Is this poster offensive? You be the judge.
I was a mile from my house, and I saw a damned interesting poster in a yard.
Let’s begin with the objet, the poster I saw in a yard in the Beaver Hills neighborhood of New Haven, a neighborhood with a substantial Chabad population, just across Whalley Avenue from my own Westville neighborhood. Dig it:
Beaver Hills—or, as I call it, “the Beav,” in homage to 1950s television—has seen a huge increase in its Jewish population in the last five years, and I am not surprised to learn that there have been tensions with the neighbors. The neighbors, by the way, are a diverse group. Among my friends in Beaver Hills are a Wasp whom I went to prep school with (and whose sister is an Episcopal priest, to drive the point home), an African American Muslim ex–police officer, an Asian-American Christian and her white preacher husband, and a lapsed Lubavitcher. And I have never heard of meaningful tensions between groups (which may just mean I am not reading the newspaper closely enough). But obviously they are there, else there’d be no call for the poster.
A very well-meaning poster, from what I can tell. And yet … is anyone else made just a wee bit uncomfortable by the silhouette of the Jewish male?
So many questions arise, like:
Is it me, or does the man depicted have no eyes?
Are those tzitzis? And is there ever a time when a Chabad man is in Saturday garb—that appears to he his Saturday coat—with tzitzis hanging out? I don’t think that’s the custom. (Or is it a gartel?)
Is that the right hat? The brim looks flared in a way their hats are not.
And did the poster need a silhouette of the Jew at all? I almost wrote “caricature,” but to be fair I don’t think this meets the definition of “caricature,” which requires that an element be exaggerated for comic effect. To the contrary, the artist seems to trying extra hard to be faithful to what a generic Orthodox man looks like. But still—did we need the picture? Did anyone need to be show this silhouette to understand the meaning of “Jewish neighbors”? (One could add: Do you also “stand with” your female Jewish neighbors, or just with the men?)
I have no thesis here, no argument. I share the photograph with you because I was charmed by the poster, heartened by it, and also made uncomfortable by it. It’s a piece of urban detritus, found art almost, that merits a dissertation. It’s literally kept me up night thinking.
So what are your thoughts? Write to me at mark.oppenheimer@substack.com.
Across the pond
I’ve written elsewhere about the really yawning gap between literary cultures in the United States and our Anglophone friends Canada and the UK. Having been to a Canadian literary festival, I can tell you that authors who are huge there don’t always make a splash here. Same with England (Roger Deakin is a favorite example; huge in England, unknown in New England).
Put Val McDermid on the list. Major Scottish crime writer—the Scots are great at crime fiction; she is one of the great “tartan noir” genre—McDermid has sold millions of books, and I am deep into 1979, her latest. I am not finished yet, and can’t say if it is up there with The Mermaids Singing, the super creepy book that put her on the map, but, set in a newsroom at a fictional Scottish paper at a time when every household still took a paper, 1979 is catnip for a former newspaper hack like me. And it makes insurance fraud interesting.
Road rage
I have had two interesting episodes lately that have got me thinking about class in America, that great unspoken.
Early last week, I was biking downtown, using one of our new-ish bike lanes, when I was obstructed by a truck from the New Haven Parks Department. The parks worker had parked in the bike lane—not the first time I have seen this, alas—while he hopped out to do some work by the side of the road. As I circumnavigated the truck, I came upon the worker who had exited the vehicle. A bit peeved, but aiming to be polite, I said to him, “In the future, would you please not park in the bicycle lane?”
I feared this wouldn’t go over well, and I was right. The man—tall, white, wearing his parks jumpsuit, and looking old enough that I’d have thought he’d be retired—glared at me and said, “I’m just getting the trash.” And indeed, I looked at his hands and he was tying up a trash bag, filled with the trash he had just removed from the public receptacle near the side of the road. It was early morning, and he was cleaning up the park, the one near my house; he had parked as close as he could to the trash can. From his point of view, he was being efficient, and saving steps, as he cleaned up the trash. And had he not parked in the bike lane, he’d have to park pretty well in the middle of the street, or else along the opposite curb, across the street.
He was doing his job, and I was questioning the manner in which he did it.
At the same time, if anyone parks in the bike lanes, even briefly, the lanes cease to be very protective; a bike lane you have to swerve out of is not a safe bike lane. This gent was hardly the first offender. This bike lane is near a school, and parents dropping their children off often park in the bike lane “just for a minute.” But having cars in your way, “even for a minute,” means you cease to trust the bike lane. And now here was a public employee feeling free to park there.
He was annoyed with me. I got annoyed back. Words were exchanged—not terrible ones, not even rude ones, but the kind of annoyed words that made both our days worse. And I’m sure part of this man’s interpretation was, “Here’s this Westville hipster on his bicycle making life difficult for me as I pick up his trash.” While I’m thinking, “In bike-friendly places like the Netherlands, biking isn’t a class issue, and it shouldn’t be here.” Which is a thought that, if he knew it, might make the parks employee even angrier.
And then there was Sunday’s episode …
Sunday, I was on vacation in a relatively well known New England beach community, and I took my 10-year-old to ride her bicycle on a trail near the beach. We loaded our bikes into the standard-issue dad-van, and I asked Cyd to drop us off at the trailhead. But it turned out that the convenient place to drop us off and turn the car around was at the parking lot for the beach, just inside the guard house. And when we pulled up to the guardhouse to explain our plan, the guard told us that if we entered the parking lot, if only to turn the van around, she’d have to charge us the $25 parking fee. When I said that I’d just back the van up and we’d get our bikes out at the side of the road, she said, “That would be unsafe. If I see you doing that, I’ll call the police.”
“So,” I said to her, “it’s basically set up so that nobody can let bicyclists off at the trail. If we do it safely in the parking lot, we pay $25, and if we do it in the road, we can get arrested.”
She looked at me, triumphantly.
“That’s right, sir,” she said. “Locals understand that it costs to use the beach.”
Well, leaving aside the non sequitur—we were explicitly not trying to use the beach, but rather the bicycle trail—this was a fascinating case of what can only be called, cliché be damned, false consciousness. It’s absurd and offensive that it costs big bucks to park at a public beach (in most of the country, beaches are public, but parking at them need not be, and access to them varies wildly; in some cases, the sand right in front of beachfront houses is private, but as you get close to the water’s edge, or in the water, it becomes public; the whole thing is a maddening mess, and still contentious, and I commend to you the story of Connecticut free-the-beaches activist Ned Coll in the book Free the Beaches). And this woman, this guard, could not herself afford to live anywhere within a mile of these beaches. Yet it was her job to enforce access, and she was determined not only to do her job—which I get—but to go above and beyond, trying to ring $25 in beach parking fees even from people who were not trying to use the beach.
To her, the important distinction was not rich/poor (and in this tangled story, I am “poor,” because I am poorer than the “locals,” many of whom are quite rich) but local/vacationer. She was representing the interests of the locals, as against the vacationers, who apparently can be sucked dry.
Further twist: As it happens, in New Haven, locals do park for free at our one public beach, Lighthouse Point, whereas out-of-towners have to pay a small fee. And every time I smugly park for free at Lighthouse Point, I feel a sense of justice, even victory, because I pay the high property taxes, and it’s my city, and we New Haveners are generally poorer than the suburbanites who might occasionally use our beach (though they mostly prefer their own beaches). In other words, at Lighthouse Point, I instinctively think it’s a good thing that locals park free, and we sock the visitors with fees. But here, where I am now, in Vacationland, local-preference strikes me as rich-folk privilege.
In any event, the guard was rude, and unhelpful, and seemed to regard cyclists with the same sneering condescension the parks employee in New Haven did.
And that’s a problem for all of us. Bikes are the people’s transportation, cheaper than planes, trains, and automobiles, and it’s a sad fact about car-obsessed America that our cheap, two-wheeled, enviro-friendly friends have become sources of bitterness and mistrust. We have to do better.
Happy summer!