An Annotated Bibliography
“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.”
— Kofi Annan
Just to be entirely honest, I was not at all excited when I realized that I still had to take English II. Ugh, another one? Why is this necessary? I’m a science guy now! I dragged myself to class on the first day, expecting to get a syllabus outlining when four different essays would be due. It turned out I was wrong.
One thing that I have thoroughly enjoyed about this class has been my ability to make it about whatever subject I want. Do I want to focus on history? Why not. Maybe a little psychology? Sure, throw it in! By being able to focus on my family through the context of these different schools, I have been able to understand and contextualize how I even got to this world and what the path was that lead me here to this exact place.
My research goals for this project are relatively simple. I want to use historical, sociological, and psychological sources to give myself a greater understanding of who my family is and what we have gone through. I want to follow my lineage from my earliest known ancestor up through my grandparents and eventually to myself. A particular focus will be taken on my Jewish ancestry, the second World War, and how those two collided head-on.
A Not-So-Happy History
When I received the email saying my Ancestry DNA results had come in, I felt a small flutter of excitement. I had never considered taking one of these tests before, but now that I had done it, I eagerly awaited the results. After class, I went back to my apartment and opened my computer up. I went to Ancestry’s website and signed in. There in the middle of the screen was the link to my results. I looked at it for a second, pondering what might lay behind it, and finally clicked it. The first result that popped up was 67% England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe. “That makes sense,” I said to myself. After all, I knew that both my mom’s and my dad’s families originated primarily from England and Holland, respectively. What caught my eye, however, was the next result: 26% Jewish.
I was aware of a little Jewish ancestry on my dad’s side, but not to that extent. I then realized that what I actually knew about the Jewish people was very limited in its scope. In order to get a better understanding of their culture and history, I went back to the original source: the Old Testament.
The Jewish people as we know them today can trace their roots back to Abraham. In Genesis 22, Abraham was said to have been tested by God by being told to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Just before he went through with it, God called out to stop him and said, “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky… through your offspring all nations on Earth will be blessed.” Eventually, Abraham died and left his fortune to Isaac, who in turn fathered twins, Esau and Jacob (Genesis 25: 24–26). Though Esau was born first and by all accounts was the more talented brother, Jacob was more cunning and took his brother’s birthright away from him. Jacob would go on to have twelve sons, each one becoming the head of one of the Twelve tribes of Israel, the tribes that any Jew today can trace their heritage back to.
I believe that whether or not the credibility of the accounts found in Genesis are completely accurate is relatively unimportant; they still build a cultural foundation for the Jewish people. And if the stories are the foundation, the familial lineage is the cornerstone. I think that all people are born with an innate desire to have a sense of identity and to connect with other people. The lineage accomplishes both of those things. If you can say that you can trace your family back to one important historical figure, that gives you someone to build your identity around. And if the other people around you can also say that they can trace themselves back to the same person, then you automatically have something in common in which to build relationships upon. Building community and reaching out to those around us are very important in my family, and though I didn’t know it until recently, I now have an additional 3500 years upon which to build and shape my identity.
Holy Bible, New International Version, Life.Church, 2018
“He’s only bluffing, surely…”
As a child being born in 1998, I had no real life context for the National Socialist German Workers Party (also known as the NSDAP or Nazi Party) or its leader, Adolf Hitler. After all, I was born in an era of relative peace. Of course I knew roughly who they were and what they did thanks to documentaries, museums, and classes in school. I knew through movies, video games, and television shows that they were the “bad guys” and the Allies were the “good guys.” But upon further introspection, I find it far too easy to fictionalize the Nazis and Hitler — to see them more as characters in a movie instead of normal people who lived, breathed, ate, and pooped just like every other person. To my grandparents, they were quite real, indeed. My grandmother saw their rise before her very eyes. It almost seems unreal that men of such horrid character, whose platform was founded on racism, xenophobia, and hatred could get and maintain power only two generations before mine, a minuscule period of time compared to the rest of human history. How could they manage this? In her 1993 book entitled German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism, Donna Harsch investigates how the largest, most powerful and populous political party in Germany, the SPD, lost power to the small, radical NSDAP party.
One of the first problems that the SPD faced in its path to implosion was a lack of identity. The demographics of the Weimar Republic (the name given to Germany in the time between WWI and the Third Reich) were shifting rapidly. People were leaving manufacturing jobs in favor of more skilled professions or service jobs. By 1930, only 60 percent of the SPD’s members were workers as opposed to 73 percent in 1926. The SPD got caught in a middle ground between its more progressive constituents and its more conservative members, not being able to cater to either and losing members on both sides.
One major blunder by the SPD was not recognizing the threat that the NSDAP resembled. However, it can be easy to see why. In 1928, the SPD was supported by 29.8 percent of the electorate, the largest percentage of any party, while the NSDAP only managed a meager 2.6 percent. They grew complacent, shrugging off the fascist and anti-Semitic viewpoints pushed by the NSDAP as bluffing. They believed that it was all intended to make noise and draw attention, nothing more. They could not have been more wrong. While the SPD maintained their course trying to implement more democratic laws into the Weimar Republic, the NSDAP took to the streets hard, holding rallies and speaking to the people. They put much effort into exposing corruption in the SPD, cracking the facade that the SPD had built for themselves. Before they knew it, the NSDAP began making alliances with other right-wing groups, unifying under the goal of toppling the establishment, and in effect giving the Nazis a real voting presence for the first time. By the September elections of 1930, the NSDAP had gone from receiving 810,127 ballots to 6,409,610, gaining 95 more seats in the Reichstag.
From then on, the descent of the SPD was largely out of their hands. The German people had suffered a great deal since the war. Hyperinflation had killed the German economy, and many people were left fighting just to get something to eat. Then, after things finally started to level out, the Great Depression hit Europe, once again crippling the German economy. Many people were tired of the slow process of politics, particularly the type played by the SPD. They wanted action and results, not legal process. Also, the NSDAP had one thing that the SPD never did: a figurehead. Adolf Hitler was someone that was recognizable, someone who people could rally behind. He expressed sentiments that many Germans shared, blaming the poor well being of the country on particular ethnic groups and other nations. When the SPD tried an attack campaign on the NSDAP, the damage had already been done, and many of the attacks just further pushed voters away from them.
This book has given me a much greater insight into how national politics works, and has allowed me to see the events of the past play out in real time. It has given me an appreciation for just how far a hurting people are willing to go to see change in their lives, whether that change be potentially harmful or not. It has been especially enlightening considering the recent political climate, and has really helped me to see how the world that my grandparents saw is really not that different from the one that I see every day.
Harsch, Donna. German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism. The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Print.
Making Animals of Men
The names Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Calvin and Hobbes, and Jon and Garfield are about as iconic as any in American media. Comic strips have been an integral part of many American families’ lives for many, many years and have provided millions of people with a laugh to start or end their day. Of course, the United States is not the only country with comics, and not all comic strips are humorous. In his 2018 article Picturing Anti-Semitism in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands, Kees Ribbens explores several comic strips from the Dutch National Socialist owned magazine “Volk en Vaderland,” or “People and Fatherland,” published as propaganda to spread anti-Semitic rhetoric to the people of the Netherlands.
In this article, Ribbens cites several ways in which the propaganda attacked Jews, the first of which depicts the Jewish people as “the Others.” When alluding to other groups of people or countries, the comics would usually choose either a character (think Uncle Sam) or an individual like Roosevelt or Churchill; however, whenever they would portray the Jews, a specific person was almost never used. Instead, a generic picture of an average Jew would be used, deemphasizing Jews as being individual people and encouraging the thought of them as a homogenous group. This was supposed to make the bad qualities that they would assign to them in other comics apply to all Jews.
Another way in which the propaganda would attempt to disenfranchise the Jews was by referring to them as their own nation. By this, I mean that they were often referred to as “Israel,” a call back to their place of origin. By doing this, the nationalists hoped to make people no longer think of Jews as their fellow citizens but rather as guests staying in their country without welcome. Again, they were being described as “the Others,” outsiders who were uniform and didn’t belong.
After them being their own group had been established, the propaganda began to push negative qualities on the Jews, the foremost being greed. This propaganda was so effective that the “all Jews are greedy” stereotype is still alive today. The comic The Merchant of Venice, based on the play, is one of the most well known examples, and it stresses many times the importance of money to Jews. When Jews were portrayed in this way, they were often also portrayed as trying to go about this in shady or illegal ways. For instance, when a Jewish merchant would be a character in a comic, he would often be shown as trying to sell an inferior product for an exorbitant price. This served to break trust and raise suspicion between non-Jews and Jews. Ironically, though they were depicted as greedy, a typical characteristic of a capitalist, they were also described as being communists.
I am very thankful that I live in a time and a place where I do not have to experience discrimination. To have someone judge me based solely on what other people have told them to judge me for would be very painful and dehumanizing. I am my own person, and enjoy being treated as such. I have so much respect for any of my ancestors who might have went through things like this, because the pressure they must have been under to continue to be decent human beings and not lash out, further propagating the stereotypes, surly was enormous.
Kees Ribbens (2018) Picturing Anti-Semitism in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands: Anti-Jewish Stereotyping in a Racist Second World War Comic Strip, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 17:1, 8–23
Unimaginable Courage
The concept of living in a war-time country is very foreign to me. It is so easy to take for granted being able to wake up everyday, attend my classes, participate in clubs, and interact with my friends without the fear of getting stopped for questioning, being imprisoned, or being killed. Unfortunately, there are still many countries in the world that deal with issues like these, but it can be easy to write those off as being “uncivilized” places. But not so long ago, World War II broke out in Europe and raged across the continent. The birth country of my grandparents, the Netherlands, came under siege of the Third Reich, being occupied from May of 1940 until April of 1945. When this happened, the Dutch government fled the country across the North Sea to England, while many civilians were stuck to deal with the Nazis. The Dutch did not roll over easily though, as is evidenced in the 1990 book Holland at War Against Hitler by M. R. D. Foot. This book is a collection of letters containing first hand accounts of the wars effects on the Netherlands and how the resistance was formed.
The beginning of the book details the period of time leading up to the war. In his letter, Robert den Boeft notes that since the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the Netherlands had been independent of neutral. Their neutrality had saved thousands of Dutch lives in World War I, and they intended to stay neutral during the looming war. However, when Dutch intelligence intercepted a message stating that the Netherlands would need to be occupied swiftly to get a better shot at the UK, neutrality was determined to be impossible to keep. The only problem was that the Dutch army was severely underfunded. After World War I, many were eager to demilitarize and decrease the burden of maintaining expensive military equipment. When they realized that they would need to start spending again, it was already too late; Germany outmatched them in every way.
It only took about five days for the Germans to blitz their way through Holland. By this point, the Dutch royal family had evacuated to England along with most of the government. In his letter, Harry Paape describes just how isolated the country was. The Germans controlled everything to the east and south of Holland and had constant naval patrols on the coast. There were no forests or canyons for any resistance groups to hide in. If there were any disturbances, the country was small enough that German reinforcements could be nearly anywhere within a few hours. If you were caught trying to escape, you would be sentenced to at least a year in a concentration camp. But with time comes boldness. It started with the little things: cutting German telephone wires, disabling aircraft spotlights, or deflating tires on cars. Then came the demonstrations and eventually the strikes. On February 5, 1941 an estimated 200–300 thousand people gathered for an anti-German march in Amsterdam. As the war raged on, more and more marches and strikes started to pop up. The Germans did not take kindly to this, and were given orders to execute disorderly people on the spot; but the Dutch kept on protesting.
While the storm raged over the country, the Dutch army based in England did its best to help. Dutch intelligence worked with the British to spy on German activity. What remained of the Dutch air force joined up with the Royal Air Force to go on bombing runs. Medics would sail in to Holland to attend to the injured while Dutch agents, like my grandmother, would sneak people back out of the country. Eventually, Operation Overlord was launched to retake the European mainland, and the Netherlands was liberated by Canadian forces. The Nazis were driven out, but not before a great deal of damage had been done.
The thought of living in a time and place like that scares the hell out of me. The fact that thousands of people were brave enough to show solidarity in the face of a brutal oppressor like the Germans while facing the possibility of execution or banishment to a labor camp inspires me. I feel very proud that my people showed such strength, and I am so glad that I have individuals like my grandmother to look up to when I need inspiration.
Foot, M.R.D. Holland at War Against Hitler: Anglo-Dutch Relations 1940–1945. Frank Cass and Co, 1990. Print.
Into the Jaws of Death
It has been referred to as the greatest assault the world has ever seen. 5,333 allied ships were launched carrying nearly 175,000 men. 20,000 paratroopers invaded via the sky. It’s date, June 6, 1944 is among the most famous of the 20th century. This assault was an absolutely critical step for the allies in winning World War II, opening up the mainland and lifting German occupation allowing Western Europeans to get back to their lives, including several of my relatives. It also allowed people like my grandmother to operate in Europe full time helping to feed people and locate their loved ones. However, all that I really knew about Operation Overlord and the D Day invasions was what little information they told us about it in history class and how it was portrayed in Saving Private Ryan. To further understand this critical juncture in human history, I found the original operation proposal written by General Frederick E. Morgan in July of 1943.
Though they were hopeful for success, the planners knew that they were not getting themselves into an easy situation. They were aware that they would have to hit the Germans with “all possible means including air and sea action, propaganda, political and economic pressure, and sabotage.” One of the biggest unknowns was the strength of the Luftwaffe, or German air force, at the time. A strong Luftwaffe could have spelled disaster for the Allies, resulting in thousands of extra deaths and the loss of many more planes, tanks, and strategic positions. Fortunately, as it would turn out, they were quite depleted by the time 1944 rolled around.
The most important targets for the allies were ports. If they could capture and control ports, not only would any German supplies coming in be cut off, but more allied ships would be able to land, increasing the number of soldiers and armored divisions available for combat tremendously. This was to be accomplished by distracting the Luftwaffe with our own air force in the northern part of France while an amphibious assault would hit the beaches in a quick blitz. Then, instead of moving inland, the forces would move along the coast, taking land for airfields and capturing ports along the way with the main intent of capturing the large port of Cherbourg.
From here, the strategy really became more chess-like. The officers would be left with a choice: whether to swiftly move to capture the Seine ports or to wait for more allies to land before continuing their assault. The situation they were counting on the most was for the Germans to retreat back to Paris and hold the line of the Seine. In this situation, it was determined the best course of action would be to take the Brittany ports instead. Once a large beach head would be established, the battle for Europe could really take off.
Without the sacrifices of those brave men that ran into the very face of danger, this world might be a very different place. Had the allies not invaded when they did, there was a possibility that the Nazis could have developed nuclear capabilities, possibly creating a stalemate. That would have been a worst case scenario for any and all of my relatives living in Europe at the time. My grandmother’s best friend, Tox, was the sole remaining member of her family. Both of her parents, her grandparents, and her brother and sister were all killed in Nazi extermination camps. Some, like my grandmother’s cousin, Jaap, were lucky enough to make it through relatively unscathed. It is unclear, however, how long their luck would have continued if not for the brave D Day invasions.
Morgan, Fredereck E. “Operation Overlord.” July 30, 1943.
“My dearest Kitty…”
The Diary of a Young Girl has proven to be one of the most well known and influential books ever written, providing insights into the terrors of war time life through the eyes of a young, innocent child. Spoiler alert: there is not a happy ending. When Anne and her family had to go into hiding during the occupation of the Netherlands by the Nazis, there was not much to do in a secret annex of an Amsterdam building. Anne decided to keep a diary for herself as a way to pass time and organize her thoughts. Then she heard that someone was wanting to collect eyewitness accounts of the terrors inflicted upon the Dutch by the Germans. From then on, Anne decided that she wanted to publish a book based upon her diary. She started rewriting and editing her diary to try to make it more interesting .
When their annex was raided, the family was taken to several work/concentration camps, and her journal was left behind. It was saved by some family friends and eventually given back to her father when he was liberated from his camp. It was clear that Anne nor anyone else in the family was coming back, so he decided to fulfill her wish to get her diary published. He edited it down to remove things deemed insensitive or too sexual and to fit in the series that he intended to publish it in. As of now, it has been translated into 70 different languages and become one of the best selling books of all time. It is a chilling read; you can almost hear her voice in the text, and you can really relate to her thoughts. Knowing how unfairly she met her end haunted me throughout the book.
The thing about this book that sets it apart from many other depictions of the Holocaust is how real it is. I think a lot of the time, we cannot even wrap our minds around just how terrible it was because the scale is almost unfathomable. In my lifetime the September 11 attacks were the worst catastrophes that I had seen, and in those, 3,000 people died. This seems like a massive number; however when compared to the estimated 17 million casualties just at the hands of Germans, it almost seems trivial. Try to imagine over 5,000 9/11’s taking place over a six year period. For reference, that is 5.4 deaths per minute for six years. The number of casualties is so large that our brains have a hard time even contextualizing it. With this diary, we as readers become very familiar with one of those victims, and it really helps to see her as way more than just a number. She was a normal girl with a normal family, friends, frustrations and desires. She was funny, thoughtful, and clever. We almost feel like Anne is addressing us herself due to her framing the entries in her diary as letters to “her dearest Kitty,” her nickname for the diary. Her use of pronouns like “you” allow us to insert ourselves into this correspondence and be an active part in it.
As the book goes on, the tone becomes darker and gloomier. We see Anne aging as each page goes by, and with this age, we see her become more jaded as well. Her innocence gets eaten away with each passing day, and she starts to become more in tune with the horrors and injustices of the world. She develops a contentious relationship with her mother and starts to feel completely isolated from everyone else. One of her only friends was Peter, a boy one year older than her who was also staying in the secret annex. They become confidants and share everything with each other. She tries everything she can to keep herself occupied including reading all the books in the house, doing crossword puzzles, and dancing. Her writing becomes better and better with each new journal entry. She starts to become more introspective and philosophical. Then, after August 1, 1944, the journals stop. According to the afterward, on August 4, the families were arrested by SS Sergeant Karl Josef Silberbauer and were later transported to Auschwitz.
I cannot imagine the horrors that the endured the last several months of their lives. The thought that people could do such terrible things to others just because of an ethnicity blows my mind and horrifies me. Knowing that this sort of thing was happening in the very country that my family had left just a decade before frightens me. I wonder what might have been if my great grandfather had never taken the transfer to America. The Diary of a Young Girl is a truly eye-opening read.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. — Anne Frank
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl, Definitive Edition. Doubleday, 1995.
“Whoever saves one life saves the World entire…”
I’ll be honest, I’m not a very emotional guy. I don’t let my mood swing very far one way or another, and I often tend not to express myself very much, if at all. But never, ever have I bawled and blubbered like I did at the end of the movie Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg. One of the reasons that my grandmother and her parents had to move from Europe to the United States was the rising threat of Naziism. When the war started, my grandmother decided to help in any way she could and volunteered with the Dutch Red Cross. Eventually, she enlisted in the Dutch Army, where she attained the rank of Lieutenant. Up until 1944, she was stationed in England receiving training and helping refugees. After the D Day invasion, she was transferred to Holland where she would give aid to people who were oppressed by the Nazi regime. She noted that it was very haunting to see houses that used to belong to Jews that were now completely vacant, their owners having been taken away by the Nazis never to return again. I decided to watch Schindler’s List, based on a true story, in order to really understand the danger of life in Europe in the 40’s, and to get a better understanding of the horrors that Jews went through. Little did I know the ride I was in for.
The 1994 winner for Best Picture and six other Oscars stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a Czech businessman during the second world war. At the start of the movie, Oskar is not what we would call a very heroic man. He is a member of the Nazi party and uses that membership to get close to Nazi officials in Poland. His plan was to use the cheap and abundant labor force to manufacture goods for the German war machine, hoping to make a nice profit. He befriends a Jewish bookkeeper who suggests using recently displaced Jews due to their wages being paid directly to the Reich. When the SS officer Amon Göth arrives and builds a concentration camp, the Germans raid the Polish ghetto, rounding up all the Jews and killing those who resist. They are all transferred to the camp, but Schindler, deeply affected by the raid, manages to get those who work for him put up in a subset of the camp where they would be able to continue to work at his factory. He and the bookkeeper work tirelessly to hire as many Jews as they possibly can. Finally, orders are received to liquidate the camp and send all of the Jews to Auschwitz. Oskar manages to convince the Nazis to let him keep his Jewish workers so that they might be able to continue to work for him; and more importantly, survive.
The absolute horrors of what happened in Europe during the second world war have never hit home to me in the way that this movie managed. The treatment of an entire race of human beings as cattle, killing without mercy or remorse, shook me to my core. I could not believe the conditions that those people were exposed to, and it really discouraged me how so many people could let something like the Holocaust happen and just turn the other way. On the other hand, it truly gave me an appreciation for how brave it was for some people to do all they could to help. The tension of the constant threat from the SS looming over Schindler the entire movie was palpable, and it was clear that one wrong move could have doomed him to the same fate that he was trying to save others from. I gained a new perspective of how scary it must have been for my grandmother to be so close to a group of people that would want her dead simply because of the ethnicity of her parents. It must have been incredibly gratifying knowing you were responsible for saving a life, but it must have also been crushing knowing that there were thousands, millions more that you couldn’t save. I will always carry with me one of the final scenes of Schindler’s List where Schindler is standing in front of all of the Jews that he saved from certain death at Auschwitz, yet all he can manage is, “I could have got more.” Cue the musical swell, and the tears.
Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, performances by Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, produced by Amblin Entertainment
The Love of my Life, the Savior of a Generation
More than anything else, sports have had the greatest impact on my life so far. Many of my earliest memories are sports related, including attending a baseball game at Yankee Stadium between the Yankees and the Red Sox, playing in a tee ball league, and meeting some of my best friends playing soccer. Sports have taken me to many different places in my life and have opened me up to lots of new perspectives and experiences. The sport that has most profoundly influenced my life has been baseball. At a very young age, I fell in love with it when I would watch Chipper Jones and the Braves playing on TBS, and my love grew from there. When I was 10, I joined my first travel baseball team, the Gilmer Bobcats out of Ellijay, Georgia. This was quite the step for me, because the team practiced an hour away from my hometown of Young Harris, Georgia. However, It was the best team within an hour radius, and I wanted to play for the best. From there, I made the step up to a team out of Dawsonville, Georgia and played there for two years. Finally, I moved up to a team from Marietta that played out of the famous East Cobb Baseball organization. It was a trek to get to practice, two hours, but it was worth it to play for and against the best competition in the Southeast. From this experience, I gained new friends from many different schools that I never would have met otherwise. I got to expand my world view from a small Young Harris perspective to a state-wide perspective. I was able to travel throughout the South to play in tournaments. In short, without baseball, my life would be completely different.
For many of the subcultures in the United States during the 20th century, sports were an integral part of everyday life. African Americans could go to their local gym to see the hilarious and awe inspiring antics and feats of the Harlem Globetrotters. Italian Americans could tune in on their radio to hear the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, abuse opposing pitchers. The demographic of importance to me is the Jewish American population of which my grandmother was a part of. In his 1992 book Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, Peter Levine examines the influence of sports on the American Jewish experience.
For purposes of this bibliography, I will focus on baseball. This was my grandmother’s favorite sport, too. She loved to go over to Ebbets Field when she was living in New York to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play ball, and continued to listen to their broadcasts after they left Brooklyn for Los Angeles. There was just something hopeful and pure about sports. Levine posits that sports provided a way to assimilate into American culture. The teams gave immigrants a new identity, a clan to belong to. Instead of being seen as “that Jewish guy” or “the Kraut,” people could now be seen as a Dodger or a Yankee or a Giant. They could keep up with how the team was doing instead of constantly worrying about the worsening conditions in their home countries. Baseball became to many as much of a religion as their previously instilled Jewish beliefs, forming into a “secular nationalistic church,” a place for community and rituals.
Baseball did not only provide a sense of belonging and a cause to get behind for migrant Jews; it also was a source of a new wave of role models for younger generations. Throughout history, Jews have never been renowned for their physique or athleticism. The stereotype has always been that Jews are shrewd traders and astute businessmen, could not compare with more “physical” races like the English or Aryans (although look at how the Berlin Olympics turned out, the Aryans weren’t so incredible after all). But with baseball going mainstream, more and more publicity was given to strong examples of Jewish athletes. Andy Cohen, the Tuscaloosa Terror as he was called, was the first openly Jewish professional baseball player. His success in the pros proved that Jews could compete as well, and paved the way for future Jewish Hall-of-Famers like Hank “The Hebrew Hammer” Greenberg and Sandy Koufax. Players like these have been inspirations to countless children throughout America.
Levine, Peter. Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American-Jewish Experience. Oxford University Press, 1992.
“She moved down here at the age of 18…”
When Alexis de Tocqueville first came to the United States in 1831, he was shocked at how easily Americans would pull up their roots and move residences. He was quoted as saying, “In the United States, a man will carefully construct a home in which to spend his old age and sell it before the roof is on.” My family is no exception. My grandmother moved from the Netherlands, then to Germany, and finally to the United States before ever turning sixteen. My father moved from New York to Virginia before making his way to Washington D.C. for college and eventually to Atlanta. My mother moved from Hiawassee, Georgia to Atlanta after getting married. Eight years after I was born, my parents got divorced and my mom and I moved from Atlanta back to Hiawassee. In their 2010 study, Shigehiro Oishi and Ulrich Schimmack tried to answer two questions: “What are the psychological correlates of frequent residential moves?” and “are frequent moves more negatively associated with the well-being of some individuals than others?”
Before the study, they predicted that frequent moves would lead to more negative psychological impacts and lower levels of life satisfaction. They also predicted that introverts would be affected more than extroverts by moves. For the study, over 7000 American adults between the ages of 20 and 75 were tracked over a ten year time interval. Participants in the study took a survey at the beginning of the ten years and one at the end. They answered a variety of questions used to determine quality of life using a number scale. Then, they answered questions used to determine how outgoing they were, along with questions asking about their social relationships. Finally, they were asked to report how many times they had moved during their childhoods. After controlling for factors like age, gender, and education, the results were rather telling. The frequency of childhood moves turned out to be significantly negatively correlated with life satisfaction, psychological well-being, and social balance. They also found that, like they had predicted, introverts were far more susceptible to the negative effects than extroverts, with the latter group being almost exempt to the pattern.
I found this very interesting because I, myself, went through a childhood move, and while I do not feel like this adversely affected me, I can’t help but wonder what if I hadn’t moved. Would my life be in a better place? Could moving to two new countries as a child have been detrimental to Jenny? While this could be true, I can’t help but feel like this speaks to the strengths of my family. No matter the conditions, we have always seemed to keep going strong and made the best of our situations. I honestly feel that uprooting ourselves has actually made us stronger, giving us a new identity to build around and make our own.
Oishi, Shigehiro, and Ulrich Schimmack. “Residential Mobility, Well-Being, and Mortality.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 98, no. 6, 2010, pp. 980–994.
“You play ball like a girl…”
America has been known for years now as the home of freedom, the light of liberty, and the center of justice in Western society. This is rather ironic seeing as slavery was legal for about a third of its history as a country, with the ramifications still being felt by generations today. Nonetheless, it was a founding principle that “all men are created equal,” and that the worth of a man should not be determined by his height, accent, or color of his skin, but by the moral fibers that make up that man. This sounds well and good, but it conveniently leaves out half of the world’s population. Yes, I am of course talking about women.
While it took ninety four years from the declaration of our country’s independence until the ratification of the 15th amendment allowing black people to vote, it took 144 years, or 65% longer, for the 19th amendment to be passed, allowing women to vote for the first time. This was less than 100 years ago, a shockingly short period of time when you compare it against all of human history. For my grandmother, the effects of sexism were still very much tangible; she especially felt them when she was applying for colleges. Several schools, including Cornell, turned her down because they saw pre-med as an intended major and were quite stirred by the fact that a girl thought she could hang in there with the guys for an “actual profession.” While this was detrimental to her confidence back then, it ultimately ended up being a driving force behind where my family is today.
Growing more curious about sexism in education, I did some research and came across an article in the journal Advances in Child Development and Behavior entitled “Sexism in Schools,” by Campbell Leaper and Christia Spears Brown. They pulled information from other studies and found that in today’s classroom, there tends to be two types of sexism: differential expectations bias and sexual harassment. The former is characterized by people assuming that work quality, social skills, and overall school success will be different for girls versus boys while the latter manifests itself as “inappropriate or hostile sexual behaviors that occur in face-to-face interactions (e.g., sexual teasing, unwanted touching) or through the use of online social media.” Studies have shown that up to a whopping 81 percent(!) of women have experienced sexual harassment in their lifetimes. This can leave serious mental scarring on those affected.
The article goes on to mention different sources of sexual harassment. The first it lists is teachers. Many teachers were found to believe that boys were more logical, competitive, and were able to do math better than girls. It was also found that many teachers were more likely to call on boys in class, grade their answers more favorably, and less likely to give them criticism. The nagging effects of these things over time could lead to self confidence and self image issues in girls. The second source it listed was peers. Peers were found to be the most common perpetrators of sexual harassment. In a 2001 study cited in the book, 54 percent of adolescents admitted to perpetrating sexual assault against a fellow peer, an unacceptably high number.
The results of the sexism found in schooling are quite startling. Despite numerous studies showing that women are just as good at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as men, only 43% of mathematics degrees, 20% of physics degrees, 16% of computer and information sciences, and 18% of engineering went to women. The good news is, this gap is shrinking every year as gender stereotypes become more obsolete. We still have a long way to go, but I am confident that we are getting closer and closer to becoming a society my grandmother and millions of other women would be proud to live in.
Leaper, Campbell, and Spears Brown, Christia. “Sexism in Schools.” The Role of Gender in Educational Contexts and Outcomes Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 2014, pp. 189–223.
The Perks of Being a String Bean
When people take their first glance at me, there are several different things that usually go through their mind. Their flash judgements usually include things like: ‘It’s a male,’ ‘He’s white,’ and ‘He’s got dark hair with blue eyes.’ However, the very first thing that probably goes their mind is ‘Wow, that guy is pretty tall.” Though I am not ridiculously tall at 6’3, I’m still taller than 97 percent of the world. I am not the only person in my family like this. My father is 6'2, my uncle was 6'4, and my cousin is 6'3. The women are no exception either, with my grandmother and cousin coming in at 5'11, and my aunt being no slouch at 5'10. Being a woman that’s nearly 6 feet tall is unusual now, so imagine being that tall back in the 30’s and 40's! There has been a lot of research put into the psychology of height, and there is some fairly convincing evidence that being tall is a large benefit.
In a 2008 study by Tim Gawley, Thomas Perks, and James Curtis, a significant correlation was found between employee heights and status as a manager or supervisor, particularly in men. A 1975 study by Arnold Feldman that they cited implied that taller people were more likely to get promotions due to heightism, or the belief that taller people are more able, more intelligent, and more responsible than shorter people. Feldman was quoted as saying, “Shortness may be a virtue in academic papers, but…to be of less than average height in American society is to fall short of the mark in almost all aspects of everyday life.” In a 1991 survey of a Fortune 500 company, people in managerial positions were often significantly taller than their peers, both in men and in women. A 1984 study of Army West Point’s 1950 graduating class found that the shortest quartile of graduates had the lowest percentage of generals, majors, and colonels, while the tallest quartile had the largest proportion.
The 2008 study sought to recreate the trends that had been seen in previous studies while controlling for more variables. The most notable controls were age, gender, and level of schooling. The results of a survey of Canadian businessmen and women showed that men who had held managerial positions were on average 1–2 cm taller than those who hadn’t, a significant amount. On the other hand, they found no correlation between height and job level with women. It is hypothesized that this may be because of reverse heightism. Whereas men or other women in positions of power might see a tall man as strong and competent, they might view a tall woman as intimidating or overly masculine.
When compared with other studies, height for men is one of the largest predictors of success behind only parents’ wealth, respondents’ education, and age. My family is very proud to have height in our genes, and we hope to use it to our benefit when we can. Height is actually one of the main reasons my grandparents ended up together. Jenny had been around the dating scene a little bit, but she was put off from it because she ended up being taller than a lot of the men she met. Finally, her best friend said that she knew someone tall enough for her, and from there, the rest is history.
Gawley, T., Perks, T., & Curtis, J. (2008). Height, Gender, and Authority Status at Work: Analyses for a National Sample of Canadian Workers. Sex Roles, 60(3–4), 208–222.
A Preventable Tragedy
We humans often tend to do things despite knowing that the consequences of those things could be bad. Think about how often people speed or even text while driving, even though those two things exponentially increase your chances of getting in a wreck. Among the worst is the habit of smoking. Smoking is the largest preventable cause of deaths in the world, with nearly 100 million deaths being attributed to tobacco in the 20th century. Despite new laws banning smoking in many areas and a social stigma arising around it, there are still more than 1 billion smokers in the world, with that number rising. Personally, I have lost several members of my family to cigarettes and cigars, most notably my grandfather, who died of complications from smoking in 1963 when my father was just four years old. I nearly lost my other grandfather to smoking as well, but he managed to quit before it was too late. Why is tobacco so bad for us, and why do we continue to use it?
According to a study by R. Rezzani and L. F. Rodella, smoking increases a persons chances of stroke, coronary arterial disease, and impotence by 100%, chances of peripheral arterial disease by 300%, and risk of aortic aneurysm by 400%. Second hand smoke alone is thought to increase chance of coronary arterial disease by 30%. This doesn’t even take into account the risk of cancer. Despite the well-known risks of smoking, there is not much evidence showing what is actually happening to cause much of this damage. The journal hypothesizes that one of the main causes of the effects could come from damage to the endothelium, or the tissue that lines various organs and blood vessels throughout the body. One of the many functions of the endothelium is producing anticoagulants, which help blood run smoothly through the body. Moreover, the endothelium has been shown to regulate the constriction of blood vessels. This, along with the anticoagulants, are some of what keep our cardiovascular system healthy, so any damage to it would clearly be devastating. There is evidence that nicotine, itself, is the culprit behind this damage, as it can form highly reactive oxygen species that damage endothelial tissue directly. This leads to the conclusion that smokeless tobacco and vapes could potentially be just as dangerous as cigarettes or cigars.
Nicotine is also the main cause behind addiction. It is an alkaloid that comprises about 1.5% of the weight of a cigarette. From first inhalation, it only takes about 10–20 seconds for nicotine to pass through the brain. This quick time period does not allow for your brain to adjust or for a tolerance to be built. The presence of nicotine signals for dopamine to be released at a higher than natural rate. The nicotine is then absorbed by surrounding tissues and nicotine levels fall. The sudden presence and then lack of nicotine causes the brain to crave more to fill the now present void of dopamine production, and thus, addictions are formed.
Nicotine addictions are the culprit behind the most preventable deaths in the world. Back when there was not any research proving that it was bad for you, smoking was very common in the United States, but it unfortunately lead to the premature deaths of millions of people. Now, tobacco industries are trying to prop themselves up and appeal to younger generations. I choose to learn from my some of my previous relatives mistakes and stay away from nicotine.
Rezzani, R., and L. F. Rodella. “Vascular Morphological Smoking-Related Changes: From Bench to Bedside.” Smoking : Health Effects, Psychological Aspects and Cessation, 1 Aug. 2012, pp. 1–34.
