Volume 46, Issue 3

THE NEW JOURNAL The Magazine of Yale & New Haven

BROTHERS’ KEEPERS Volume 46 • Issue 3 • December 2013

staff publisher Tessa Berenson editors-in-chief Sophia Nguyen Cindy Ok executive editor Benjamin Mueller managing editors Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni design editors Lian Fumerton-Liu Emmett Kim David Shatan-Pardo photo editor Maya Binyam senior editors Tao Tao Holmes Isabel Ortiz Emma Schindler associate editors Maya Averbuch Lara Sokoloff A. Grace Steig Ike Swetlitz

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

copy editors Nathalie Levine Justine Yan staff writers Ashley Dalton Arielle Stambler

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2013 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area at the rate of $50 for one year. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature.

We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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the new journal Volume 46, Issue 3 December 2013 www.thenewjournalatyale.com

features

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Eye of the Beholder A writer goes more than skin deep into beauty pageant culture.

by Arielle Stambler

Brothers’ Keepers How does Project Longevity define “community” in “community policing?”

by Zoe Greenberg

Vital Signs A group of activist nurses rethink health care.

Julia Calagiovanni

standards

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points of departure by various authors

snapshot Another Bid

by Lara Sokoloff profile Top of His Glass

by Ike Swetlitz

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poetry by various authors

snapshot Breadlines

by Maya Averbuch

endnote

by TNJ Staff

Cover Design by Carson Evans december 2013

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Madeleine Witt

points of departure

Guts and Glory In 2006, Olympic figure skating gold medalist Sarah Hughes told Sports Illustrated that “Natural Hazards” was the hardest class she took at Yale. She had caught Professor David Bercovici’s lecture, now called “Natural Disasters,” in an unfortunate semester. After a hopelessly easy 2004 version, “Natty D,” as Bercovici and his students refer to it, was swinging too far in the other direction. Sarah Hughes had fallen into a course with serious math and serious science. Along with most every other nonscience major in the room, she couldn’t handle it: between 2004 and 2005, enrollment dropped from 420 to 150.

Bercovici can still reel off his other favorite course evaluations from that semester, including but not limited to “Bercovici is the devil,” and “This is the most horrible class I’ve ever taken…I dreaded every moment of it.”

Why is a former chair of Yale’s Geology and Geophysics department with a Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics teaching a class of almost 350 students—a significant portion of them humanities and social science majors finishing their distributional requirements? “Natty D”

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is, at least some years, a type of class students know too well: a gut—a perfect opportunity for no work and a good grade. But at an academic institution like Yale, having top-notch scientists teach seas of disinterested students may be a waste of resources. Thus, the backlash.

In 2006, the year after Hughes took the course, Bercovici’s harder (“de-gutted”) version of “Natural Hazards” attracted a total of nineteen students. “That was a great year,” Bercovici says, joking, mostly. He clarifies, “I don’t actually want the course to have nineteen students.

I do like actually teaching for people who are of all types, honestly.” A big course creates a kind of “buzz,” which helps potential majors find his department.

The new “Natural Disasters,” in 2007, would cut some items from the syllabus. It wouldn’t demand any less quantitative work from students, but Bercovici made other kinds of concessions: “If we want to make the level high, we need to provide lots of opportunities for help.”

More guidance means lectures once a week that focus on applying concepts to homework, and discussion sections offer something between advice about problem sets and readymade answers. “Anybody who wants to do well on the homework can do well on the homework.

There’s no reason anyone should be doing crappily on the homework,” Bercovici says.

This year, the class is held in one of the largest lecture halls at Yale, Sheffield-SterlingStrathcona 114. But lecturing behind a podium puts too much space between Bercovici and his students: “It looks to a student like I’m not really there, or that I’m like a hologram, or a performer. It’s like when you go to a play, people are texting. They think the actors can’t see them.”

Instead, he weaves through the aisles waving a laser pointer and keeping in motion so students know that he is a sentient person, who can see them texting and emailing and sleeping in the dozens of rows spread throughout the hall and its balcony. “At least there’s a little bit more interaction,” he says, “They know that I’m standing right there looking at their Facebook.”

Bercovici enjoys teaching “Natty D” much more than he did teaching any of the previous versions of “Natural Hazards,” because he has more contact with his students. The ones who go to lecture stay after to ask questions, and come to section each week. But Bercovici thinks he

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—Ben Lempert

Building Up In 1912, just months after opening, the Taft Hotel was already known for its distinctive modern grandeur. With its domed Tiffany stained glass, the lobby served as a meeting place for the hotel’s notable guests. On a typical weekend night, Yale students and guests crowded the oak-paneled room’s Persian carpets and perched on Colonial Revival-style carved chairs. In the dining room, their conversation rose to meet the glittering crystal chandeliers hanging from an elaborately molded soaring ceiling.

Today, a guest at Roìa, the French- and Italian-influenced brasserie that opened in the Taft dining room this March, can still get a feel for that century-old scene. Executive chef and owner Avi Szapiro and his director of operations and wife, Meera, relocated from Brooklyn to open the restaurant. Together, they supervised a year of careful demolition and reconstruction with the goal of repurposing the space while reclaiming its historic beauty.

Over the last hundred years, the property has been occupied by various eateries, each looking to make the space its own. In the eighties, a mezzanine level and sweeping staircase were added. Then, Downtown at the Taft—briefly called Baccus Enoteca—made a number of

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could still improve the course. He’d like to have a smaller class, so he can better engage with students. He’s considering capping the course, and reserving the slots for underclassmen.

“I’ve loved teaching some juniors and seniors,” Bercovici says. “But the people who come into a class with a perspective of being forced to take a ‘Sc’ class at gunpoint—they seem more likely to be juniors and seniors.”

He does not live in blissful ignorance about his course’s place at Yale, but he cherishes the memory of students who unexpectedly become geology and geophysics majors after studying with him. The key is to find a balanced class in which diligent non- and never-majors still get some kicks, the lazy tell their friends not to come back, and somewhere, in the sea of bodies, a geologist is born.

changes in a move toward more contemporary design: the floor was layered with carpet and linoleum, and the walls with particleboard. John Stuart Gordon, an associate curator at the Yale University Art Gallery who specializes in decorative arts, described the drastic changes as “denying the history of the space.”

To bring the history of the space to the foreground, Szapiro recruited Patriquin Architects, the New Haven firm behind the Chapel Street restaurant Zinc, and consulted with Grayling Design, a New York firm known for its distinctive work on brasseries. The project began in May 2012, promptly stripping away a century of accumulated redecorating. Down came the particleboard, revealing the original oak paneling behind it. When seven types of flooring were peeled away, the original tile emerged: a pearly white-and-gold-flecked mosaic. The winding staircase came down to open up the ground level, but the mezzanine remained to add extra seating, a second kitchen, and more bathrooms.

“The space breathed a sigh of relief,” according to Szapiro, “like taking off layers of clothing.”

The years of renovations that had simply ignored the bones of the building had ultimately saved them. “Neglect is the great preserver,” said Gordon.

The remainder of the work depended on finding elements that complemented the original structures at the heart of the space. Szapiro

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consulted the American Standard’s 1912 catalog and photographs of the old dining room to find the styles of fixtures that fit. Sitting in one of the red leather booths in the restaurant, he showed me pictures on his iPhone from the vintage-scouting missions that ultimately yielded vintage sinks, salvaged doors, and a chandelier from the period. “I had a vision of what I was looking for. You start looking for things, and then the picture starts becoming clearer and clearer,” he said. The space itself often provided the best direction. When renovating the kitchen, the team came across a swatch of wall in what they believed to be the original paint— a light beige—and chose the new color based on that.

Enough documentation exists that a nearperfect recreation of the Taft dining room could be possible, but Roìa’s divergences from the original look are, the team believes, essential to the restaurant’s identity. The original tile floor, which a century ago was covered in rich Oriental rugs, is now left bare, exposing its blemishes and chips. The new look is more casual, better suited to today’s guests.

Christian Garnett, principal architect of Grayling Design, says that he’s not overly concerned with upholding historical accuracy.

When he works on a project, he turns to the plaster, molding, and ceiling of the space for inspiration. “There’s a narrative hidden in the walls of the place,” he said. “The idea is that if we can tap into that, it gives the place a depth and richness that you can’t get otherwise.”

“We feel like stewards of the space more than anything else,” Szapiro told me. “You are taking delight in protecting a little piece of history.” I haven’t been transported all the way back to 1912, but it does feel a little closer.

—Caroline Sydney

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A Match Made in New Haven In the late seventies, Yale students flocked to a three-story furniture shop on Whalley Avenue called Rubber Match to buy waterbeds for their dorm rooms. Owner George Zito told the Yale Daily News in 1978 that in the past month he had sold at least a dozen waterbeds to Yale students. On the whole, students were enthusiastically in praise of the mattresses, though one interviewed student noted that “waterbeds are terrible when you’re drunk.” Her story concluded with the claim that Zito would ride the crest of an ever-growing $130-million waterbed industry.

The waterbed wave at Yale may have come crashing down within the year; administrators prohibited waterbeds from dorms because of leaks. But Rubber Match is still around today, despite its long-gone campus renown. These days, Yale students are a rare sight on most of Whalley.

“I’m trying to get the Yale students to go past Popeye’s,” Zito said. “They always stop right there.”

Sheila Masterson, executive director of the Whalley Special Services District, an organization that works to improve Whalley’s security and maintenance to help drive commercial traffic, acknowledged that most businesses on the street don’t hold much appeal for the average college student. For decades after the seventies, the area was dominated by car dealerships and service stations. Even with the addition of the Stop & Shop on the street, New Haven residents generally visit the area to run errands and “take care of the dull stuff,” as Masterson put it. “You wouldn’t come to Whalley Avenue to do your Christmas shopping unless you were buying Mom and Dad a box of pears.”

In October, Zito celebrated Rubber Match’s fortieth anniversary with commemorative mugs, T-shirts, and refrigerator magnets. He also recently launched his latest initiative to target Yale students: a Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum.

Rubber Match’s walls are now covered with memorabilia accumulated over decades of fandom, recently transported from Zito’s basement. Drawings by Yoko Ono, a plate signed by all four Beatles, and Jim Morrison’s original fingerprints from his arrest in New Haven now

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mingle with futons and bedspreads.

Drifting in a sea of establishments that cater to adults with cars and steady employment, sixty-four-year-old Zito has spent much of his long career thinking of creative ways to draw Yale students up Whalley. Despite years of mixed success, he is convinced that students would love the shop—if they’d just walk past Popeye’s to find it.

Rubber Match has a decidedly sixties vibe, which Zito notes ought to appeal to college students nostalgic for a decade they never experienced. Signs out front saying “Undefeated Champs!” and “Introducing George-O-Pedic Memory Foam!” are printed in colorful, bubbly lettering that begs to be described as “groovy.”

At the back of the first floor, a head shop counter offers hookahs, tobacco, and a variety of marijuana paraphernalia. A Yale sophomore named David Rico visited the shop early last fall and noted that the furniture store and head shop seem oddly segregated, united only by their presence under the same roof. Zito, however, believes the inventory to work well together.

“I call it ‘beds and heads,’” he said of his business model. “We couldn’t say that in the eighties.”

Zito offers discounts to Yale students and free delivery directly to dorm rooms. Aaron Gertler, a Yale junior, purchased a futon there for his suite this year. He said he paid less than a comparable futon at IKEA would have cost. He was also pleased when Zito himself delivered the futon within thirty minutes.

As the shop’s owner, marketing strategist, and primary salesperson, Zito is perhaps Rubber Match’s most intriguing draw. The heavy-set grandson of Italian immigrants, Zito is New Haven born and raised, and not embarrassed to tell one story after the other about himself and his time here: the time he entered a waterbed in a charity bed race down the New Haven Green to generate publicity, the time he gave money to a homeless man who then became a preacher and repaid the money years later, the time he saved a Yale student from a mugging by hurling a club across Whalley Avenue. He corroborates many of these stories with newspaper clippings saved in binders on his desk or framed on Rubber Match’s walls, but they retain mythic proportions.

“People like to claim that New Haven kind of lacks that small-town charm, and certainly

Yale has done a great job of commercializing it into chain store oblivion,” Gertler said. “But I think there are opportunities for people to get some of that small-town charm back, and I think one of the ways to do that is by shopping at a place that’s been here since Kingman Brewster was keeping things cool with the Black Panthers in the late seventies.”

Zito thinks the museum is already starting to bring in new customers—but even if that’s true, he will mostly just be making up recently lost ground. The arrival of IKEA in 2004 to New Haven’s retail scene amplified the challenge posed by Rubber Match’s physical distance from campus. Zito estimates his sales in the months of August and September, when students generally outfit their common rooms with futons and beanbag chairs, have been down by ten to fifteen thousand dollars since IKEA opened. He seems to relish the challenge of turning back the clock.

“This for years has been my fight: how do I get my business back again?” Zito said. “I don’t know if we’re going to get it back, but we’re going to get a bigger market share soon.”

Zito’s confidence aside, Rubber Match is still not widely known on Yale’s campus. After more than forty years in business, Zito feels that it’s time to finally solve the puzzle of how to lure students far enough up Whalley to see his futons, his hookahs, his Jim Morrison fingerprints, and the pictures of his grandchildren. He says that if the Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum doesn’t work, he’ll think of something else. After all, in the natural ebb and flow of a college’s population, seniors depart each May and freshmen arrive each August, ready to be persuaded to buy futons and hookahs, and perhaps even a waterbed. Meanwhile, Rubber Match floats on.

—Isabelle Taft 7

snapshot

Another Bid

A holistic approach to prison reentry.

by Lara Sokoloff

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hen Dan Justino addresses you, he repeats your name at least twice, once toward the beginning, and again at the end. “Juan, come talk to Lara here. Come over, Juan,” Justino calls to Juan Figueroa, a small 35-year-old with jet-black hair. Other than his tan work boots, he wears all black. When asked what his first impression of Justino, his boss, was, Figueora immediately responds in a softspoken voice: “Intimidating.” Two nearby workers nod in agreement. Justino believes in honesty and has a strict “no-bullshit” policy. He’s not afraid to tell his employees when they’re not working hard enough—or tell me when I’ve asked the wrong question. This delicate balance of power and intimacy serves Justino well with the population he works with: recently released prisoners.

New Haven suffers from a dearth of resources for former prisoners and a high recidivism rate. After release, prisoners are generally dropped off in front of the Whalley Avenue jail and must find their own way from there. Often, they have no form of identification or home.

Many return to crime, leading to a recidivism

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rate of sixty-five percent, much steeper than the nationwide rate of forty percent, according to Justino.

The New Haven Prison Reentry Initiative coordinates the efforts of various government nonprofits to lower the city’s recidivism rate.

Emerge, the program Justino directs, is its newest member. Since its founding a year ago, Emerge has helped former prisoners through the often lonely and unwieldy process of reintegration.

At Emerge, reentrants are employed at ten dollars an hour in construction jobs. The occupation primarily attracts males, but Justino has considered opening a bakery to bring women into the program. Participants take online classes to become proficient in math and reading at the tenth and eleventh grade levels. Reentrants also attend weekly discussions called “Real Talk,” to discuss topics like mental health, addiction, or childhood trauma. Justino, an exoffender himself, leads the group each Friday morning aiming to understand how each individual landed behind bars, and how he can keep himself from being sent back.

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Alden Woodcock is responsible for interviewing each candidate and determining his potential to thrive at Emerge. A clean-shaven, young white man who dons large square glasses and smiles often, Woodock said he looks for reentrants who are committed to their own success in the program. “The first question I ask everyone I interview for this job is, ‘Do you have another bid in you?’” Woodcock said. “And if they hesitate, then they’re not in the program.

The ones that say, ‘I’m done. I need this,’ those are the guys that I’m excited to work with.”

Emerge is designed to act as an individualized bridge program between prison and permanent employment. It was launched in 2010 under the umbrella of a city initiative called Empower New Haven before becoming independent in 2012. The program was modeled after San Francisco’s Delancey Street Foundation, which has rehabilitated ex-convicts, drug addicts, and the homeless for over forty years.

The foundation currently operates a café and restaurant, catering and limousine services, a landscaping business, and a moving and trucking company, each staffed by reentrants and people who have struggled with substance abuse. A portion of the profits helps cover housing, food, and clothing costs for the employees.

Emerge tries to fill a void in New Haven with its combination of employment, education, and character-building. This personalized model mandates that each individual carry a performance journal on the job to jot down notes about the day’s work. They turn it over to Woodcock, who reads each journal to follow each reentrant’s progress and interviews each reentrant to talk about how he has progressed and how he can continue to improve. Since its inception, the program has seen a twelve percent recidivism rate among its participants, a significant drop from the statewide average of sixty-nine percent.

Emerge’s construction teams work on projects in six New Haven neighborhoods. Employees work three days a week for a total of twenty-five hours per week. Justino limits the number of work hours to remind reentrants that this should be a stepping-stone, not a permanent job. “It gives them incentive to leave us,” he said. Some find jobs in construction similar to their work at Emerge, while others go into completely different industries. Several Emerge employees have found permanent em-

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ployment with the administration at Emerge.

Justino recruits many participants through parole and probation officers, but most participants find out about the program through word-of-mouth. The crew members wear bright orange vests that advertise “Emerge” in bold lettering across the back, with C.O.R.E. just below it, signifying “Community Offender Reentry Experience.” Justino credits visibility as the main recruitment tactic. Most importantly, they work in neighborhoods that have some of the highest incarceration rates in the state, neighborhoods many Emerge members have at some point called home.

For Roger Johnson, a soft-spoken thirtythree-year-old, a friend’s orange vests worked.

Johnson, who served a fourteen-year sentence for committing manslaughter, was released and then saw federal agents round up a group of his friends. They were being incarcerated again for alleged drug-dealing and murder. “That was a sign that I needed to get serious about changing my life, or I was going to end up in the same boat as my friends,” Johnson said. “I wasn’t firmly rooted. I was dibbling and dabbling, moving to and fro. I needed structure.” This convinced him to follow his friend’s lead and join Emerge.

He has now been at Emerge for eighteen months, where he supervises a twelve-man work crew. Each work crew is supervised by a reentrant, who serves as both a role model and a leader, to promote a healthier relationship with authority. “They can hang out, they can be boys on the street,” Justino said. “But here, this is work. He’s a supervisor. He’s my enforcer.”

Yet some important distinctions remain between this program and conventional work settings. Justino recognizes that offering the men temporary employment is not enough to get reentrants on their feet for good. In order to improve full-time opportunities, one day each week is dedicated to academic education, until participants test at tenth- or eleventhgrade reading and math levels. Once they do so, they can have those hours back for work, creating a financial incentive to complete the education component of the program. Since October 2012, Emerge has used Khan Academy, a nonprofit education website created in 2006

by MIT and Harvard Business School graduate Salman Khan. There are no teachers, since Justino said they unintentionally made reentrants feel belittled in the past. Instead, each reen-

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Photos by Ivonne Padilla trant works with a facilitator from Emerge.

The facilitator serves as a coach, motivator, and support system, which has led to dramatic results: in some cases, Justino says, individuals have advanced one grade level in just twentyfour hours of coursework.

“Real Talk,” the third component of the program, encourages reentrants to work through problems from their past and present through discussion groups. For Justino, a goal of these talks is for reentrants to shed what he refers to as “angry black man face.” He says, “It served us well in our communities. It kept us alive in the hood, in the yard. But where we’re headed, it no longer serves us well.”

Reentrants work through unresolved childhood traumas that continue to affect their behavior. Over twenty-five percent of the men have struggled with substance abuse that has never been addressed, and many, including Justino himself, have struggled with mental health issues. “Two months ago, these guys were sitting in the yard,” Justino tells me. “And now, they’re beginning to talk about abuse, and more importantly, how to stop it here, how to not perpetrate it on their children. That’s the magic.”

Anthony Torres, a quiet 22-year-old with

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soft eyes, came to Emerge four months ago. For him, Real Talk also presents an opportunity to work through problems with his co-workers. Upon arriving at Emerge, he immediately clashed with another reentrant. But he has learned how to sort out conflicts. “We’re grown ups, we can talk stuff out to reach a better outcome,” Torres says. “Our communication has now grown a lot, and he’s actually a pretty good guy. We just hadn’t gotten to know each other.”

Emerge only reaches sixty men per year, and both Justino and Woodcock are uncertain if their resources can effectively support a larger program. The small size fosters a strong sense of community, as the men help one another in the field and at the table during “Real Talk.” But the success of the program depends on each reentrant’s commitment. Justino cites Darius Jones as one of the organization’s success stories, calling him Emerge’s “poster child.”

He first arrived at Emerge when it began three years ago after learning about it through his parole officer. After going through Emerge, Jones received a degree in business administration from Gateway Community College, and became the organization’s bookkeeper.

Sitting in the office in a neat brown polo shirt, tapping away at his computer, Jones tells me that the police gave him a lot of trouble where he grew up, in Wellington, Connecticut.

I’m surprised when Justino interrupts: “That’s easy to blame them. What was your role, what was your fifty percent? I can’t change that police officer. That’s as useless as sitting in a rocking chair and hoping to get to Manhattan. It ain’t happening.” Then he asks, “The only thing you can change is who?”

“Myself.”

“That’s right. Don’t ever forget that.”

Reentrants are taught to carry this attitude out of the program and into the rest of their lives. But however often Justino and the staff repeat the words, they remain difficult to practice. Though Emerge ensures that former prisoners are no longer abandoned at the door of the Whalley Avenue jail, and helps them gain skills and a community, individuals face the ongoing challenge of making their way in the world.

Lara Sokoloff is a sophomore in Trumbull College and an Associate Editor for the New Journal. the new journal

profile

Top of His Glass

A journey to glassblowing at Yale.

By Ike Swetlitz december 2013

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couraged him to skew the data in favor of his employer, and Smith recalls thinking, “This is not science.” The article presented a lucrative alternative—and the chance to work with fire.

When Smith moved to New York for his wife’s work two weeks later, he brought the clip with him.

Neither Smith nor his wife found success in New York. She didn’t get the job she had wanted; Smith started working for a furniture manufacturing company, where he was passed over for a promotion. His thoughts kept straying back to the article. It had promised a starting salary of around thirty thousand dollars, the equivalent of over sixty thousand dollars today. And North America’s only scientific glassblowing academic program, at New Jersey’s Salem Community College (SCC), happened to be within commuting distance of his in-laws in Pennsylvania.

But before applying to the program, Smith wanted to learn more about what scientific glassblowers actually did. So he talked with his father, a plant manager at Radio Corporation of America, and his brother, a graduate student at Rutgers, who both worked with scientific glassblowers. They told him that glass tradesmen are crucial to the maintenance of industry and research. “It sounded like something interesting to do because it does involve some scientific training, and it does involve working with your hands,” Smith said. “I’ve always enjoyed that. So I gave it a shot.” He enrolled in SCC’s program in January of 1986.

The school still boasts the only academic program for scientific glassblowing in the United States. South Jersey was the birthplace of the glassblowing industry in colonial times.

Located at the confluence of major shipping lanes, it’s where glassblowing grew up, says Dennis Briening, current chair of scientific glass technology at the community college. The program currently accepts forty-four students each year, who go on to work at institutions such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology and GE Global Research.

During his first few weeks at the college, Smith practiced making round bottoms on glass tubes and attaching tubes to each other at right angles. The work was, in Smith’s words, “immensely boring,” but he didn’t give up. To learn more, he found a job at Atmar Glass, a small, family-owned glass shop halfway between Sa-

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Photos by Caroline Lester

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our thin blue flames lick the underbelly of a glass flask as Daryl Smith steadies his blowtorch. With sweat dripping from his forehead, he directs the heat at one of three stumpy tubes attached to the spherical flask. The glass glows white-hot and starts to melt. Just as the tube begins to droop, Smith snatches it away with a pair of tweezers. The tube stretches until all that connects it to the flask is a long, thin thread. When the thread breaks, a spark of light appears as the chemical bonds in the glass split apart. The glass closes around the quarter-sized hole where the tube once was. During this minute-long part of the process, Smith has been holding a hose between his teeth that connects his mouth to the sphere.

He breathes a puff of air into the sphere, and the hole reappears, leaving space for Smith to push the tube in again. He works without talking; the only noise in the studio comes from the jazz playing on a radio in the background.

A soft-spoken man with short brown hair, Smith is Yale’s scientific glassblower. He spends his days building and repairing glass laboratory equipment in a cramped room filled with a mechanical lathe, gas canisters, torches of different shapes and sizes, and boxes of glass pipes, stoppers, and joints. Today’s job comes at the request of Timothy Newhouse, a chemistry professor who inherited the flask, along with other old glassware, from another faculty member.

He uses the flask to conduct chemical reactions isolated from the atmosphere. But he needed the protruding pipes replaced so that they were the same shape as and could plug into his other glass equipment.

Smith uses the lathe to rotate the sphere, bathing it uniformly in a blue flame from another torch, to prevent it from cracking as it cools.

The final step is to place the piece in a special oven that gradually heats and then cools the glass to strengthen it. After four hours, it will be ready for use in Newhouse’s lab.

Smith has been a glassblower for nearly twenty years. He grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a few hours away from southern New Jersey, the heart of the glassblowing industry.

But he had never considered a career in glassblowing until after college. He was a year out of Texas A&M University when he came across an article in his local newspaper titled, “Glass Blowing: A Job With a Future.” It was 1985, and his job at the time in fisheries science had en-

Photos by Caroline Lester

completing his second semester so that he could focus more on his job, so he graduated with a certificate as opposed to a degree. By that time, he was already building pieces for Atmar’s regular catalogue, such as boiling flasks, addition funnels, and drying apparatuses.

His daughter Mallory was born in 1987, and her brother Preston followed two years later.

Smith often moved for work at the beginning of his career, but he set up a miniature glass studio wherever he lived. One of his houses had an adjoining gray, two-story barn about the size of a one-car garage. He set up a torch on the second floor and worked on repairs during nights and weekends. “It’s shaking in the wind,” Mallory said, recalling one day from her childhood. “But Dad’s up there with the radio on, blowing glass.”

Mallory was six or seven years old when she first learned how to use a glassblowing torch herself. Her father guided her hands for the first hour or so, and then stepped back, watching at a safe distance. She made marbles, pendants, and Christmas ornaments. “It was a cool experience to have him say, ‘You are smart enough and trustworthy Daryl Smith calls this torch the “workhorse of the enough that you can handle glassblowing industry.” this,’” Mallory said. Still, working with a flame frightened her. Making larglem Community College and Lancaster, and er pieces of glass required big flames. “When worked part time for the rest of the semester. you’re knee-high with a grasshopper, you’re During the summer of 1986, he began working scared of it,” she said. Her younger brother full time. was often there, right beside her. He learned to As the summer drew to a close, Smith found blow glass from his father as well. out that his wife was pregnant. In order to keep Smith spent the next few years working for their health insurance, he needed to work full small glass companies on the east coast before time, Smith said, “That was like, bust-ass time!” he landed a job with Kontes Glass, the largest He spent sixty hours a week—twenty at school glass manufacturer in the United States at the and forty at his job—blowing glass to support time. At Kontes, Smith pushed his craft beyond his growing family. He left the program after standard scientific glassware and began mak-

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ing more challenging or extravagant creations.

He made yard-long test tubes with diameters as wide as your wrists. He was told that they were horse bloodletting tubes. “Oh my God, those things are huge!” Smith says in recollection. “Poor horse!” To this day, he doesn’t know who placed the order or why. “I kind of didn’t want to find out.” Smith made about two dozen.

Each took twenty minutes.

After five years at Kontes, Smith heard about an opportunity too good to pass up. Word was spreading that Joe Luisi, the glassblowing instructor at Salem Community College, was retiring. “It was the job,” Smith said. His application was accepted, and he started teaching in the fall of 2000.

While Smith was an instructor, the college got rid of the one-year certificate program, keeping only the two-year degree. They determined that anyone who had completed the oneyear certificate program and attained significant experience could receive the degree. “So I eventually got my associate of applied science while I was an instructor,” Smith said.

Smith enjoyed his job, but started to regret that he spent most of his time teaching as opposed to glassblowing: “I kind of missed build-

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ing things—the gratification you get from making the apparatus,” he said. After five years of teaching, he took a position at Yale that would allow him to both teach and blow glass. Smith fixes broken equipment and helps researchers with specialty pieces, in addition to teaching a workshop on the basics of scientific glassblowing.

His class is always oversubscribed. It is listed as a graduate-level chemistry laboratory class but is open to all Yale students. This year, all of the participants happen to be graduate students in the chemistry department, but in past years workshop has been entirely undergraduates. The semester follows the course of his daughter Mallory’s lessons: first they make marbles, then Christmas ornaments, before moving on to more advanced concepts.

Students also learn techniques that they can apply in their research. Louise Guard, a fourth-year chemistry graduate student who took Smith’s class last fall, learned how to seal samples of chemicals in glass chambers under vacuum to send out from the lab for outside analysis. “It’s especially helpful if he’s on holiday and you want to send some compounds out.”

Other skills take more time to master. Dur-

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ing class on a Tuesday in early October, fifthyear graduate student Sahr Kahn struggled to create a straight seal, which involves smoothly fusing two glass tubes together, end-to-end.

Khan bemoaned her work—the glass had wrinkled near the attachment, where it should have been even. “You’re not going to master it in this class,” Smith reassured her, “It takes years.” He had taken four or five years to become proficient at the technique. “What?” Khan whipped around, a mangled piece of glass tubing grasped in hand. “Okay, good!”

While Smith enjoys teaching, he came to Yale so that he would be able to get back behind the torch. Often, his work simplifies otherwise arduous processes. Guard walks around her laboratory, pointing at large apparatuses of connected glass tubes and pipes sitting behind fume hoods. “Without those, we couldn’t do any of our chemistry,” she says. These are Schlenk lines, which Smith builds for the lab. They have eight of these set-ups, which allow chemists to conduct reactions without air getting in the way. Otherwise, they would have to conduct their experiments in a glovebox, which would require them to use unwieldy rubber gloves to manipulate their samples.

Some of Smith’s work is less routine. The strangest request he ever received came from Patricia Brennan, then a postdoc in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale. Brennan, a graduate student, and renowned ornithology professor Richard Prum, were studying the mechanics of the duck penis.

In order to observe it in action, they needed a transparent alternative to a female duck’s genitalia.

Silicone models were life-like, but too weak. “When we tested them with the males, the males actually broke through every single one,” Brennan said. “The conclusion is: they have an explosive eversion.”

While a noteworthy observation, it also meant that Brennan and her team needed a different model. Brennan and her team approached Smith to request a glass duck vagina, which would be stronger but still transparent.

Smith wasn’t as surprised as Brennan and her team thought he would be. He had made strange equipment before while working for Kontes Glass, including glass condom molds. And the glass vagina didn’t require any specialty techniques. “It was just bending,” Smith said. Bren-

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nan asked for a few different models: one was a straight tube; two more were spirals with three twists each; a fourth was short and squat, bent like an elbow. They didn’t exactly look like vaginas, Brennan concedes, but the geometry and shape were life-like enough for her purposes.

He is happy with his work, but Smith hopes to push the boundaries of glassblowing—maybe even beyond Earth’s atmosphere: he tells me he wants to be the first glassblower in space. With space technology advancing, he anticipates a need for an on-site glassblower, perhaps at a space station. “I hope they hurry up,” Smith said. “Because I’m getting older.”

Glassblowing in space could be a whole different art form. So much of the skill associated with glassblowing is knowing how to turn pieces of hot glass, which would normally flow downward due to gravity, in order to offset gravity’s effects. “It’s so ingrained and so a necessary part of glassblowing,” Smith said. “To actually be in a non-gravity situation, and to see what it would be like and what you could do with it? Just wild. Mind-blowing.”

Until then, Smith will have to content himself with blowing glass on Earth, a life he enjoys. “It’s like his natural habitat,” Mallory said.

“Seeing my dad there, watching football on Sundays, cooking in the kitchen, or blowing glass— he just owns the situation and looks completely in his element.” It’s the same at Yale, whether he’s making a round bottom on a glass tube using a hand torch or fusing a piece of tubing onto a spherical flask. His hands move by instinct, the radio always playing in the background, his concentration never wavering from the glass.

Ike Swetlitz is a junior in Silliman College and an Associate Editor for the New Journal.

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poetry Sextant There are many ways to sleep that are not restful. There are lakes that are open or closed in different seasons as though by some kind of door.

Tonight the eels migrate: they know where they are going: they have been there once before.

They are like sound particles traveling outward from a single source, acquiring the behavior of the space they interact with, now returning less loudly back to the place they came from in order that they may be heard. I turn the lock against the eels, scatter salt: my house is not a sea.

One could sleep all night through the migration, a sharp instrument in one’s hand, as if a dream were a way to measure the angle between two objects: one real, and one wriggling, slow but urgent, across the frost and asphalt, making an undecipherable sound.

Margaret Shultz

I Can Imagine a Terrific Rain I can imagine a terrific rain and ten thousand people screaming in the Canadian north. All of my professors are there and the wind is actually so strong that it breaks my arms. In the same way that I hate my body, I see a wide disc of earth covered with people that I know, screaming, launched from the surface of the earth towards Prince Edward Island or into green waters near Ellesmere Island.

Where are my shoes? I lie in your bed while you rinse, my head in halves like a nut and rain cutting me long-ways. Walking north towards Newfoundland, I see everything from up top sluiced by a horrific rain over the Baffin Bay, completely destroyed by nature.

You unplug a quarter inch from the stereo and wrap it up. In the yellow light, you throw me a glance in passing.

When I continue to do worse than everybody else, I have visions of lines of rain across my neighborhood. I sleep because I smoke enough weed but otherwise I watch the flood make cleavages in the earth. It is so frustrating to me that I am not miles away in Greenland, refrigerating with the birches like a tired buoy – that far north I think I could myself be a work of art, at least an ice sculpture bobbing forever.

Elliah Heifetz

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the new journal

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Feature

A writer goes more than skin deep into beauty pageant culture. bydecember Arielle Stambler 2013

“C

ontestant number 19.” The announcer’s amplified voice reverberates through the auditorium. I look down at the number pinned to my dress. My legs snap into position, and I begin my walk into the bright light: one and a half large circles around the stage, just as I practiced this morning. I try to smile at the three female judges seated at a table below me and at the audience in rows of school cafeteria chairs beyond, but it’s the mechanical smile of a news anchor. When I pose for the first time, stiffly shifting my weight leftward, everybody claps. I’m not sure what they’re clapping for.

My legs jitter as I walk, even though my sparkly heels are only two inches high. An iridescent mother-of-pearl necklace hangs around my neck. My satin dress swishes quietly. I’m wearing more eye makeup than I ever have in my life. And yet, I have a strange feeling—novel to me—that from where the judges and audience are sitting, I look beautiful, enigmatic, older, even seductive.

After completing my circuit, I stop in front of the pageant’s creator and emcee, Logan West.

“If you could change one thing about society’s attitude toward women, what would it be?” West asks, passing me the microphone.

Three empty seconds pass.

“I think I would want everyone to be able to define feminism for him or herself,” I begin, my voice trembling. “I think that that’s sort of a loaded word, umm, and unfortunately, it usually has negative connotations. And I would love for everybody to be able to think about what fen-fenim-feminism means for him or her and to be able to express that.” I pass the microphone back to West and exit the stage.

A few weeks earlier, I would have answered West’s question very differently: “Make society stop objectifying women through institutions like beauty pageants.” But I was also curious about their widespread allure, to the point of entering a pageant myself: the 2013 Connecticut USA Extravaganza Pageant in New Haven.

Maybe pageants offered more ways to be beautiful than I’d realized.

The Miss America pageant began in 1921 as an Atlantic City summer resort festival. That first year, fifteen-year-old Margaret Gorman was crowned the winner because the judges deemed her capable of handling the responsi-

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And the forty-five-dollar entry fee supported bilities of motherhood. Girls like Gorman repa good cause, the anti-bullying organization resented an idea of American morality expectWest started when she was fourteen. The paged to hold the nation together after World War eant system isn’t based on judging the bodies I in the age of Jay Gatsby, jazz, and the flapper’s of young women; with its alternative rules and loosening sexuality. Women had won the right overwhelmingly positive branding, West saw to vote just the year before. In the twenties and her pageant as a potential force for good. thirties, Miss America winners exemplified At nineteen years old, West knows a thing conservative definitions of femininity: docile, or two about pageants, and the mainstream unassuming, and chaste. pageant circuit. In 2012, she won a crown at The expectations for contestants have Miss Teen USA—a giant, pink-jeweled tiara, and changed. The women who compete must pera glimmering sash, to be specific. The title came form a talent and have a social platform that with a $25,000 check. Originally from Souththey would use their title to promote. An oftington, Connecticut, she became the first girl cited fact about the Miss America Organizafrom the state ever to win the title. tion is that it is the top scholarship provider for West spent the following year serving as a young women, doling out more than forty milfigurehead of the Miss Unilion dollars each year. A reverse Organization. cent ad for the organization During her reign, she featured a young woman in Does the proclaimed shift promoted Unite Against a strapless dress holding in values really reflect a Bullies Today, which teacha tiara, looking up at the words: “Some people call deeper change in pageant es students in grades three her a beauty queen. We call through seven how to recphilosophy? her a scholar.” Many of the ognize and stop bullying uswomen who have won the ing a five-step plan. School pageant in the last decade principals were much more have been college graduates hoping to finance willing to let her into classrooms to conduct an education in law, medicine, or another proanti-bullying workshops when Miss Teen USA fessional field. All of them have professed paswas calling. sion for community service. All of them have West and I Skyped a few weeks before the been confident and well-spoken.

Extravaganza Pageant. Sitting in her Pace UniBut does the proclaimed shift in values reversity dorm room, she looked nothing like she ally reflect a deeper change in pageant philosodid in her TV appearances: no makeup, hair phy? tucked away in a bun, body swallowed by a gigantic gray sweatshirt, eyes framed by rectLogan West, a junior commercial dance maangular glasses. Her voice was still a bit nasal jor at Pace University, claims that her pageant, from the cold she’d had earlier in the week. the Connecticut USA Extravaganza Pageant, is “I’m just a normal girl. I went to a normal different. school. I go to a normal college,” she said. “I just “I don’t really think it’s about the glitz and get to wear a crown sometimes.” the glamour that most people expect. It’s reWest had won a local pageant when she was ally a fundraiser for my program, Unite Against four years old, but didn’t return again until she was thirteen, the year she started being bullied Bullies Today.” for not “acting her race.” West is the daughter That’s how West billed her project to a Fox of a white father and African-American mothConnecticut news anchor in a September interer. For six months, another biracial girl in her view. She insisted on the ways that her pageant class criticized her tastes in music, her friends, didn’t fit the stereotype. Like many pageants, and her clothing—then slammed her into lockit included an interview, a swimsuit competiers and spat on her. West entered the Miss tion, an evening gown competition, and an opAmerica pageant system as a way to reclaim tional talent portion. But “swimwear” could be herself post-bullying. She was judged there too, interpreted so loosely as to mean “anything you but this time she was told that her clothes, her would wear to the beach.” It was open to boys manner, and her opinions were right. Although and girls, men and women of (literally) all ages.

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the new journal

Photos Courtesy of Ernest Hendersen The author walks on-stage for the 2013 Connecticut USA Extravaganza Pageant. she has only ever done six pageants total, she’s won five out of the six. The exception was Miss America’s Outstanding Teen, a national title.

The rules stipulated that she couldn’t enter herself in the contest again, but West was eager to win a national title. Doing so meant she had to switch to the Miss Universe system, and her mother and coach, Patricia West, was concerned about that change. The Miss USA system is more explicitly focused on beauty than Miss America: it doesn’t include a talent portion or award scholarship money, and doesn’t ask contestants to have a social platform.

“I’ve always told the girls, don’t rely on your beauty,” Patricia, who also coaches her other daughters, told me. “You’re going to have to have something more to back it up.”

Patricia supported Logan anyway, driving her to a martial arts center in West Haven five days a week so that she could get in shape with a world-class fitness coach for the dance portion of her training. Every day, she drilled West on questions about current events to keep her up-to-date and able to express her opinions eloquently. “If you talk to me too quickly, I’ll say,

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‘Start that sentence over again.’ I know I can drive my kids absolutely insane,” Patricia said— but she’s proud of the results, and she believes in pageants. “They force you to stay up on current events, to know who you are, to know what you stand for.”

Then she made me an unexpected proposition: “Have you considered entering the pageant yourself?”

I clammed up, then. I balked, making some excuses, stammering. Finally, I took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it.”

A week later, I say yes.

I am not the first person Patricia has convinced to give pageants a try. Her converts include Patrick Moore, the 2013 Extravaganza’s co-director, who met the Wests after a Tae Kwon Do class at the West Haven martial arts center (where Logan trained for Miss Teen USA). At the time, Moore didn’t know much about beauty pageants, but he knew he didn’t want his then four-year-old daughter Carlina to enter any. But Patricia convinced him to con-

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The contest was open to men and women of all ages. sider the 2012 Extravaganza.

In the months that followed, Moore worked on interview questions with his daughter a few nights a week. Questions necessitated explanations. “Why is purple your favorite color?” he would ask her. He explained to me, “You bring it down to the fact that grapes are my favorite food and I like sunsets, so I like purple,” he said.

“You have to bring it down to that level.” Sometimes, exhausted and impatient, Carlina cried, so they would pause in her practice.

But Moore felt it was a vital supplement to her education. “What course in school do you take to get on stage and demonstrate interviewing techniques under pressure?” he asked me. “If she was uncomfortable with it, we would take a break for couple of days. We had no expectations of winning anything.” Carlina won the four- to six-year-old age division, as well as an award for Best Interview, beating out contestants nine years older than her.

I wait for my interview in the 2013 Extravaganza Pageant, sitting in the airy auditoriumcum-cafeteria at the John C. Daniels International School. The seven other contestants in the “Miss” (unmarried female adult) category gather around one of the lunch tables. Among us are a twenty-five-year old model, a bulldog breeder, a junior from Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), and two of my friends from Yale (Patricia and Moore strongly encour-

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aged me to get my friends to sign up). The judges call us in one by one.

At the table with me is 24-year-old Tayler Ross, who I had met before the pageant itself.

She’s been doing pageants since she was five, but she tells me the interview portion always freaks her out. Ross is the real reason my two friends and I are in this pageant; Moore had given me her contact information when I had only just learned about the pageant. During our interview a month ago, she’d promised to help me if I entered: “I’ve always wanted to coach someone and see if my coaching helped them do better.” She then worked with me on two skills that her six-month-old baby, Jayana—also a pageant contestant—would be acquiring soon: walking and talking.

“So let’s see your heels,” Ross said first while I pulled out my wedges. She donned fourinch gray suede stilettos. Cuing up a Justin Timberlake song on her tablet, she demonstrated her walk: a series of deliberate bounces, each step replacing the one before it in a seemingly straight line. She looked natural and unaffected. At the end of her walk, she twirled elegantly without once breaking eye contact. When it was my turn, I was supposed to follow her lead while also crafting a walk that somehow “expressed my personality.” Instead, I tried to replicate Ross’s movements.

With that, Ross quickly moved on to inter-

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view practice. competition. When I get onstage, I’m distracted “Arielle, tell me what it’s like being a tour by the lyrics of the Keri Hilson song playing guide at the Yale Art Gallery. What is your faover the loudspeakers, “Don’t Hate Me ‘Cause vorite piece of art?”

I’m Beautiful.” (“All eyes on me when I walk in,/ I started babbling about a Futurist painting No question that this girl’s a ten,/ Don’t hate of an amusement park, but Ross interrupted me. me ‘cause I’m beautiful.”) I’m walking too fast.

“Yoo-hoo, where are you looking?” My gaze I pose awkwardly. I don’t know when to smile, had strayed to the side to avoid eye contact. when to look at the judges or the audience.

“Eyes right here.” She pointed to her own eyes.

My body feels like a machine whose manual I She added that I had already said too many haven’t bothered to read. Distracted, I forget to “umms” and “likes” and that I was connecting do the graceful final turn that I practiced this all my sentences with “and” instead of pausing morning and walk offstage abruptly. between ideas. She had me try again.

Before the evening gown competition, I ask It turned out Ross was a good coach. In Angelica Belardo, the SCSU junior, if she will do front of the judge panel at the 2013 Connectimy makeup. Five minutes later, she is threadcut USA Extravaganza Pageant interview, head ing my eyebrows. judge Liz Wong asks me the same exact art galI’m terrified. I can wash makeup away, but lery question. I feel confident when answermy eyebrows are not going to grow for a long ing, making sure to pause betime, according to anI’m walking too fast. I tween sentences. other contestant. She But the judges’ next says I won’t have to pluck pose awkwardly. I don’t brings me to a stumbling halt. know when to smile, when them again for a month “At this point in the pagafter they’re threaded. to look at the judges or eant, what is the title of your I’m touched when Belararticle going to be?” do, seeing the concern on the audience. My body “Oh, good, good question.” my face, apologizes for feels like a machine I stall. The judges chuckle. throwing all of this at me whose manual I haven’t “Maybe something like ‘judgat once. ing beauty.’”

This is her first beaubothered to read.

Knowing that I’d come ty pageant, too. Belardo in to test the beauty pageant world, their resigned up wanting to support the anti-bullysponse had been to test me. ing cause. She had told me about being bullied from the age of twelve through her senior year In the afternoon comes the onstage comof high school. Her friends spread rumors usponent of the pageant. Wong told me that girls ing instant messaging, and talked about her win pageants from the neck up. “You only have at school. She would come home crying, and the stage for fifteen seconds,” she said. “If you dreaded having to return the next day. can get a judge to only focus on your face be“I didn’t really think of it as bullying,” Belarcause you are exuding that much confidence do had told when we talked before the pageant. and positivity, by the time you come offstage, as “I thought of it as drama, and one of the normal a judge I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I forgot to look at things that people go through. It’s something her body.’ It really isn’t about what you’re wearthat adolescents do.” ing. It’s about what your face is doing.”

Her experience shaped her interest in Still, I choose not to walk onstage in a bikihow the mind works, leading to her major in ni. I wear a modest one-piece and on top of that, psychology. Belardo hopes to get a master’s in I wear a cover-up that probably sheaths more social work, and eventually work with teenagof my body than my evening gown will. I don’t ers who struggle with depression or substance want to feel like a piece of meat, and luckily abuse.

I’ve entered a pageant that will forgive—even When we came to a discussion of my intersupport—that impulse. At Patrick’s encourageest in the pageant, I had told her I wanted to test ment, all of the contestants in the Miss categomy preconceived notions—that I came into the ry are wearing cover-ups except for one. experience with a belief that beauty pageants The swimsuit portion is my first walk of the were outdated, objectifying, and judgmental.

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She interrupted me. “And that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do with the pageant,” she said. “It’s against bullying.”

I asked Belardo what she thought the difference was between the kind of judging that is implicit in bullying and the kind that makes up pageants.

“You’re bringing the best out of you,” she answered. “Your fashion sense, the way you express yourself.” Middle and high schoolers are disapproving rather than supportive in its judgment, she said, and without the confidence boosters of beauty pageants.

Belardo stumbled as she thought aloud about the drawbacks. “We should all equally win. I think that would be a better way…I’m not really sure.”

She ultimately answered that the way pageants combat bullying is through the confidence they give people to stand up on stage and know that “you don’t have to be accepted everywhere you go.”

When Belardo finishes my makeup, I am wearing so much I can see it in my peripheral vision. She shows me how I look in a compact mirror. My T-zone is now hairless and my eyebrows don’t look dramatically different, just more even. Seeing the makeup, I understand for the first time why they call it “eyeshadow”— the sparkly dark blue powder looks indeed like a long shadow cast by my eyes and extending almost up to the arches of my newly-slimmed brows. Belardo has extended the black eyeliner ever so slightly into the crow’s feet that ring the corners of my eyes.

“True beauty is what shines out when you compete,” I remember Patricia West saying to me. “You can have the most beautiful body and face. But if inside there’s not just a genuine love for others and community, you’re not going to look so pretty on stage. Pageants teach you about being a total package. You’re well-spoken, give back to community, and you’re smart, and happen to be pretty.”

Everyone in the room tells me I look beautiful and that my face will look dramatic from the audience’s perspective. They praise Belardo for her masterful work.

My friend Salma Dali, who is also competing, borrows my fanciest dress for pageant day.

It is a fuchsia floor-length gown with a haltertop, a criss-crossed back, and tiny jewels on

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the bust. When Salma answers her onstage question in it (“As a neuroscience lab assistant, what are your goals to make a change in our society?”), she looks beautiful, poised, and wellmeaning—everything this pageant loves. She wins the “Miss” division.

Yet Wong, the head judge, reveals that she had actually pegged me as her winner after the interview. I’m shocked by this. “You answered every question as if we were having a conversation,” she said. “You didn’t come in expecting to win. You came in like, this is who I am, this is what I’m doing.”

Everything I’d been told about this pageant suggested that it was meant to give people the opportunity to work specifically on building self-confidence. But hearing the judge’s rationale still left me with questions about what it means to win pageants, why pageant culture rewards what it does, and what participants— winners and losers—want from the experience.

It seems that everybody gets something a little different. Through pageants, West has gained a substantial platform from which to promote her organization. Ross has learned how to exude grace and speak with poise on a stage. Carlina Moore has gotten to feel like a princess.

All of them have chosen to do something that I learned is both nerve-wracking and difficult. They subscribe to a values system about responding to judgment with poise, and accepting it. They believe that the skills necessary to excel in pageants are valuable outside the pageant world—and that within it, those factors can be evaluated, without making deeper, possibly damaging judgments about beauty or personality. They believe this with missionary zeal, and though I don’t trust all the tenets of this religion, there is something about their faith that tugs at me.

I re-watch the video of my performance at the pageant. It’s both me, and distinctly not me.

I remember shaking on stage, but that doesn’t come across. My voice hadn’t tremble as much as I’d thought it had. I walked faster than I was supposed to. I did smile awkwardly, like I was trying to show I’d understood a joke that I didn’t really get, when Carlina yelled, “Go, Arielle!”

The audience clapped when I left.

Arielle Stambler is a senior in Morse College and a Staff Writer for the New Journal. the new journal

snapshot

Breadlines How budget cuts will affect New Haven’s hungry.

by Maya Averbuch

I

n a small apartment in Fair Haven, Patricia Stuart goes to get a letter from her bedroom.

Family Feud plays in the background as she emerges with an envelope in hand, and begins to read in a low, gravelly voice: “In accordance with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, maximum allotments can only remain the same each year until the regular Thrifty Food Plan adjustment increased allotments above those set by the Recovery Act.” In comprehensible terms, the news is bad: her food stamp benefits have been cut from two hundred dollars a month to $189.

“What are we supposed to do?” she had asked soon after I walked in. Stuart, a tall, middle-aged woman wearing a colorful robe, spends most days at home or in the doctor’s office. Seated at her living room table, she shows me why she has been out of work for the last few years—

december 2013

she cannot lift her right arm more than a couple of inches. “Just moving it hurts right now,” she says softly, before laying it gently back in her lap. When she needs to leave the apartment, her goddaughter drives her, because taking the bus causes panic attacks. She places the letter alongside financial statements, pill bottles, and a bouquet of plastic roses.

Stuart is one of over 36,000 New Haven residents who receive food stamps, officially known as SNAP benefits, through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave people like her across the country extra food dollars to get them through the hard times of the recession. That temporary boost ended on November 1, forcing many to adjust their budgets. Legislators had assumed that the economy would pick up by the law’s expiration

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Photos by Maya Averbuch and Maya Binyam date, but in the New Haven, unemployment has stubbornly remained at twelve percent, and the cost of living has gone up. Some Connecticut representatives are part of the battle: Representative Rosa DeLauro has protested vehemently against additional reductions, and Senator Chris Murphy made headlines for eating on a SNAP budget for nearly a week last spring.

Since the cuts, Stuart has kept an especially sharp eye out for coupons and sales. She bought five pounds of potatoes and a five-pound bag of flour for ninety-nine cents each at ShopRite.

Once a month, she stops at a food pantry to get additional supplies. “I don’t eat too much of the fresh stuff,” she notes. In fact, she tries not to each too much at all. She grows weary when I mention that under the Farm Bill being debated in Congress, several billion food stamp dollars may be cut once more.

On a map of food insecurity in Connecticut, New Haven is a dark stain, indicating that people here are worse off than those in the rest of the state. The portion of city residents on food stamps has approached thirty percent in the past few years, and the problem is worsened by governmental disorder. In the spring of 2013, a federal judge ordered that the Connect-

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icut Department of Social Services (DSS) fix its “systemic deficiencies,” including illegally long wait times and frequent loss of applications.

But by the numbers, fewer people go hungry in Connecticut than in other parts of the country. In New Haven, the DSS has embarked a path of modernization, and nongovernmental resources are also readily available to residents. There are numerous soup kitchens, food pantries, and shelters. People spend at farmers’ markets, which double the value of their SNAP dollars and give them greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables. When asked if people are hungry in New Haven, Robert Jackson, a supervisor at the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen, says they shouldn’t be. Holding a mop in his emptied dining hall, he notes matter-offactly: “There are so many places that feed you.”

But the lines keep getting longer. With the food stamp cuts arriving right before Thanksgiving and not long before the winter cold, people have turned increasingly toward nonprofit aid. The city’s charitable network finds itself spread thin.

On a Tuesday morning at the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen, Rick Durance, the

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assistant to the executive director, says, “December is looking bad, and January is going to be worse.” A former Michigan resident and AmeriCorps volunteer, Durance moved to Connecticut to work at Christ Church Episcopal in downtown New Haven, which runs the soup kitchen. In that time, he’s seen the numbers of meals the kitchen serves jump. Now, in the last week of every month, the one-room dining hall prepares to serve an unprecedented three hundred lunches. Durance expects the figures will only increase as New Haven starts to feel the effects of the SNAP cuts. “Folks are feeling shunned,” he says, “We’re feeling unable to provide for a community we care about.”

David O’Sullivan, Durance’s soft-spoken boss, tells me that the clientele has changed considerably in the twenty-seven years he has worked at the kitchen. When he started, he says, the typical beneficiary was an older male with a drinking problem. Now, the people who come looking for a meal are, on the whole, younger, whiter, more well-to-do, and sometimes toting kids. “For a lot of the newer folks, you can sense the stress levels are higher,” he tells me. They come in asking for assistance the soup kitchen cannot provide—diapers, baby food, rent assistance. Though a SNAP coordinator is sometimes on hand to direct them to the Department of Social Services, O’Sullivan says, “The government has stepped back.” The annual twenty thousand dollars in governmental funds that Christ Church Episcopal had received for the past five years has been cut. Now the directors have to rely on grants, donations, and fundraisers.

I leave just as the first of the lunch crowd files in. They make their way towards stacks of bread and pots of hot food fresh from the adjoining stainless-steel kitchen. With Farm Bill cuts of anything between four and forty billion dollars over the next ten years, Durance fears that soup kitchens and food pantries will not be able to handle the demand. “They will close, unequivocally,” he says, with a hard look in his eyes. He hopes, however, that his kitchen will be an exception.

Those who cannot line up for cooked meals often stock their own fridges and cupboards with the help of food pantries instead. The following Saturday, I am standing in front of the Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James. The

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church runs Loaves & Fishes, the largest weekly New Haven pantry that allows its guests—as the program manager, Reverend Keith Voets, calls them—to pick out their own food. Voets had told me that people line up well before the pantry’s 9 a.m. opening. When I arrive at 8:30, there is already a line around the block.

Inside, John Castillo, the church’s goodnatured caretaker, directs me to the serving area. A food stamp recipient himself, he seems mostly unfazed by the SNAP reduction: “It has caused me to cut back a little on red meat, but other than that it’s basically the same.” Yet the times are not easy for him: he tells me about his multiple sclerosis and how his household includes his six younger siblings, all in the same cheerful tones with which he had given me directions. Pay from the church is not enough for Castillo to go without assistance, but he says that New Haven has offered him much more support than New York, where he grew up. Plus, he insists, he fares better than some others who are struggling here. As we speak, someone in the next room yells, “We’re about to get started,” and the volunteers’ opening prayer drifts through the door: “Give us today our daily bread…”

Loaves & Fishes gets most of its food from the Connecticut Food Bank, one of two large food assistance banks in the state. The CT Food Bank, whose central location is in nearby East Haven, also relies on donations from local markets and growers. Government food provisions have run thin, and the decline is expected to continue. Neither the Food Bank nor the pantries know how many of the people who come in are on food stamps, but with more cuts to come, CT Food Bank Communications Director Mary Ingarra says the Food Bank is expecting more of a strain on its programs.

Back in the volunteer area of Loaves & Fishes, the strain is visible. Volunteers shuttle around quickly, cutting pie for guests and bagging bread to deliver to elderly people at home.

A teenage girl hurtles by, saying, “We have an egg spill. Eggs are down.” A white-haired man peers out of the kitchen to ask, “Does anyone know how to make coffee in these things?”

Another, wearing a pink sweater and jeans, declares, “Straight-up chaotic today.”

In the next room, a volunteer holds up numbered laminated papers to make sure guests reach the food tables in an orderly fashion.

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Individuals who arrive with their own bags get an extra item from a table with Thanksgiving staples like stove-top turkey stuffing, while the rest move on to the standard fare: packets of rice, cans of sweet corn and green beans, bags of potatoes, and fresh zucchini. A chart on the wall displays pictures and labels of lesser-known fruits and vegetables, including yucca and various kinds of yautía—presumably part of the young new reverend’s plan to make guests’ diets more nutritious. Loaves & Fishes also runs a small free medical clinic, and the rates of diabetes and obesity that volunteers see are staggering, Voets says.

Two older women cross in front of me.

“Venga por aquí,” one says to the other. Another woman runs forward saying, “Wait, wait, wait,” before grabbing the hand of a small child.

Loaves & Fishes does not ask any questions of its guests, so it does not have statistics on its clients’ demographics, but one can observe the people who mill about. The pink-sweatered volunteer declares that many are drug addicts who trade in their SNAP swipes for cash at local grocery stores and then show up at the pantry.

Nationally, only one cent on every SNAP dollar spent is illegally exchanged for cash, a fraud rate that has dropped in recent years. Both Voets and volunteer captain Sally Fleming tell me that many of their guests are working poor, people with one or more low-wage jobs who still struggle to make ends meet. Fleming, a small, gray-haired woman who slips in and out of sight as other volunteers ask for her assistance, says, “I don’t think anyone’s starving, but there are certain families that run out of food and have to live on pasta by the end of the month.”

For the homeless, who have nowhere to store food or cook meals, options are even more limited. Yet the shelters they turn to are not always able to provide the food they need. At Columbus House, one of New Haven’s largest homeless shelters and social service organizations, Paula Bowe explains that she is borderline diabetic, and it’s crucial that she maintains a healthy diet—with fresh vegetables, lean meat, fish, and not too many carbs—to prevent the disease from worsening. “It’s the stuff that you’re not supposed to have that you can afford,” she says, seated at a table in the shelter’s office space. Columbus House Intake Specialist Martha Deeds, a young woman with short-cropped

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blonde hair, points out that though homelessness often exacerbates people’s health issues, the shelter cannot cater to all dietary restrictions. “The options are limited,” she says.

Bowe speaks vehemently about her fight to support herself—and her adult disabled son—within the system she depends on. She lost her longtime job as a clerk at Stop & Shop three years ago, after a car accident sent her to the hospital. She lived off savings and settlement money for months, but both have run out, forcing her to seek help at Columbus House.

She struggled with the Department of Social Services; her SNAP benefits were cut off when her renewal form was sent to her old mailbox.

When she applied again, the office misplaced her documents. Like others, she has become jaded: “If my body would let me, I’d rather work eighty hours a week than deal with the federal or the state government.” I ask her about the department’s new office, which has made use of a statewide system to manage clients’ accounts online and a new scanning process to prevent lost documents. There’s more staff and wait times have decreased significantly, but after her fight, Bowe remains skeptical: “It’s the same old welfare office.”

Work is hard to come by for Bowe, given that she cannot operate a computer easily, which she says is required for most jobs.

Though the state has stepped in to cover her future rent, paying utilities without an income is impossible. She hopes to move out of Columbus House as soon as possible, but she worries that even with a kitchen, she will struggle to prepare healthy meals. For now, she practices her computer skills in the hopes of finding employment.

To successfully advocate against future cuts, those affected need to tell their stories, says William Bromage, chair of the Food Assistance Working Group, and they need to do it well: “Everyone can tell their story, but not everyone can do it concisely and powerfully.”

The group is part of the New Haven Food Policy Council, which has banded together with local nonprofits to train a few people to do so.

The twelve chosen food advocates come from all over New Haven, and most rely on assistance—whether from SNAP, soup kitchens, or food pantries. In October, they attended a fivehour training session to learn how to speak at

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a legislative hearing, write letters to newspaper editors, and reach out to fellow community members.

The advocates are paid for an eleven-hour internship, anything from attending conferences to assisting with surveys to—I’m unnerved to learn—speaking with reporters. But Bromage points out that the $12.50-per-hour compensation is necessary when dealing with such a low-income population. There are, of course, barriers to what they can do. At one council meeting, food advocate Kimberly Hart complains, “Policymakers can testify for hours.

When I testify? Three minutes.” And perhaps there is some heartstring-pulling.

Patricia Stuart, who lives in Fair Haven, is another one of the food advocates. Initially she speaks of the food stamp cuts with resignation: “There’s no sense in trying to fight it, because you won’t win.” But she attended part of the food advocate meetings, and plans to return.

Among people like her, there’s a sense of collective vulnerability. The poor, especially those

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who struggle with multiple jobs or impermanent housing, are often not the ones closely following federal debates. Faraway politicians hand down decisions, and the consequences, announced in the formal language of legislation, translate to a lost gallon of milk, or one more bruised tomato.

The food advocates are just a handful of New Haven citizens, but they represent many others. In conversation, they tell the stories of people—a friend with kids, a woman in the street, a couple featured in the paper—who are struggling more than they are. They speak not the language of policymakers but instead the language of empty shopping carts and skipped meals. Their perspective, they hope, will change the spirit of the debate—if lawmakers hear them.

Maya Averbuch is a sophomore in Berkeley College and an Associate Editor for the New Journal.

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Feature

BROTHERS’ KEEPERS The other side of Project Longevity, New Haven’s much-touted gangs initiative.

by Zoe Greenberg

On November 26, 2012, twenty-five alleged members of two of the most violent gangs in New Haven filed into the Hall of Records, an imposing stone building with wide white columns on Orange Street. At the door, Reverend William Mathis greeted the young people, all of whom were on probation or parole. Those twenty-five were about to attend the first “call-in” of Project Longevity, a new police initiative that has come to exemplify the practical challenges even the most progressive anti-violence programs face.

New Haven is a small city with a high homicide rate. Between 2003 and 2012, 185 people were killed in the city. In 2011, violence reached a twenty-year high, with thirty-four homicides and 133 non-fatal shootings. At the end of that year, the mayor hired a new chief of police, Dean Esserman, and gave him clear orders: stop the shootings.

Esserman already knew New Haven well. He had been the assistant chief of police in the nineties, when he helped institute community policing in every area. Cops walked neighborhood beats instead of driving in circles, gathered intelligence on gang leaders instead of petty criminals, and steered people towards social services instead of jail. In 1993, Esserman left for a job in New York. The department’s budget was cut and subsequent chiefs reverted to more traditional law enforcement methods, which saturated violent areas with police and racked up arrests.

Now Esserman is back, and so is community policing. In 2012, he helped launch Project Longevity, a program that, though widely praised, has left some in the community feeling unfairly targeted and

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unwilling to buy in.

For eleven months before the first call-in, a team of cops, detectives, academics, and activists studied the perpetrators and victims of the worst violence in New Haven. Officially, these are “groups,” just a step or two above cliques, and not “gangs,” which are fairly established, with an internally-recognized hierarchy. The team went through five years of police records.

They interviewed neighborhood cops, probation and parole officers, federal agents, and family members. They analyzed relationships between individuals. If you murdered Jim, they asked, who else was in the car? What was your relationship with Jim before the shooting? Who do you hang out with?

The cops used to just track down and arrest an individual in connection to a crime, but Project Longevity has expanded the scope of their inquiry. Police can react to a gang-related murder by focusing their attention on an entire network. And the police aren’t working alone— state and federal law enforcement have also promised to crack down on whole groups who do not heed Project Longevity’s message.

In November, Project Longevity brought in alleged gang members for a two-hour meeting.

They displayed the initiative’s “table of organization” they had created over the past eleven months, a map of relationships that visually linked each person in the room. The team’s message was clear: we know who you are. We know who your friends are. The body count ends now.

“The first of you who goes to kill—we don’t just go after you,” Esserman says, summarizing his speech at the first call-in for me one afternoon in his office. “We go after all of you. You might not be responsible for the murder, but you are responsible for being part of the gang.

Look to your left and look to your right—you are your brother’s and your sister’s keeper. What one does, the gang pays for.”

Project Longevity’s “focused deterrence” approach originated in Boston in the nineties with David Kennedy, now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. In his book Don’t Shoot, Kennedy writes that the people committing violent crimes are “not an entire generation, not everybody in the hot neighborhoods, not all the young black men. Not everybody exposed to violent video games or rap. Not everybody from a single-par-

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ent family. Not everybody who could get a gun if they wanted one.”

Focused deterrence is based on a common pattern identified by criminologists: the overwhelming majority of violence in cities is caused by a very small percentage of the population that moves in identifiable groups. The opposite of focused deterrence is general deterrence—the “stop and frisk” program in New York City, for example, which was recently declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court—where everyone gets police attention, whether or not they are violent offenders.

According to a 2009 New Yorker article, Kennedy began developing the roots of what would become the Project Longevity strategy in 1994, when the National Institute of Justice gave him and two colleagues a grant to study gang violence in Boston. Kennedy met Paul Joyce, the leader of a city police unit focused on gangs. Joyce had been quietly and successfully reducing homicides among some of Boston’s most violent gangs.

Joyce had realized that law enforcement officials and punitive measures alone couldn’t make people stop shooting. No matter how long prison sentences were, or how many young men got arrested, the number of homicides stayed constant. But if people with moral authority in the community—local clergy, grandmothers, and victims of violence—told violent offenders to stop shooting, they were more likely to listen.

Kennedy studied Joyce’s tactics for six months, eventually developing a framework for focused deterrence as a citywide program.

Instead of asking cops to deliver informal notifications to individual gang members, Kennedy and his colleagues designed a forum—the callin—where they identified members of gangs to come together and hear the clear message: if one member of a gang commits murder, the whole unit will be placed under a microscope.

Five months after the first call-in, the homicide rate had gone down by seventy-one percent.

People started calling it “The Boston Miracle.”

The first person I met who had been “called in” to Project Longevity, Sean, seemed to be a homegrown New Haven miracle. I was taking a sociology class called “The Urban Street Gang” with Project Longevity researcher and Yale professor Andrew Papachristos, who identifies gang members in New Haven and analyz-

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es their links to each other. We learned about blocks west of downtown New Haven. Large Project Longevity from four panelists: Reverwhite and beige houses with two-story porches end Mathis, the director of the program; Doug are interspersed with brick apartment buildBethea, a street outreach worker whose son ings and smaller row houses. At Kensington was murdered in 2006; Thomas McDaniels, who and Chapel, a steady flow of people enter Dux founded a support group for grieving family Market to buy cigarettes and lottery tickets, members called “Fathers Cry Too”; and Bethea’s or stand by the curb to catch up with neighborson Sean, a twenty-two-year-old convicted felhood friends. on who was on probation and had been called in The consensus among the residents I speak to one of Project Longevity’s first meetings. with is that Kensington Street used to be crazy.

Sean sat quietly at our seminar table while Asia and Joshua, who look about eighteen and Reverend Mathis explained the basics of the are standing by a grassy park halfway down program. Then it was Sean’s turn to speak. He the street, say the neighborhood used to be told us that in 2009 he went to jail for robbery; so crowded, you could look to either side and he has since been released and is now on proonly see people. Gus, a middle-aged man who bation until 2015. His probation officer manworks at Dux, says there used to be people selldated he attend Project ing drugs outside his shop Longevity’s meeting. He in broad daylight. An older has since moved out of woman tells me in the eight“I wanna change...I don’t his old neighborhood, he ies Kensington was “really wanna die out here.” dresses differently, and rough.” he doesn’t hang out with Everyone agrees that the same people.

Kensington is calmer than it “I wanna change,” used to be, though the cause Sean said. “I don’t wanna die out here.” and timing of this transformation are up for The people in charge of Project Longevity debate. Some say it happened a year ago, when are optimistic that there are many others like everyone got arrested; others say it happened Sean who want to change, and who will change. eight years ago, when everyone got arrested.

Reverend Mathis said that the program will When I walk down to Kensington one afterlead violent offenders to “life—and life more noon, there are clusters of people sitting on abundantly.” Attorney General Eric Holder gave stoops, hanging out in yards, pushing strollers, a press conference in New Haven the day after and leaning out of parked-car windows. attending the city’s first call-in and said, “ProjLaquanna Miller is standing outside her ect Longevity will send a powerful message to sister’s house, watching her two-year-old nephthose who would harm their fellow citizens.” ew Tramire. Miller remembers standing on the Chief Esserman said Project Longevity will porch of this same house in October, when a have a profound effect on the relationship bedrive-by shooter on Kensington accidentally tween the community and the police because shot Tramire in the chest. The bullet fractured “the community—in the full light of day—sees his pelvis and caused citywide outrage. Today us giving their children a second chance.”

Tramire is grinning, wearing a blue sweatshirt.

As I learned more about the program, I Miller’s son was called in to Project Longevfound that the voices of one central constituenity, and she has less than glowing things to say cy are absent from the media coverage. Where about the program. were the people who had been called in? What “Basically, I don’t think it’s working,” she were they saying? says. “Still people getting shot, still people sellReverend Mathis would not release the ing drugs.” names of the call-in invitees, and neither would Her criticisms are two-fold: first, by going Professor Papachristos or Barbara Tinney, through the probation and parole lists, the rewho leads Project Longevity’s social services. searchers and cops working on Project LongevThe formal avenues had failed, so I went to the ity aren’t necessarily targeting people actively street. making trouble on the street.

“Just because you hang in the area doesn’t Kensington Street is a wide city street a few mean you’re in a gang,” Miller says. According

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Charts Courtesy of CT Data to her, they brought in some young men who aren’t actively involved in violence, like her son, and they didn’t call in some young men who are. She seems uncomfortable with the basic premise of the program—that people should be accountable for the actions of their networks of friends.

Second, she has no idea what the program does or how it works. If they’re trying to bring the community together to help fight violence, she says this program isn’t a good way to do it.

Her son, who shows up mid-way through our conversation, received a letter from his probation officer about the call-in. He didn’t know what it was about, and didn’t want to show up, but his probation officer made him. “I don’t even understand what Longevity is,” Miller says. “Is it for drugs, is it for guns, is it for both?”

Her son would not give me his name, and most people I spoke to who had been called in wanted to stay off the record. This, of course, helped explain why their voices were largely missing from the media coverage of Project Longevity. Because they wouldn’t give their names, it was difficult and often impossible to fact check their stories, or go back to them for more information. Their critiques lacked the

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specificity offered by the sociologists and police officers I spoke with, but ultimately, they were the ones with firsthand information about the experience of being called in.

Miller’s son says the program doesn’t actually give people the tools to change.

“It’s bullshit,” he says. He and other young men in the neighborhood were told to get off the streets—but no one can get a job, and, he says, the street is the only place to make a living. He thought the social workers connected to Project Longevity would get people jobs, but they haven’t.

“Us being from the streets, we don’t know if they’re pushing their power,” he tells me. His criticism challenges the basic trade-off proposed by Project Longevity—that the police will help you out with jobs and social services, if you’ll help them by not shooting. But to Miller’s son, the power disparity between the police and the alleged gang members is so wide that a give-and-take model just seems unfair. How could he trust police after years of watching them round up his friends?

The other Kensington Street residents who were called in to Project Longevity had similar criticisms. One young man in a red sweatshirt

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is angry about the infringements on rights. He people or black people or people with a crimisays the cops are targeting whole groups of nal record. “We’re doing the exact opposite,” he people for individual crimes, even when many says. “We’re surgeons.” of those targeted have nothing to do with those And even as some of the participants in crimes. He says he’s not in a gang and he doesn’t Project Longevity say the program is at odds want to be treated as if he is. The loose red with the community’s interests, there are also sweatshirt he’s wearing now is the same one residents on Kensington Street who agree he was wearing recently when a cop stopped with the police’s crime-fighting efforts. Gus, him and said he could go back to jail for wearwho works at the corner store, tells me the ing red, because this is a Bloods area. But he just neighborhood has changed for the better, and got out of jail, he says, and he has to wear what that “the police are doing a good job.” A young he has. Another teenager mother named Mary says “They’re bullshitting you. says he isn’t a Blood, and he community policing can doesn’t understand why he be frustrating, but she’s We didn’t just call you was called in as an alleged also grateful for their vigiin because you’re on member of the gang. A third lance, because she has a probation and parole.” young man pulls a Project little girl.

Longevity business card out “That’s why the cops of his pocket, and says the call-ins weren’t useare taking everyone,” she says. “’Cause we have ful because there was “too much police there.” to think of the children.”

The negative associations he had with the po Project Longevity isn’t taking everylice were simply too strong to overcome in one one. But the main challenge for the police is meeting. that their surgical work can look and feel to evWhen I tell Chief Esserman that some pareryone else like an arbitrary round-up of all the ticipants feel like they are being wrongly idenyoung men in the neighborhood. tified as gang members just because they’re on probation and parole, he responds quickly and Scot Esdaile, the president of the Connectifirmly. cut NAACP, is one of the most vocal critics of “They’re bullshitting you,” he says. “We Project Longevity. He grew up in Newhallville, didn’t just call you in because you’re on probaanother neighborhood whose gang population tion and parole, because how come we didn’t has been targeted through the initiative. He call in ninety percent of everyone on probation says he knows everyone in the neighborhood, and parole?” Esserman says the Project Longevand that the kids who were called in comity team did careful, precise research for the plained to him afterwards. eleven months before the call-in. They went “The kids said, ‘Scot, they brought us in, through five years of records. They did link they bought us pizza and soda, and all they did analysis, creating maps of social networks. was threaten us,’” Esdaile recalls. Esdaile is When I ask if it’s possible that they’ve made frustrated because he says the program seems mistakes, or misidentified people, he says, like it was simply imposed by law enforcement sure— without considering the input of the commu“That bullet could have gone into their nity. body by accident when they were in the Yale Reverend Mathis and Chief Esserman conemergency room, and the guy we arrested and tend that they held a series of meetings with convicted for shooting them could have been the community before they launched the iniwrong, and the gun could have been make-betiative. They briefed local politicians, clergy lieve and they could have been from Mars and members, and activists on Project Longevity, they really weren’t the person who was dying and asked particularly interested people to in the hospital that day.” He looks at me as if I join the team. could not be more naïve.

The debate over Project Longevity raises He says his team is not “fishing,” that those the question of what constitutes “the commucalled in were summoned for specific, renity.” All the people I talk to are trying to speak search-backed reasons. They are not dragging for the community, either implicitly or explica net down Kensington Street, looking for poor itly: Scot Esdaile, Reverend Mathis, the New

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Haven Police Department, the residents on Kensington Street. But the community is heterogeneous, and in this case, it’s divided. Even if Project Longevity is a thoughtful, precise program based on months of data collection, there is still the challenge of making sure those affected understand the program and support its results.

It is much too early to tell what impact Project Longevity is going to make. The numbers in New Haven are small, and the call-ins only began a year ago. Its official evaluation will happen in three years, and will be conducted by Professor Papachristos and a team of colleagues. They will determine the success of the program based on whether there is a statistically significant reduction in shootings and arrests for violent crimes among the groups they’ve been working with. Papachristos’s research team meets weekly and tracks every single shooting that occurs within the city, to determine whether or not it was gang-related.

The team hopes to steadily collect enough data to establish if Project Longevity is helping to stop the shootings.

ers. It is our job, as community members, or service providers, or police officers, to steer gang members towards the right path. It is up to those who can to prevent the man on his right from pulling the trigger, and to keep the man on his left from drawing a knife.

But whether or not Project Longevity succeeds in numerical metrics, a question remains.

How can a program overcome a divided community and years of mutual mistrust between police and people on the street? When we discuss “community,” who is responsible for whom?

There is an enormous gap between the people trying to provide encouragement and the people who are supposed to receive it. Even while Reverend Mathis and Chief Esserman and a host of other leaders encourage gang members to be their brothers’ keepers, many of the participants in Project Longevity don’t agree that they are brothers. They do not want to be kept.

Zoe Greenberg is a senior in Berkeley College.

One Sunday morning, I attend Reverend Mathis’s church service on Sperry Street, one block away from Kensington. The Springs of Life Giving Water Church is not large—it has only twelve chipped black pews in its center aisle—but it is lively. There is a full drum set and keyboard; the music is so loud I can’t quite hear what the fellow congregants say when we lean in to bless each other. Reverend Mathis wears a long black robe with red buttons. He wipes the sweat from his forehead as he delivers a spirited sermon and leads us to Hebrews 10:24: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

Reverend Mathis tells us that we must be encouragers for those around us who have lost their way. Seeing me in the audience, he adds to his sermon that Project Longevity is about encouraging the people who commit violence in New Haven to change their course; it is about showing them that the community cares about them, and is affected by them.

In Reverend Mathis’s view, as in Project Longevity’s view, we are all our brothers’ keep-

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Feature

VITAL SIGNS

by Julia Calagiovanni

“I

’ve always had an uncomfortable relationship with institutions,” Peggy Chinn, a professor of nursing, declares from the podium.

The audience laughs in agreement. They don’t tend to get along with authority, either.

They’ve gathered at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing on a September weekend to find others like themselves at the first Rebellious Nursing! conference. For these nurses, who bring a far-left perspective that’s uncommon in their profession, the weekend promises to be part homecoming, part summit; part protest, part celebration.

These “rebellious nurses” know that the biggest struggles aren’t always the ones that have to do with blood and guts. The social issues that loom large over the country are impossible to ignore when bodies become battlegrounds, and when the effects of poverty and discrimination are seen up close in emergency rooms and clinics. At the same time, society isn’t always kind to nurses themselves; in the medical hierarchy, they’re often treated as less valuable than doctors. These nurses are here to plot and strategize, to win respect for their profession and quality care for their patients. They want to change the spirit of their profession through conversation, and to keep their colleagues to re-examine their approach to work.

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A group of activist nurses rethink health care.

The conference kicked off the previous evening at a converted warehouse in West Philly now used as a local arts center. I dutifully made my nametag on cardboard repurposed from a Quaker oatmeal box and tied it around my neck with rainbow yarn: “I’m here because…I’m writing an article about Rebellious Nursing!”

I received my hot-pink conference brochure with the RN! logo—a nurse’s gloved hand clasping a patient’s—emblazoned on the front.

Beer, vegan pizza, retro soda. Flannel, dirty Converse sneakers, thick-framed glasses. This felt close to home, not so distant from my own neighborhood. I’m no nurse: I’m squeamish about blood, and it’s been years since I took biology. But I am sympathetic to these selfproclaimed “rebellious nurses”—we are all frustrated by the obvious inequities in American health care. Who gets care, and who doesn’t?

How are the sick treated, both as patients and as people? Unlike me, these nurses can make these changes happen. They take a risk by speaking up, but it’s their patients’ health and well-being that are at risk if they don’t.

This conference is the brainchild of Sarah Lipkin, a student at Yale’s own School of Nursing. After an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan, a flirtation with the film industry, and a stint in Portland, Lipkin now claims the title of “rebellious nurse” proudly, but her path to

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nursing wasn’t always clear.

“It just took me a long time,” she laughs, explaining the journey that brought her—hotpink bangs, conch-shell tattoo, and all—to New Haven. After college, Lipkin decided to become a doula, a nonmedical caregiver similar to a midwife without medical training. Lipkin also spent time working with survivors of domestic abuse and recently released prisoners, before arriving at Yale in the fall of 2011 to begin a three-year master’s of science in nursing.

That February, she attended Yale’s leftist lawyering conference, “Rebellious Lawyering,” (or, affectionately, “RebLaw”), held annually at the law school. The conference brings lawyers together to discuss how they can use their expertise to work on behalf of people who face discrimination. She started thinking about ways to bring RebLaw’s approach to law into the field of nursing. The questions brought up at RebLaw about economic inequality, structural violence, and oppression seemed similarly applicable to nursing, but no one in the medical field was talking about them.

Throughout the conference, and over the following weeks, I talk to other nurses and students. They’ve worked in hospitals, clinics, schools, camps, hospices, classrooms, Planned Parenthoods, and outreach programs; they come from Baltimore, Philadelphia, Tennessee, Brooklyn, Seattle, Virginia, and New Haven.

The stories accumulate, and a common thread runs through them all: nurses witness horrendous treatment but lack the resources to change the system. A patient shows up in the ER complaining of pain, but colleagues deny pain medication because he’s probably a junkie looking to take a “rest” and get high. Another patient can’t speak English, but the staff doesn’t bother to call a translator. A fourteenyear-old girl gives birth as her mother screams at her and calls her a slut; a nursing student looks on and wonders what she can ethically do.

Another teenager has a stillbirth; she’s black and living in the South and the hospital administers a drug test, even though there’s no legal requirement to do so; because there are traces of crack in her system, she’s charged with murder. A secretary shreds disability forms, hoping to encourage self-advocacy in a patient. An older woman isn’t given pain medication, because pain is just part of being old. Neither are some Hispanic or African-American patients,

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because “those women” are “too proud.” A patient of color is referred to as a “thug.” Rude and judgmental comments are made about a larger patient’s weight. An obstetrician has a busy day—so she encourages a patient to have a Csection.

Too often marginalized or underestimated, nurses themselves become targets. A nurse is a little too assertive—so co-workers whisper that she’s a lesbian. Nurses are sexually harassed by doctors or patients. A doctor dismisses a nurse’s suggestions about best how to treat a patient.

“Doctors make all the decisions,” complains Tino, a cardiac nurse from Tennessee, “but they’ll be in the room for a minute, while I’m in the room for twelve hours a day. I see different things.” If doctors treat cases and nurses treat people, and if nurses are powerless and doctors in control, ultimately, both the patient and the nurse suffer.

Peggy Chinn, the conference’s keynote speaker and professor at the University of Connecticut’s nursing school, was a key figure behind the 1980s radical nursing movement known as Cassandra, which promoted feminism in the health care profession. She quickly became something of a patron saint to Lipkin, who was beginning to envision a twenty-firstcentury reimagining of radical nursing. Armed with Cassandra’s archives of mimeographed newsletters, Lipkin realized that Chinn and others in the movement had begun a conversation that she wanted to continue. Lipkin reached out on Facebook and Tumblr in early 2012, searching for other “rebellious” nurses. “As a student, I have felt isolated in my attempts to find forums for progressive conversation around the practice of Nursing,” she wrote.

It turned out that Lipkin wasn’t alone. By that fall, she and her cohort of online supporters had made a lot of progress. “It’s kind of a miracle,” she reflects. “I don’t think this could have happened ten years ago.” By the following September, the group was ready to go: hundreds of nurses, students, and allies gathered in Penn’s Claire Fagin Hall for the first Rebellious Nursing! Conference.

The conference’s goals were bold and broad: the manifesto on the very first page of the pink booklet declared that they were “envisioning justice and liberation for health seekers, health workers and communities,” and uniting “to find

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inspiration, awareness, solidarity, and practical ways to impact health equity and health disparities.”

The manifesto was moving, but it didn’t say enough. Lipkin told me that nurses were “on the front lines, with patients, every day.” What did that mean? It was time to take some vital signs.

“What was your earliest experience with oppression?”

I’m at a workshop called “Anti-oppression fundamentals training for health care workers.” Jenna Peters-Golden, an organizer for a Philadelphia-based activist collective called AORTA (“anti-oppression resource and training alliance”), asks us to discuss the question in pairs. I sit in on a conversation with two nursing students, Amanda and Danie. Danie grew up moving between developing countries; her parents were aid workers, and their family was considered well-off just by virtue of having a house with four walls and a roof. Amanda grew up in Alabama, eating in restaurants where the customers were always white and the workers were always black. In school, she was shown the famous videos of children marching for civil rights and being crushed by fire hoses during Birmingham’s Children’s Crusade. She started crying and was sent home. “I never had a dialogue about inequality until I got to college,” she says. As they share stories, participants start to recognize similar inequalities in their work as nurses. Danie now interns at a local prison, and is conflicted about her work there. It’s her job to provide the best care she can to her patients, but she’s also part of a prison system she often finds unjust. “How can you support the inmates as patients while you’re working in this system of oppression?” she wonders.

After this activity, Peters-Golden poses another question: “Why did the Titanic sink?”

Answers rise from the audience. A lack of communication. Responding only to what was immediately visible. Overconfidence. Poor construction. Going too fast. Following the captain’s orders. Waiting too long before radioing for help.

Peters-Golden explains the idea of the “iceberg of oppression”—a theory that oppressive actions, visible on the surface, are enabled by systemic and institutional prejudices that lurk below. We’re here, she says, to “challenge the iceberg.”

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But, I wonder, doesn’t the ship need to be steered? Where else is work—fast, careful work—more important than within the lifeand-death world of a hospital? Isn’t there a case for patience, and working within the system? Then again, I don’t have to put on scrubs every day and go to work, witnessing injustice in a place meant for healing. In a workplace where decades of prejudice linger, but where minutes—even seconds—matter, the work still has to go on.

Almost every nurse can recall a moment that moved him or her to action. For Peggy Chinn, it was a death—not of a patient, but of the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1982, after decades of attempts to ratify the ERA, the amendment’s final deadline arrived, and it failed, three states short of ratification. Chinn happened to be at an American Nurses Association convention in Washington shortly after the amendment failed, and noticed that the guest speaker for the maternal and child health section was the conservative senator Orrin Hatch.

She and likeminded colleagues “decided that that was all we could stand. We had to do something,” she tells me.

Chinn had discovered the essay “Cassandra,” written in 1860 by Florence Nightingale— a more radical figure than many think, she tells me, a character blurred by history’s lens. “I was talking about it constantly,” Chinn explains.

She was particularly taken with one line: “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity— these three—and not a place in society where one of the three can be exercised?” Even in the supposed post-women’s liberation era, this reminder of earlier times showed Chinn and the other women how far they had to go. They decided to adopt the essay’s name for their collective, which began in the early 1980s. Feminism became a powerful tool to reimagine the flaws in a field of work largely dominated by women, helping them connect general oppression of women to the way they were treated as nurses.

Yet Chinn stresses just how much vehement resistance there was to feminism within the nursing profession itself. “Nurses just resented feminism, or they were afraid of it,” she recalls. For its part, the feminist movement itself wasn’t much help, either. “They were trying to overcome the stereotype of the good wife, the submissive woman, obedient to the man. And

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Photos by Elaine Liebenbaum they felt that nursing was just an extension of that male-created role.” Cassandra, an explicitly radical movement, valued nurses’ ability to nurture their patients while providing quality health care. Liberal feminists objected to this emphasis on traditionally feminine qualities.

Chinn seems to look back on that time with fondness, despite her frustration. It was a heady time, she says, when feminism felt new but was “starting to really blossom.” Earlier in her career, she had worked as a pediatric nurse at a hospital, but hated it. “It was like nurses didn’t have a brain and should just be a robot,” she explained. They were expected just to carry out the tasks they were given. She spent a few years in a physician’s office, which offered a better workplace, and then moved on to teaching college- and graduate-level courses in nursing at the University of Buffalo, and then at the University of Connecticut. “I knew I wanted to teach differently,” she explained. Inspired

by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, she developed a teaching technique that saw education as a process of solving problems, not memorizing information. It meant asking questions, and not necessarily having the answers.

Almost all of the nurses I talked to seemed satisfied with the technical aspects of their nursing education—the skills and the science.

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But they can face some unlikely adversaries in their non-nursing peers. Madeleine Wilson, a senior undergraduate nursing major at Penn unaffiliated with the Rebellious Nursing movement, describes her high-school self as a “very typical, straight-A, AP student that wanted to be a premed and have my elite life set out.”

When her mother suggested the idea of nursing, she hated it. “No way someone like me who is top of the class is going to consider it,” she remembers thinking. She ultimately decided on nursing after being won over by the opportunities and faculty at Penn. Now, nearing the end of her undergraduate nursing degree with a minor in health care management from Wharton, she has spent four years hearing that attitude reflected in her peers’ opinions on nursing. “I get a lot of shit about how nursing is easier— ‘why don’t you be a doctor?’” she explains.

Sometimes this tension plays out in institutional dynamics. Lola Pellegrino, who graduated from the school of nursing last year, told me found herself feeling uncomfortable in some of her classes. Once, she tells me, jokingly, a class on psychiatric nursing was so hetero- and gender-normative that she “wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail at the Powerpoint” in one particular lecture.

Lipkin tells me how the nursing school was

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an early avenue for women to be part of Yale: it was founded in 1923 as the first autonomous school of nursing in the country, and all eight of its deans have been women. YSN is progressive in many ways: it has a strong community of LGBT students, a respected midwifery program, and an academic approach that recognizes nursing as an important academic—as well as practical—field.

The Yale School of Nursing is far removed from the rest of the university. The school’s move this October to Yale’s “West Campus” site in Orange, Connecticut—a twenty-minute drive from our bench on Cross Campus—allowed the school to expand and improve its facilities, but it also moved the school away from the rest of Yale’s medical community. The seven-mile distance between the nursing school and the medical school seems to reflect stark differences in resource distribution. Commenting on the move, YSN nurse-midwife student Emily Martyn says she no longer feels like she is “in the middle of the medical community.” But while nurses undertake rigorous courses and provide important care, in the eyes of some, they will always be “just nurses.”

Beyond anatomy and physiology, it’s clear that there are bigger lessons that need to be taught in nursing school. After all, there’s no “Racism, Sexism, Ageism, and Homophobia 101,” but these problems are just as serious, many rebellious nurses might contend, as any medical emergency. Like illness itself, health disparities among minority or disadvantaged populations also bring suffering—just on a slower, and often more insidious, level. These societal problems are particularly dangerous in the life-or-death medical world.

That brings them to the elephant in the room: money. Nurses stare huge economic obstacles in the face on a daily basis. Health care is expensive, and people will often go without it if money’s tight. For patients on Medicaid or other forms of government-funded health insurance, reimbursement rates are so low that providers must see patients in rapid succession, which leads to lower-quality care. “You might not realize that something’s going on,” Martyn says. “You have to actually sit with a patient to hear what they have to say and give them the care they deserve.” For many providers and patients, taking that time is simply im-

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possible. Obamacare, Pellegrino says, will “push us there…It’s a step in the right direction,” but change will likely be slow.

Even the division of labor between doctors and nurses reflects economic tensions: nurses, Chinn says, have the most power when they are “taking care of people who no one else wants to take care of”—that is, populations that don’t bring in money. For example, nurses have a lot of latitude when working on a Native American reservation, but in mainstream environments where they can compete with nurse-midwives and nurse-anesthesiologists, their authority is limited. And traditional avenues of advocacy might not be available, since most nurses aren’t unionized. The nation’s largest nursing union, Nurses United, will only accept nurses with certain credentials, excluding many nurses and medical professionals.

Chinn is blunt: “Systems are set up by physicians or administrators who are out to make the most profit. As long as our health care system is a profit-based system, this kind of thing is going to happen”—that is, quality of care will be affected by who can pay for it and how much doctors will make.

Emma Dorsey, a nursing student at Penn, tells me that she came to the conference because she believes that nursing is a radical profession and wanted to “connect with other radical nurses, learn from them, draw strength from them, and have some fun.” She writes that she gained “all of the above” as well a tattoo. Her biggest unanswered questions: “What next? Can we make a publication? Can we have another? More, please! More! How can we make more nurse-managed clinics and build a radical health option for the poor?”

For Dorsey and others, this is the state of living and working in the space between questions and the answers. What gets these nurses from shift to shift is their renewed sense of purpose: the idea that new conversations can take place in emergency rooms, in clinics, and across the profession. I had gone to find the revolution, and I’m still trying to make sense of what I saw. But the work of building a healthier world might just start with rebellion.

Julia Calagiovanni is a junior in Silliman College and a Managing Editor for the New Journal.

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endnote

SIS, S.O.S. As you write course evaluations for your fall classes or read them compulsively to pick your spring ones (and then throughout the semester to bask in what could have been), pick and choose from these categories of answers to: “How would you summarize this course for a fellow student? Would you recommend it to another student? Why or why not?”

Warning: if you don’t like dancing in front of people, avoid it. He’ll make you dance, no matter where you hide.

Rambly:

To say this was a bad class is an understatement akin to “the ocean is wet.” Without a doubt it was the worst educational experience, if one can call it that, I have suffered since the seventh grade

This is the worst class I’ve taken at Yale…I wish its terribleness had revealed itself before the drop period ended...I hated every minute of the purgatory that was taking place in front of me…This is nothing you haven’t seen in a Malcolm Gladwell book…Worst of all, there’s no Internet in YUAG, so you have no choice but to sit and suffer without even the respite of Sporcle…He takes 15 minutes to start lecture every day, often giving information he already emailed to us. He’ll acknowledge that he sent this information in an email, AND THEN REPEAT IT AGAIN WORD FOR WORD. He goes off on random tangents during class; I once timed it, and he spent 18 minutes discussing a prenatal class he took before his kid was born. Once, we wasted 40 minutes playing the Prisoners’ Dilemma; what Yale student HASN’T heard of the Prisoners’ Dilemma? How many times must we look at the covers of Neal Stephenson books just so you can make some stupid puns? …Overall, I’ll probably do well in this class. Heck, I’ll probably get an A. But was it worth it? Was the soul-crushing agony and slow torturous death of my passion worth it? Absolutely not.

Ass-kissing:

Befuddling:

American Novel should be called Amy’s Book Club because it feels less like a class than an enjoyable commitment to becoming more cultured and well-read

It squeezes all the major western philosophical ideas into my mind in one year and it really helped me to think better like a real man.

These quotes are real. So is their pain and their ecstasy.

Short & sweet: Sure Matter of fact: I would recommend [Ethnography of Everyday Political Life] for those interested in learning about what it’s like to be a politician, to be involved in the political world, and what it takes to be a politician. Also those interested in ethnography.

Overdramatic:

Openly hateful: you might as well google figure drawing and learn from that.

And the lingering historical grudge: I would recommend [The Civil War & Reconstruction, 1845-77} to Yankees.

—Compiled by TNJ Staff

december 2013

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YALE UNIVERSITY

JUDAIC STUDIES–SPRING 2014 Course Offering CLASSICAL PERIOD JDST235 g /RLST147 g , Introduction to Judaism in the Ancient W orld. Steven Fraade. M W 11.35-12.50 JDST 238g/ RLST114Prophecy in Context, Robert W ilson/Hindy Najman. T 1.30-3.20 JDST 392 g /RLST405 g , M ishnah Seminar: Tractate Rosh HaShanah. Steven Fraade. Th 9.25-11.15 JDST414 g /RLST425 g , Talmudic Narratives in Context. Yishai Kiel. M 3.30-5.20

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIODS JDST 275/PHIL213, The Philosophy of M aimonides. Gabriel Citron. TTh 2.30-3.45 JDST265 g /HIST 345 g /M M ES148/RLST202 g , Jews in M uslim Lands from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries.

Ivan M arcus. TTh 11.35-12.50

MODERN PERIOD JDST 288 /HUM S271/ITAL360, Primo Levi and Holocaust W riting. M aurice Samuels. W 2.30 -4.20 JDST 293/RLST214/HIST248, Introduction to M odern Jewish Thought. Elli Stern. TTh 11.35-12.25, 1 HTBA JDST 330/RLST330/M M ES350, M ulticulturalism and Jewish Law in Israel. Yuval Sinai. M W 2.30-3.45 JDST 334/HIST224J, Jewish Emancipation in the M odern Era. M ichael Silber & Elli Stern. Th 3.30-5.20

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE JDST 312/HUM S249, Hebrew Poetry in M uslim Spain. Peter Cole. M 1.30-3.20 JDST 316/LITR348/HUM S427, The Practice of Literary Translation. Peter Cole. TTh 1.00-2.15 JDST 318/LITR 282, Cultural Study of Israel. Hannan Hever. W F 1:30 -2:20 JDST319/HEBR162/M M ES161, Israel: Ideology and Practice. Dina Roginsky TTH 2:30-3:45 JDST 323/NELC155/M M ES160, State and Society in Israel. Dina Roginsky. TTh 11.35-12.50 JDST 407/M M ES156/HEBR161, Israeli Popular M usic. Dina Roginsky. M W 11.35-12.50 HEBR120 g , Elementary M odern Hebrew. Shiri Goren. M TW THF 10:30-11:20 & 11:35–12:25 HEBR140 g , Intermediate M odern Hebrew. Ayala Dvoretzky. T TH 1–2:15

GRADUATE ONLY COURSES HIST 601/RLST776/JDST790, The Jews in M edieval Societies. Ivan M arcus. T 1.30 -3.20 JDST 690/CPLT905, Jewish and Arabic Literature in Israeli Space. Hannan Hever Th 3.30-5.20 JDST 756/RLST700, Philo of Alexandria: Interpretive Context, Philosophical Affinities, and Reception Harold Attridge/Hindy Najman. W 3.30-5.20 JDST 760 /RLST772, Rabbinics Research Seminar. Christine Hayes. T 1.30-3.20 _____________________________________________________________

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