At least 1,800 people were dead or missing last week after flash floods hit Tibet and Nepal, where a giant torrent of mud, water, and ice smashed through buildings, swept away buses, snapped bridges into pieces, and engulfed people who tried to run but were overtaken by its destructive force.

Flash floods also drowned people and houses in Indiana, Hawaii, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut.

So far in 2026, some 51,434 wildfires have burned more than 7.9 million acres in California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

Earthquakes have caused 6,500 deaths in Venezuela, and also devastated California, Honduras, Indonesia, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Japan, and Spain— and again, that’s just this year.

This summer’s heat wave in Europe has caused more than 20,000 deaths.

The Colorado River is drying up after decades of overuse, threatening seven western states with impending drought.

In Argentina, thousands are flocking to the Patagonia Desert, hoping a petroleum boom there can reverse the nation’s decades of chronic economic instability.

Chicago’s April snows

There’s no easy escape from these nightmares. Trains and plane fares are going through the roof. The price of diesel fuel hit $5.62 a gallon last week, 53% higher than a year earlier.

Even in places where nobody worries about meteorological conditions— like say, Gaza or Ukraine— people find other things to worry about, like being bombed out of their houses and apartments. Or data centers are gobbling up thousands of acres, each one consuming as much electricity as tens of thousands— or even hundreds of thousands— of homes.

Is no place anywhere in the world safe from these acts of God and man and maybe even a few women? I thought you’d never ask.

Let me put it this way: Barbara and I were living in Indiana in 1965 when the Palm Sunday tornado struck, causing everyone in our town to hunker in the northwest corner of their basements (as they’d been instructed) while the storm raged overhead. Fortunately, nobody in our town suffered more than heavy rain. But just 16 miles to the north, the storm toppled a church building, killing several worshippers inside.

Then we moved to Chicago, where, for four years, we encountered not just snow in April, but a major blizzard each April.

When we moved to Philadelphia in 1972, I routinely bicycled my younger daughter to school every day. The first time it snowed, we arrived at school at the customary hour, only to discover that all Philadelphia schools had been closed due to the snow. If Chicago closed the schools every time it snowed, the school year would last maybe four months.

Philadelphians who drive

We Philadelphians, marinated in the modest Quaker tradition, tend to hide our light under a bushel basket. The fact is: None of the above disasters has occurred here or is likely to.

Ever since our president (forgive me, his name escapes me), in his wisdom, launched his war against Iran this past February, most Americans not already victimized by floods, fires, earthquakes, or droughts can talk about little else than the high price of gas at the pump. My key question: Have you heard anyone in Center City Philadelphia complaining about gas prices?

Of course, some of us downtown Philadelphians do own cars. We just don’t drive them very often, because pretty much everything we need is within walking distance. That includes supermarkets, boutiques, pharmacies, medical care, and some of the East Coast’s best restaurants. (It’s America’s most walkable city, according to USA Today for the third straight year.)

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts— home of the world-famous Philadelphia Orchestra and six other arts groups— is two and a half blocks from my home. The fabled Academy of Music, home of opera, ballet, and traveling Broadway productions, is four blocks away. So is Curtis Institute, one of the world’s greatest music schools. My office is seven blocks away. Walk another 15 minutes and you hit a string of world-class museums: the Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Barnes Foundation (which houses more French Impressionists than any Paris museum), the spanking new Calder Gardens, and of course the queen of them all, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It’s a cultural smorgasbord that’s second in concentration only to New York City. And the cost of living is a lot lower.

Oh, did I mention that New York City’s 911 emergency phone system broke down for seven hours last week, preventing hundreds of callers from reaching operators?

Summer camp for grownups

My 2023 Honda Accord hybrid has 7,200 miles on it after three years— that’s less than seven miles a day. And a hybrid recharges its batteries every time you step on the brake, which you do a lot of in the city (but not in the suburbs or on the Interstates). If Barbara and I fill up the gas tank once a month, that’s a lot. Incidentally, the Lombard Swim Club, AKA summer camp for grownups, is five blocks from us. When you live in Philadelphia, who needs a summer house at the Jersey shore, the Poconos or on Cape Cod?

Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times named Philadelphia the #1 must-visit destination in 2026, the year the city stepped onto the world stage with America’s 250th birthday, the FIFA World Cup, and the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. (I know, I know— the Journal and the Times are fake news. But still.)

Maybe best of all, our president is so preoccupied with messing up Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Charlotte, Memphis, New Orleans, and of course Washington that he’s barely noticed Philadelphia. Thank God for his short attention span. (Please don’t tell anyone.)

Last year our city recorded its fewest homicides since 1966 and its most jobs since 1980. There’s a certain logic to these trends. If you have a job, plenty of cultural amenities, and no blizzards, floods, or fires to worry about, why kill anyone?

W.C. Fields said it

Surely, you say, there must be something wrong with Philadelphia. And you’re right. The streets and sidewalks are often torn up. My mother-in-law, of blessed memory, often counseled us to “look up and see the beautiful buildings” whenever we walked in town. That’s how I tripped and fell on the sidewalk this past May.

After America’s Civil War, Philadelphia reinvented itself as “the workshop of the world”— a bustling but boring industrial powerhouse, where the only decent restaurants were Bookbinder’s and Shoyer’s, you couldn’t get a drink or watch a ball game on Sunday, and most respectable people fled to the suburbs. Now Center City has reinvented itself once again, as a glitzy center of arts and culture, gourmet restaurants, and gleaming high-rise buildings, not to mention home to more than 100,000 upward strivers.

Philadelphia’s favorite booster— no, not Ben Franklin, but W.C. Fields— once proposed this epitaph for himself: “Here lies W.C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.” Me too.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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“No matter what happens,” this Israeli honcho assured his American Jewish visitors, “everyone around the table will always have a homeland in Israel.”

“Excuse me,” Punch Sulzberger exclaimed, “but I’m an Episcopalian! Is this still my country?”

Hoo boy! What a comment to make to a Sulzberger! These people don’t like to be categorized or pigeon-holed, to put it mildly.

The Sulzbergers’ original family patriarch at the Times, Adolph Ochs (1858-1935), was indeed the son of German Jewish immigrants. He married Effie Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the primary architect of Reform Judaism, which sought to modernize the religion to suit American life. Ochs’s son-in-law and successor at the Times, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger (1891-1968), was a Reform Jew and also an outspoken anti-Zionist during a time (the 1940s) when the Reform movement was still debating whether to support a Jewish state in Israel. He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or a nationality– that Jews should be distinguished from other Americans only in the way they worshipped. The notion of a Jewish state in Israel, of course, undermined that position.

Arthur O. Sulzberger Sr., the above-named “Punch” (1926-2012), was not religious at all. And much like his father, he viewed Zionism as a racist concept. He married an Episcopalian and raised their son Arthur O. Jr. (“Pinch”) in his wife’s Episcopalian faith. Pinch, born in 1951, as an adult stopped practicing religion altogether and was married by a Presbyterian minister.

So, are these 21^st-Century Sulzbergers Jews, or aren’t they? And why am I relating this family history now?

Like American Indians?

Well, you see, this month California took a crucial step toward requiring state agencies to include an optional box for “Jewish ethnicity” on all demographic data forms, from college applications to public assistance programs. California already recognizes nearly 50 other racial and ethnic identities for data collection purposes, from American Indian to Samoan. But this bill’s passage would make California the first state to officially treat Jewishness as something more than a religion.

“Plenty of proudly identified Jews do not attend synagogue or even believe in God,” noted the New York Times this month, “and Jewish tradition considers them to be Jews just the same.” In 2021, the Pew Research Center found that only 11% of American Jews said that “being Jewish is mainly about religion,” with most preferring some combination of religion, ancestry, and culture. (The Times neglected to mention where its own controlling family stands on this issue.)

On the other hand, you can’t convert to another race or ethnicity. But you can convert to Judaism.

So, what’s the bottom line when it comes to defining who’s Jewish? Ancestry? Religion? Nationality? Tribe? Or something else?

Superman without Lex Luthor?

That question has baffled scholars and antisemites alike for centuries. In Constantine’s Sword, the ex-priest James Carroll explored the long history of Catholic antisemitism and how this theological hostility toward Jews set the stage for modern racial antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Carroll argued that Christians were gentle folks for their sect’s first 300 years. Then the Emperor Constantine seized upon the cross and the crucifixion as nifty symbols with which to unify his empire. And subsequently the Church needed a common enemy to keep its squabbling flock together through the years. I mean, who would pay any attention to Superman if Lex Luthor didn’t exist? Besides, antisemitism was so much fun, doncha know?

Come to think of it, Christianity is the world’s only major religion that’s preoccupied with the manner of its founder’s death. Who knows, or even cares, how Abraham, Moses, Muhammad, Confucius, or Buddha departed this Earth?

If Palestinians were smarter…

Adolf Hitler, for his part, became so obsessed with defining Judaism that he took his eye off the battlefield and lost World War II. The founders of the State of Israel, lacking Hitler’s luxury of unlimited deliberation time, opted for Hitler’s definition— understandably, since Israel was originally conceived as a refuge for Hitler’s victims. That means that anyone with even a teensy bit of Jewish blood— yes, even the Sulzbergers— would be welcomed there if things turn nasty for Jews elsewhere. Israel is not so much a Jewish state— that is, one governed by the benevolent precepts of the Jewish religion— as a “state for Jews,” many of whom apparently feel no compunction about nasty behavior toward strangers in their midst. (As one of my otherwise charitable Jewish friends puts it, “Why don’t the Palestinians just go somewhere else?”)

And, yes, the Israeli definition of who is a Jew is a racist concept, in the sense that I (who have spent all of 20 days in Israel, in two visits more than half a century ago) can board a plane to Tel Aviv tomorrow and be welcomed with open arms, whereas a Palestinian whose family worked that land for generations must relocate somewhere else. (As I’ve suggested before, if the Palestinians had any brains, they would all convert to Judaism— in which case they too would be welcomed in Israel, after which they could practice any religion or none at all, just like Israeli Jews.)

On the other hand, Israel has created a more humane society than most of its neighbors, not to mention the Third Reich, which lasted only 12 years, compared to Israel’s 78 years and counting.

What about ‘food Jews’?

The California bill aims to help the state quantify its Jewish population in order to track hate crimes and for public health purposes— for example, by determining where to promote genetic screenings for diseases common in Jewish communities or ensuring that antisemitic attacks are not misclassified on reporting forms.

The trouble with the bill lies in its failure to recognize a primary Jewish characteristic: Our resistance to being classified (which we share with the Sulzbergers, among others). Nor does the bill consider that many Jews belong to multiple Jewish subgroups, some of which can’t stand each other. The ultra-Orthodox have no use for me, and vice versa. I may admire the Sulzbergers for reinventing and sustaining modern journalism, but not for turning their backs on their ancestors, who most assuredly were not Episcopalians or Presbyterians.

Of the many Jewish subgroups, one of my favorites are the “food Jews,” a sect which includes some of my relatives. These people never attend synagogue or open a prayer book. But at every Jewish holiday, they conscientiously and lovingly prepare all the appropriate edibles from scratch. And despite their lack of scholarly credentials, they grasp and transmit the three essential elements of every Jewish holiday:

1. They tried to destroy us.
2. We survived.
3. Let’s eat.

To paraphrase Hillel the Great: That is the whole law. All the rest is commentary.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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July 31, 2026

Hello Dan Rottenberg,
I hope you’re having a great week.
My name is Jason Katzman, and I am a Senior Editor at Skyhorse Publishing. I recently spent some time reviewing your book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League 1950-55, and I wanted to reach out to share my thoughts.
I was particularly impressed by the depth and authenticity of your historical narrative. Your ability to bring together firsthand accounts and personal reflections offers readers a vivid and compelling look into a pivotal moment in collegiate sports history. What stood out most was how effectively you captured both the institutional transformation of the University of Pennsylvania and the human impact of that transition, especially the experiences of players, coaches, and supporters navigating uncertainty and change.
The balance you’ve achieved between sports history and broader academic and cultural evolution makes the work both informative and emotionally engaging. It provides valuable insight not only for football enthusiasts but also for readers interested in the intersection of athletics, education, and institutional identity.
I would be very interested to learn more about your current and forthcoming projects, as well as whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you do have representation, I would be pleased to continue any discussion through your agent. If not, I would be happy to outline how the process typically works, should there be interest in taking the conversation further.
Subject to reviewing additional material, there may be scope for a broader discussion regarding a potential fit within Skyhorse Publishing’s sports history and narrative nonfiction program.
If this is of interest, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Jason Katzman
Senior Editor & Managing Editor
Editorial Department
skyhorsepublishing
jkatzman.skyhorsepublishing@gmail.com
https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/
Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. 307 5th Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10016

August 3, 2026

Hi Jason Katzman,

Thanks for your kind words about The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League 1950–55. It sounds to me like you’ve actually read it!

I’m a journalist, editor, and the author of 13 published books, summarized at
https://danrottenberg.com/wp/books.

My current project is a book about the 25-year struggle to build Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The research is now in its second year and will probably require at least another year to finish. I have a no-strings advance, and a research assistant, but haven’t yet submitted a proposal to any publisher.

My agent retired at the end of last year, due to Alzheimer’s. So I’m now on my own.

I have two other nonfiction books on the back burner: a memoir about growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the post-World War II years, and an exploration of a famous 13th-Century conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and a prominent German rabbi who happens to be my ancestor. Most of my projects take years or even decades to complete. One of them (Death of a Gunfighter, 2008), took 57 years.

If I haven’t scared you off, you can learn more about me from my personal website: www.danrottenberg.com.

Thanks for your interest.

Sincerely,
Dan Rottenberg

August 3, 2026

Dear Dan Rottenberg,

I hope you’re having a great week. My name is Anna Roberto, and I work in editorial at a publishing house. I recently spent some time with The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League 1950–55, and I was impressed by the way it combines institutional history with deeply personal testimony. The oral-history format gives remarkable immediacy to a pivotal moment in collegiate athletics and higher education, making the broader historical transformation feel vividly human.
I would be very interested to learn more about your current and forthcoming projects, as well as whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you do have representation, I would be pleased to continue any discussion through your agent. If not, I would be happy to outline how the process typically works should there be interest in taking the conversation further.
Subject to reviewing additional material, there may be scope for a broader discussion regarding potential fit within a publisher’s history, sports history, and narrative nonfiction publishing programs.
If this is of interest, I would be delighted to hear from you.
Warm regards,
Anna Roberto
Executive Editor
Publishing Editor | Macmillan
https://us.macmillan.com
Equitable Life Building,
120 Broadway, New York NY 10271, USA

My reply to Anna

Dear Anna,

Thanks so much for your warm regards and your kind words about my latest book, The Price We Paid. But I must confess to mystification on one score: The wording of your letter is almost identical to an email message I received three days ago from Jason Katzman at Skyhorse Publishing. Since both of you provided the addresses of your respective publishing houses and even photos of yourselves, I assumed that you are real people.
So, what’s going on? Why is an editor at MacMillan copying messages from Skyhorse? And how did you see Katzman’s letter in the first place?
Thanks for any light you can shine on this mystery. Come to think of it, it might make a good book!
Sincerely,
Dan Rottenberg

August 5, 2026

Hello Dan,
I hope you’re having a great week.
My name is Jesse McHugh, and I am a Senior Editor at Skyhorse Publishing.
I recently spent some time reviewing your book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League 1950–55, and I was impressed by its thoughtful, well-researched, and compelling exploration of a pivotal moment in collegiate athletics and higher education. What particularly stood out to me was your ability to weave together firsthand accounts into a vivid oral history that captures not only the transformation of the University of Pennsylvania’s football program but also the human experiences behind one of the most consequential institutional decisions in American college sports.
Rather than simply recounting historical events, you bring to life the voices of the players, coaches, administrators, and supporters who experienced this remarkable transition firsthand. The balance between sports history, institutional change, and personal narrative creates a compelling account that will resonate with readers interested in football, higher education, and American history alike.
I would be very interested to learn more about your current and forthcoming projects.
I would be happy to outline how the process typically works, should there be interest in taking the conversation further. Subject to reviewing additional material, there may be scope for a broader discussion regarding a potential fit within Skyhorse Publishing’s sports history, college athletics, and narrative nonfiction publishing program.
If this is of interest, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Jesse McHugh
Senior Editor
Editorial Department | Skyhorse Publishing
mcjesse.skyhorsepublishing@gmail.com
https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com
307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018

Dear Jesse,

I was having a great week until I received your message. Now it’s a confusing week.

You see, the letter you sent me is the same letter I received last week from Jason Katzman in your own Skyhorse Publishing house, not to mention from Anna Roberto at Macmillan. The only substantial difference is your photo. Don’t you and Jason talk to each other? And if you do, why send me the identical letter? And how did Anna at Macmillan get into this act? I thought Skyhorse and Macmillan hated each other worse than Trump hates immigrants. And why are you expending so much energy on me?

Granted, I’ve always thought of myself as the second coming of Ernest Hemingway. But nobody else does, except maybe my wife and daughters. So, what the heck is going on? Are you all creatures of Artificial Intelligence? Even your photos?

Warm (albeit artificial) regards,
Dan Rottenberg

A reply from Anna Roberto

August 14, 2026

Dear Dan,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and for raising the question so directly.
I completely understand why the similarity between the two messages would have caught your attention. I can assure you that I did not have access to the correspondence you received from Skyhorse, and it would not be possible for me to have seen a private email exchange between you and another publisher.
What may have made the messages feel familiar is that editors across the publishing industry often use a similar structure when reaching out to authors whose work has attracted their interest: a brief introduction, a comment on the book itself, a question about representation, and an invitation to discuss additional material. If I had been responding to or drawing from another publisher’s correspondence, the content and observations would have been noticeably different.
In that sense, the resemblance is likely a reflection of the fact that both messages were expressing a similar publishing opportunity and inviting a conversation about your work, rather than one being copied from the other.
I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to clarify, and I’m grateful for your good humor about the situation. If you’re open to it, I’d still be very interested in hearing about any current or forthcoming projects you may be developing.
Warm regards,
Anna Roberto
Publishing editor/ Macmillan

…And my reply

Dear Anna,

Of the three editors who wrote to me in the past month, you are the only one who replied, thus demonstrating to my impressionable mind that you are not a robot (I think). So please forgive me for ever doubting that you are flesh and blood.
When I first received these messages, I assumed this was some sort of scam, like one earlier this year, which flattered authors into providing “expenses” for book club discussions of their works, click here. My purpose in responding this time around was to use this correspondence in my weekly Substack column, “Contrarian’s Notebook,” which circulates to about 1,300 readers. Although anyone can subscribe to it, I suspect most of my readers are colleagues, friends, relatives, or fans of my various past projects. I’m happy to add you to my subscriber list. The column is posted each Monday at 4 p.m. If you check it out this Monday the 17th, you will find this correspondence there.
In any case, I think you have passed my test. So I am sending you the text of the original message that I sent to Jason Katzman. If you really want to pursue our relationship, I’m game if you are. Oh, and have a nice week.
Warm (and not the least bit robotic) regards,
Dan Rottenberg

August 15, 2026

Dear Dan,

Thank you for your thoughtful and generous reply. I appreciated both your sense of humor and the care you took in explaining why the similarity between the original messages gave you pause. I’m glad I was able to provide some reassurance that there is a real person on the other end of the correspondence, and I look forward to reading Monday’s Contrarian’s Notebook.
Thank you as well for sharing the message you originally sent and for outlining the range of projects you have been developing. It was helpful to learn more about your background and your long-form approach to nonfiction writing.
You mentioned that your previous literary agent retired at the end of last year. May I ask whether you have since secured new representation, or whether you are currently unrepresented? Knowing your current representation status would help determine the most appropriate way to continue the conversation.
If you are not currently represented, I would be interested in taking an editorial look at your manuscript or proposal materials before considering any potential next steps. If you have a PDF of your current manuscript, proposal, or a substantial sample of the work in progress, I would be grateful if you would send it along for an editorial review.
Thank you again for your openness and for continuing the conversation. I look forward to hearing from you.
Warm regards,
Anna Roberto

August 15, 2026

To be continued…..?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

The bad news you already know. Our fearless leader has trapped us in a pointless war in Iran. Russia’s fearless leader is bombing apartment buildings in Kyiv. Israel’s fearless leader is bombing defenseless Palestinians (for which Jews like me are inexplicably being blamed). ICE agents are doing to immigrants what Gestapo agents once did to Jews. Extreme heat is changing (and sometimes ending) people’s lives all over the world, while the U.S. government fires rafts of climate scientists. The cost of food, gas, and energy is going through the roof. Our vaccine-vilifying secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is hosting a cooking show on YouTube, while the dedicated 85-year-old public health doctor Anthony Fauci is maligned in Congress.

Now for the good news: LeBron James, perhaps the greatest basketball player in history, has committed himself to spending two seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers, raising hopes that the Sixers can win their first National Basketball Association championship since 1983, much the same way he erased a 52-year title drought for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016.

If you walked through Center City on July 24, the day the news broke, folks were talking of little else. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro declared July 24 “LeBron James Day” throughout the entire state. Last Thursday the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrated James’s decision with a 32-page special section, which is 31 pages more than any Philadelphia newspaper ever devoted to Benjamin Franklin. (Frank Sinatra’s another story.)

Remember Yogi Berra?

By most accounts, James is a decent, intelligent fellow and a good family man who married his high school sweetheart and has raised three children with her. So why, at age 41, did James choose Philadelphia?

He has said several times over the years that his goal is to go down as the greatest basketball player of all time. He already holds records for the most seasons played (23), most games played, most minutes played, and most field goals made in league history. Signing with the Sixers, James said, had nothing to do with money or family. He just wanted to win again. He’s already won four championships with three teams. Winning five championships with four different teams would settle the “greatest” argument once and for all.

Except…

My own boyhood sports idol, Moose Skowron, won four World Series championships with the New York Yankees and one with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and he wasn’t even admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yogi Berra won the World Series ten times with the Yankees. As for basketball, Bill Russell won 11 NBA championships with the Boston Celtics.

40-year-old athletes

Also, James will be 43 by the time his contract expires. His body could expire before then, when he least expects it. I was 46 when I foolishly got into a serious basketball game. I went up for a rebound, came down wrong on my left foot, and spent the rest of that month with a swollen knee wrapped in ace bandages, never to play basketball again. I’m no LeBron James, but there’s a good reason why 40-year-olds don’t play basketball.

Yes, I know: Aaron Rodgers is still quarterbacking the Pittsburgh Steelers at age 42. Tom Brady won a Super Bowl at 43 and retired at 45. The kicker Adam Vinatieri recently retired from the Indianapolis Colts at 47. George Blanda of the Oakland Raiders was still playing at 48. Nick Altrock actually played in a Major League baseball game at 57. But these superannuated professional athletes shared one thing in common: They didn’t play basketball.

There is much to admire about an athlete like James who kicks over the traces of a secure existence every few years to make a fresh start with a new team. There is also much to admire about an athlete who refuses to meekly surrender to the aging process. To compete at the highest level of any sport— or any endeavor, really— takes an awesome combination of talent and determination (and luck, as we shall see if you read on). To win consistently at that level takes even more.

What’s greater than winning?

In his quest to prove himself the greatest basketball player of all time, Wilt Chamberlain cut back on his shooting and rebounding in the 1967-68 season and led the league in assists, just to prove that he could do anything he wanted on a court. But the ultimate point of a team sport isn’t individual statistics; it’s winning games. Which is why Bill Russell was a more valuable player than Chamberlain.

Come to think of it, winning isn’t the ultimate point of a team sport, either. It’s remembering that a team sport is a sport, not a war. If LeBron James spends serious time in Philadelphia, he could do worse than check out the plaque in Penn’s Franklin Field that reads: “To win the game is great. To play the game is greater. To love the game is greatest.”

The late Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril, who won 514 games over 29 seasons, understood this. When asked to comment on the occasion of his 250^th victory in 1981, Carril replied: “I don’t give a hoot about the first one, nor the 100th, nor will I care about the last one. They are so meaningless anyway. A victory is to be enjoyed for a while and then forgotten, and a defeat should be reflected upon for a while and then forgotten as well.”

The question I would ask James at this point is the same question I would ask Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin: Not “Are you the greatest?” but “What’s your next career?” And how will you respond when, inevitably, somebody breaks your records?

Remember Tony Jackson?

The late Penn sociologist E. Digby Baltzell once observed that successful people aren’t very interesting. How we deal with failure and disappointment may be more inspiring. I’m thinking here of one of the basketball heroes of my own New York City youth.

Tony Jackson was a brilliant six-foot, four-inch jump shooter and a two-time All-American who led St. John’s University to the championships of New York’s Holiday Festival in 1958 and the National Invitation Tournament in 1959, in an era when those tournaments showcased basketball’s finest talent.

I first saw Jackson play in March of 1957, when I was 14 and Jackson was a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. That day, playing against New Utrecht in the first round of New York’s Public School Athletic League tournament, he dazzled me by scoring 15 points in the first half alone— until the second half, when he scored 39 more points. His 54-point total that day broke the Madison Square Garden record for basketball at any level— high school, college, professional. At that time, he was the all-time top scorer in the history of the Public School Athletic League.

Caught in a scandal

At St. John’s, which then was consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten college teams, he was the only player in that school’s history to average 20 or more points per game over three varsity seasons. Had there been a three-point shot in those days, he might have averaged more than 30 points a game. He was also unsurpassed as a rebounder. In short, Tony Jackson was as good as they come. But none of this ever went to his head.

“He didn’t walk around with a swagger,” one of his teammates recalled years later. “You have no idea how modest and unselfish he was.”

Jackson might have become a professional star of LeBron Jamesian magnitude. But fate had other plans. Two months after he was selected by the New York Knicks in the March 1961 NBA draft, Jackson’s name turned up in an indictment listing college basketball players implicated in the game’s recent point-fixing scandals. Jackson had rejected a bribe offer, but his offense was his failure to report that he had been approached. He was never accused of a crime, but he and every other player named in the indictment were barred for life from playing in the NBA.

‘There’s a plan for you’

So instead, Jackson spent much of the ’60s playing in the short-lived American Basketball League. When the American Basketball Association was created in 1967, Jackson joined the New Jersey Americans, the franchise that eventually became the NBA’s Nets. He made the ABA All-Star team that season, averaging a respectable 15.9 points per game. But unlike LeBron James, he never got the opportunity to test himself against the best of the best in the NBA. He retired from pro basketball altogether before he turned 30.

Jackson spent the rest of his life working in recreational programs in Brooklyn. He got married and had a son and two daughters. His St. John’s starting teammates stayed in touch over the years and held regular reunions. He died of cancer in 2005 at age 65.

About his lost opportunity to become an NBA star, Jackson said this: “I have this belief. When you’re created and brought to this Earth, there’s a plan for you. This was the plan for me. You’re bitter for a while, but, hey, there’s life afterwards. I didn’t want to become a bitter person.”

I admired that guy when I was 14. Still do, albeit for a different reason. His message to LeBron James might be: What really matters is the “life afterwards.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

Lindsey Graham, the Republican U.S. Senator from South Carolina who died suddenly on July 11, was always a follower, never a leader. But the relative virtue of his buddies and their causes seems never to have figured in his calculations. He struck me as essentially a weak man who instinctively gravitated to the comforting shelter of those he perceived as stronger at any given moment.

Some people aspire to speak truth to power. Graham aspired to rub elbows with power.

The ‘three amigos’

He was, as the Associated Press put it, “a member of virtually every bipartisan gang in Congress— with a relentless ability to adapt to political realities, particularly when it came to Trump.” During President George W. Bush’s second term, Graham belonged to the so-called “Gang of 14” that broke an impasse on judicial nominations. During Barack Obama’s second term, he belonged the “Gang of Eight,” a group of Senators who tried, unsuccessfully, to create a bipartisan overhaul of the immigration system. During Joe Biden’s presidency, in 2022, Graham joined yet another Senate gang, consisting of ten Republicans who supported a bipartisan agreement on gun control.

Or maybe you remember Graham as one of the globetrotting “three amigos” (with his Senate colleagues John McCain and Joe Lieberman) who pressed for American military intervention abroad in 2009, especially during the Iraq War. These guys were once so close that they compared their friendship to a marriage. But even married amigos have their limits.

Neither McCain, a Republican, nor Lieberman, a Democrat, could ever accept the notion of Trump in the White House. But Graham did. After Lieberman retired in 2013, and McCain died in 2018, Graham searched for other heroes he could look up to. Basking in someone else’s shadow was his métier. The search led him to Donald Trump, and then away from Trump, and then back to Trump again.

From McCain to Trump

When Trump first emerged as an unlikely presidential candidate in 2015, Graham (as McCain’s sidekick) was quick to lambaste him as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

“You know how you make America great again?” Graham asked rhetorically in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” He later declared that he had voted in the 2016 election for Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, rather than for Trump or Hillary Clinton, the Democrat.

Then Trump won the 2016 election and McCain died, and guess who became Trump’s new sidekick? But when Trump lost the election of 2020 and Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Graham rose in the Senate late that night to declare, “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough.”

At that point, you see, Graham assumed Trump was finished. Four years later, when it turned out that Trump wasn’t finished, Graham realized that enough wasn’t enough. Now he regularly and effusively lauded Trump. Earlier this year, Graham joked, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

Batman without Robin?

Say this much for Trump: He never changed. From the time he entered politics a dozen years ago, he remained the same narcissistic buffoon he had always been. The regard in which he was held by Graham depended entirely on whether Trump was in office or out of it.

Graham used to be close to Joe Biden. Then President Trump began attacking Biden’s son Hunter. Graham had to choose between a sitting president and a former president. Whom do you suppose he picked?

Look, sidekicks have their place. Where would Batman be without Robin? The Lone Ranger without Tonto? Sherlock Holmes without Dr. Watson? Andy Griffith without Barney Fife? Mary Tyler Moore without Rhoda Morgenstern? Johnny Carson without Ed McMahon? Jerry Seinfeld without George Costanza? Jackie Gleason without Ed Norton? Wyatt Earp without Doc Holiday? Henry IV without Falstaff?

But these cronies all shared one common characteristic: They stuck by their leaders through thick and thin.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the New York Times asked Graham if he ever worried about being seen as a toady to Trump. Graham replied: “No, here’s what I worry about. That we’re going to get it wrong in Syria and Afghanistan. I worry more about the policy stuff. And I have more influence than I’ve ever had.” Fair enough. Next question: Has anyone visited Syria or Afghanistan lately?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

Quite the contrary. Herman, my father, was playing clarinet in a youth chamber orchestra organized and led by an earnest 23-year-old music teacher named Bernard Carp. At some point Bernie Carp realized that his violin section needed bolstering. So, he prevailed upon his wife to enlist her kid sister, a budding violinist named Lenore Goldstein who had just turned 15.

On arriving at her very first rehearsal, Lenore seated herself on a folding chair which promptly collapsed, sending her sprawling onto the floor. As my father told the story years later, “I saw those legs kicking in the air, and I thought, ‘That’s for me!’”

One man’s band audition

That initial physical attraction obviously led to something deeper, because they were married six years later. What strikes me now about their relationship is the role played by music— not just in bringing them together, but as a sustaining force that kept them together through more than 40 years of marriage.

They were never professional musicians. But Dad played clarinet in the Penn band, along with his best friend since third grade, Herb Gold, who played the piccolo. Everyone in their circle, it seemed, played something. One of the few who didn’t, their decidedly non-musical friend, Lazar Levinthal— a rabbi’s son and future talented greeting card cartoonist— auditioned for the bass drum in the Penn band, just to stay near his buddies. (He was told, memorably, “Beat it.”) At that time and place, music was in many cases the common thread that connected people.

Even before they were married, Lenore and Herman joined the New York Choral Society. They performed with that group at the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40. Mom, who had a beautiful soprano voice, was part of a small madrigal group formed from that chorus.

Gilbert & Sullivan

When my brother and I came along in the ’40s, our household became early subscribers to Young People’s Records, a mail order subscription club that endeavored to find painless ways to introduce classical music to resistant kids like us. I remember, for example, Richard Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which my mother hoped would resonate with me at age four. It didn’t then, but when I hear it today, at age 84, it takes me back.

Both my brother Bob and I were enrolled at music schools, where we tried a variety of instruments— in my case, piano, violin, recorder, clarinet, and— the only one that stuck— the banjo uke. But music was a constant backdrop in our lives. In our Upper West Side apartment, Mom would start singing on the least pretext— say, some song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe

— and then Dad would join in with the harmony, or vice versa.

Nothing venture, nothing win,
Blood is thick, and water’s thin.
In for a penny, in for a pound,
It’s love that makes the world go ’round.

At least that’s how I remember it.

A folk-dance impresario

Their phonograph seemed to be constantly playing operas like La Traviata or La Boheme, which I (like most teenagers) studiously ignored— until, years later, when I started attending operas myself and found myself thinking, “Hey! I know that aria!”

After Bob and I were grown, Mom resumed her concert singing by joining the Collegiate Chorale, which appeared regularly with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 1970s she subsequently sang with the New York Choral Society.

Meanwhile, during the 1950s, Dad became interested in folk dancing, taking extensive lessons as both a dancer and teacher. In 1962, when he was 46, he sold his interest in his ladies knitted wear company to devote himself entirely to the seemingly cockamamie idea of spreading global good will through folk dancing. He subsequently taught folk dancing and ran the cultural activities at International House, New York’s residence for foreign graduate students. That role led to his creation of an international touring dance company, which at its peak performed as many as 300 shows a year for schools, colleges, corporations, civic organizations, foreign governments, and the U.S. Armed Forces, all in the service of spreading its motto: “Joy in Every Land.”

A portable record player

But here’s my point: This stuff was in my parents’ bones even before they were born. Around 1910 my grandfather, Marc Rottenberg, was courting my grandmother, Rosalie Margulies, by dragging a portable, wheeled record player— a rare contraption at the time— from his house to hers for the entertainment of her family. Rosalie was a good pianist from childhood; at parties as a teenager, she would sight-read songs or play them merely from having heard the tune sung. Later she taught piano privately and as a volunteer at the Hebrew Day Nursery in Brooklyn.

For many years, Marc and Rosalie’s voices were mainstays of their synagogue, the Society for the Advancements of Judaism on the Upper West Side. In the 1950s they were early organizers of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua. From about 1960, Marc was president of the Hebrew Arts School for Music and Dance (later the Kaufman Music Center).

But something had changed by the time I reached young adulthood. Music remained a presence, but it no longer seemed to be the central organizing force. At parties in high school, I teamed up with one of my best friends, Peter Rothman, to entertain folks with our banjo ukes. We gathered frequently with two or three other friends at my home to tape record songs. But it wasn’t until some years later that Pete Rothman and I discovered that we both shared a common love of the songs of George M. Cohan. There simply was no context in which that subject would have come up.

A mother’s ambition

Similarly, it wasn’t music that first attracted me to my wife. Barbara and I met on the Penn campus, where we were both students. A mutual friend introduced us. Our courtship consisted mostly of fraternity parties, movies, football games, and drives to the Jersey shore— interspersed, to be sure, with occasional visits to the Philadelphia Orchestra or the ballet. Barbara’s parents had a piano in their living room, but that made no impression on me, any more than their sofa and china cabinet: In those days it was a basic piece of furniture that every home possessed.

Not until we were engaged did I discover that Barbara was a dedicated pianist who was already teaching, or that her parents had once been serious pianists as well. The subject just never came up, presumably because our lives now embraced many other diverse interests.

The last half-century has produced more ways to find mates: singles bars, “personals” ads, and now the Internet.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Barbara’s paternal grandfather manufactured dental instruments. His wife harbored dreams that her son— Barbara’s father— would move in a more artistic direction. On the day he graduated from medical school, she chastised him: “So, you’re a doctor. But you could have been a piano teacher!”

Her family needed one more generation to realize that ambition. The music was there all along, just waiting to be seized.

But tell me: How did you find your spouse?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

“Trump’s favorite child, Ivanka,” Virginia Heffernan hyperventilated in the Los Angeles Times in 2018, “holds an indeterminate public-facing position in the White House— or in real estate, or maybe fashion…. It’s impossible to keep track of all the gangsters Ivanka has palled around with. But what’s truly damning are the shady real-estate projects she has made rise and go forth.”

Frank Bruni said something similar in the New York Times three years ago: Ivanka, he wrote, has “a special talent, a preternatural discipline, for pausing at every pivotal crossroads and making a coldblooded, single-minded assessment: How do I navigate this to maximum advantage for me?”

Well, yes. It’s easy to despise this woman with her striking looks, voluptuous body, and extensive connections whose every material need seems to have been handed to her on a silver platter. Despite her lack of political experience, Ivanka at age 35 became an unofficial advisor in her father’s first presidential administration. Two months later, she became an official paid employee in his administration.

“She traipsed after him to Washington,” Bruni noted. “She traipsed after him to meetings with European leaders. She even traipsed after him to the demilitarized zone.” When Ivanka hawked her Ivanka Trump clothing, sunglasses, handbags, and perfumes, Kellyanne Conway plugged her brand from the White House briefing room. Meanwhile, Ivanka hung out with faux celebrities like Kim Kardashian and cultivated real estate deals with tycoons who craved access to her father.

‘A piece of ass’

All true. And yet…

Have you ever paused to wonder— really, seriously wonder—what it must have been like to grow up as Donald Trump’s daughter? A daughter whose dad almost certainly suffers from narcissistic personality disorder? Specifically, the daughter of a man whose narcissism plays out on a global stage? Consider:

— In 1990, when he was married to Ivanka’s mother, Donald Trump conducted an adulterous affair with Marla Maples. Worse, he bragged about it to the New York gossip columnists. The story made the front page of the New York Post, along with Donald’s claim (apparently false) that Marla had told her friends that Donald had given her “the best sex I ever had.” Ivanka was eight years old at the time.

— That same year, during a divorce deposition, Ivanka’s mother accused Trump of raping her. She later withdrew the comment, saying she meant instead that she had felt a lack of tenderness. Whatever. Ivanka was nine.

— In 2003, Trump told the shock-jock Howard Stern’s radio show, “You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka.” Trump specifically rated Ivanka as a “ten,” while evaluating other celebrities as only “sixes and sevens.” She was 22 at the time.

— In a 2004 interview, Stern— playing his customary role of agent provocateur— asked Trump if he could call Ivanka “a piece of ass.” Trump replied, “Yeah.” Ivanka was 23.

— During a March 2006 appearance with Ivanka on “The View,” Trump remarked, “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.” It does not appear to have occurred to Trump that he was then newly married to Melania Knauss, his third wife.

— In 2005, while bantering with NBC entertainment reporter Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood,” Trump indicated he might start kissing a woman that he and Bush were about to meet. “I did try and fuck her,” Trump said. “She was married.” Then he added, “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

This taped conversation was made public in October 2016, during Trump’s first presidential campaign. It strikes me as nothing more than male locker-room banter. But the whole world heard it. Including, of course, Ivanka.

— In 2023 a civil jury in New York concluded that in 1996 Trump had sexually attacked the writer E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. At that time, Trump was married to his second wife, Marla Maples. Thus Ivanka, who was 42 when the verdict was delivered, became aware of an incident that occurred when she was 15.

Of course, I haven’t mentioned the many other claims of sexual harassment and assault lodged against Trump, not to mention his payment of hush money to the porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Conversion to Judaism

What’s a daughter to do with such a dad? Most daughters with problem fathers would seek some sort of private relief. Maybe therapy, with or without the father. But no such private option exists with Donald Trump, whose every move is public.

After actively campaigning for her father in 2016 and 2020, Ivanka announced in 2023 that she would step back from politics to prioritize her children and family life. “While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena,” she said, in what struck me as a not entirely successful effort to resolve her impossible situation.

More important, Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism in 2009 and her marriage that year to Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, strikes me as an effort to carve out a safe, structured space where her father— whose real and imagined sex life included fantasies of dating his own daughter— couldn’t intrude. (Trump was raised his in his Scottish-born mother’s Presbyterian faith, but in October 2020 he declared that he no longer identified as Presbyterian and now considers himself a nondenominational Christian. In any case, he’s not exactly a defender of the faith.)

Not that Orthodox Jews are necessarily any more virtuous than Presbyterians. In 2005, Jared’s father Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Among other things, Charles admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranging to film a sexual encounter between the two and send the tape to his sister to intimidate her. Not the sort of issue Maimonides ever grappled with.

The case for Platner

Look, I’m as tempted as you are to crack wise about these people. Everybody needs a good laugh, and what better target than a converted Jewish princess whose latest venture is a $1.5 billion luxury hotel and resort on an abandoned island off the coast of Albania where she says she swam from a friend’s boat and “hiked barefoot all the way to the top,” notwithstanding that the island is clogged with bramble, seeded with mines, crawling with snakes, and so stony that even its beaches— which are covered with pebbles, not sand—are difficult to walk on shoeless?

But here’s my bottom line: In a million years, would you want to trade places with Ivanka Trump? Really?

I harbor similar feelings about Graham Platner, the recently dumped Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from Maine. Is he a jerk? In many respects, yes. A drunk with a Nazi tattoo? Yes. A philanderer and a rapist? Probably. Would he make a good Senator? Probably not.

On the other hand, Platner served three combat tours in Iraq for the Marine Corps and one tour in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army. That is, over a period of eight years he put his body at the disposal of our nation’s elected officials, which is more than I can say for myself (not to mention Susan Collins or Donald Trump).

Platner has said that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder because of his military service, which seems likely, since he receives full military disability benefits. Do we owe him something more? Does he have something to contribute to the national dialogue? These are good questions without easy answers. In any case, I hesitate to look down my nose at such a person, given what he’s been through. That goes for Ivanka, too.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

I certainly am. It was a tough choice, let me tell you. Not to mention the rigorous entrance exam and the brutal physical. But as I look back on it now, choosing my sexual identity may have been the most important decision I ever made— even more important than picking my race or ethnicity. Next to those earth-shaking decisions, selecting a lifelong spouse was a piece of cake.

But seriously…

These ruminations were prompted, as they are each June, by the global observance of Gay Pride Month, a celebration that has appropriated the word pride so effectively that its mere mention connotes homosexuality in the minds of everyone who encounters it, gay or straight.

There was a time when people took pride in individual or group achievements, as opposed to Nature’s achievements. That changed in 1968 when the songwriter James Brown came up with the funk anthem, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which exhorted Black people to boldly celebrate their heritage, reject white supremacist beauty standards, and loudly reclaim their identity with swagger rather than whispering it in shame. Good ideas, all. February was designated “Black History Month” eight years later.

“Disability Pride Month” has been observed annually in July since 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. Disability Pride describes itself as a response and counteraction against ableism and social stigma— a concept that has roots in the same valid social theory that supports LGBT Pride and Black Pride.

Jesse James and Emily Dickinson

And then there are redheads, like me, who’ve been oppressed and stigmatized since Biblical times. We got into the pride act in 1977 by organizing Redheads Are Special People. Which we are. How else would you describe folks who comprise only about 2% of the world’s population and some 4% of Americans, yet have produced 15% of U.S. presidents, not to mention some of the world’s great overachievers?

Can anyone imagine American history without Christopher Columbus, George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson? Statecraft without William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, or Winston Churchill? Literature without Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw, or Sinclair Lewis? Music without Vivaldi, Paderewski, or Beverly Sills? Sports without Red Grange, Don Budge, or Red Schoendienst? Crime without Jesse James or Lizzie Borden?

In his 1943 book The Hero in History, the philosopher Sidney Hook suggested that only a handful of people have personally altered the course of world history, and of the half-dozen examples he cited, three— Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin— were redheads.

I didn’t make any of these redhead pride lists. So I’ll settle for pride by association.

Let’s be honest here. You used to think I was a jerk, right? But now, after reading about the exploits of my proud fellow redheads, you see me in a whole new light, yes?

And that’s just the beginning. Did I mention that I’m also right-handed? Do you know how many righties signed the Magna Carta?

‘A proud sponsor of…’

To be sure, it’s no shame to be Black, gay, disabled, or redhaired. And when you belong to a group that’s been marginalized for centuries, you may be forgiven for bending over backwards in the opposite direction. On the other hand, last week I received a flyer from the Philadelphia Water Department proclaiming, “We’re proud to protect your water.” Maybe there’s a better word than proud?

When I consult my thesaurus, proud yields synonyms few of us would be proud of, like arrogance, conceit, smugness, self-importance, egotism, vanity, immodesty, and superiority. The Biblical notion of “pride goeth before a fall” means, essentially, that if you’re too conceited or self-important, something will happen to make you look foolish. So why has the Pride label become so ubiquitous?

The corporate strategist Kim Skildum-Reid argues that the words “Proud sponsor of” constitute “the most worthless phrase in sponsorship.” She says it may as well read “Boring sponsor of” or “Unsophisticated sponsor of” or “Lazy sponsor of.” I’m inclined to agree.

Stonewall and abortions

Gay Pride Month— now expanded to “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month”— originally commemorated the Stonewall uprising of 1969: six days of protests and riots against police harassment of patrons at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. At the time, the Stonewall was one of New York’s most popular gay bars, but homosexuality was still a crime in New York. Indeed, as late as 1966 it was illegal for New York bars to serve alcohol to gay customers. (How was a bartender supposed to know who was gay? Did law schools offer a course?)

The Stonewall revolt changed the landscape of homosexual society virtually overnight. Previously, gays had been perceived as helpless victims; after Stonewall, they were citizens actively asserting their rights. Now, that’s something to be proud of. Or should I say inspired by?

The same might be said for Shout Your Abortion, a recent movement that seeks to normalize abortion by encouraging women to speak up “loudly and proudly” about their abortions. At least these women are commemorating their own actions, as opposed to their membership in some natural or ancestral clan. But they raise another question: Which is worse— people who claim abortion is murder, or those who say it’s cause for celebration? Or does a reasonable answer lie somewhere in between?

Clarence Darrow meets the Proud Boys

In 2016 the Pride label was appropriated by the neo-fascist Proud Boys, many of whose top leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy for taking part in the U.S. Capitol attack of January 6, 2021. What, exactly, are these Proud Boys proud of? The group self-describes as “proud Western chauvinists,” by which they mean white nationalism, misogyny, traditional masculinity, and Western culture, not to mention anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+, and antisemitic. To put it another way: The Proud Boys’ pride stems not from anything they have achieved, but from their harebrained perception of an imaginary culture they yearn to attach themselves to.

They remind me of the fellow who, more than a century ago, chastised Clarence Darrow for remarks about racial equality that threaten “the purity of the white race.” Darrow, the great attorney for underdogs, paused thoughtfully for a moment, then replied: “The white race is the biggest group of sons of bitches that ever walked the Earth. I may belong to it, but I don’t boast about it. I apologize for it.”

Why Sid Caesar faded

In a recent essay for AARP Magazine about Sid Caesar, TV’s comic genius of the 1950s, the critic David Margolick argued that, as television expanded from its urban base into the hinterlands, Caesar proved “too rigid, and too proud, to repurpose himself”— a rare case of a thoughtful use of the word proud. But in his final paragraph, Margolick slipped back into today’s lazier use: Caesar’s work, he wrote, “still stands proudly— enduringly— on its own.”

The solution to our pride problem seems obvious. Let’s take one of the few remaining unassigned non-Pride months on the calendar and create a “Language Debasement Month.” Until then, I’ll give the last word on this subject to my late grandfather, Marc Rottenberg. “We Hungarians are a proud people!” Marc used to say. Then he would pause and add, “But I’ve never figured out what we have to be proud of.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

Fortunately, I provided such a list in 1996, in my maiden month as editor of the Philadelphia Forum. These 19 basic tenets are worth repeating here 30 years later— especially since, sad to say, not one of them has yet been enacted.

1. Foster greater respect for the law. Respect for law and order is declining because society suffers from a critical shortage of lawyers. Many drug dealers, gang leaders, prostitutes, racketeers, and embezzlers would become lawyers if only the pay were better. Federal subsidies may be necessary.

2. Encourage understanding between suburbanites and city dwellers. Instead of focusing on our differences, let’s emphasize our similarities for the greater good. Just because suburbanites live in big houses surrounded by grass and trees while millions starve, is that any reason to pick on them? Because they pollute the air with their cars and consume disproportionate amounts of land, water, gas, and electricity, is that any reason to resent them? Just because they’re smug parasites who gobble up millions of acres of farmland to make room for cul-de-sacs and barbecue pits and family rooms and four-car garages and strip malls and tacky fast-food franchises at every intersection while the rest of society burns, is that any reason to hate their goddamn guts?

3. Capital punishment for the underprivileged. One of the few functions that government performs effectively nowadays is the prosecution and execution of illiterate or retarded defendants who can’t afford their own lawyers. In an age of limited tax resources, let’s concentrate our public funds on services the government really does well.

4. Foster lasting peace between Hungarians and Puerto Ricans. These two proud and ancient peoples have quarreled for so long that they’ve forgotten their original grievances. A new generation of farsighted leaders on both sides must stand up and say: Enough hatred. Enough killing. Never again!

5. Crack down on smut in cyberspace. The Forum’s editorial board is disturbed by the prospect of Americans watching unrestricted sex and violence in the privacy of their homes. But we enjoy watching it ourselves. A nationwide closed-circuit system, providing some sort of exemption for journalists and other morally superior people, may be necessary.

6. Build the Ludlow Street Expressway now! This vital transportation project— the last unfinished piece of the great superhighway linking Haddonfield with Cheyenne, and the linchpin of Mayor Rendell’s economic recovery plan— has been stalled for years by a small cabal of selfish real estate interests— specifically, the owners of those outdated relics of a bygone era, Liberty Place and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. An aroused citizenry must ask these obstructionists: Which comes first— civic progress or private profit?

Deport all Protestants?

7. Save the Society Hill Rite Aid. Despite its landmark status, this venerable 18-year-old faux fin-de-siècle structure where Larry Kane once filled a prescription for suppositories faces imminent demolition by greedy developers, who plan to replace it with yet another tiresome Georgian mansion and carriage house. An aroused citizenry must prevent this atrocity, with their bodies if necessary.

8. Support the right to bare arms. Must we now have laws dictating even our clothing styles? Especially on hot days, the individual’s right to dress comfortably must take precedence over the sensibilities of a few random prudes.

9. Impose spending limits on the rich. Such legislation wouldn’t eliminate the growing gulf between the haves and the have-nots, but it would remove much of the resentment.

10. Keep conundrums out of the public schools. Adolescence is difficult enough without exposing young people to enigmas— at taxpayer expense, to boot— at precisely the time when their hormones are exploding. The decision to use conundrums is an individual matter best left to families and the private sector.

11. Persuasion, not legislation, is the best answer to America’s epidemic of aberrations on demand. Reasonable people on both sides of this issue recognize a woman’s inalienable right to an aberration. But why on earth would she want one?

12. Deport all Protestants. What are they always protesting about, anyway? If they don’t like it here, why don’t they go back where they came from?

Pompous patricians

13. Arlen Spector for President. Look at it this way: Once he’s spent eight years in the White House, we’ll never have to deal with him again.

14. Vincent Fumo for U.S. ambassador to Bosnia. Few other public officials possess the sure grasp of the subtleties of power politics required for this sensitive diplomatic position. Such an appointment would of course represent a loss to the Greater Philadelphia region and to the state. But the larger cause of world peace demands this sacrifice from Pennsylvanians.

15. Require all Philadelphians to wear uniforms. If it makes policemen and schoolchildren behave themselves, wouldn’t it work for the rest of us?

16. Bring back pompous patricians. Changing socioeconomic patterns have largely eliminated the sort of aristocrats who used to be seen throughout Center City wearing Savile Row suits, sipping fish-house punch, and uttering comments like, “My good man, do you have change for $100?” or “Out of the way, peasant!” Federal subsidies may be necessary to restore this necessary balance to our urban population.

17. Bring back colorful street characters. The aforementioned socioeconomic patterns have also removed from the streets and park benches an entire class of people who once enlivened Center City’s public discourse with observations like “They aren’t fit to polish my shoes!” or “I’ve been to Europe, and I just don’t give a damn!” Again, federal subsidies may be the only appropriate response.

Free movies for journalists

18. Preserve the Inquirer and Daily News by protecting them under the federal Failing Newspapers Act. If they qualified, such protection would exempt both papers from antitrust laws, thereby enabling them to share advertising, business, printing, and corporate functions while continuing to operate separate editorial departments. This economic advantage would discourage predatory competition and thus guarantee Philadelphia two vigorous independent daily voices in an age when most U.S. cities are served by only… on second thought, forget it.

19. Provide free movie passes for journalists and their families. No direct or indirect public benefit would result from distributing these passes. But we want them anyway.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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“Should we ask for blindfolds?” the first Jew wonders.

“Don’t make trouble,” the second Jew cautions.

That old joke about how Jews survived in antisemitic Europe— usually by keeping a low profile— actually applies to any newly arrived immigrant group in any country. Back when America still welcomed immigrants, the late sociologist Nathan Glazer developed this theory about families who settle here:

—In the first generation, all the relatives live in the same city (and sometimes the same building), and they’re all in business together because they can’t trust anyone else.

—The second generation still lives in the same city, but they’re no longer in business together.

—The third generation is scattered across the country.

Glazer didn’t say it, but to me it’s a matter of new arrivals developing the confidence and assertiveness to strike out on their own. Which in many cases takes a few generations.

You may see this phenomenon in your own family. Certainly, I see it in the contrast between my family and my wife’s.

Barbara, as a second-generation native American, grew up with eight first cousins, all of whom lived in Philadelphia. They developed close relationships, which have continued to this day, even as they’ve spread out to places like New Jersey, Washington (D.C.), Florida, North Carolina, Kentucky, and California— locations which, to their parents, seemed almost as remote as Russia or Lithuania.

Someone asked me the other day whether Barbara is an extrovert or an introvert. After some reflection, I replied: “Compared to her parents, she’s an extrovert. Compared to our daughters, she’s an introvert.” That answer, I submit, has nothing to do with Freud and everything to do with how many generations passed since their family got off the boat.

Hire a relative?

I, on the other hand, am a third-generation American. I grew up in New York City, but by the time I was maybe eight years old all my cousins were living elsewhere. My aunts and uncles had the confidence to seize opportunities in places like Chicago, Syracuse, Princeton, and Providence. My brother and I saw them maybe a half-dozen times a year, at most.

At that time, my grandfather Marc (first-generation American) and his son, my father (second-generation), were 50-50 partners in a ladies knitted wear company, with an office in the Garment District and factories in Brooklyn and Valley View, Pennsylvania. In the familiar tradition of first-generation immigrants, they enlisted my maternal grandfather to manage their mill in Valley View, presumably because they knew they could trust him.

From time to time, Grandpa Marc proposed that they hire some other relative who needed a job. My dad invariably declined; the problem with hiring relatives, he said, is you can’t fire them if they don’t work out. To which Grandpa Marc invariably replied, “What’s the point of having a family business if you can’t hire family?” Here were two viewpoints, both valid, reflecting not so much good business practices as the generational longevity of the practitioners.

The exception: Albert Greenfield

Of course there were exceptions to Nathan Glazer’s generational pattern. The Philadelphia tycoon Albert M. Greenfield (subject of my 2013 biography, The Outsider), was born in Russia in 1887 and brought to America in 1896. Unlike anyone else in his family (and possibly the world), he seems to have been endowed with supreme confidence from his earliest childhood years. When Greenfield opened his real estate office in 1905, he was 17 years old and entering into a business to which he brought no experience whatsoever— only his certainty that the future would be different and that he would help to bring it about.

Within a year Greenfield would make twice as much money as his father had ever made or ever would make; within four years he would own, among other things, the house where his parents lived; within seven years he would be earning $60,000 annually (equivalent to more than $1 million today); within 12 years he would be worth about $15 million; and within 25 years his company would be the largest real estate company in the United States.

Conventional wisdom in Greenfield’s day (as well as now) held that immigrants required at least a generation or two to absorb American values. But it was Greenfield’s perverse yet fiercely held belief that immigrants appreciated American values better than the natives and consequently made better citizens.

The Greenfield family’s arrival in America coincided with the Panic of 1893, one of the longest and severest depressions in U.S. history. In the nation’s rural heartland, the newly organized Populist Party professed to see “a nation brought to the verge of moral and political ruin,” which sounds very much like the conventional wisdom you hear today from native Americans. Yet most of the immigrants then arriving by the hundreds of thousands saw only an empowering and energizing land of opportunity.

Fleeing ‘shithole’ countries

Immigrants, whether fleeing from persecution or merely seeking better jobs and homes, tend to be optimists: They believe that moving to a new homeland can improve their lives. Consequently, they become agents of change wherever they settle. By the same token, a nation that welcomes immigrants becomes an incubator for change.

Of course this is no mere theoretical discussion. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can strip “Temporary Protected Status” from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants— status which has allowed them to remain in the U.S. for years.

Haitian refugees were first granted this status after the 2010 earthquake there that killed about 250,000 people. That status was offered again in 2021 after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise left Haiti in chaos and the capital city of Port-au-Prince almost completely controlled by dangerous gangs. The most courageous and determined Haitians got the hell out and headed for America, where they thought their resourcefulness would be welcomed.

These immigrants might, in a generation or two, have made useful contributions to society that we cannot now even conceive. Come to think of it, Haitian TPS holders already contribute nearly $6 billion annually to the U.S. economy and more than $1.5 billion in taxes. But now they must be deported for the crime of seeking refuge here from what President Trump calls a “shithole” country.

Megyn Kelly’s rant

Trump has expressed a preference for immigrants from places like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. But of course, Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes are happy where they are (at least partly because they live beyond Trump’s jurisdiction).

Stephen Miller, architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, has argued that immigrants and their children bring generational problems to the U.S. and dilute “true” American values.

The TV commentator Megyn Kelly offered this welcoming message last week to Haitian immigrants: “We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us... Go back to fucking Haiti!”

Amy Wax, the loopy Penn law professor, has suggested that Brahmin women doctors from India feel anger, envy, and shame toward Americans because they realize that their own native country is a “shithole.” She also thinks that immigrants “are too loud” and responsible for an increase in “litter.”

Stephen Miller’s secret

Need I tell you that Stephen Miller’s ancestors spent centuries in another shithole: Tsarist Russia, where the threat of anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription into the Tsar’s army caused Miller’s great-grandfather to flee in 1903 and settle in— you’ll never guess— America.

Amy Wax’s parents, similarly, came here from Eastern Europe, a paradise then and now. I can’t imagine why they ever left. Maybe they felt guilty because they were having too much fun?

Megan Kelly’s ancestors emigrated to America from Ireland, Italy, and Germany. Needless to add, the native American WASPs immediately welcomed them with open arms. Not. Actually, the WASPs back then told Megyn Kelly’s ancestors pretty much what Megyn Kelly told the Haitians last week.

And now, the fourth generation

But I digress. Nathan Glazer showed how the third generation of immigrant families in America is usually dispersed across the country. But he never ventured to say what happens to the fourth generation. So let me take a crack at it:

All the members of the fourth generation are reunited on the West Coast, usually in California, but maybe in Seattle, Santa Fe, or Phoenix. Certainly, that’s been the case in my family, where I am the only one of six first cousins still left on the East Coast.

This scenario assumes, of course, that Stephen Miller won’t find some excuse to deport all of us cousins to El Salvador. Mustn’t dilute those true American values, after all. My bags are packed, just in case.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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“It is giggling, weeping, spinning, convulsing, mosh-pitting, truck-honking, law-skirting, trumpet-playing, cowbell-ringing, off-key-singing, cigar-lighting, all-night-ing— remembering to remember it all, as if Knicks fans would ever forget,” reported the usually sober New York Times.

“It is hugging strangers so hard they go airborne, fist-bumping cabbies as they crawl through concrete delirium, high-fiving kids on shoulders (and adults on shoulders), climbing stoplights and trees and scaffolding to wave the team flag higher, swiping utility cones and wearing them as hats because they are orange.”

But what most impressed me was the way ancient antagonisms crumbled on that magical night. Blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trumpers and progressives, feminists and sexual harassers, Jews and neo-Nazis, Catholics and Protestants, Israelis and Palestinians, Hindus and Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’ites, Brits and Irish, Galitzianers and Litvaks, even Episcopalians and Presbyterians, for goodness’ sake— all joined hands in common cause, brought together by nothing more than the thrilling sight of five men running up and down a hardwood floor in their underwear.

Scaling light poles

If you failed to appreciate this moment, that may be because you recall the 1979 celebration in Pittsburgh, when the Pirates won baseball’s World Series for the first time in 19 years. On that occasion, according to reliable reports, the festivities included several female Pirate fans who, in the passionate delirium of the moment, spontaneously performed oral sex on male strangers on the streets of downtown Pittsburgh. New York’s revelry, by contrast, was relatively sedate.

As for Philadelphia, when the Eagles won pro football’s supreme title in February 2018 for the first time in 57 years, the New York Times informed its readers: “In the grand old city with the grand old football tradition, they will scale light poles and drive dune buggies up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and chant ‘Fly Eagles Fly’ until their voice vanishes. The party will rage for months, because the improbable has happened.”

Well, yes. In this slog otherwise known as human life, everyone needs an occasional sublime moment to sustain us through the miserable toil and struggle to come. Some of us might find sublimity in artistic events, such as the shocking New York Armory Show of 1913 or the opening night of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1953.

When Fieldston hated Barnard

Still, when the clock expired on the Knicks’ victory this month, I found myself recalling a similar celebration that took place in January 1961 when my New York prep school, the Fieldston School, finally defeated its despised basketball rival, the Barnard School for Boys.

These two schools had hated each other since before I was born. During my six years at Fieldston, we played Barnard’s basketball team 12 times and lost all 12 games, usually by lopsided scores. Can you imagine the frustration and anger that gnawed away at loyal Fieldstonites year after year?

Why, exactly, did these two schools hate each other so, and why did their faculties tolerate and even tacitly encourage such hostility? The trite answer is that they hated each other for the same reason Yale hates Harvard, Cambridge hates Oxford, Eagles fans hate Dallas, and France (once) hated Germany: because their parents, not to mention their parents’ parents, hated each other.

But ultimately some genuine pedagogical logic may have justified the Fieldston-Barnard rivalry. At least since the 19th Century, educators have instinctively perceived the critical role played by sports in fostering two vital components of human achievement: competition and cooperation. These pedagogues recognized that such a perception is best conveyed in some practical and dramatic form; that the essence of drama is conflict; and that, short of the ultimate conflict— war— the safest and most effective surrogate might be an age-old traditional rivalry against a contrived enemy school conveniently located just a few city blocks away.

Pandemonium strikes

In the rivalry’s final basketball game of my senior year, Fieldston managed, for the first time in my six years there, to hold Barnard’s margin of victory to fewer than ten points. When that game ended, I melodramatically announced, in my capacity as Fieldston’s co-captain, that no matter where I might be in the future, I would return to New York for every Fieldston-Barnard basketball game until we beat them.

Fortunately for my future plans, Fieldston’s basketball team finally defeated Barnard the following year, when I was a freshman at Penn. And what pandemonium ensued when that game ended! Mobs of Fieldston students— some of whom had been in kindergarten the last time Fieldston won a basketball game against Barnard— stormed the court in a hysterical orgy of screaming, jumping, weeping, hugging, kissing. And then… and then…

After ten or 15 minutes of this mayhem, people started looking at their watches, gathering up their books, checking their homework assignments, and bumming rides home from seniors with cars.

“It was the first time I realized how reality tends to disappoint expectations,” my younger brother Bob, then Fieldston’s basketball manager, recalled years later, when he was a rabbi. “When the thing you were so looking forward to finally happens, how can you possibly express all your pent-up hopes in that moment? I remember thinking: Isn’t there more? Couldn’t there be more? Now we just go back to what we were doing?”

Bednarik’s greatest game

I will give the last word to the late Chuck Bednarik, the mainstay of Philadelphia’s National Football League champion team in 1960. During a radio interview in 1980, Bednarik was asked to choose the greatest game of his college career at the University of Pennsylvania. Without hesitation, he cited the 1948 Penn-Army game at Franklin Field, a seesaw affair witnessed by 78,000 fans, in which Penn held the lead three times against the heavily favored Cadets, only to lose in the final minute on a touchdown pass caught by Army’s Jack Trent.

The interviewer, a Penn student, expressed surprise: How could a heroic All-American figure like Bednarik choose a defeat as his greatest game?

You could almost hear Bednarik shrug over the airwaves. “Well, two years later Jack Trent was killed in Korea,” he explained. “When I heard that, I realized it was foolish to get too concerned over whether we won or lost a football game.”

For that matter, Fieldston’s hated rival, the Barnard School for Boys, closed its doors in 1972. Not much left to hate there.

But here is the good news: You can still spend the day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, basking in some of the work that once caused riots at that 1913 Armory show. What is truly sublime truly endures.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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In such a situation, how should you proceed? (Choose one.)

a. Seek to reassure your famously aggressive and independent-minded staff journalists by addressing their legitimate concerns about you.

b. Go straight to work without acknowledging the elephant in the room.

c. Fire anyone who questions your qualifications for this job.

If you chose “c,” you could well be tapped as the next executive producer of “60 Minutes,” the iconic Sunday flagship of CBS News. Since the arrival last month of Nick Bilton, a technology journalist and filmmaker who, I repeat, never worked in this business, three of the program’s seven correspondents have been fired, and a fourth left voluntarily.

Cage full of tigers

These sackings have widened a rift that long existed between the leaders of CBS News and the staff of “60 Minutes,” who are accustomed to operating with a high degree of independence from the network. Since its debut in 1968, “60 Minutes” has hosted some of the storied names in broadcast journalism, from Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, and Morley Safer to Lesley Stahl and Anderson Cooper. Don Hewitt, who created the show, often described its brutally competitive environment as “a cage full of tigers,” noting that he had to massage big egos and occasionally coax them back into the cage. But the bottom line with those “tigers” was an understanding that, at the end of the day, they were all pros who wanted what was best for the program and its audience.

By contrast, last month, Scott Pelley, a senior correspondent who was at the network for 37 years, told Bilton, “You have slender qualifications for this job” and accused Bilton’s boss, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes’.” For this offense, Bilton fired him the next day.

A complaint about the Times

The turmoil at “60 Minutes” actually began last year with the hiring of Weiss, a former print and Internet opinion columnist (sort of like me, come to think of it, except that I’d never presume to run a TV news operation), who ousted the show’s senior leadership before she installed Bilton. Weiss was appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison, a tech scion who took control of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, in a multibillion-dollar merger. David’s father is Larry Ellison, cofounder of the software company Oracle and said to be the world’s sixth-richest man.

Weiss was once an editor at the opinion section of the New York Times, where she was tasked with attracting conservative and centrist voices. But she left the Times in 2020 after three years, writing a kvetchy (and public) resignation letter in which she complained, among other things, that she was the victim of “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and racist.” This is sort of like a soldier griping because somebody is shooting at him, or a quarterback whining because people are trying to tackle him. As Don Hewitt could have told her, when you’re a journalist, criticism comes with the territory.

Remember TWA?

Weiss and Bilton claim that the broadcast TV industry will soon be obsolete and that “60 Minutes” needs to reinvent its 58-year-old formula to avoid the fate of other media highflyers brought low, like Time Magazine or America Online. And they could be right. Nothing lasts forever. But the key question to my mind is: How do you manage the transition— not just at “60 Minutes,” but everywhere— because the whole world is transitioning every day?

I’m old enough to remember when mighty companies like J.P. Morgan, A & P, Bethlehem Steel, Standard Oil of New Jersey, RCA, and Trans World Airlines had carved a permanent place in the nation’s consciousness, or so everybody thought. Philadelphia, where I live, was once dominated by seemingly eternal fixtures like the Pennsylvania Railroad, Curtis Publishing, Drexel & Company, the First Pennsylvania Bank, Scott Paper Company, John Wanamaker’s department store, the Horn & Hardart restaurant chain, and the Evening Bulletin. Now all are gone.

Alan Halpern’s method

The turmoil at “60 Minutes” got me thinking about Alan Halpern, my editor at Philadelphia Magazine more than half a century ago. Most bosses instinctively hire people they feel comfortable with– employees who will work well together as a team. Alan was a notable exception.

He didn’t hire staff writers for their compatibility or teamwork. He hired them because they were good writers with diverse interests and backgrounds (but not so diverse, to be sure, as to hire Blacks, Latinos, or Muslims). He recognized that the best journalists, by their nature, tend to be individualistic, egotistical, insecure, and neurotic. But he willingly spent his days surrounded by such eccentrics as the price of bringing vibrant writing to his magazine’s pages.

The result— at least during my two and a half years there— was a staff that resembled a dysfunctional family (somewhat, I suspect, like “60 Minutes” in its prime). Alan would tolerate hostile behavior from his writers as long as they produced good copy. “If you spit in Alan’s face,” I once remarked to Herb Lipson, the magazine’s publisher, “he’ll tell you it’s raining.”

“Oh, worse than that,” Herb replied. “If you stabbed Alan, he would apologize for messing up your knife.”

Jim Quinn departs

By contrast, after Alan left Philadelphia magazine in 1980, he was succeeded by Art Spikol, who had other priorities. As a new boss (like Weiss and Bilton), Spikol felt the need to assert his authority. One day in his office, Spikol found himself on the receiving end of a diatribe from the magazine’s strong-willed restaurant critic, Jim Quinn. As that meeting was later described to me, midway through their tempestuous quarrel Quinn rose, turned his back on Spikol, and headed for the door.

“If you go through that door,” Spikol told him, “don’t come back.” That was how Philadelphia Magazine lost one of the city’s most fiercely brilliant writers.

Alan Halpern lasted 29 years as editor of Philadelphia Magazine. Art Spikol lasted less than two. Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton at CBS? We shall see.

Full disclosure: My daughter, Lisa Yellin, was for several years Don Hewitt’s personal trainer.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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When you were born 18 years ago, your parents were determined to give you a strong name— an unusual name— a name that people couldn’t just say but would have to sing. And did you ever live up to their expectations.

At age 18 months, at the Jersey shore, an ocean wave knocked you over and could have drowned you. Your traumatized parents expected you to start crying. Instead, you exclaimed, “Agee!”— your term for “Again!”

When you were 11, after President Trump embraced his bizarre notion of “alternative facts,” you responded by launching The Chattering, a satirical newspaper dedicated to delivering nothing but fake news and useless misinformation. A sense of humor is said to be a sign of high intelligence in young children. This response on your part was not only hilarious, it was also honest.

Your Hebrew school teacher once observed that you rarely take the easy way. Instead, she said, you’re “always looking for the long and complicated way, challenging yourself endlessly and yet miraculously finding it fun and amusing.”

And this month you are graduating from one of America’s most extraordinary high schools— Brooklyn Tech— whose unique programs like Moot Court, Mock Trial, and Law and Society have inspired you to scrap your earlier dream of becoming a surgeon for a more daunting challenge: repairing America’s broken legal system. This is a quest that even I tremble to contemplate. My own feelings about the legal profession are decidedly mixed.

Amusement park case

I speak as a journalist who has written often about lawyers (like the Chicago Seven defender Bill Kunstler) and law firms (like the defunct Philadelphia super firm of Wolf, Block, Shorr and Solis-Cohen). Indeed, the admired faces hanging on my office wall are not journalists but lawyers like Clarence Darrow (who said, “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You cannot be free unless I am free”) and Learned Hand (“The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure that it is right”— that is, if you’re not quite sure that you’re right, you will listen respectfully to others). And of course, I am grateful for the dedicated lawyers who successfully defended me in seven libel suits.

On the other hand, when your mother was a little girl, she was injured on a ride at an amusement park. The park’s operators refused to express any concern, lest doing so would be construed as an admission of their legal guilt. A lawyer offered to represent us for one-third of any damages he might collect. After the case dragged on without any resolution, I told him, “I don’t really want any money from these people. I’d just like an apology.” The lawyer replied, “How can I get one-third of an apology?”

Doctors vs. lawyers

I can’t help recalling an incident years ago at a conference on forensic medicine. During one panel discussion, a lawyer teased a doctor, “Two hundred years ago, when you doctors were still bleeding your patients, we lawyers were drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution!”

The doctor then replied: “It’s true— we doctors do things differently today than we did 200 years ago. And you lawyers have changed almost nothing.”

It’s a point worth pondering. Until 1920 or thereabouts, medicine was more art than science. Antibiotics, organ and tissue transplants, radiology, pacemakers, cryosurgery— all were unknown. In those benighted days, doctors were not supermen but fallible mortals whose most valued asset often was a soothing bedside manner.

Yet thanks to recent advances in immunology, endoscopy, angioplasty, organ and cellular transplantation, and especially the mapping of the human genome, the medical profession today stands on the threshold of eliminating many human diseases and possibly even death itself. These days the medical profession’s greatest challenge is not curing sickness but the high cost of this biotechnological revolution, not to mention what to do with the millions of people now surviving into their 90s or beyond.

Crime and punishment

And lawyers? Today as in the distant past, the legal profession still largely clings to the adversarial model as the best way to resolve differences, despite the huge cost of lawsuits (in time, money, and bitterness), not to mention the mounting evidence that many ostensibly financial conflicts actually stem from emotional roots, and so would be better handled by therapists or counselors or social workers than by lawyers.

In criminal justice, the concept of “crime and punishment” persists despite growing evidence that punishment rarely improves anything and that more effective (and far less costly) alternatives now exist. Hardly a week passes without the exposure of some miscarriage of justice that took place because prosecutors were merely doing their jobs— that is, zealously pursuing guilty verdicts, as opposed to zealously seeking truth.

Is there no better response to crime? Even judges, prosecutors, and lawyers increasingly acknowledge that there is— and it’s usually non-legal. Private mediation services now resolve disputes relatively quickly, inexpensively, and without hanging anyone’s dirty laundry in public. More than 40 “community courts” around the U.S. now tackle low-level crimes in troubled neighborhoods by sending defendants to drug treatment shelters and social services instead of levying fines or sentences to overcrowded jails. A handful of prostitution treatment courts across the U.S offer, in lieu of jail, a lengthy intensive therapy regimen for women with multiple prostitution arrests.

My own small contribution to this brave new world was a “conscience clause,” which I routinely appended to all my freelance writing agreements. “This agreement,” it read, “presupposes an atmosphere of mutual good will between the parties, and presumes that any issues not covered here can be resolved amicably, in keeping with the principles of the Golden Rule.”

To my clients, I explained: “This is our mutual protection against lawsuits. If I think you’re mistreating me, and you can look me in the eye and tell me that this is how you’d like to be treated, then I’ll drop my complaint.”

This approach has been accepted by all my clients, save one— a law firm whose managing partner astutely perceived my purpose. “If we agreed in principle to staying out of court,” he remarked, “we’d drive ourselves out of business.”

The envy of Afghans and Russians

Let us stipulate (as lawyers like to say) that the evolution of Western law— from the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi through the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, and 200 years of precedents developed by our courts— is a wonder to behold. Americans’ willingness to file lawsuits or criminal charges instead of fighting duels, hiring hit men, or burning down each other’s homes remains the envy of, say, Afghans and Russians. The “rule of law” that we Americans take for granted remains a distant dream in places like China or Iran. At their best, lawyers are problem-solvers— as we are reminded when we’re exposed to groups that have no patience with nit-picky, precedent-oriented lawyers (Donald Trump’s inner circle comes to mind).

The fact remains that the law is an inherently coercive tool, at a time when modern technology has developed the means to harness the non-coercive ability to communicate at many levels— from blogging to social networks to YouTube videos to organizing not-for-profits, protest demonstrations, and boycotts of disfavored products.

In such a world, the relevant question for people of good will is: How can the tools of the future be utilized to devise a more civilized and compassionate society? At 84, the only thing I know about the future is that it will be very different from the present. (I’m clueless about artificial intelligence.) But I do know that if there is any hope for the future, it lies with people like you— whatever career you ultimately choose.

Democracy’s flaws

You enjoy the luxury of growing up in a relatively secure and confident family. You were raised in the world’s most stimulating city. You also enjoy the benefits of an excellent education (which presumably will continue this fall when you enter the University of Chicago) and a humane Jewish tradition that stretches back 4,000 years. These blessings have granted you the relatively rare ability to think beyond your own narrow needs. From early childhood you have shown unusual concern for the fate of the Earth. You’ve marched in support of the environment. You painted “Portraits for Pantries” to help feed the poor.

But these efforts are possible only because you live in a free and democratic society. And today this fragile human experiment is under attack all over the world, including our own country. The flaw in government of the people, as we have seen lately, is that it requires people to take seriously their duties as citizens. It requires those in the minority to accept the results of elections. And it requires those in the majority to respect the rights of the minority.

This is no easy task, because we are all fallible humans, which means we can easily be swayed when demagogues appeal to our basest emotions and resentments. When that happens, democracies can die— unless strong and courageous individuals speak up for truth, justice, and tolerance, and against ignorance, hatred, and force.

A fugitive from Hitler

In your case, fortunately, you needn’t look far for examples. During the Vietnam War, your other grandparents, David and Elly Rubin, risked their personal freedom by providing sanctuary to the antiwar activist priest Daniel Berrigan when he was a fugitive from the FBI for his acts of civil disobedience. David and Elly followed their consciences even though their son— your dad— was just six years old at the time.

Elly’s mother, your paternal great-grandmother Marjorie Rosenfeld, found herself in the odd position of an American Jew studying psychoanalysis in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933. There she met Alfred Leonard (born Levi), a German law student who was documenting cases of attacks against Jews throughout Germany. After Marjorie returned to America a few months later, Alfred was forced to flee Nazi Germany. But he arrived in the U.S. as a refugee with only a temporary tourist visa, which would require him to return to Germany— and likely imprisonment or death— once it expired. He contacted Marjorie, and she came up with what seemed to her an obvious solution to his legal limbo: The two of them should get married. Which they did in late 1933.

Was she in love, in the bourgeois sense? Marjorie lacked the luxury to ask that question. She simply followed her instinct to do the compassionate thing. And that is why, among many other reasons, you are here today. And why, I wager, you will demonstrate the same courage and clarity of purpose when some fugitive from injustice comes knocking on your door.

‘I’m more flexible’

“You know what I like about being a child?” I heard you say when you were four and a half. “I’ll die later than my parents.”
What I like about being your grandfather is: It gives me hope that some people will possess the brains and energy and ideals to sustain the planet after I’m gone. Whether they’re lawyers or not.

When you were not quite six, I remarked that I was very impressed by your knitting. “That’s something I can’t do,” I said.

“Yes,” you replied, “but I’m younger – I’m more flexible.”

Exactly. This old planet needs its batteries recharged, and you’re one of the folks who will figure out ways to do it.

How will you use your awesome tools— strength, knowledge, curiosity, and humor— to improve your world? You can’t do it alone, of course. But maybe you will embolden others to follow your example. Maybe you will plant some seeds that will blossom in ways no one can imagine.

A tall order? Sure. But from someone with a name like Thelma Rubin-Rottenberg, the world expects nothing less!

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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A movie prop? Or a work of art?

We Philadelphians are at each other’s throats again over an old cultural question: Has William Penn’s 17^th-Century urban experiment evolved into the patrician blueblood city of Thomas Eakins or the gritty blue-collar burg of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky? Specifically, what should we do with that tacky Rocky statue that Stallone donated to us decades ago?

No doubt you recall Stallone’s original 1975 film, which was an urban work of art in its own way: the story of a hopeless lowlife South Philadelphia clubhouse boxer who, through an incredible fluke, gets a chance to fight the world’s heavyweight champion and, to the surprise of everyone, acquits himself respectably.

No film has captured so well the profound psychological distance that separates South Philadelphia from the glittering city of the Bicentennial tourist ads. For more than half the film, we see nothing but the squalid back alleys and bars of Rocky’s neighborhood. Not until Rocky goes into training for his title fight do we see him jogging around Philadelphia’s ornate Second Empire-style City Hall, through beautiful Fairmount Park, and along the Ben Franklin Parkway (modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris) to the Eakins Oval and the awesome Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose imposing exterior announces (if you didn’t already know) that this is one of the world’s great art institutions. (In the size of its holdings, the PMA is America’s third largest art museum, trailing only the Metropolitan in New York and the National Gallery in Washington.)

Shades of Rizzo

So when Rocky jogs up the steps of the Art Museum and waves his arms triumphantly toward the Parkway, we can suddenly understand why thousands of blue-collar Philadelphia whites worshipped the high school dropout mayor, Frank Rizzo— and why, by extension, 77 million Americans went belly-up in 2024 for a snake oil salesman like Donald Trump: In both cases, one man’s unlikely success story embodies a dream that his followers live vicariously through him.

Most of the six subsequent Rocky sequels featured a bare-chested bronze statue of the big guy, standing triumphantly at the top of those Art Museum steps. When Stallone finally tired of the Rocky franchise in 1990, he offered to donate the statue to Philadelphia in the hope it would be permanently installed in that location. This gesture— coming at a time when Philadelphia’s municipal government had posted four consecutive deficits, had been saddled with a junk credit rating, and had lost 40% of its tax base within the previous ten years, 24% of its jobs within the previous 20 years, and 20% of its population within the previous 30 years— was almost immediately embraced by Mayor John Street, City Council, the business community, and the editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which reasoned, “The museum represents one grand part of Philadelphia. People working hard to achieve rowhouse dreams is another piece. The two ought to be able to exist side-by-side.”

It was left to the Art Museum’s president, Robert Montgomery Scott— a quintessentially Old Philadelphia descendant of Scotts, Montgomerys, Ingersolls, and Binneys– to bring the city to its senses by quietly stating the obvious: The Rocky statue was merely a movie prop whose permanent presence on the Museum steps would debase the Museum and Philadelphia alike.

Joe Frazier and Malcolm Jenkins

The statue was subsequently installed outside the Spectrum in South Philadelphia— a sports venue (home of the 76ers and Flyers) that lacked the movie’s emotional message. It was briefly exhibited inside the Art Museum. Then in 2006— conveniently, just seven months after Bob Scott died— the Fairmount Park Commission approved a compromise: The Rocky statue would be moved again— not atop the Art Museum steps but just east of them. Here, for the past 20 years, masses of tourists have flocked to pose for selfies with the statue and to run up the Museum steps, just as their hero did.

(Did these tourists ever venture inside the Museum? Don’t ask.)

Now the statue has become the centerpiece of a new Art Museum exhibit, “Rising up Rocky and the Making of Monuments,” which traces more than two millennia of artists’ engagement with boxing and celebrity. The Art Museum has gone whole hog for this ploy, focusing not only on the fictitious Rocky but also the legacy of real Philadelphia boxers like Joe Frazier and Bernard Hopkins. A lavishly illustrated souvenir book, selling for $25, includes a contribution from the former Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcom Jenkins, who is neither an artist nor a boxer. Come this August, Rocky will be installed at the top of the Museum steps permanently.

‘Athens of America’

How do you feel about that? I’m of two minds.

On the one hand, no question, the money changers have invaded the temple. The Barbarians have breached the gates. While he lived, Bob Scott conveyed a consistent message: Philadelphia is not Hollywood, Disneyland, Las Vegas; or colonial Williamsburg. In an age of ersatz culture, Philadelphia is the real thing. The Art Museum was a refuge where lovers of genuine culture could escape pop culture for at least a few hours. No more, apparently.

On the other hand, cities aren’t carved in stone. They’re living organisms, constantly reinventing themselves.

Philadelphia, to be specific, was not only the world’s first planned city, but also the world’s only city founded and profoundly influenced by Quakers. In the 18^th Century, Philadelphia evolved first into a maritime waterfront commercial center and then into the birthplace of American democracy, as well as the nation’s capital. In the early 19^th Century, Philadelphia was famous as the cultural “Athens of America” and as the nation’s financial center.

‘Workshop of the World’

But after the Civil War, that illustrious heritage was largely discarded in favor of the more commercially alluring possibilities of a modern industrial city. By 1900, thanks to Philadelphia’s unique proximity to the industrial holy trinity of coal, iron, and railroads, William Penn’s “green country town” had once again reinvented itself, this time as “the workshop of the world,” a manufacturing behemoth whose diverse capabilities had scarcely been matched anywhere in the world before or since.

Yet at that time “Philadelphia,” for most people, meant a dour provincial factory city known mainly for its Liberty Bell and its repressive Sunday blue laws— the butt of vaudeville jokes (“I went to Philadelphia last week, but it was closed”). Nevertheless, in the 20^th Century, this city whose Quaker founders frowned on music had incubated an orchestra that was widely considered the world’s finest, not to mention the “Philly sound” of soul music. By the 21^st Century it had become a center of arts and culture, gourmet restaurants, upscale hotels, and gleaming office buildings.

The lesson? Cities invariably evolve, whether we like it or not. Those that welcome risks are the most likely to benefit. The storied golden age of ancient Athens was actually briefer than Philadelphia’s. Even the revered painter Thomas Eakins, let us remember, once outraged proper Philadelphians by his use of nude models of both sexes.

Rocky may be schlocky, but many people who’ve never seen the inside of a museum now come there because they’re inspired by his story of personal transformation. Who knows where that inspiration may take them, and us?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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—Spring finally arrived! (True, but then it disappeared again.)

—The Dow hit 50,000! (Until it didn’t.)

—We won the war! (True, but to someone who’s lived through Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea, military victories are no big deal. Especially when they all turned out so well.)

—Ukraine is driving back the Russians! (Great, but we haven’t reached the finish line.)

—At a momentous two-day summit in Beijing, Trump and Xi refrained from slapping tariffs on each other and instead agreed not to bother each other, especially concerning Taiwan! (This is good?)

—My sports teams whipped your sports teams! (Actually, they didn’t.)

—The 2020 election was finally settled! (Except that it wasn’t.)

—After three weeks of scrambled images and gobbledygook on CNN (but no other channel), our home TV reception miraculously snapped back to normal without our calling any technician! (True, but watching the BBC alternative was a revelation.)

—No one in my family has been arrested or shot by ICE agents! (True, but many other families can’t say the same.)

—The Justice Department indicted Raul Castro for conspiring to kill four Americans 30 years ago! (He’s 94. That’ll teach him a lesson!)

—Tech mogul Elon Musk lost a lawsuit to AI mogul Sam Altman! (Yes, and therefore…..?)

—Trump dropped his family’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS! Instead, he settled for the government’s promise not to audit his family’s back tax returns! (Look, I know Trump has trouble making ends meet. If this settlement enables him to live within his means, I can’t object. But celebrate? That’s another story.)

To live to 100

No, the spring in my step this week has to do with a personal matter. Maybe you’ve forgotten: I’m 83, an age at which one’s grandiose dreams of global peace and ethnic harmony have largely narrowed to less ambitious goals, like remembering my computer passwords or where I left my cane. At reunions these days, I hear classmates say, “I don’t mind dying, but I’d just like to know how everything turned out.” To the extent that world events concern me, what keeps me going is my determination to outlive Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (although I know full well that another bully, equally malign, will probably pop up in their place).

Our friend Marty Schwartz of Muncie, Indiana, who lived past 100, used to tell us, cheerfully, “Old age just means higher maintenance.” On the other hand, a distant relative was asked, on his 100^th birthday, what he had learned. “It’s just one damned thing after another,” he grumbled.

So… what excites me this week?

Falling on the street

Regular readers of this column no doubt recall that on January 19, while biking to my office, I slipped on the ice, fell off my bike, and broke two bones in my left ankle. (For all the pitiful details, click here). After ankle surgery, I was largely confined to my home for months while clomping around in a variety of boots on my left foot and walking with the aid of my above-mentioned cane.

I was just about all healed when, on May 15, I fell again while walking a block from my home (blame an uneven sidewalk curb or blame me for daydreaming). This time I suffered a huge black-and-blue mark on my right leg and a swollen right knee. I thought maybe the knee was broken and I’d have to go in for more surgery and God knows what else.

Last week I submitted the knee to an X-ray. The next day I got the result:

Negative.

I dodged another bullet.

I ask you: What could be more thrilling? (OK, OK— maybe Raul Castro’s indictment. But aside from that…)

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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The hero of Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a model of civic rectitude— based on her father— in an otherwise narrowminded 1930s Alabama town. As a widower, he dispenses kindness and wisdom to his children without raising his voice. As a lawyer, he defends a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. In the 1962 film adaptation, when spat upon by a white bigot, Atticus (played by the unfailingly decent Gregory Peck) merely wipes the spittle off his cheek and proceeds on his pacifist way.

What killjoy could possibly find fault with such a noble character?

As it turns out, Harper Lee herself may have been one such wet blanket. In 2015, when this reclusive author was 89 years old, sight- and hearing-impaired, not to mention the victim of two strokes, she “discovered” and published her second novel. Go Set a Watchman may well have been Lee’s 55-year-old first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird— a darker, more nuanced rumination about small-town Southern bigotry that was probably reshaped by a gifted editor into the much more readable and comfortingly gallant novel, easily digestible by most middle-school students. And where Mockinghbird is set in the distant 1930s, Watchman takes place in the more immediate ’50s.

racist Atticus?

But the Atticus Finch of Watchman is no idol. He’s a racist, for one thing. He’s a member of the White Citizens Council, for another. And he’s much more cautiously conservative than the Atticus of Mockingbird.

“Listen, Scout,“ he tells his daughter, now an adult in her 20s, “what would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There would be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state government run by people who don’t know how to run ’em?”

SaraKay Smullens, the Philadelphia writer and therapist, has suggested— persuasively, I think — that Harper Lee was muzzled for decades by her domineering older sister (and lawyer) Alice Lee, who had a vested interest in protecting the fantasy image of their fictitious father figure portrayed in Mockingbird. Not until Alice Lee died in 2014 at the age of 103 did Harper Lee dare to “discover” her more nuanced and negative Watchman manuscript.

The simple facts

Penalize me for piling on if you must, but I’ve found another defect in the saintly Atticus that even Harper Lee and her editor missed: He’s a crummy lawyer.

I watched a TV screening of To Kill a Mockingbird the other night and noticed a Finch flaw that had previously escaped me. The film’s emotional high point comes during the trial of Tom Robinson, the Black man unjustly accused of rape, when Atticus delivers his emotional closing argument to the jury. It’s a doozy.

(You can read the whole speech here.)

“Gentlemen,” he begins, “I shall be brief, but I would like to use my remaining time with you to remind you that this case is not a difficult one, it requires no minute sifting of complicated facts, but it does require you to be sure beyond all reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant.

“To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. This case is as simple as black and white. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant.”

So far, so good. Atticus is beseeching the jurors to examine the evidence, or the lack thereof, all of which is on his side. But before you know it, he shifts gears and attacks the whole Southern system of racial segregation.

‘She kissed a Black man”

“I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the state,” Atticus declares, alluding to the alleged rape victim. “But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man’s life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with.”

His strategy, see, is to defend a Black man by attacking a white woman before a jury of good old white men.

“She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance,” Atticus continues, “but I cannot pity her: She is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done— she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her….

“What was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was her daily reminder of what she did. What did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: She kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man.”

This is great stuff, if you’re a political reformer, or a clergyman, or an actor auditioning for a screen test. But a lawyer’s first obligation is to his client. By attacking the South’s cherished Jim Crow system, Atticus alienates everyone on that all-white jury.

‘Do your duty’

The witnesses for the state, he asserts, “have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption— the evil assumption— that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you.”

That speech resonated with me when I first heard it in the early ’60s. Of course, I then was an Ivy League college student living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The jurors sitting in judgment on Tom Robinson were uneducated white bozos from a provincial Southern town in the 1930s. Atticus would’ve been well advised to try a different approach with such a jury.

Then comes the angry peroration: “In the name of God, do your duty.”

Atticus leaves the jurors no choice: They can acquit his client only if they also sign up for the Civil Rights movement. Surprise! They opted for conviction.

Maybe Atticus should have been a doctor?

Full disclosure time: I should mention that Julie Fallowfield, Harper Lee’s literary agent from 1970 to 1996, also represented me from 1975 to 1996 (when she retired). And Alan Pakula, who produced the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, was my cousin. Oh yes— and Rosemary Murphy, who played Atticus’s goodhearted next-door neighbor in the film, attended the same summer camp in the French Alps that I went to. But I never discussed the author, the book, or the film with any of them.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

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In 1980, Turner revolutionized television news by creating Cable News Network, which presented news all day long in the outlandish belief that news occurs all day long and ought to be reported when it occurs. In its first two years, this novel concept lost up to $2 million a month. At first, CNN had fewer than 2 million viewers, compared with the three big networks— CBS, NBC, and ABC— whose news broadcasts then collectively reached more than 50 million households. Today those network news operations are almost irrelevant in the shadow of CNN and its subsequent imitators, like Fox News, MS Now, CNBC, BBC, Newsmax, and NewsNation.

Then in 1985, Turner paid $1.5 billion for the MGM Studio’s library of 3,500 old and presumably worthless films that everybody had already seen (like Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane) as well as the Warner Brothers’ pre-1948 catalogue, which included Casablanca and all the Looney Tunes cartoons. Turner harbored the bizarre notion that new generations (not to mention old ones) might want to watch these films repeatedly, uncut and without commercial interruption. The result, nine years later, was another revolutionary cable TV concept: Turner Classic Movies, which attracted millions of new viewers to Turner’s cable TV network.

By contrast, the Lenfest Institute

I mention these flashes of brilliance because we live in an age when many otherwise sensible people believe the future of news and information lies not with driven visionaries like Ted Turner but with the sort of cautious, prudent folks you find in the not-for-profit sector.

Newspapers have been shellshocked ever since the late 1990s, when the Internet began delivering news instantly, conveniently, inexpensively, and even interactively, without sacrificing a single tree or wasting gas on a single delivery truck. In this brave new world, 2,900 American newspapers have vanished since 2005, and many of the survivors have been saved only by some sort of do-good civic foundation. The largest of these, the Philadelphia Inquirer (which changed hands six times between 2006 and 2016), survives today as the subsidiary of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, a well-intentioned not-for-profit corporation, dedicated in principle to supporting hard-hitting local investigative journalism.

Every six months or so, the Inquirer publishes an op-ed essay by Jim Friedlich, the Lenfest Institute’s CEO, extolling the virtues of this new model and beseeching governments and private citizens to help support it. He writes hopefully of “practical, bipartisan approaches,” including “smart public policy,” like a New Hampshire proposal for tax subsidies for small businesses that advertise in local news outlets. Or an Illinois state program that provides payroll tax credits to news organizations that employ local journalists. Or a Pennsylvania proposal to provide state grants and fellowships for local journalists.

The best that can be said about these ideas is that they may maintain the status quo until some creative hustler like Ted Turner figures out a better way to make money from good journalism. The worst that can be said about them is that they force journalists into partnerships with politicians when we should be their independent watchdogs.

In any case, precisely because they lack stockholders, not-for-profits like the Lenfest Institute lack the incentive to think entrepreneurially— which I would argue is the key to enterprising journalism. No one’s life’s savings are tied up in a foundation— and without that personal survival motive, the urge to innovate becomes less urgent.

Small-town revolution

In my own career, no fewer than five very different publications have demonstrated what a difference one gutsy entrepreneur can make.

My first boss, Hugh Ronald in Portland, Indiana (population 7,000), lacked any formal journalistic training, other than working on his college paper. But in the 1940s, when he was managing a local work-clothing factory, Hugh grew disturbed by the mediocre quality of Portland’s daily paper, the Commercial Review. In 1946, when he was 35, Hugh teamed up with a Portland banker to buy a small weekly paper elsewhere in the county. Three years later he converted it to a weekly county-wide pictorial magazine. For the next ten years, this rural county with less than 23,000 population enjoyed a phenomenon unknown even in many major cities: competition between local print media. Finally, in 1959, the owners of the Commercial Review capitulated and sold their paper to Hugh’s company.

Now Hugh implemented his astounding vision of a vibrant, independent small-town paper. Although dailies of this size typically employed a three-person news staff— an editor, sports editor, and women’s editor, none of whom held a college degree— Hugh’s Commercial Review had a five-person staff, including three college graduates. To attract professional journalists to Portland, Hugh offered above-average pay. (At a time when starting reporters in Chicago were making $65 a week, Hugh offered me $100 out of Penn in 1964.) Most papers of this size printed canned editorials, if indeed they had an editorial page at all; Hugh initiated a policy of daily signed editorials, written by the staff, often taking controversial positions on local and national issues. The paper’s slogan— “You can’t afford to miss a single issue”— was a constant reminder to readers and staff alike that our priority was our audience, not some lofty abstract principle.

Barney Kilgore’s Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal, founded in 1889, was for its first half-century a pedestrian and often corrupt business rag. It was transformed beginning in the early 1940s by a driven visionary named Bernard Kilgore, who introduced the notion of humanizing articles about complicated subjects. Kilgore insisted that editors and reporters make room in news stories for anecdotes, narrative details, and portraits of individuals. Under his regime, reporters were granted the then-unheard-of luxury of working on stories for days— or, when necessary, even weeks or months— to provide the reader with an in-depth report.

Kilgore also prodded his reporters to address readers in language that was neither pedantic nor patronizing. “The next time I see the word upcoming in a story,” he declared in one famous memo, “I will be downcoming, and someone will be outgoing.” Moreso than any other American newspaper at the time I joined it (in 1968), the Wall Street Journal had assembled that rare combination of resources, expertise, sound instincts, writing talent, independent spirit, and professionalism that distinguishes a great newspaper from a merely competent one.

A movie or a lecture?

Philadelphia Magazine, similarly, was a bland Chamber of Commerce organ for more than half a century after its founding in 1908. It had no editorial budget and just 6,000 subscribers in 1961, when publisher Arthur Lipson died and ownership passed to his exuberantly childish son, D. Herbert Lipson. At this point, Herb Lipson liberated the magazine’s previously muzzled editor, Alan Halpern, and by the time I joined it in 1972 Philadelphia had evolved into a spunky, trend-setting magazine of 140,000 circulation whose writers brought style and wit to every subject, no matter how mundane. There was nothing like it anywhere in the country, including New York (Philadelphia Magazine subsequently provided the model for New York Magazine).

The difference between reading Philadelphia and other publications in those days was roughly the difference between attending a movie and a lecture. Instead of reporting the dry facts about urban prostitution or suburban burglaries, Philadelphia writers portrayed the night’s work of a fictitious “composite” prostitute and a “composite” burglar, based on real people they knew. They wrote not as objective journalists but as passionate humans sharing their excitement about their subjects.

This was the dawn of what came to be known as “the new journalism.” At that time, you bought Philadelphia Magazine not to read specific stories or writers, but for the general expectation that anything you found in any issue would surprise, delight, shock, or fascinate you. In this manner, Philadelphia Magazine introduced its readers to a broad range of weighty subjects— education, transportation, poverty, city planning— that wouldn’t otherwise have interested them.

(Philadelphia Magazine finally passed this year from the Lipson family into a not-for-profit. Are you surprised to learn that the current issue contains a long critique of Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Tony Watlington that reads, yes, like attending a lecture rather than a movie?)

The Welcomat’s eccentric boss

In the spring of 1981, I met Susan Levin Seiderman, a suburban housewife (as such women were then called) who had recently inherited control of the Center City Welcomat, a free weekly newspaper distributed in downtown Philadelphia. This “shopper”— so-called because people read it mostly for the ads— had been launched in 1971 by Susan’s father, Leon Levin, not out of any interest in Center City but to protect his weekly South Philadelphia Review from competition on its northern flank.

Throughout that decade, Susan had implored her father to upgrade the Welcomat into a more sophisticated vehicle, but her risk-averse dad had stubbornly refused. Now Leon Levin was gone. and Susan was eager to fulfill her vision— what she described to me as “the Village Voice in Philadelphia”— but uncertain how to go about it. Her logic was refreshingly selfish and direct: “If I have to read this paper,” she told me, “I want it to be interesting.”

Thus began a novel experiment. Susan and I converted the Welcomat into a free-wheeling and unique opinion forum. Instead of assigning stories, I asked readers to submit unsolicited essays and letters on subjects they cared about. I granted them total freedom to express themselves, no matter how offensive their thoughts. In effect, the Welcomat was a precursor of the Internet.

As the editor, I was often credited with this transformation, but it never would have happened without Susan’s willingness to risk capital, her courage to let me experiment and make mistakes, and her passion for free expression that enabled her to smile politely each week while her paper published opinions and language that made her cringe. Her combination of hardheaded managerial acumen and maternal concern enabled her to build a loyal and talented organization that maintained its family ambience even as it grew into a big moneymaker.

I often heard Susan described as eccentric— a description I would not dispute. She could be irascible, temperamental, unpredictable, and maddeningly illogical (much like Ted Turner). Her attention span was minimal. Yet the bottom line of life with Susan was a rewarding weekly experience for the Welcomat’s readers, advertisers, and employees. She was living proof of George Bernard Shaw’s famous axiom: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Or, in Susan’s case, an unreasonable woman. We should all be so eccentric.

The Inquirer’s Roberts revolution

And of course, there was the Philadelphia Inquirer, which published my column on its op-ed page for 19 years. Walter Annenberg, who for 27 years had used the paper as a personal tool to reward his friends and punish his perceived enemies, finally sold it in 1970 to the respected Knight Newspapers chain. Two years later the Knights hired Gene Roberts, national editor of the New York Times, to take charge of the Inquirer, and Roberts soon attracted a world-class staff, largely through the magnetic appeal of his reputation as a “reporter’s editor”— that is, one who gives reporters the freedom and encouragement to tackle ambitious projects.

Over the next 18 years, this outwardly shy, absent-minded, gnomelike executive editor transformed the Inquirer from one of America’s most despised newspapers to one of the most admired— from a paper that had never won a Pulitzer Prize to one that collected 17 during his tenure, and from a money-losing runner-up among Philadelphia’s newspapers to a profitable and undisputed leader.

Early in 2019— almost 30 years after he left— a documentary film tribute to the Inquirer’s glory years under Roberts was screened at a Philadelphia theater, attended by a large crowd of graying Inquirer alumni, including Roberts himself, by then 86 years old. During the question period that followed, I asked Roberts: “Suppose that today you were 40 years old again and national editor of the New York Times, as you were in 1972 when the Inquirer came calling. And suppose the Lenfest Institute invited you to revamp the Inquirer, as the Knight chain did in 1972. Would you accept that offer?”

Roberts diplomatically declined to speculate about a hypothetical situation. My guess was that today he would stick with the Times and its profit-driven family owners rather than risk restarting his career with a not-for-profit. But upon further reflection, Roberts would never receive such an offer from the Inquirer today, because bold gambits rarely emanate from not-for-profit institutions.

I know what you’re thinking: At least the Inquirer isn’t vulnerable to ego-driven billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who recently dismembered the distinguished Washington Post to ingratiate himself with Trump. And you’re quite right. At the end of the day, I feel about profit-driven journalism much the way Winston Churchill felt about democracy: It’s the worst of all systems, except for all the other systems.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

So why not shoot them?

In the long and ludicrous history of political assassinations, the perpetrators’ goals and motives (not to mention their states of mind) have varied wildly. Some believed they could change the course of history: In 1865 John Wilkes Booth harbored delusions that disposing of Lincoln and his cabinet would rally the South to rise again. In 1914, the Bosnian student Gavrilo Princip thought slaying the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would convince the Austro-Hungarian empire to liberate Bosnia and Herzegovina; instead, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, launching World War I.

Some assassins were driven by punitive vengeance. Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, shot Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 because he thought Gandhi was too nice to Muslims. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist, shot Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 ostensibly because of the senator’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was shot and killed at a parade in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who thought Sadat was too nice to Israel. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was similarly assassinated in 1995 by Yigal Amir, an Israeli law student and far right nationalist who deemed Rabin too nice toward Palestinians, and who apparently felt his mere legal degree was inadequate to deal with such issues.

Oswald’s place in history

Some assassins believed they had had scores to settle. In 2024, Luigi Mangione tracked and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, not for any offense Thomson had committed per se but because Mangione apparently viewed Thompson as a human symbol of the health insurance industry’s “corporate greed.”

Some had specific aims. In 1935 Carl Weiss, a 29-year-old physician, shot Louisiana’s demagogic/populist senator (and former governor) Huey Long because Long intended to eliminate the district where Weiss’s father-in-law, Judge Benjamin Pavy, had held office for 28 years. (Whether Weiss killed Long is still debated. Weiss fired only one shot at Long. Long’s bodyguards then fired 60 shots at Weiss, at least one of which hit Long, who didn’t die until two days later.) The Stern gang, a Zionist paramilitary group, assassinated Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in the Arab-Israel war of 1947-48, because they perceived him (probably mistakenly) as a puppet of the British and the Arabs.

Some assassins just craved attention. We still don’t know exactly why Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK in 1963 (and, since Oswald was himself fatally shot two days later, we probably never will). The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was driven by a combination of a distorted narcissistic personality, deep-seated resentment of authority, and a frantic desire to establish himself as a significant historical figure. And how can we forget John Hinckley Jr., who, after seeing the 1976 film Taxi Driver, tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981 out of an obsessive desire to impress the actress Jodie Foster?

Caesar and Hitler

Some assassinations make no sense, perhaps because we haven’t yet learned the full story and maybe never will. Martin Luther King Jr. had plenty of enemies in 1968, from J. Edgar Hoover to the Ku Klux Klan on down. But James Earl Ray, a drifter prone to inept holdups and burglaries, a man who had served more than 13 years in penitentiaries, where he became notorious for bizarre and sometimes successful escape attempts?

And, yes, a few assassination attempts may have been justified. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE by a group of some 60 presumably responsible Roman senators, who stabbed him 23 times to prevent Caesar from seizing dictatorial power. Operation Valkyrie was a failed 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi government. The plotters belonged to the German resistance, composed mainly of Wehrmacht officers (among them the “Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel), who tried to kill Hitler at least five times in 1943 and 1944. Their apparent aim was to wrest political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party and to make peace with the Western Allies.

But whether history’s assassins were rational or nuts, smart or stupid, noble or nasty, all shared one common trait: None of them achieved what they’d hoped to accomplish.

Those Roman senators who collectively murdered Julius Caesar thought they were saving the Roman Republic; instead, that stabbing triggered civil wars that led to the final collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. Huey Long’s death in 1935 may have snuffed out his radical “Share Our Wealth” movement and eliminated him as a presidential election threat to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it failed to eliminate Long’s legacy: After his death, Long’s descendants and relatives dominated Louisiana politics for more than 50 years.

Germany’s anti-Nazi Valkyrie plotters, for their part, received no help or encouragement from Germany’s American, British, and Russian enemies, who were committed to a view of all Germany as irredeemably evil.

And now, a teacher

So now we have Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old math tutor and one-time “Teacher of the Month” for a test preparation company in Torrance, California— holder of a master’s degree in computer science from the prestigious California Institute of Technology. Allen may be history’s first teacher/assassin.

OK, OK, maybe he’s not a teacher of civics or psychology, but still— someone who made his living communicating some sort of useful information from one generation to the next.

Yet last month, in his hotel room, Cole Allen posed for a selfie decked out in guns and knives, then traumatized a big Washington social/political event. To be sure, no one was shot or hurt that night, including Allen himself. (At least three shots were fired at Allen by security guards.) He never came within 355 feet of his presumed target, President Trump. Ultimately, Allen caused a lot less harm than, say, the Washington mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Where are the shrinks?

James Earl Ray, you may recall, pleaded guilty to killing Dr. King in 1968 to avoid the death penalty, then spent the remaining 30 years of his life claiming he had been “set up” by shadowy conspirators— a view supported, among other parties, by Martin Luther King’s own family. So much for our criminal justice system’s hunger for the pursuit of truth.

So maybe this time around, when we’ve all finished hyperventilating over the White House Correspondents’ party-pooper, let’s cut him a deal: Instead of sentencing Cole Allen to one of the limited punishments available in our criminal justice system— say, execution, or life imprisonment, or torture, or castration, or six months’ community service— let’s talk to him.

Let’s get a good shrink or two capable of probing beneath Allen’s faux macho surface and ask him: What were you thinking, really? If you did shoot Trump, what did you expect would happen next?

Now that you’ve had your 15 minutes of fame, you’ll have a lifetime to reflect about it. Would you share your thoughts— as opposed to your manifestos— with us? It’s not too late to make something useful of your life, even now. Could you maybe help us find other, less violent ways to air our grievances? Ways that might actually work?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

The University of Pennsylvania, my alma matter, is currently contemplating “open expression” guidelines aimed at discouraging students from opening their mouths. Penn is also fighting demands from the Trump administration to hand over a list of Penn’s Jewish employees (for the Jews’ own good, of course. Or maybe the Trumpies need a minyan for a cabinet meeting). Meanwhile, the president of Ohio State resigned last month after he was found devoting maybe a little too much open expression to a woman who wasn’t his wife.

What is it with academics these days? Why can’t they keep their minds on their work and their pants zippered— like, say, politicians, corporate executives, and entertainers?

Mediocre deans

These developments are especially dismaying to me because I credit Penn for most of the good things in my life. I had many terrific professors and teachers there, some of whom (like Nancy Leach Sweeten and E. Digby Baltzell) became my friends in later life. I had an interdisciplinary major that was ideal for a potential journalist: American civilization, which taught me to judge other cultures (past and present) according to their values rather than my own. I wrote a column for the Daily Pennsylvanian, which landed me my first job. On the football team, I learned to deal with adversity, to function as part of a group, to push myself beyond my imagined limits, and to take and give criticism— all skills that served me well as a journalist and editor. Perhaps most important, at Penn I met and married my wife.

Of course, that was more than 60 years ago. And Penn wasn’t such a happy place then, either. At that time, Penn’s dramatically upgraded faculty and student body was supervised by mediocre deans committed to defending the status quo, especially concerning the treatment of women students.

So, is any of my experience still relevant today? Let me take a crack at it.

1. Grade inflation. According to the Yale report, 79% of grades given to Yale undergraduates in a recent academic year were an A or A-. That’s up from 10% in the alleged golden age of 1963, when I was an undergrad.

Seven years ago, I taught a course in biography at Drexel University’s Pennoni Honors College. I based the students’ grades on a combination of their papers and their class participation. Several students, upon receiving their final marks, lobbied me for an upgrade, which was unheard of in my day. One student told me his A- grade would spoil his perfect A record. Another insisted that she deserved full credit for class participation because she had attended every class, even though she hadn’t said a word during any of those classes.

I told them that I myself may have received a few A’s as a Penn undergrad. But I mostly got B’s and a few C’s and even one D— “and I’m here today to tell the tale.”

Where did I rank within my Penn class? I never knew, although I did get at least one hint.

One day during the off-season in my junior year— probably January or February 1963– I had to go to Penn’s football office in Weightman Hall. I’ve long forgotten the reason for my visit, but I’ve never forgotten the sight that greeted me when I opened the door.

There I saw our head coach, John Stiegman, and his three assistants huddled around a long table, intently studying several sheets of paper spread out before them. The object of their attention was a printout of all the varsity football players’ grades from the previous semester— which, in the Ivy League, was a critical factor in determining who would and wouldn’t be eligible to play the following year.

When Stiegman saw me, he started laughing. I asked him what was so funny. “Reds,” he replied, “we’ve gotta keep you on the team– to tutor these other guys!”

Nevertheless, that team of presumed academic lightweights subsequently produced its share of accomplished physicians, lawyers, educators, financiers, judges, and even one TV actor. As I said, we lived to tell the tale, despite our grades.

2. Diversity. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating.

Over the past two generations, educators have discovered that students learn as much from their peers as from their professors or their books— that the most transformational academic experiences often occur not in classrooms but in spontaneous interactions with people unlike themselves.

Numerous studies have since reinforced that conclusion. Even in dry, fact-based subjects like math or science, student performance improves when they’re with diverse classmates— presumably because you’re more likely to exercise your brain among people unlike yourself. In other words, diversity makes you brighter.

This is why the most selective colleges now encourage or even require undergraduates to spend at least one semester abroad. That is also why, when it comes to college admissions these days, diversity matters more than grades or test scores. “We’re looking for a well-rounded class, not well-rounded students,” I’ve heard admissions officers say.

The key question for college applicants, then, is not how bright or accomplished they are, but what unique qualities or talents will they bring to their classmates?

On this question, I speak from personal experience. In the early ’50s, I spent three summers at an international camp in the French Alps whose population was deliberately split between Americans and Europeans. It was a transforming educational experience, but its value would have been negligible had all the campers been Americans, or Europeans, no matter how gifted they were, and regardless of the camp’s programs and staff.
America’s selective universities, which failed to persuade the Supreme Court to sustain affirmative action, have also failed to persuade the public about the educational value of diversity. It’s a shining example of Rottenberg’s Law as to Why the World Is So Screwed Up, to wit: People with knowledge (such as academicians) can’t communicate, and communicators (such as journalists) don’t know anything.

3. Campus antisemitism. My Jewish fraternity at Penn included a musclebound football guard who spent his days pumping weights in Hutchinson Gym. But he never played football after his freshman year, because he felt uncomfortable as one of the few Jews on the team. I, on the other hand— decidedly non-musclebound— never had a problem in this regard. Some of us are more sensitive about this issue than others.

One day in the dressing room, one of my teammates perceptively remarked, “How come 30% of the students at Penn are Jewish, but there are only three Jews on the football team?”

“No, no,” I jested. “There are four Jews: Me, Levin, Paul, and Murphy over there.” Murphy (not his real name) was the last fellow anyone would mistake for a Jew: He was a graduate of Philadelpia’s Roman Catholic High School, and he lived in Newman Hall, Penn’s Catholic refuge, whose residents attended Mass daily). Everyone laughed at my little joke, including Murphy.

In the days that followed, I repeated variations of this Murphy-as-Jew joke. One day, for example, I shouted across the dressing room, “Hey Murph, are you taking off for Yom Kippur?” In a way, it was a curious (and, yes, unkind) sociological experiment in reverse antisemitism. Some of our teammates who weren’t quite into the joke began looking at Murphy differently, and Murphy himself didn’t know how to handle this unexpected attention. My experiment finally ended when Murphy cornered me one day and said, “Hey, let’s cut out this Jewish stuff.” And that was that.

4. Political imbalance. At Yale, according to the committee’s report, “Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, the Law School and the School of Management.” A recent survey at Princeton found that only 11.4% describe themselves as either somewhat or very right-leaning. Of course, that’s a shame. And yet…

Campus politics reflect the nature of academic work. In theory, at least, scholarship (like journalism) involves an endless quest for the unknowable truth. Ultimately, scholars and journalists are observers rather than players. They must keep an open mind about everything— again, in theory— because they know they could be wrong. This constant doubtful questioning tends to be a liberal attribute.

On the other hand, certain other occupations— business, the military, and sports— require the ability to act quickly, based on incomplete information. These actors must possess a firm belief in what they’re doing. They don’t— can’t— waste too much time pondering alternatives. Here the highest priority is a certain homogeneity in backgrounds, interests, and beliefs that allows the business at hand to move forward. (If football players conducted endless philosophical debates in the huddle, as they used to do in “Doonesbury,” they’d never call a play.)

Of course, conservative intellectuals do exist. But they tend to gravitate to think tanks, where at least they can proceed with some agreement about basic principles.

Why aren’t there more conservative professors? You might as well ask: Why aren’t there more liberal generals?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com

I confess that nothing lately has quite animated me as the news that ordinary citizens had non-violently dumped a supposed dictator-for-life. But are we maybe getting a little too excited about the Trump-Orban analogies? That’s my question.

Victor Orban was “Trump before Trump,” as Trump’s pal Steve Bannon once admiringly described him. During his 16 years as prime minister, Orban rigged Hungary’s election rules, installed loyalists in once non-partisan government jobs, undermined judicial independence, repressed his political opponents, and hounded independent media and universities. Much like you-know-who.

Desperate Syrian refugees

Orban also funneled government money into conservative organizations and think tanks aimed at undermining the European Union and promoting an authoritarian world order. He was Vladimir Putin’s biggest ally inside NATO as well as the original architect of what he called Western illiberalism.

Like Trump, Orban incited popular sentiment against immigrants, gays, and religious minorities. In 2015, Syrian refugees desperate for a new homeland hurled themselves on the tracks at a Hungarian railway station when a train they thought was carrying them to Austria was stopped by Hungarian police to take them to a detention camp. This deliberately nasty act was intended to deter other refugees from heading to Hungary. It was Orban’s version of ICE, years before Trump’s cruel variety of ICE even existed.

“The migrants’ despair,” noted the Hungarian writer Noémi Szécsi at the time, “was because they didn’t want to be stuck here— in the country where we Hungarians are destined to live our shabby little lives.”

Gracious concession

Trump openly admired Orban, and our own Vice President JD Vance traveled to Hungary this month to campaign for him. When Orban ran for a fifth term this year, observers like me assumed he was as unbeatable as, say, Putin is in Russia or Xi in China. Yet it turns out that most Hungarians care more about putting food on their tables than tyrannizing gays, immigrants, atheists, and political liberals.

So, Hungary’s voters decisively turned Orban out of office. His opponent, Peter Magyar, won 53% of the popular vote, compared to 38% for Orban, and Magyar’s party apparently won a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament, probably sufficient to undo many of the dictatorial policies Orban had put in place.

Could something so revolutionary happen here? Maybe. But Hungary’s model differs from ours in a few striking respects.

For one thing, Orban accepted his defeat graciously. He did not suggest the election had been rigged or stolen. Can’t picture Trump doing any such thing. Do the words “gracious” or “concession” even exist in his dictionary?

Hungary’s overachievers

For another thing, America is a nation of immigrants (at least until Trump came along). Hungary, on the other hand, has long been a nation of emigrants. Ask yourself what two traits the following overachievers (past as well as present) share:

Franz Liszt, Eugene Ormandy, Sir Georg Solti, George Soros, Fritz Reiner, Estée Lauder, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Koestler, William Fox, Adolf Zukor, Paul Newman, Leslie Howard, Tony Curtis, Mitzi Gaynor, Andrew Grove (founder of Intel), Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), George Rosenkranz (father of oral contraception), Ignaz Semmelweis (father of antiseptic medicine), Peter Goldmark (father of TV), Bela Bartok, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, John Lukacs, Harry Houdini, Joseph Pulitzer, George Pataki, Alfred Bendiner, Art Buchwald, Ernie Kovacs, Frank Capra, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hedy Lamarr, Bela Lugosi, Michael Curtiz, Peter Lorre, Peter Falk, Don Adams, Jerry Seinfeld, Tommy Ramone, and the current CBS News chief Bari Weiss.

The answer: They’re all descended from Hungarians, and they all did their overachieving after they or their ancestors left Hungary. (In Hollywood’s early days, one movie studio posted this sign: “It is not enough to be Hungarian. One must also have talent!”)

How come these failures in Hungary succeeded so wildly in America and western Europe? When immigrants move from poor countries to rich ones, noted the economist Paul Collins in his 2013 book, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, “their productivity rockets upwards,” because they are “escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.” Of course, that book was published before Trump got to the White House. Trump frowned on immigrants from what he called “shithole” countries. (He preferred immigrants from Sweden.)

The 20th-Century Philadelphia tycoon Albert M. Greenfield— a Russian immigrant (the subject of my 2014 biography, The Outsider) who rebuilt Center City and restored Society Hill— once remarked, “Most of the world’s great achievements were accomplished by men who were born poor.” Not the sort of idea easily comprehended by the likes of Orban, or Trump.

Lenin and Hitler

Can our nation of immigrants finally respond to Trump the way Hungary’s nation of emigrants finally responded to Victor Orban? A cautioning word from Robert Zaller, the retired Drexel history professor and confirmed skeptic, may help bring us back to Earth:

“Lenin’s Bolsheviks won 25% of the last free vote held in Russia (and seized power through a revolution). Mussolini, with 7% of the seats in Italy’s Parliament, was installed by a monarchical coup. Hitler’s Fascists won 32% of the vote in Weimar Germany’s last election (down from 37% in the immediately preceding one) and also got in through a coup. Trump alone was the people’s choice.”

(Actually, Trump got only 49.8% of the popular vote when he won the 2024 election. And only 46.1% in his 2016 victory. Those may not be the landslides Trump claims, but they’re much better numbers than Lenin or Hitler ever managed. And those guys caused more trouble than Trump, at least so far.)

Wisdom from Pulp Fiction

So, is Orban’s defeat a model for Trump’s defeat? As Shakespeare put it, “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” On the other hand, when Shakespeare wrote that line (in Hamlet’s soliloquy) he was specifically referring to suicide as an answer to suffering, pain, and uncertainty.

Maybe we should give the last word on this matter not to Shakespeare and Hamlet but to Winston Wolfe, the Mafia cleanup specialist played by Harvey Keitel in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction. When his fellow hoodlums congratulate him for so effectively concealing the evidence of their crimes, Wolfe warns them: “Let’s not start suckin’ each other’s dicks quite yet.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com