Michael Winship: Roll Away the Stone of Ignorance

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

I was in Los Angeles last week where -- for my sins -- I'm co-producing a play, directed by my college friend Louis Fantasia.

It's called "Charlotte: Life? Or Theater?" by Elise Thoron with music by Gary Fagin; previews begin at the Met Theater on April 19, officially opening April 26 and running through May. Try to see it if you're out there.

Shameless plug aside, the play's based on the brief life and astonishing artistic legacy of a young painter named Charlotte Salomon -- a Berlin Jew from an assimilated middle-class family who, in 1940, fled to Southern France to escape the Nazis.

Such as Anne Frank kept her remarkable diary, and somehow sensing that her remaining time on earth might be brief, Charlotte Salomon chronicled her life and relationships in a prolific burst of creativity. She painted hundreds of vibrant watercolors, accompanied by an autobiographical narrative. Collectively, they now are recognized as one of the most extraordinary bodies of art to emerge from the violence of World War II.

She created more than 1,300 paintings -- deeply personal, vivid images of a German Jewish family haunted by multiple suicides and ripped apart by Nazi persecution. In 1942, Charlotte entrusted her work to a family friend, saying only, "Please take care of them. They are my entire life." A year later, she was deported to Auschwitz. Charlotte was murdered upon immediate arrival. She was 26 and pregnant with her first child.

As Passover begins and the Christian Holy Week is underway, Charlotte's life, her art, and her demise have a particular relevance, especially in a world that continues to let religious strife, division, and ignorance gnaw away at our basic shared humanity and, yes, faith.

My involvement with this play is requiring some flying back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. So it was with a mixture of ire and a sense of irony that I watched a scenario unfold on an LA-bound United Airlines flight last week.

The plane was full. Among the passengers was a group of Hasidic men, ultra-Orthodox Jews in long, black satin jackets and wide-brimmed, black felt hats. Two of them refused to sit in the same row with a female passenger. Their religion forbids just about any contact with women outside the home and family.

There was much ado as flight attendants persuaded people to switch seats so the Hasidim would remain unsullied by proximate estrogen. All of which probably violates about a dozen interstate commerce and sex discrimination statutes. When civil and religious laws are at loggerheads, civil law prevails. But not, apparently, in a cabin about to be pressurized to 8,000 feet.

The alternative? Possibly the men would have made do somehow. But had their demand been refused, perhaps they would have wanted off the plane, which would have required finding their luggage and removing it, resulting in a long delay. And so the airline acquiesced.

Certainly, the Hasidim aren't the only religious group with such attitudes toward women -- Mecca, anyone? -- yet I couldn't help but think their rigid, medieval close-mindedness might have rejected Charlotte Salomon's spirited creativity almost as surely as the totalitarian force that snuffed it out.

A couple of days later, sitting at LAX, waiting for my flight back to New York, I read that another troglodyte, James Dobson, founder of the conservative religious group Focus on the Family, had told U.S. News and World Report he didn't think former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, a potential presidential candidate, "is a Christian. At least that's my impression."

When all, er, heck broke loose, a Dobson spokesman scurried to elucidate that what his boss meant to say was that Dobson "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian -- someone who talks openly about his faith. We use that word -- Christian -- to refer to people who are evangelical Christians."

Well, shut my mouth. Of course, the damage was done. Apparently, Dr. Dobson had forgotten that part of Matthew 7 that admonishes, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," then goes on to discuss hypocrites casting beams out of their own eyes, pearls before swine, etc.

Dobson's memory lapse isn't surprising. In Boston University professor Stephen Prothero's new book, "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't," he discusses a Gallup poll that found Bible reading in this country at a record low. Many believe, Prothero writes, that "having a relationship with Jesus is more important than knowing what he actually did [and] believing in the Bible is more important than knowing what the Bible has to say."

As the late Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn once said, a book that good, you don't have to read.

copyright 2007 Messenger Post Newspapers

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

buzzflash | delicious | digg | yahoo | technorati