JULY 2007
BOOK REVIEWS
Susan Abulhawa, author of THE SCAR OF DAVID, human
rights activist and founder of Playgrounds for Palestine
will have two book readings and signings on
Saturday, July 7 at 2PM in Dallas/Frisco TX and
Wednesday, July 11, 7PM at Borders Bookstores in
Langhorne PA.
http://www.scarofdavid.com/events
DALLAS/FRISCO, TX -- THE Bookworm / 3245 Main Street Frisco / Sat. July 7 2PM (972) 712-1455. Susan will also be participating in panel discussions/debates to present the realities of Israeli occupation in Palestine. LANGHORNE PA --- Borders Bookstore / Directions Below /
Wed July 11 7PM (215) 943-6600 We are proud to announce The Wisconsin Humanities Council will be presenting Susan Abulhawa and THE SCAR OF DAVID at The Wisconsin Book Festival this fall. WBF is one of the top five book festivals in the country, and the nation's largest free event, hosting nearly 20,000 attendees and staging over 100 events. Please plan to attend a reading near your home. For directions http://www.friscobookworm.com/ http://www.bordersstores.com/events/event_detail.jsp?SEID=173010
Susan Abulhawa - PfP Founder - Upcoming Events for July 2007
Press
Release:
May 24, 2007, Bayside, NY -- Barnes and Noble
Booksellers of the Bay Terrace Shopping Center
hosted author Susan Abulhawa to give a brief
talk about her book The Scar of David,
which was first published in December, 2006. After the
talk attendees brought their copies to her to sign.
Earlier in the day, Ms. Abulhawa had attended a Kingsboro
Community College class, whose professor had made the
book assigned reading this semester. According to a
Kingsboro College spokesperson, such attendance did not
constitute a college-sponsored event. The
originally B scheduled event was to have included a
reading from the novel, but Rabbi Bruce Goldwasser of
Temple Beth Sholom in Flushing encouraged a call-in and a
boycott of the bookstore as intimidation. He
claimed, "It's an historical novel based on made-up
stuff. The made-up stuff is that Israelis were forcing
the Arabs out of their homes." Temple
Beth Sholom is taking part in the Terror Free Oil
campaign of Joe Kaufman, who is the Chairman of Americans
Against Hate and CAIR Watch. CAIR is the Committee
on American-Islamic Relations, whose "mission is to enhance understanding of Islam,
encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower
American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote
justice and mutual understanding.
QJCC
values freedom of speech, recognizing that this right is accompanied by responsibility. QJCC does not want to add to the publicity of this book with rallies or newspaper articles/letters to the editor, but suggests a letter writing/phone calling campaign to the Bayside Barnes and Noble stating displeasure with this author's appearance and the lack of balance of Israel's point of view. The issues of the Middle East are complex and require a thoughtful presentation. If Banes and Noble still wishes to have this woman appear then it behooves them to invite an author that relates Israel's point of view such as Michael Oren or Dore Gold. Please inform your congregations of this unfair and biased presentation.
According to a Barnes Noble spokeswoman the
store received
an audience had been filled with display
tables. Between 7:15-7:30 PM as attendees
arrived, many police officers stood in front of the
building. One policeman stated that they were
taking their lunch break Mr. Miller told the
audience that not everyone is so afraid to address the
crimes committed against Palestinians. "The French
publisher will release the French version in 2008 on the 60th
anniversary of Israel's formation to make sure that the
Israeli version is not the only version the public
hears."
Ms. Abulhawa remarked that the central idea
of the book was not hers but originates with
Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, who presented the
idea of an Arab child raised as an Israeli Jew in
"Return to Haifa." Israeli agents
assassinated Kanafani in 1972. Kaiss al-Zubaidi directed
a movie version of Kanafani's story. The film was
released in 1982. Ms. Abulhawa's book is a
page turner and tear jerker in which the metaphor of the
scarred stolen child stands for the theft of
Palestine. Ms. Abulhawa wanted to "show the
Palestinian narrative in a human light." She said,
"Art is about finding common human ground and making
the connections.
View full size
When asked why CAIR attempted to intervene, she pointed
out that she cannot speak for CAIR but noted, "I am
a Muslim and a big supporter of CAIR. They are a civil
rights group. They saw a violation."
Ms. Abulhawa told the audience, "Barack Obama gave
an abominable cowardly speech to AIPAC. None of the
candidates take a moral stance. We fought a civil war
against racial subjugation. We should not support that
crime in another country. Israel is founded on the
concept of entitlement of one people at the direct
detriment of another." Ms. Abulhawa added
that the historical backdrop of her novel was accurate,
but all of the characters are fictitious even if
some of the story like the orphanage chapter was drawn
from her experiences. She said, "My
friends cursed me for making them cry so
much." Then she added, "Anytime you
humanize Palestinians, you get shut up." But perhaps
not this time. Mr. Miller disclosed that a Dutch studio
has shown interest in producing a movie based on the
book. Action memorandum from Queens Jewish
Community Council, Inc. to organize pressure on
Barnes and Noble: http://members.
*********************************
'END THE WAR
IN IRAQ' BY TOM HAYDEN
ZNet Commentary
Tom Hayden's War June 04, 2007
By Vijay Prashad
Tom Hayden is a veteran of peace. A pioneer of the
anti-war movement in the 1960s (including as one of the
Chicago 7), Hayden is now, after a hiatus in California
politics in the 1990s, a central figure in the current
anti-war movement. His range of experience, both in terms
of time spent in the struggle and institutions struggled
with and against, make his counsel important. This is why
his new book, Ending the War in Iraq (Akashic Books,
2007) should be compulsory reading not only for anti-war
activists, but for all Americans who are interested in
making something of the country.
Hayden's horizon for this book is that the U. S. needs to
withdraw from Iraq. That is a necessary first-step for
any progressive agenda. But to engineer the withdrawal,
the American public needs to grasp at least three things:
(1) that the war and occupation are a fiasco for the
interests of the American and Iraqi people, and that they
have only exacerbated the insecurity of both; (2) that
the Iraqi resistance has a popular base among the
majority of the Iraqi people, and therefore it cannot be
defeated by a conventional or counter-insurgency military
operation without an immense loss of life; (3) the
anti-war movement in the U. S. does not march to the tune
of a single drummer but it is nonetheless powerful and
effective, and has had an honorable lifespan since 2002.
Having established these three points in the first three
chapters, Hayden then takes us into the fourth, the one
which is of great importance: how we, as progressives, as
people, can end this war.
Hayden starts his analysis by pointing to the eight
pillars of the Bush strategy in Iraq: Iraqi support;
American public opinion; American media; Political
support; U. S. military capacity; U. S. financial
capacity; Moral reputation; U. S. global alliances. He
spends a few hundred words showing how each of these
works to shore up the Bush strategy, and then offers a
few hundred words to show what U. S.-based activists can
do to undermine that pillar. Each of these pillars is
significant, and he offers very useful methods to deal
with them. Two of them, for instance, are already
important places where our movement intervenes: at the
pillar of U. S. military capacity, the
counter-recruitment movement and the anti-contractor
campaigns have made and continue to make a significant
dent; at the pillar of U. S. financial capacity, the work
of the National Priorities Project to unravel the costs
of war is central as is the use of this data in
localities to point out how, for instance, schools are
being under funded to pay for the war.
But there is one pillar that does not get much notice or
take much of our effort: the pillar of Iraqi support. It
is related to another important pillar, the American
media. The American, or to give it its correct name,
capitalist media (cap media as it was once called) has
effectively blocked off from the U. S. public the erosion
of Iraqi public support for the war and occupation.
Whereas right after the actual invasion ended in 2003, a
substantial number of Iraqis, for whatever reason,
claimed to support the new dispensation. Now, 61% of
Iraqis support the resistance and two-thirds of the
population wants an immediate withdrawal of U. S. troops,
regardless of the consequences. These facts are not
discussed in the capitalist media, and therefore don't
often make it to the tablogoids or the water coolers.
Apart from the facts, there is no sense of the people
behind them. The capitalist media does not meet average
Iraqis who are part of the 61% and ask them why they
support the resistance, what this means for them, and
what they would like the Americans to do? Without such
stories, the resistance, and so the majority of the Iraqi
people, is demonized by the capitalist media, who then
feed us a story that the resistance is comprised of
ex-Ba'athists, fundamentalists and others who are
historical anachronisms.
The activist media needs to refute this picture, and
reveal to our public and to our elected representatives
that true extent of Iraqi public opinion in depth as much
as in these statistics. We need to gather the stories of
suffering that constitute the basis for the Iraqi
people's opinions.
We must show our public that the U. S. occupation is
playing a very dangerous game, of supporting a sectarian
government while paying lip service to being against
sectarianism. What we have is not a Civil War (which
assumes that there are two relatively co-equal parties in
conflict within a nation); we have an Occupation taking
the side of one political force that wants to inflict
damage on other (Sunni, but also secular and
secular-nationalist) political forces. The venomous
Bernard Lewis approvingly predicted this state of affairs
in 1992, "If the central power is sufficiently
weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the
polity together. The state then disintegrates into a
chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes,
regions and parties."
Much of the groundwork for the destruction of Iraqi civil
society happened during Saddam Hussein regime (1978 on),
but the appalling destruction of the Gulf War
(1990-1991), the brutal sanctions regime (1990-2003) and
the early years of the Occupation (2003-2005) certainly
devastated civil capacity. This internecine conflict in
Iraq is buttressed by the U. S. military presence, whose
support of the Shi'a-alliance contributes to the problem
without posing any solution to it. As Hayden points out,
if the U. S. public was taken to war through
fabrications, it is being stopped from withdrawal by an
equal dose of fabrications (that chaos will ensue with
the withdrawal, as if chaos is not already Iraq's
reality). One of our tasks should be to take the measure
of Iraqi public opinion and bring that to the living
rooms and streets of the U.S.
The Democratic Congress, despite a spirited move by the
Out of Iraq Caucus, could not cut off funding for this
unpopular and criminal Occupation. Hayden gives those
within Congress who are yet in the fight a very useful
way to shift U. S. public opinion. We could, in our
localities, "hold hearings on taxpayer funding for
Iraqi ministries filled by militias and death squads.
Cutting off all congressional funding will be more
palatable when people and politicians fully grasp the
dysfunctional, repressive, and sectarian nature of the
Iraqi government, and realize that American troops are
supporting the Shi'a-Kurdish side in a civil war."
This is a very valuable way to bring Iraqi public opinion
to the U. S., and thereby to sharpen U. S. public
discontent with the Occupation.
Tom Hayden's book is a very useful primer. It needs to be
read and to be drawn from. Our movement is powerful, and
now it needs to be pointed in the right direction. There
are some good signposts in this book.Prashad
Tom Hayden's War Jun 04
Book Review by Joachim
Martillo (ThorsProvoni@
[Originally published on
Monday, Nov 3,
Even if The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology,
Theory, Ideology and Identity by Uri Ram is somewhat
dated, this book remains useful because it surveys a
lot of the important English and Hebrew sociological
literature about the State of Israel. Non-Hebrew readers
can thus gain some access to otherwise inaccessible
scholarship. Because Zionist censorship for the
most part controls US public discourse, the ability to
cite genuine Hebrew sources can protect against attempts
to silence discussion by means of accusations of
anti-Semitism.
I now understand more why so many Israeli sociologists
write history books and articles. So much of Zionist
social activity connects to various (mostly false)
conceptions of Jewish history that Israeli sociologists
need to develop a historical perspective in order to do
sociological research.
Because Uri Ram is a post-Zionist, he tries hard not to
act as a Zionist propagandist. He is aware of the
complete fabrication of modern Zionist identity. If I am
not mistaken, his earliest important work describes how
Ben-Zion Dinur and colleagues created the educational
system in the 1950s that constructed the Zionist national
consciousness first among Israeli Jews and then among
American Ashkenazim.
Before this propagandization, normal Rabbinic Hebrew
terminology describe
Even though this relatively short book (207 pages)
is quite lucid in comparison with sociological papers,
the text is probably tough reading for the
non-sociologist.
The chapter on the sociology of elitism identifies the
intellectual origins of the Israeli polity in
The reader must approach some of the material in the
discussion of elitism cum grano salis because Yonatan
Shapiro, the creator of the Israeli sociology of elitism,
was himself an unrepentant Labor Zionist and consciously
or unconsciously confused the distinct ideologies of
Fascism and Nazism. Shapiro has no problem
identifying the authoritarian nature of Herut (Begin's)
politics but is blind to the Leninist authoritarian style
of the politics of Labor and its predecessors even though
Ben-Gurion and most of the founders of Ahdut ha`Avodah
were open and frank admirers of Leninist political
techniques. Shapiro's prejudices make it difficult
for him to understand of the fall of Labor from power in
1977 or to relate it to similar developments in
The following comment (p. 72) in the chapter on elitism
has qualified relevance to the politics of family values
in the USA: "As for the role of 'values,' Shapiro
insists that they are mere derivatives of strategic
interests and instruments of domination, which cannot in
themselves explain much about any social structure."
Sami Smooha introduced the school of pluralism to Israeli
sociology. I have not read much of his work, but if Ram
describes it correctly, Smooha was daring by the
standards of Israeli academia. Yet Zionist
indoctrination has distorted his work, for he appears to
view the accidentally fabricated Mizrahi (oriental
Jewish) identity as comparable to Eastern European Ashkenazi
ethnic identity.
Shlomo Swirski introduced the Marxist perspective to
Israeli sociology, but if Ram's description is accurate,
he has not read much of Katznelson's, Arlosoroff's or Jabotinsky's
writings, for he is unable to identify Labor Zionism as
fascist and fails to perceive the abstract Nazism in
Revisionism (Jabotinskian or Likud ideology). Swirski
needs to investigate more about the behavior of Zionists
in the pre-State period toward `edothammizrah
(oriental communities)
The actions of pre-State Ashkenazi Zionists toward those
few Oriental Jews, who wanted to assist the Zionist
movement, shows that Ashkenazi Zionists had no genuine
interest in Jewish Arabs or Persians and only worked to
bring them to Israel when they realized
1) that there were not enough Ashkenazi settler-colonists
to hold Palestine and
2) that the Zionist state needed a class of native
collaborators as raw manpower and cannon fodder.
Swirski believes that
The discussion of Israeli sociologists of feminism is
interesting, but these researchers apparently do not know
enough about Eastern European Ashkenazi gender roles or
relations to provide much useful information about
gender-related developments either among Israeli Jews or
among American Ashkenazim.
Nordau's concept of Muskeljudentum, which is
superficially a call for Jews to be come athletic but at
a deeper level proposes to remake Judaism into
a religion or ideology of conquest and violence, is
probably a direct reaction to the traditional Central and
Eastern European perception of Ashkenazi males as weak
and effeminate. The gratuitous violence that the IDF
commits on all Palestinians as well as the gross
vulgarity of IDF soldiers toward Palestinian women and
girls is probably a form of psychological compensation
for historic European attitudes toward Ashkenazi males.
In Ram's book, the best comes last. The Israeli
sociology of colonization is closest to the reality of
the State of Israel and Zionist crimes against the native
population. Colonization sociologists have
developed some interesting euphemisms and linguistic
distinctions, but to their credit they have made more
progress in bringing their analysis into public
discussion than comparable American academic
investigators and researchers of
I liked the phraseology on page 176.
"The Israeli economy is unique in that it does not
rest either on a profit economy or on the accumulation of
debt, but rather on unilateral capital transfers.
This enables the Israeli ruling bureaucracy to maintain
an enormous military establishment and simultaneously to
guarantee a reasonable standard of living to the
population."
I would have bluntly stated that
Either formulation suggests the following obvious
questions.
1. What possible reason could Israeli leaders have to
work toward a reasonable modus vivendiwith
Palestinians? And
2. what possible reason could Neoconservatives have to
work for the stabilization of the ME?
If there were no conflict over
Israeli colonization sociologists are unfamiliar with the
Czarist colonization enterprise in the
Israeli sociologists have generally failed to relate
modern Israeli culture (and modern Ashkenazi American
culture) to traditional ethnic Ashkenazi culture because
they are so entranced both by Zionist sloganeering for
the negation of the Diaspora and also by Zionist myth of
a single Jewish Volk -- even those researchers
like Ram, who intellectually know that `am yehudi
is purely a Zionist nationalist construct.
The book itself provides inadvertent evidence that the
traditional Eastern European Ashkenazi social mechanisms
for the control of deviance are still operative (albeit
weakened) among Israeli Jews just as they continue to
exist among Ashkenazi Americans. Even
though Ram is oblivious to the obvious need for a
unified sociology of traditional Eastern European Ashkenazi
culture in its Eastern European context and of the
evolution of this culture both in the American and
Israeli context, reading his book is well worth the
effort, for gaining an understanding of the historical
and current flawed state of Israeli sociology helps the
reader to understand the Zionist enterprise and provides
him with much data necessary to inform the American
public of the truth and to combat Zionist propagandists
in the USA.
(*) Zionist control of public discussion in the
Thomas Agonistes
SUPREME DISCOMFORT
The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas
By Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher.
Illustrated. 422 pp. Doubleday. $26.95.
After all the twisted racial history of the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with the smallest margin of victory in more than 100 years, with little professional scrutiny and with a level of manipulative political rancor that diminished everyone directly involved. The effect on Thomas, we learn from this impeccably researched and probing biography, was to reinforce the chronic contradictions with which he has long lived.
Thus, although he seriously believes that his extremely conservative legal opinions are in the best interests of African-Americans, and yearns to be respected by them, he is arguably one of the most viscerally despised people in black America. It is incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces the policy and has persuaded himself that it played little part in his success. He berates disadvantaged people who view themselves as victims of racism and preaches an austere individualism, yet harbors self-pitying feelings of resentment and anger at his own experiences of racism. His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives. He frequently preaches the virtues of honesty and truthfulness, yet there is now little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings — not only about his pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v. Wade.
Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher conducted hundreds of interviews with Thomas’s friends, relatives and colleagues for “Supreme Discomfort,” in addition to doing extensive archival research. Although Thomas refused to be interviewed, this was not a serious handicap, given his vast paper and video trail and his volubility about his feelings. The authors superbly deconstruct Thomas’s multiple narratives of critical life-events — the accounts vary depending on his audience — and it says much for their intellectual integrity that though they are clearly critical of their subject, their presentation allows readers to make their own judgments. Thomas is examined through the prism of race because, they argue, “that is the prism through which Thomas often views himself,” and their main argument is that “he is in constant struggle with his racial identity — twisting, churning, sometimes hiding from it, but never denying it, even when he’s defiant about it.”
The first third of the book assiduously assembles the shards of his life from his birth in Pin Point, Ga., to his nomination to the Supreme Court by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and it casts new light on the social and psychological context in which Thomas fashioned himself. Pin Point, where he spent his first six years, comes as close to a scene of rural desolation as is possible in an advanced society. This is black life in the rural South at its bleakest, in which the best hope of the law-abiding is a job at the old crab-picking factory. It is in this sociological nightmare that a 6-year-old boy, by some miracle of human agency, discovers the path to survival through absorption in books. Born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his father when he was a year old, plunged into the even more frightening poverty of the Savannah ghetto, Thomas, along with his brother, was eventually rescued by his grandparents.
Thomas has made a paragon of his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, an illiterate man who, through superhuman effort, native intelligence and upright living, was able to provide a fair degree of security for his family. Anderson cared deeply for the downtrodden, and the hard turn in Thomas’s adult individualism cannot be attributed to him. Indeed, it turns out that the man Thomas reveres disapproved strongly of his conservative politics.
Three other important forces shaped Thomas. In addition to white racism, he suffered the color prejudice of lighter-complexioned blacks. This dimension of black life has been so played down with the rise of identity politics that it comes as a shock to find a black person of the civil rights generation who feels he was severely scarred by it. Thomas says that growing up, he was teased mercilessly because his hair, complexion and features were too “Negroid” and that his schoolyard nickname was “ABC: America’s Blackest Child.” The authors seem inclined to believe contemporaries of Thomas who claim that he exaggerates and has confused class prejudice with color prejudice, as if class prejudice were any less execrable. On this, I’m inclined to believe Thomas, although, given where he now sits, the wife he sleeps with, the child he has custody of and the company he keeps, it might be time to get over it.
But Thomas bears the scars of yet another black prejudice: not only was he too black, he was also culturally too backcountry. Coastal Georgia is one of the few areas in America where a genuinely Afro-English creole — Gullah — is used, and Thomas grew up speaking it. In Savannah he was repeatedly mocked for his “Geechee” accent and was so traumatized by this that he developed the habit of simply listening when in public. That experience, Thomas claims, helps explain his mysterious silence on the Supreme Court during oral arguments. This seems a stretch, since Thomas is now an eloquent public speaker and an engaging conversationalist who, like most educated Southerners north of home, erased his accent long ago.
Another revealing aspect of Thomas’s upbringing is his difficult relationship with women. He is now reconciled with his mother, but for much of his life he resented and disapproved of her. She, in turn, acknowledges that she preferred his more compassionate brother, who died in 2000. The event that most angered the black community was Thomas’s public rebuke of his sister for being on welfare. The person most responsible for adopting and raising him was his step-grandmother, yet it is his grandfather, who initially spurned him and had abandoned Thomas’s own mother, who gets all the credit. His first career choice was to be a Roman Catholic priest, and he actually spent a year in a seminary, presumably anticipating a vow of chastity. For all his bawdy humor, he was extremely awkward with women, and his bookishness did not help. This hints, perhaps, at one source of his later troubles.
Up to the point of Thomas’s confirmation hearings, this book is a finely drawn portrait that surpasses all previous attempts to understand him. The remainder of the work is more wide-angled. Merida and Fletcher, who are journalists at The Washington Post, take us through the tumultuous hearings, then examine Thomas’s career and personal life up to the present: his complete embrace by the extreme right (he is a friend of Rush Limbaugh’s); his performance on the court; his relationship with Antonin Scalia, an ideological ally who some people think heavily influences Thomas’s thinking; and his secluded private life. We learn interesting things about him — for example, the stark contrast between his sometimes unfeeling legal opinions and his often compassionate personal relationships; the fact that he has quietly facilitated the confirmation of very liberal black judges, often to their amazement; and that he is probably the most accessible of the justices and enjoys the admiration and abiding loyalty of his clerks.
The treatment of Thomas’s legal doctrine, however, is pedestrian. Whatever one’s reservations about his “originalist” philosophy — notoriously, he has held that beating a prisoner is not unconstitutional punishment because it would not have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers — recent evaluations of his opinions by scholars like Henry Mark Holzer and Scott Douglas Gerber indicate that they should be taken seriously. Well, by lawyers anyway. We have also gone beyond the question of “who lied” in our assessment of the hearings. Of greater import would have been a critical examination of the bruising politics behind these hearings, the way both sides manipulated Thomas and Anita Hill, and the questionable ethics and strategic blunder of the left in focusing on Thomas’s sexuality, given America’s malignant racial history on this subject, instead of on his suspect qualifications for the job.
Nonetheless, the book remains invaluable for any understanding of the court’s most controversial figure. It persuasively makes the case that “the problem of color is a mantle” Thomas “yearns to shed, even as he clings to it.” In doing so, it brilliantly illuminates not only Thomas but his turbulent times, the burden of race in 20th-century America, and one man’s painful and unsettling struggle, along with his changing nation’s, to be relieved of it.
Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis.”[TheBlackList] Orlando Patterson Reviews Clarence Thomas Book
mEMORIAL
OF NOVELIST
Dorothy West
(1907-1998)
Dorothy West. the child of Rachel Pease Benson and Isaac
Christopher
Westt, a freed slave and successful businessman that
owned a wholesale
fruit company and became known as the "Black Banana
King" of Boston.
West's formal education began at age two under the
tutelage of Bessie
Trotter, sister of Monroe Nathan Trotter, editor of the
Boston Guardian.
As a result, West was capable of doing work well ahead of
her age and
grade level when she entered the Farragut School at age
four. West wrote
her first story, "Promise and Fulfillment,"
which was published in the
Boston Globe at age seven. She completed her elementary
education at
Matin School in Boston's Mission District. In 1923, West
graduated from
the Girl's Latin High School and continued her education
at Boston
University and the Columbia University School of
Journalism.
In 1926, her story "The Typewriter" tied for
second place with a story by
Zora Neale Hurston in a contest sponsored by the New
York–based
Opportunity, the National Urban League journal. After
attending the
awards dinner in New York City, West decided to move to
Harlem, where she
became part of the Harlem Renaissance. Because of her
youth, West was
nicknamed "The Kid."
In 1927, West' small role in the original stage
production of Porgy made
possible her trip to London with the production company.
During the
1930's, she was involved with producing Black and White,
a documentary
about racism in various cultures. The film's production
entailed
traveling to the Soviet Union. While the film was not
completed, West
extended her visit for another year.
On returning to New York in 1934, West founded Challenge,
a literary
magazine that published works by many writers on a wide
range of social
and political issues. She co-founded New Challenge in
1937. Only one
issue was published, but the magazine reflected West's
increasing interest
in class issues and the struggles of black people. West's
magazines were
among the first to provide a venue for black American
literature.
Unfortunately, her efforts lacked financial support and
both magazines
quickly folded.
In 1940, West landed a job writing for the New York Daily
News. She was
among the first black American women to receive a byline
in a large
publication. West also worked as an investigator for the
New York City
welfare department before joining the Federal Writers
Project of the Works
in Progress Administration (WPA) until it ended in the
mid-1940s. West
continued to write, publishing several short stories,
including "Hannah
Byde," "An Unimportant Man,"
"Prologue to a Life," and "The Black
Dress,"
during this period. She was also a frequent contributor
to The Saturday
Evening Quill.
After the Federal Writers Project closed, West moved to
Martha's Vineyard,
where she wrote for the Martha's Vineyard Gazette and
completed her first
novel, "The Living Is Easy" (1948), a
semi-autobiographical novel that
critically explores racism and class-consciousness among
black Boston's
bourgeoisie. West also published a collection of essays
"The Richer, The
Poorer: Stories, Sketches and Reminiscences" in
1994.
While she began her second novel, The Wedding, in the
1960s, West did not
complete it until after her Doubleday editor and Martha's
Vineyard
neighbor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis encouraged her to do
so. Similar to
her earlier novel and many of her short stories, which
dealt with the
"white racism echoed in black society's obsession
with gradations of skin
color and the possibility of ‘passing,' The Wedding
(1995) examines issues
of race and class among upper-middle class black
Americans in the Martha's
Vineyard community of Oak Bluffs. The Wedding was adapted
for television
by Oprah Winfrey; it starred Halle Berry.
Dorothy West died August 16, 1998. She never married nor
had children.
(Sources: www.aaregistry.com, www.pw.org/mag/West.htm and
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0764341.html)The DISH Vol. 10 No 22