Journal of Public Law

July 4, 2021 Kelley Kidd. I like Ben Shapiro, a conservative podcaster who seems to be as popular among young conservative American intellectuals as he is unpopular among those who do not so label themselves. But I aim to write a little on one of his favorite topics–the contributions of what he calls “the “Judeo-Christian” heritage.

July 4. 2021 I have recently found the delightful views of one Ben Shapiro, a prominent Jewish contributor to current American conservative thinking. He postulates that the cornerstone of American freedom and unique position in world progress and well being comes from Greek science and Biblical religion. While i agree with his premise, I also see a world in which many Biblical values he omits have contributed as much of more than the ones he has spoken for.

Kelley Kidd May 28, 2021 I believe that large segments of the American Progressive movement have abandoned principle for misguided opposition regarding Israelis and Jews.

In 1971 I moved from Washington D.C. to take a job as a teacher at small educational program of Antioch College, a school founded by Horace Mann. By ant estimation Mann had been a pillar of the American progressive movement in education and in politics. The college had been establishing “satellite” campuses and programs outside its base in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The Baltimore program was one which focused on providing credit for life experience and tutorial training in a variety of fields, including music. That music education work was headed up by a young man who let me know quickly that he was as progressive as any Antioch teacher might be suspected of being and that he was also anti-Jewish, As the part owner of a bar near campus, he could and did introduce me to an assortment of usually white customers who shared his views on various subjects–including his general dislike for things Jewish

Fifty years ago I was stunned by negative attitudes towards Jews, especially those that came from self-proclaimed liberals or progressives or leftists. My upbringing in the deep South Bible belt had always leaned towards seeing negative images of Jews as either communists and unfashionable ultra-liberals or as greedy financiers and narrow minded legalists. My evangelical roots in those days had made me familiar with the tendency of some Christians to adopt a certain casual linking of Jewish identity with a legalistic and hypocritical sort of religiosity—ala the Pharisees as the Gospel of Matthew portrays them. My experience had also exposed me to many conservative Southern whites who saw Jews as representatives of Marxism in politics and Freudian in social/psychological orientation. And many of the same conservatives on social issues viewed Jews as the architects and principal beneficiaries of ruthless business and financial practices and power. Finally I had often heard complaints that Jews were the source of unwanted progressive media and movie characters and actors and themes. The presence of Jews in civil rights activities in the ’60s often provoked anti-Jewish remarks among outspoken segregationists and white supremacy advocates. Despite these early negative portraits of Jews, and perhaps because of them, I had always assumed that liberals would be at least tolerant of Jewish religious and ethnic identity, Adolph Hitler’s hatred of Jews and communists seemed to me to forecast liberal anti-authoritarian openness to all things Jewish. So I was not prepared for what I found instead–the widely shared view among liberals that Judaism was an absurdity and Zionism a form of ethnic and religious bigotry. My musical and bar owning friend turned out to be only one among many anti-Jewish “liberals” or “progressives” on other issues.

In the last half century I have converted to Judaism and continued to be the progressive that came North to Antioch College 50 years ago. I have watched with concern the growing tendency of progressives to continue to strongly favor religious tolerance as an abstract idea, but to disparage Judaism as a way of life, and to appreciate the need for strong democratic nations unless the nation is Israel.

JULY 30. 2020 KELLEY KIDD

I am now 78 years old whose vocation is as a public defender lawyer in the small Georgia city of Statesboro. I have been a Jew since a brief ceremony in 1977. Of course I am a convert, one whose personal religious history had been rooted in a Southern protestant family and churches. This little essay is an effort to tell how and why I have been trying for more than forty years to be as good a Jew as i could be.

GETTING INTRODUCED BY THE KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE. For four hundred years the King James translation of the Bible has been the cornerstone of Protestant religion. When the old South is called the bible belt, it is that particular book that is being referred to. And there is no greater stronghold of evangelical fundamentalist Christianity than this region. There is no more greater concentration of those fundamentalist values than middle Georgia, and my home town of Milledgeville had been the capital of Georgia for sixty years. So my upbringing was soaked in the values of churches which had broken with national churches over slavery and continued traditions of white supremacy, although the words were never said out loud.

1968 THE VISIBLE DIMENSIONS OF CHANGE

I believe 1968 was the single most crucial year in my eventual decision to convert to Judaism, although I did not formally take that step until nine years later. What makes that fact a bit more than odd is the fact that I had no close Jewish associates in 1968. To an outside observer my transformations that year were that I stopped working as a lawyer, although I passed the Bar Exam in that year and did not actually become a member of the Bar until two years later. I left my law related job and the office near the top of Atlanta’s tallest skyscraper in February and was living and working in one of Atlanta’s most poverty stricken ghettoes within six months. All of my residential neighbors in February were affluent white suburbanites in May, and all of my neighbors were poor and Black by July. I was working on a promising career in politics in February, and working every day in a hopeless campaign to elect Maynard Jackson to replace Senator Eugene Talmadge by September. I was a promising young moderate in the Winter, and a daily associate of very radical civil rights and Peace Now advocates by September.

So with all these transformations, a casual observer would see a man at a great turning point that had nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. But with more than half a century of hindsight, I can assure you these more visible life changes this year were absolutely necessary necessary changes that later enabled me to make the decision to become as Jewish as I can manage to be.

So I start with a few of the events and new acquaintances of 1968. And these were certainly extremely important to my life outside any consideration of their roles in my later conversion.

May 8. 2021

The Journal is an experiment in private publishing. When it goes unused the owner begins to fear his lack of IT skills will prevent him from publishing again. So he writes something like this little rant and tries to publish it.

June 2020. Where we are now. The scope of this posting is accurately given by its title. Some of my oldest recollections are of worrying about my Father’s safety while he was the acting police commisssioner of our small Southern city. I am a 78 year old white criminal lawyer who still represents hundreds of people accused of crimes every year. Between infancy and now i have lived for three years in the census tract with the highest murder rate in the United States and many more years in Baltimore, a city the current U.S. President has referred to as “crime infested”. In the last half of 1983 nd the first half of 83 my closest friend and spiritual mentor was a man who had once been the most prominent “hit man” for the Mob in Baltimore. And I consider the funeral of my home town’s most famous murderer the single most crucial moment in my emotional and spiritual development. My life has been saturated with the influence of crime and the enforcement of laws against crime. Hence my experience with law enforcement has continuously been extremely important to me.

I start with the most recent. On May 6 I learned that there had been a young black man killed in Brunswick, Georgia by at least two former law enforcement workers, one of whom had been a certified law enforcement officer for many years and the other had worked for a prosecutor in a nearby city. The killing had actually happened months before, but no official action had taken place subsequently. The Mother of Ahmaud Arbery, the man killed, had been lied to by law enforcement officers about the circumstances of the killing and two successive prosecutors had concluded that no crime had occurred. One of these prosecutors had volunteered in writing to the other that the killers were justified in killing Arbery because they clearly had “probable cause” for a citizen’s arrest of Arbery. The most cursory investigation of the law and facts in the case would have shown the prosecutor that there was no evidence that Arbery was committing a felony offense in the presence of his killers, which would have made an argument for that position under Georgia law. Instead there was shky evidence that Arbery may have been committing a technical trespass by going on a construction site, that he was a jogger who had left that site some time before the killers blocked his path repeatedly with guns, then shot him three times when he resisted them.

A week later the media was filled with information about Breanna Taylor had been shot to death by officers engaged in executing a nighttime no knock search warrant for drugs in the apartment in which she had been sleeping when plain clothes officers burst in. She was a young black medical emergency responder in Kentucky. The no knock warrant had only recently become a valid basis for unannounced entry into a private home through a five to four Supreme Court decision. And that procedure had only been approved where there was a valid safety concern for the officers if the home’s residents were given the opportunity to meet the officers at the door to learn of the search warrant. But in the Taylor situation no such concern could be shown and there were no drugs, the supposed presence of which had been the excuse for the entry.

No arrest had been made in the Taylor killing before four law enforcement officers in Minnesota held a handcuffed black man down on the street while one of them kneeled on their prisoner’s neck for nearly nine minutes. During that time the helpless man begged for his life, called for his Mother and eventually ceased breathing or having a pulse. The officers were fired the same day but not arrested. I begin this writing after two solid weeks of widespread protests and demonstrations.

Minnesota certainly does not have a reputation of being a place where anti-black racism is notorious. It isn’t Mississippi or Alabama. And Kentucky was not a confederate state either. So these killings in these states raise the very real question of whether the police tend to shoot faster and with less real threat of danger to themselves when the life that may be lost is that of a black person. And they also raise the question of whether the problem is a national not a regional one. This issue is about to become one that shares center stage with the corona virus problem, but this police racial problem will likely be with us long after the virus is a bad memory.

March 2021 by Kelley Kidd Being Jewish is not for everyone and those who have loved Judaism have never claimed that their way of life was intended tor more than some people. I was neither raised as a Jew nor raised among Jews. Like most middle class white Southern boys in the 1940s and 50s I grew up with parents and associates who were Protestant Christians and politically quite conservative. Those who did know me when I was very young would not have been surprised if I had become a minister like my Uncle Bill, whose last pulpit was the First Baptist Church of Austin Texas. And no one would have been surprised either if I had followed a first cousin in a career in electoral politics. In those days that would have meant a brand of Southern evangelical political thinking that was “conservative” on all social and political issues. And that political conservatism implicitly rejected the notion that Jews were even fully American in the sense that my white Christian forebears had been.

Of course I became familiar through early reading with Jews, I never had a conversation with any Jew until I was in college, but I felt that I knew something about them from the Gospel of John’s references to their rejection of Jesus and their constant efforts to kill him, which the Gospel showed led ultimately to his unjust crucufiction. Then there were the far from admirable characters of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’ Fagan. More important than the negative portraits of literature was the obvious to me reality that white gentiles had created my beloved United States. White male gentile Christians had been creating and running America since they landed on Plymouth Rock. Phillip Roth once clearly summarized the megafact of WASP ownership of this country. Referring to the conditions prevailing in my infancy Roth writes from the standpoint of a Jew in that time:

” It went without saying that {a successful WASP farmer of the time] was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indianand enslaver the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it—generals, dignitaries ,magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots….” pp.94-94, The Plot Against America (2004).

In my childhood white protestant patriotic churchgoers were almost certainly reinforced in their attitudes about Jews in part because the Jew, like every other minority group, counted for almost nothing in the patriotic history and politics and economic life of my country. They did not even weigh very much in my early learning about the Bible I was taught to believe was the foundation of my religion. I learned from the Gospel of Matthew to despise Pharisees, that group of religious leaders who Jesus often chastises for allegedly ignoring the important values of love and mercy, and hypocritically stressing unimportant if not downright ugly small strictures in “the law”. My adult relatives portrayed Jews as loud, tasteless, pushy, clannish and materialistic.

So absolutely nobody who knew me in my my youth would suspect that my favorite religion would be Judaism by the time I was 30 or that I would actually become a convert a few years later. Nobody, including me. The path to Judaism involved thought, study and some remarkable experiences. This posting is about the path of searching and finally finding Judaism as a spiritual path.

My introduction to Judaism came largely through that Bible my Baptist Mother taught me to revere. Of course that Bible did not contain the word Judaism, the Jewish scriptures were clearly labelled as Old Testament, which relegated those scriptures to the role of prologue to the New Testament, or possibly even implied that those scriptures were replaced by the latter testament. But they were also somehow sacred enough to be included in the great book. And some of the psalms, the Ten Commandments and passages allegedly predicting Jesus were all to be treated as holy and still to be followed. Other portions of the hebrew scriptures were touched upon lightly or ignored altogether. But I was of course learning from books written by jews for Jews. In my childhood that meant absorbing images of the characters, dramatic scenes and language of the King james Version of the Bible. Seventy percent of that “authorized version” was actually a pretty good translation of the Hebrew bible into seventeenth century English. Before i was four years old my mother had my twin brother and me standing on chairs to be seen by sitting adults, assembled to hear us recite poetry and answer questions from her careful instruction of us. We wee prodigies of learnin about the prevailing babtist views on what to know from and about the “Old Testament”. To this day I persist in feeling great graitude to her for that.

The Bible was taught as though it had all been written in the mind of God, then dictated to Christian scribes for the faithful believers in the Trinity and the salvation of belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. The Jews had been “God’s Chosen People” until Jesus preached the gospel my evangelical Mother pointed out to me for memorizing before I was five years old, the famous .John 3: 16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth is Him should not perish , but have everlasting life.” That verse was the most important teaching of my life for most of my childhood. Salvation from sin and eternal death were enclosed within it. And it was the repudiation of what I was taught had always been the mistaken doctrines of Catholics and the Jews, which i was to understand were trust in adherence to law and the doing of good works. We protestants followed this 3:16 preaching, which had come straight from Jesus and had been confirmed by the subsequent experience of real Christians from the disciple Peter and the apostle Paul straight through to the great preachers of my own time like Billy Graham and my favorite pulpit preachers.

But it was not even absolutely clear to me that the writers and subjects of the Old Testament were Jews until I was in grade school. Were the Israelites or the Hebrews all Jews or merely ancestors of the later Jews. the word Jew did not appear until the Gospel of John contained numerous references to “their rejection” of him and their efforts to kill him, efforts which were apparently successful when they pushed a reluctant Roman official to order his crucifixion. Years later I learned that the notion that the Jews killed Jesus became a widespread belief among Christians. in the early years of the christian faith. I did not hear my Christian teachers explicitly denounce that point of view.

And the limp and frequently blond haired blue eyed Jesus of typical depictions belied any motion that he in fact was a Jew himself. i saw no Jews who fit that description. instead both the living examples and frequently the visual depictions of Jews were curly haired and black eyed and usually had convex noses–features never shown of Jesus in the stained glass windows of my Father’s Methodist church sanctuary or the portraits hung in the Baptist churches my Mother preferred. The women were said to be scolders and the men grasping and entirely intent on taking as much money as possible for the sale of as little value as possible. The expression “Jew you down” referred to the real or imagined practice of the sme people as buyers; allegedly they haggled the seller to get the lowest possible price for something they wanted to buy. Hence Jews were the “money changers” were assumed to be the people referred to as profaning the temple by selling the animals required for sacrifice.

But perhaps the most often heard negative reference to Jews was the suggestion or insinuation that they were the opposite of “genteel”, a word with the obvious reference to the Christian meaning of “gentile” to mean a Christian or at least a non-Jew. The only explicitly Jewish characters i the literature I read outside the Bible were Fagan, the crook and exploiter of children in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and Shylock. the ruthless money lender who gets his just put down in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the offensive and whiny Jew in Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises, and Ben Hur, the prince of Judah who has the good fortune to become a Christian. Then in 1960 as i was going off to college, Phillip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus showed me a variety of irritating and decidedly ungenteel modern American Jews.

I suppose my first exposure to the idea that Jews were sometimes very positive and admirable came in a college Bible class. The teacher who handled my own breakout group was a Mehodist former Dean of Men at Emory, the beloved “Hebe” Reese. He was bald and bespeckled and gentle. And he was a lover of the Hebrew propets, hence his nickname. I never heard him referred to by any other. This same Hebe taught that Amos, Hosea and Micah and the first Isaiah all were sharply critical of the governments and ruling classes of their times. I emerged from that class with a new respect for the Judaic civilazation that had produced such social critics. Perhaps equally important was learning that this was the same people that produced the David who composed the 23d Psalm with its hymn to God as a constant comforter and protector. Sadly it did not teach that David and the prophets were all referring back to a covenant relationship between that people and a deity whose central commandments were about that people’s responsibility to love God and each other. I left that course still believing that it was Jesus who had given the world that view and been rejected by Jews for that view.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Jewishness that emerged from my Protestant belief system was the notion that God had decided that the faith in Jesus which would save those who believed in him would also damn to hell those who chose not to so believe, and the first and foremost of these nonbelievers wee the Jews. In fact the narrative of the Gospel of John often referred to “the Jews” as those seeking to kill Jesus throughout his ministry and succeeding in getting the Romans to do just that eventually. By rejecting their own scripture’s prediction of Jesus as their own “messiah”, they had also created a false narrative for others to follow. By continuing to treat their own scriptures in a legalistic and material manner, they had spurned spirituality and rejected the loving humility of the true Christian. No wonder then that they had become the founders ad practitioners of cutthroat capitalism and godless communism and socialism! They were also the authors of doctrines which “coddled” the lazy and defiant and degenerate types who constituted most of the “poor white trash” that leached off the good middle class citizens like my parents. And Jews constituted the backbone of the radicals who pushed those women and blacks who defied the praiseworthy efforts of decent white Christian men, that group which had written the Constitution and who rightfully and competently directed the direction of the American way of life. Some of these things were said openly and frequently. But all of them were evident in the makeup and policies of the community in which I grew up.

White male supremacy ruled the land, and that really meant rich white protestant man supremacy. It was impossible to miss the point that virtually all of the power and respect in the United States belonged to rich white protestant men. Law and history and custom and habit recognized just those as leaders and no one else. So any child born in Milledgeville Georgia whose Father fit that description was a fortunate one who would be nuts to want to belong to any other group except the one to which his birth entitled him.

And yet…

A child there was in the land of Georgia who was born a twin boy in a home not really a home at all. Mother fretted about the Father. Father we called daddy and Daddy drank too much always when he drank, and Mother scolded and feared he chased other women and sued for divorce long before nice middle class Southern folks did that sort of thing. And she must show in a court before a judge that he was unfit to be a husband, And she did that in the small town in which his family was prominent and where the boy and his brother were very young and frightened. the boy named for his Father’s Father loved the Mother, and the boy named for his Mother’s Father loved his Father. And the boy who loved his Father was me.