Sorry it’s been so quiet over here. Had a bad cold last week and was also working on some writing for print publication (more on that soon).
Over Memorial Day weekend we visited my mother, and I spent some more time with my father’s papers. I brought a bunch of new papers back home, some […]
[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since […]
Also filed in Books, Paul Greenberg 101, civil rights movement, disarmament, family, hungry blues, jewish, judaism, nyc politics, old left/new left, race and racism, situations and predicaments, writings of PG
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Thursday, September 2, 2004
Maybe it was 1937 when my oldest brother and I were in a local WPA theater production of Waiting For Lefty. I remember thinking that a union organizer was the noblest of all jobs even better than playing right field like Mel Ott. I also thought that Jewishsocialist was one word and that Jews who were not socialists were the exceptions even though my mother’s family was among the exceptions.
We were a decidedly secular family. Judaism was some old fashioned thing that my paternal grandmother held onto and it was sort of embarrassing. I did love seders at my Aunt Beck’s house because my Uncle Sam made Exodus come alive. To me Moses was a union organizer and socialist revolutionary and John L. Lewis all rolled into one.
Also filed in Paul Greenberg 101, alabama, civil rights movement, disarmament, document, family, frankie newton, hungry blues, jazz, labor movement, liberal party of new york, nyc politics, old left/new left, writings of PG
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As usual, while I’m here at my mom’s house, I’m sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. I’ve been looking through some of the documents from Dad’s work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master’s thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad’s involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and a there’s a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I’m going to post a little from what I’ve been reading while I’m here on my Passover visit.
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