Good morning! Good morning, and welcome to Sunday Griot! So nice of you to take time out of your busy holiday schedule to stop by for a story. Please, I know it’s not Chanukah yet, and won’t be until next week, but we’ve got some oil in the back and batter for do-it-yourself latkes. (Make sure you have some coffee to wake yourself up first. I don’t think I actually remembered to tell the landlord we were going to do this when I rented the room.)
Today’s story is a Chanukah story, and it isn’t. Well, it happened around the time of Chanukah, and it involves a menorah, but there’s much more to it than that. You may have heard this story before, but I wanted to share it one more time.
And in 1993, it had a problem.
Or rather, the problem came to a head in 1993, but it had been simmering long before that. One day racist literature began to appear in town where none had been before. When a local woman placed an item about a Jewish educational event in the Billings Gazette, she received a death threat. Not long after, someone put a bullet through the window of her minivan as she pulled out of her driveway.
Then in 1993 Ku Klux Klan literature was left with cars at a parking lot where a Martin Luther King Day event was being held. The local Jewish cemetery was desecrated. An Indian woman’s home was painted with swastikas. The local Jewish congregation began to receive bomb threats. “Skinheads” appeared at a service in the city’s African Methodist Episcopal chapel and took up positions in the back. They made no overt actions to disrupt the service, but it was obvious they intended to intimidate those in attendance.
Then, one day in early December, Isaac Schnitzer got a brick through his bedroom window. His only crime was posting a picture of a menorah in his window that a friend in his elementary school class had given him.
Isaac’s mother Tammie decided enough was enough. She was used to being a stranger in her own home town; she had converted to Judaism to marry her husband Brian, a local doctor. In doing so she became one of only about a thousand Jews in Montana, and suddenly she had to look at the world in a different way. You see, it was her minivan that had had its window shot out. Isaac was with her at the time.
Tammie got in touch with Gary Svee, an editor at the Gazette, who agreed to run a front page story about the incident in the paper under the headline, “But how do you explain that to a child?” The story also recalled how, when the Nazis occupied Denmark during World War II and forced Danish Jews to wear yellow stars on their coats, the King of Denmark wore one as well and many of his Christian subjects followed suit.
That day’s edition of the Gazette carried a full-page picture of a menorah along with an editorial urging readers to stand up against the violence. That day paper menorahs began to appear in windows in houses all over Billings. and when more bricks came, more menorahs went up. Reader boards around town urged peace. Ministers denounced the violence from their pulpits. Glaziers and painters volunteered their services to repair damage. The Gazette later estimated that as many as 10,000 homes had paper menorahs in their windows at the height of the campaign. When you remember that Billings is a city of less than 100,000 people, it starts to sound like almost half of the families in town had menorahs in their windows.
And it worked. Whether the perpetrators of the hate crimes left the city, or went underground, or felt ashamed of their deeds and forsook them, it’s impossible to say, but the crimes stopped, all because the people of Billings united to say they weren’t going to put up with them any more.
I lived in Billings in the late 1970s, and I don’t remember there being any overt racism or anti-Semitism there at the time. I like to think I would have noticed, since I dated a Jewish girl for a while. Billings has changed since then, and not always for the better. I remember going back for my father’s funeral in 1994 and being saddened that so many “casinos” had sprouted up. Places like the pool hall across from the post office I used to use now sported video poker machines.
Even so I was glad to hear that the people of my old stomping grounds had rejected hate en masse. This story gained national attention, and was the subject of a documentary shown on PBS. And recently, a play about the incident had its world premiere in Billings. I took the name of this wee’s story from the name of the play; I hope Ms. Cohn and Mr. James don’t mind that I borrowed it.
There’s always a danger to linking to further information about a story like this. It’s possible that it will turn out that I got a detail wrong, or that someone will have told the story better than I did. I apologize for any details I screwed up on, and as for better storytelling, well, that’s OK too. I don’t mind. I figure anything that gets the word out that when people are united they can stand up to bigotry and hatred is good.
Thank you for coming by today! Next week I have an original Christmas story I want to present. Until we meet again, may all your stories be happy ones, and as always, cheers to all of you.
Funny you should tell that story, Omir. I was just reading again about the student who got visited by the FBI because of his purchase of Mao’s little red book, and I was thinking that it would be great if thousands of people at that school ordered that book from the library.
It reminds me of the herding behavior zebras use to protect themselves against attacks by lions — they bunch together so the stripes of any one indiviual are hard to pick out of the bunch. I think it’s a great defense mechanism for humans too — from everyone claiming “I am Spartacus!” to menorahs in the window to mass orders of Mao’s Little Red Book.
It’s the sort of thing I’d be willing to take part in, but that’s just my perverse nature. 🙂