social responsibility earns lots of points in my book.

So does buying local and from local businesses.  Which leaves me in another quandary.  Go Local Tacoma says that for every buck spent in Tacoma, approximately .68 cents stay in the community.  Is Starbucks considered local to Washington?  Just because they are a huge corporate organization dedicated to bring in the honey money for their stock holders by selling sub-par coffee (for the most part) doesn’t just fully write them out of the “local” scene.  The fight exits within our ranks of what, exactly, “local” means.  Washington?  The Pacific Northwest?  West coast?  United States?  North America?  For myself, I stick with Northwest products as much as possible.  Since Starbucks is based in Washington, my conscience can buy their coffee and feel good about supporting “my” local area.

The next question arises, is Starbucks fighting back against McDonald’s witty coffee campaign?  I think I laughed myself silly on the way to work last fall while listening to a McDonald’s radio ad, where a emotional hippy upstart was changed into a conservative business Republican after having McDonald’s latte.  The political fight of Republicans accusing liberals of being elitist is carried out in McDonald’s campaign strategy.  Huffington Post reports that Starbucks is repositioning away from their elitist $4 coffee drinks and in its place offer things like: value meal “breakfast pairings” at a cost of $3.95 to “appeal to cost-conscious customers.”  Starbucks, after all, made it cool to pay a high price for a cuppa Joe, bringing in scarf-wearing women and the metrosexual men to “hang out” in the posh Starbucky setting.

Another cost-cutting four-buck buster is the new Starbucks VIA, released this past February.  When I opened the tiny packet and watched the finely grounded beans dissolve in a cup of hot water, I was positioned over the sink, expecting to spew it out and decry the decay of coffee in America.  When young bucks and hussies are reduced to dissolving coffee beans in their water, it is just not a good sign for America’s values–what are we coming to?  Instant breakfasts, dissolved in a glass of Oprah’s Acai juice?  Instant friendships that can be consumed with a beer?  Instead of spewing, I drank.  To the dregs.  This coffee was impresive, despite being instant (my inner elitist comes out in regards to “instant” coffee).  Starbucks VIA contains the original essential oils from the finely-ground coffee beans, which seems to be the secret ingredient–traditional instant coffee lacks those essential oils which gives good coffee its rich and full-bodied flavor and aroma.

Despite the impressive taste, Starbucks VIA instant coffee is better at what, I ask?  Beating back home invaders?  Overcoming entropy?  Providing a clean, renewable source of energy?  Perhaps solving the meaning of life?  VIA gains ground on the fact that it allows me to fuel up any time, any where, and will allow yet more minerals to be leeched from my system as I become more dependent on coffee; and for a cheaper price, too.

Cheap and instant.  The way Americans like their women and now, their coffee.

image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/cafemama/

Last Wednesday I was told that I had been accepted for Taglit Birthright’s May 18 Israel Quest Trip. For those unfamiliar with Taglit Birthright, allow me to provide some background.

Birthright was founded in 2000 by Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt in cooperation with the Israeli government, private philanthropists, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and Jewish communities around the world.  It proposed offering a free ten-day-trip to Israel (including airfare) to Diaspora Jews ages 18-26. Since it’s founding, over 200,000 Jews from some 52 countries have taken advantage of Birthright’s trip.

Sound like a pretty sweet deal?  It certainly is, but it would be wrong to view Birthright’s goal’s as purely philanthropic. From speaking with alumni of the program I’ve identified four implicit objectives embedded in the program:

1)  To awaken a sense of “Jewishness” to those living outside the State of Israel.

2)  To introduce single Jewish men to single Jewish women in hopes of “repopulating the Jewish race.”

3)  To encourage Diaspora Jews to commit Aliyah (immigrate to Israel) and/or join the Israeli Defense Forces.

4)  To make Diaspora Jews aware of Israeli politics so that – should they return to their home country – they can be counted on to put pressure on their governments to support legislation related to Israeli security concerns: both commercial and military.

While Birthright has been criticized for its aforementioned agenda, it has nonetheless inspired alternative groups like Birthright Unplugged to develop similar programs.

I have wanted to go on a Birthright tour since I was 19.  In college I applied multiple times but was always unable to secure a trip date that was compatible with my studies.  After graduating I abandoned any hope of getting the necessary time off from work to go on a trip to Israel until a bad economy provided me with more time than I knew what to do with.  Having been rejected again last summer I had resigned myself to never getting an opportunity to visit – what I consider my ancestral homeland – until last Wednesday when I was suddenly informed that a space had been reserved for me to go May 18-June 1. Five days later, I was contacted by a DC representative of Birthright who wanted to conduct yet another interview with me to determine whether or not I was “eligible” to receive a Birthright gift.

Now, what you have to understand is, Birthright has only a few criteria for determining whether or not you’re “eligible” for their gift.  The principal one being, obviously enough, you have to be Jewish.  This is easier said than done because designating one as “Jewish” means crossing both religious AND racial lines. Nonetheless, Birthright feels comfortable defining “Jewish” as those recognized as Jewish by the Jewish community or by one of the recognized denominations of Judaism; or if either parent is Jewish and the applicant does not actively practice another religion.

For the record:

1)  My whole life I have always been considered a member of the Jewish community.  Not only is my faith Jewish, I am dark-skinned, I have a big nose, and – yes – I am circumcised.  Ethnically, my mom is 100% pure Jewish as was every one of her ancestors from at least 1492 onward (when her family fled the inquisition in Spain).

2)  I am a member of the Reconstructionist denomination of Judaism, which has nearly 400,000 members world wide and is recognized by both the Reform and Conservative denominations.

3)  My mother was born Jewish but converted to Christianity, my father is an agnostic gentile.

4)  I practice no other religion, but I did attend a private Christian high school.

5)  I don’t speak Hebrew and am not bar-mitzvahed

6)  I do keep Kosher (not Kashrut but close) and I do make a point to go to temple every now and again.

A reasonable person would consider me an ethnic Jew with a secular perspective on what the Torah offers to the modern world.  This is perfectly in step with what Rabbi Kaplan said about giving the past a vote – not a veto. Nonetheless, in past interviews, Birthright has made “being Jewish” more than the seemingly diverse criteria described above.