Last Friday, the middle school invited guest speaker Andy Lulka to the first Windows and Mirrors assembly. This new series of events is meant to be a “window” through which people can view communities and cultures different from theirs, and a “mirror” for people who belong to them.
Lulka, a Jewish woman who was born in Mexico, shared some of her family history with the community, detailing the journey her grandparents and great-grandparents made to Mexico from their respective countries of origin. Her great-grandparents on her mother’s side headed to Mexico after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Because they spoke a hybrid of Hebrew and Spanish, they believed they would have an easier time adjusting to Mexican society. On her father’s side, her grandparents’ family escaped the pogroms in Russia and arrived in Mexico after being turned away by Canada and the United States.
She also discussed the differences between Jewish communities in Mexico and those in North America. “You have a huge Jewish community in the U.S. In Mexico, there’s about 50,000 Jewish people, and that’s in a country of 125 million,” she said. Communities in Mexico, she explained, also are mostly of the orthodox denomination.
Lulka, now residing in Toronto, also talked about some of the differences between Jewish communities in Canada and Mexico. “Canada is a much smaller country in terms of population than Mexico, so we make up a much bigger portion of the population,” she said. “We tend to integrate more into our population whereas in Mexico it’s a very closed community.”
Since Friday evening marked the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Lulka took some time to explain the importance of the holiday and the traditions associated with it, including the activities in the month leading up to the new year, such as the daily sounding of the shofar, fashioned from a ram’s horn, and the Tashlikh, in which a person’s sins are atoned by symbolically casting them into a flowing body of water.
On Monday, author Kelly Yang spoke to fourth and fifth graders about her book, “Front Desk,” inspired by her childhood experiences living as an immigrant to the United States. The book has won wide praise and numerous awards, including the 2019 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and a Parents’ Choice Gold Medal Fiction award.
Yang shared some of her own story of being a very young new immigrant who struggled with speaking English, as well as someone who began college at age 13. She also spoke about writing and gave students advice on why and how they should approach the process. Reasons she gave for taking up writing included the fun involved in creating worlds that the creator can control and the importance of good writing in the students’ future academic and professional lives. To become a good writer, she said, students should make an effort to write every day, spend lots of time reading, and learn to analyze books and movies. During the Q&A session, Yang revealed that Scholastic was the only publisher who accepted her book, and that even as a published writer, she experiences self-doubt. “Everyone does!” she said. “But the answer is to write for yourself and not others.”
“Front Desk” is one of the books that students are reading for the Tournament of Books, in which students vote on various books placed in a bracket to determine the winner at the end of the year.
On Monday morning, the upper school hosted a special assembly featuring cultural commentator Jay Smooth, who runs the popular video blog Ill Doctrine and also founded Underground Railroad, the longest-running hip-hop radio program in New York City.
Smooth referenced the history of hip-hop as an example of how communities can make each other better. Just as rappers, DJs, dancers and other members of New York’s hip-hop communities challenged one another to become better artists and people, so too should other communities make sure that its members are conscious of their own privileges of race, gender, class or ability, and show a willingness to receive criticism. “We need to change how we receive these critiques,” he said, “by fundamentally changing how we think about what being racist is, or sexist or ableist.”
Many people, Smooth said, have treated racism like having their tonsils removed, when it is “more like the plaque that builds up on your teeth every day,” something that must be addressed diligently throughout one’s life. “We are all naturally susceptible to implicit bias,” he said, “and we are all a part of systems we can contribute to, without being conscious of it.”
When being criticized by someone, Smooth advised to “listen with humility, and consider that they’re speaking from an experience we’ve never had.”
The upper school received a visit today from the Langston Hughes Project, a fusion of music, literature and history led by Ron McCurdy, a professor of music at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music.
McCurdy first gave a morning lecture on Langston Hughes and the many artists of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Later, the accomplished trumpeter was joined by drummer Mike Mitchell, bassist Giulio Cetto and pianist (and 2001 Harker middle school graduate) Yuma Sung at a special assembly at the Athletic Center, where McCurdy gave a powerful performance of Hughes’ poetic suite “Ask Your Mama,” reciting and singing Hughes’ lines as images and film reels of figures and events of African-American history were displayed behind the group.
Members of the upper school’s Jazz Band later attended a special master class given by McCurdy, where they performed Cannonball Adderley’s “Work Song” and received his feedback. McCurdy advised students to use their sheet music as a roadmap and avoid scanning it too much as they played. He also told them to learn the history behind the pieces they learn: “If you understand the history of why you’re doing what you’re doing, it’ll make a whole lot more sense to you.”
McCurdy also worked with the Downbeat show choir, which had been learning Nina Simone’s version of the 1960s show tune “Feeling Good.” After hearing their rendition, McCurdy coached the singers supporting the soloists to do more than simply sing the notes in their part. “Sing like you mean it,” he said, referring to the optimism in Simone’s performance. “I’ve got to hear that joy, that optimism.”
Today, upper school students attended an assembly that featured an appearance by Tom Nazario, an assistant law professor at the University of San Francisco and founder of The Forgotten International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to alleviating poverty around the world. Nazario partnered with photojournalist Renee C. Byer to publish the 2014 book “Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor.” The book chronicled the lives of extremely impoverished women and children in various parts of the world, including northern Ghana, Peru, India and Romania.
The publishing of the book led to the creation of a documentary of the same name, which students and faculty viewed at the assembly. Similar to the book, the film traveled to Ghana, Peru and India to examine the lives of people living in extreme poverty, with commentary provided by people the filmmakers encountered during their travels.
Following the viewing, Nazario answered questions from students. Nazario explained how interpreters were instrumental in overcoming language barriers and approaching people for interviews. Many of the people in the communities he visited, he added, were very close-knit and dependent on one another, a quality he noted is largely lacking in wealthier countries.