User:Alexevasion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In order to get a sense of who I am, you need to understand my social background. If you don't care or don't have time to find out where my people come from, you can skip down this page to just the details of my own life - which I think has also been very interesting thus far... My name is Alex Goldman and I was born on September 28th, 1982 in Charelston, SC.

The biggest consolidated chunk of my ancestry is Ashkenazi Jewish. My father descends exclusively from Jews who eventually found their way into Europe after being scattered them far and wide from the Middle East. These are the only kinds of Jews most Americans know. However, there are other distinct groups possessing the common Semitic gene and religious beliefs that have very different physical features, histories, languages (Yiddish, Ladino), and traditions. However, despite my stereotypical Jewish name, my heritage is paternal, the wrong side in the ancient tradition, making me gentile in all but the most reformed temples. This is due to that Old Testament kind of insecurity about women having sex with men other than their husbands and thus being unable to guarantee a baby is really fully Jewish unless the mother is Jewish. So, because of the Jewish emphasis on genetics (God’s “chosen people”), I would have a tough time getting Israeli citizenship or marrying an Orthodox Jewish woman with her family’s blessing.

Furthermore, my parents gave me no religious teaching when I was young and I was neither baptized nor bar mitzvahed. All that I know about religions tradition comes from my own investigation, which has led me to a very interesting place in which I feel no real allegiance to one particular faith and possess equal parts limited knowledge on a vast variety of religions. Still, my name and “halfie” status don’t give the full picture of why even quasi-Jews like myself seem and often feel like a distinct population. It isn’t genetics – keep in mind that the different Jewish peoples look different because to a significant extent, they interbred with the populations of the geographic regions they settled in. Like African Americans, this was probably not by choice most of the time, but by force – rape/coercion of a subjugated people. The Jews really did have a tough time, whether it was the Egyptians, Romans, or Europeans providing it for them. However, I am very reluctant to say that they fared worse than other displaced minority populations with distinct racial and cultural traditions – like the gypsies. It wasn’t just Europeans who gave them rough treatment either; they had much the same problems in the other places that they settled. I’m also not exactly sure what makes minority groups like this cling so fervently to their beliefs – often its because the majority group won’t allow them to integrate, assimilate, and interbreed but there are many examples like the Jews who have kept themselves largely, if not totally separate up until modern times despite the terrible consequences that this entailed.

The plight of the Jews in Europe is over a thousand years long and includes many instances of expulsion, terrorism, discrimination, and genocide. This happened in different places under different circumstances. Sparing the particular dates and atrocities, suffice it to say that Jews were always second class citizens ripe for scapegoating anytime the opportunity presented itself to the Catholic Church, the nobility, or disgruntled peasantry. However, my Russian and German Jewish ancestors lived very different lives because they came from both Eastern and Western Europe, places where Jews fit very differently into the social order. In neither region were Jews allowed to live or work in the same places as Christians, so segregation (as always) bred like resentment. The historical link of Jews to finance is a due to the fact that usury (the lending of money at interest) is forbidden in the New Testament which such that a strict interpretation of the Bible would allow only Jews to cash on profits that immoral to Christians.

Wherever it seemed Jews might be granted basic inalienable civil liberties by sympathetic rulers, like in Germany during the early 20th century, there always was a backlash that led down a nasty road to renewed genocide. This happened every hundred years or so throughout Europe and the Middle East, but especially after the failed revolutions in Central Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848. My German Jewish family come to America and brought over all their close relatives from Europe before WWII, but I am certain that there were many distant cousins in both the East and West who perished in the Holocaust. Although leaving under different circumstances, my German Jewish ancestors only beat my Russian Jewish ancestors to America by a couple of decades.

Though violent animosity towards Jewish populations consistently happened from the time of the Crusades onward, it was in Eastern Europe that Jews suffered worst. There, a stable merchant and financier class was never really allowed to develop, and the already poor Jews was terrorized throughout the 19th century by pogroms led by disgruntled peasantry, but fully sanctioned by the czar and local elites. Their homes were burned, possessions looted, women raped, and men killed. Entire communities were wiped out in the kind of despicable rampage Americans associate with incidents like Rosewood. The violence was worst in Southern Russia, Poland, and Romania, but similar incidents occurred anywhere else large Jewish communities existed. The May Laws were passed by Czar Alexander III to make life impossible for Jews in the Russian empire, banning them from both rural and urban areas and placing strict quotas on how many could be accepted into higher education and professional institutions. This propelled the mass emigration of over two million Jews between 1880 and 1920, among which were my great grandparents.

My Jewish family settled in New York and Boston. My paternal great grandfathers managed to work their way up from immigrants to business owners – one started a holiday greeting card business (which ironically did most of its business at Christmas) and the other became a real estate manager. What is perhaps most impressive about Jewish culture is their commitment to education. I am a third generation college graduate in my family, though the first to attain higher degrees. While known mostly for their entrepreneurial acumen, they are incredibly well represented in creative and scientific pursuits, far beyond their notably small share of the American population (about 2% total). Jews represent almost a quarter of all global Nobel laureates. Furthermore, despite their highly publicized successes, Jews have remained notoriously liberal since their days as sweatshop factory workers organizing unions to their staunch support and participation in the Civil Rights Movement. I recall my grandmother telling me a few weeks before she died how while she was enrolled at NYU she had secretly voted for the Socialist presidential candidate against the advice of her wealthy father.

While there are no incredibly successful or famous people in the Goldman family, they are all turned out well educated and cultured. My uncle Richard writes movie scripts in Los Angeles and my uncle Donald consults on digital archiving of national libraries while living in Paris. My paternal grandparents led long lives mostly free of serious disease, but they did suffer some anti-Semetic discrimination in their early lives. Despite the fact that they were educated people from well off families, many residential areas, professions, and organizations were still closed of to Jews. My grandmother complained bitterly about the way the Red Cross treated her and other Jewish wives during WWII when my grandfather was serving as a navigator in the Army Air Corps. My grandfather still states that he wasn’t able to enter medical school because he was Jewish. Still, my dad grew up in a big house in a nice integrated suburb north of NYC and attended integrated public schools and got a college degree at Ohio Wesleyan University.

My mother’s paternal grandfather was an Armenian immigrant to the United States who left his home country in the 1890s. A rise in Armenian nationalism at that time coincided with the waning power of the Ottoman Empire. As it collapsed into factionalized infighting, certain leaders lashed out against the Armenians and began first with political persecutions and killings in 1894 and escalated to full scale genocide and deportation that eventually killed over a million people. It was the first mass genocide of the 20th century and foreshadowed many of the techniques that would be used in Nazi Germany, including concentration camps and the use of religious animosity between Muslim populations throughout the empire and the majority Christian Armenians. Being Christian and light skinned helped my great grandfather as an arriving immigrant and he found his way to Louisiana where he would eventually own a farm employing mostly black tenant farmers to work the land. I am unsure of where or how they met, but he married my great grandmother, an Irishwoman whose family likely emigrated in the mid 1800s during or after the potato famine and English imperial policies had brought the country to ruin.

My Armenian grandfather owned a small plantation estate in Louisiana during the early 20th century, complete with black tenant farmers and the like, but committed drunken suicide one night by parking his car on the railroad tracks. This incident coincided with the Great Depression ruining the agriculture in the region and his death left his wife and child poor. My grandfather grew up fairly poor in a shack located in the small bayou town of Berwick, Louisiana after the depression ruined the agriculture business in the region. He did a little shipbuilding before WWII and joined the army at the onset of WWII. He was assigned to help smuggle weapons and supplies to Sweden in order for them to maintain their neutrality and fend off German advances. This position led to a long career as a Foreign Service officer.

He married my grandmother in Sweden and my mother, the first of three children, spent her life moving around to different geopolitical hotspots in places like India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Mexico where her father handled sensitive government affairs. My grandfather eventually got some cushy assignments in places like Switzerland, Israel, and Barbados. Both his early childhood friendships with the children of black farmers on his father’s estate and his later life travels contributed to him being a very tolerant man for his day, allowing my mother to date Asians and Hispanics in her teenage years. My grandmother was a secretary in Sweden when she met my grandfather, and she never worked again after getting married. When my mother was growing up, they lived only in poor countries. Thus, even on a government salary, they were always able to afford to keep multiple servants in residence with them. This gave my grandmother more time away from household. Her last child, my uncle, contracted Polio in Malaysia and was severely handicapped. My mother was expected in her late teenage years to take up most of the childrearing responsibilities (especially for her brother) of which her mother had grown increasingly less fond. She attended school at the American School in Geneva, Switzerland (the birthplace of the International Baccalaureate program) and returned to take care of her brother and sister in the summers when her parents took vacations together. As is common in families where the oldest child is female, her mother called on her to drop what she was doing to come home and take care of her siblings even up her college days at LSU. Since her father was paying and responsible for getting her secretary work at the UN in the summertime, she had little choice but to abide by her mother’s wishes. The last time she came home to help, she decided to quit school and become a flight attendant for Pan American Airlines. Though this went expressly against her father’s wishes, her entry into the workforce gave her freedom from familial obligations. That was a very good job for women at the time (not anymore) and my mother qualified mostly on the basis of her looks and her fluency in English, Spanish, French, and Swedish. Her mother died in 1975 from breast cancer (possibly related to heavy drinking) when my uncle was only ten years old. My grandfather later remarried a woman from his hometown, moved to a Washington D.C. suburb, and became a born again Christian like her in his old age. He died in 1998 from esophageal cancer linked to liquor intake and resultant chronic indigestion that eroded his throat lining.

My paternal grandfather was a B-25 navigator in the Army Air Corps during World War II and flew bombing missions against Japanese forces in Burma (now called Myanmar). His father was a Jewish real estate broker in New York City whose company still operates today under the guidance of my great uncle’s children. He married my grandmother before enlisting to fight in WWII and returned home to work in her families comparatively larger and more lucrative greeting card business. She was raised in luxury as the beloved only child. They lived well even during the Great Depression and her father had the foresight to stockpile large amounts of liquor before prohibition to supply their numerous house parties. She remembered her fondest times as those days she spent at the seashore with her friends and extended family. Her gifts for swimming and diving were complemented by a degree she earned at NYU in the late 1930s. Despite all these privileges, perhaps the most impressive thing about my grandmother was that she never worked a day in her life. Thirty years of marriage and three children led to a nasty divorce that I understand advantaged my grandfather more – he had boats, motorcycles, and horses to entertain him in his midlife crisis. She moved to Florida and lived out the rest of her life in a decent condo overlooking a par 3 golf course while my grandfather slowly squandered away what was left of the family fortune with extravagant travel, multiple homes, and even a yacht called “The Golden Mistress”. Needless to say, he had been a quite a philanderer for a number of years. Eventually, he exhausted his cash pot and retired to live off various wealthy girlfriends. At least he was good at sports and women – business never seemed so important to me, but it was to his children. For this reason, he had a very estranged relationship with my father until they reconciled when he came to see me as a young boy. It wasn’t so much about the loss of money, but the shame of being somewhat responsible for mismanaging and eventually ruining a business that had been a significant source family pride. Both my grandfather and my father have a knack for ruining relationships. When the get upset, even about things that seem very unimportant to others around them, they tend to yell, call people names, and say incredibly nasty things that lead people to strongly dislike them. My grandfather lived with a woman that I adored for a long time in Michigan, but a few years ago, they had an argument and he actually kicked her. Then she kicked him out, ending that chapter in his life. My father’s family participated in the flight to the suburbs in the 1950s and was raised as one of three boys in the family who grew up in the New York suburb of New Rochelle. My father played lots of different sports, attended the local public high school, got bar mitzfahed, and led a life as comfortable and perhaps more uncomplicated than my own. He got his bachelors degree in economics from Ohio Wesleyen University (a school his mother chose for him) and came back home to work in the family business – starting out loading trucks and moving up into production and management. He worked there for nearly a decade, but eventually lost his stake when it dissolved under internal and external pressures in the early 1970s. He met my mother, then a Pan Am stewardess in New York City a few years before this happened. His unemployment thus gave him the opportunity to travel around the world a couple of times for free with her. My mother always told me the main reason he wanted to get married instead of just indefinitely cohabiting (like I’m doing) was so that he could utilize the spousal travel benefits that her job provided.

My mother's grandmother came from a Swedish family that has some royal ancestry dating back quite far and strangely enough, including some Basque nobility as well. They owned a significant portion in Stockholm in the late 1800s, but the patriarch's drinking and gambling decimated this fortune. Many people on my mother's side of the family have had problems with alcohol and mental instability. The geographic and cultural climate of Sweden is highly conducive to alcoholism and continues to be today despite the outrageous price placed on liquor by the national government. My maternal grandmother's uncle was a skilled musician and won the Swedish Eurovision song competition (sort of like the musical Olympics for Europe though more overtly political) in the 1970s, but eventually he died a hermit; it was months before anyone discovered his body rotting in his apartment. My mother always spoke fondly of her Swedish grandfather, though she reported that he treated his wife like servant and to her disgust, would snap his fingers at her instead of asking to pass plates at the dinner table. My mother was born in Stockholm, but was shuttled all over the world as part her father's Foreign Service career, she ended up speaking a number of languages: Swedish, English, Spanish, French. However, she dropped out of college at LSU to work as a flight attendant for Pan American Airlines for a dozen or so years. She met my father while she was based out of New York and they got married a couple of years later. In the late 1970s, my father got a chance to set up and run the American branch of a Dutch office supplies company called Kores in South Carolina and he and my mother moved there, effectively ending her career since there were not a lot of big airline hubs nearby.

Shortly after I was born, my father had to get serious heart surgery (cigarettes, fast food) after which he bowed out of his executive position in the company. We moved in 1989 to Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, a nice upper middle class resort community with a great school system. We lived in a fairly large house in a gated community with a pool in back. I spent my childhood less than a mile from the beach involved all kinds of recreational pursuits like surfing, skateboarding, rollerblading/hockey, golf, tennis, and getting into trouble with neighborhood friends that were almost always older than me. My mother was diagnosed with cervical and lymphatic cancer in 1992 and suffered heavily from the surgery and treatment for the rest of her life, making both of my parents significantly handicapped healthwise. Being the only child, I grew to dislike the constant presence of my parents at home and their mostly undivided attention to me. Part of this was due to their dual early retirement and to their dislike for one another. My mother developed lymphoma in her legs which took away her youthful attractiveness and resultantly she blamed my father for not loving her sexually or emotionally. They fought a lot and my father was almost always the aggressor and more emotionally abusive party. I remember especially hating my middle school years because it became more apparent than ever that I was young and immature for my grade. I got beat on by the bigger boys and none of the girls were interested in me.

Perhaps because of my alienation, I became a very rebellious young teenager mostly through participation in the drug subculture. My two best friends and I got arrested for trying to shoplift almost a thousand dollars worth of Christmas presents at the mall when I was 13 to save money for drug transactions. I had lots of lesser run-ins other with the police and other authority figures during the next few years. My dad threatened to send me away to boot camp or private school a lot, but he never did. I foiled one attempt at privatization of my schooling by writing an entry essay on how I learned not to mix rum and orange juice. I spent these years getting respect by using and selling relatively soft drugs and constantly getting high on marijuana. I snuck into weight lifting classes at my school to get bigger and be able to intimidate deadbeat clients. I listened to hip hop for streetwise education. I became a decently profitable businessman, but I did get ripped off and beat up occasionally. I had a lot of dealings with really shady characters in Jacksonville Beach who helped me stay supplied. This was about the only interaction I got with lower and working class people in my childhood. My high school was public, but it was one of the best in the state, which was another reason I escaped private school. There were very few racial minority students and the students came mostly from upper middle class parents. Still, I managed to get in trouble there as well and I dropped out of the IB program because I strongly disliked most of my classmates and their academic ethic.

I never could make the varsity golf team at my high school, probably not due to drug use, but to my hometown having the nation's highest concentration of golf courses and the huge pool of talent that came with it. This probably represents my greatest personal failure. I did however, manage to occupy the fifth spot on the varsity tennis team, but this was mostly to fill a spot for extracurricular activities on college applications. At age 16, I became bored with drugs and got increasingly interested in nonfiction books and magazines. I worked as a golf cart attendant for two years and as a beach rentals attendant for another year, earning the best wages of anybody my age at both jobs. I learned that I really do like simplistic hard work more than most people with my class background. This made me hate my parents’ choice to not work at all even more. Indeed, I actually started occasionally applying myself a bit in school. I liked the interesting classes that my school offered as electives: psychology, sociology, theory of knowledge. I liked to argue with teachers and classmates. While many of my friends from the beaches continued down my former path, becoming lifetime violent drug abusers with blatant sexists and racists, my life took a different turn. Still, I found myself remaining loyal to them and occasionally caught up in their personal troubles. To my joy, my father moved out of our house in my junior year of high school and my parents divorced soon after.

My senior trip was to Cancun, Mexico and while I hated the superficiality and costliness of the club scene, I did get a chance to experience first hand how poor people really lived. I remember accidentally taking the bus in the wrong direction and winding up in the neighborhoods where the resort workers actually lived. I was shocked at the shacks and mud huts just a few miles from huge high rises and expensive restaurants at the shore. I remember shopping at one of the local trinket markets and seeing effigies of a man who I did not recognize at the time, but later understood to be Che Guevara. When I got home, I researched his life and read some biographies on him from my local library. I became impressed and committed to doing something about the terribly unequal and unfair world around me. I came to the University of Florida in the Fall of 2000 and immediately became very involved in a small leftist circle of friends and activists around campus. I participated in the small riot in Washington D.C. during the 2000 presidential inauguration in the anarchist black block. I attended many protests during that first year of college, but I became quickly disillusioned with that particular subcultural scene. I found them to be locked into meaningless moral debates and concern with political correctness than with actual tactical strategy. Also, while visiting a friend in Chicago that winter, I had the eye-opening experience of being arrested for trespassing in the city’s worst housing project when I simply tried to walk through in order to see for myself what life was like for residents. I began living in my girlfriend’s small non-air conditioned dorm with her roommate and eventually her roommate's boyfriend as well. During the summer of that year, my friend Maggie and I hitchhiked from Florida to Maine and back, stopping in the major cities on the Eastern seaboard, staying with friends and family in some places, meeting new people in others, and occasionally sleeping on rooftops when we had no other option.

In 2002 I started taking graduate classes in the Sociology department as part of their BA/MA program. I began my undergraduate scholarship with a study of credit card debt and financial competency among students at UF. I wrote my honors thesis on trying to apply a Scandinavian cohousing housing strategy the New Everyday Life (NEL) to disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States. In the summer of 2002 I traveled to Mexico for two months to improve my Spanish and tour Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Mexico City. In 2003 I became active in trying to enrich the youth program at my local community center, located in a predominantly African American neighborhood. I had the opportunity to co-teach a 3000 level section of American Families in the Spring of 2003 and integrate a service-learning curriculum into the class involving the curriculum at the community center. We enacted an action research program attempting to involve local residents in the activities there. I ended up writing my Master's Thesis on the experience and the policy implications of my findings. My mother died of alcoholism-related liver disease on August 23, 2003. I really never knew she had a drinking problem until the year before her death, but I didn’t do much to stop it even when I did. My father still lives in Jacksonville beach with his long-term girlfriend and I enjoy visiting his home and my old friends on occasion.

I attended the anti-Free Trade of the Americas Agreement (FTAA) protests in Miami in November 2003 as part of an ethnographic research endeavor and was for the first time both tear gassed and shot at repeatedly by the largest and best organized protest policing operation in history (now immortalized as the Miami Model). However, it was not so much the state repression, but the overall ineffectiveness of the protest/activist subculture which continued to intrigue me most. The next year, I got the opportunity to observe the rise and fall of a really well intentioned subcultural organization in my neighborhood called the Community Cafe, which allowed me to connect some of the sensitizing concepts I had developed in Miami to more a more local setting. My girlfriend of five years and I spent the summer of 2004 taking an extended graduation trip for three months in Europe, exploring alternative means of tourism by riding bicycles, camping, and staying with people we met through accommodation-sharing sites on the internet. In August 2004, I began teaching Principles of Sociology at UF with a class of 60 students. In the summer of 2005, I taught an upper division course in social inequality. My teaching philosophy is built on discovery based learning, a model many students have difficulty fully appreciating. However, to my own credit, I have recognized that I put more time and effort into my classes than anyone else in my department. Also, that summer I became a certified yoga instructor and started teaching classes at UF gyms almost every day of the week.

My PhD topic has yet to become crystal clear, but I have a number of converging interests. I fear the ultimate effects of rising levels of unsustainable resource consumption. This trend is most pronounced in developed nations like our own, but perhaps the larger problem is that the lifestyle fueling the flames is quickly being adopted in the developing world via cultural/economic imperialism. Global biological and atmospheric processes are being affected in unprecedented ways by human forces. While this system has in the past proven itself quite resilient, it cannot maintain the equilibrium that sustains our life if its fundamental processes are significantly altered. We don't seem to know much about what shape this the potential realignment will take or how it may affect humankind, but most people are content in marching towards answering that question in the most uniformed and dangerous way imaginable: trial and [perhaps fatal] error. For a more popularized and toned-down cautionary report, see the Millennial Ecosystem Assessment. Most of all, I find consumerism, today's opiate of the masses and chief economic growth stimulus, is to blame. However, one cannot really question consumerism without questioning the fundamental logic of capitalist economies and the value systems they bring with them. This line of inquiry quickly becomes very theoretical and unhelpful for resolving the dilemma at hand with anyone outside of academia. So, I hope to ground this discussion in contemporary social behavior patterns and particularly innovative organizational forms. The three main conceptual arenas I am working in to further this discussion are community, consumption, and social movements.

I am interested in the strategies of contemporary groups and organizations that use value rationality (as opposed to pure instrumental rationality) to fill niches in mainstream market/state institutions and decommodify important social processes. All of my research interests and life ambitions revolve around the idea that alternative social structures can offer a way for individuals to be more empowered to make more ethical and more enjoyable choices in how to live their life: online accommodation sharing systems, the Community Cafe, social science wikis, cohousing communities, my work at the neighborhood community center, my cooperative business objectives, etc. Moreover, I believe these examples are indicative of a countertrend turning our society away from homogenized daily life in a mass society that the economic dictates of instrumental rationality forces upon us. I am interested in how people creating and marinating these various social innovations understand their relationship to this larger social trend. It is also important to understand how these organizations compare and contrast with the three big contemporary American subcultural social movements of Punk, Hip Hop, and New Age, which have been mostly co-opted and assimilated by the same market forces they originally sought to oppose. Grasping this larger conceptual underpinning will be key to my ability to understand, as well as effectively advocate and strategize for the burgeoning anti-consumerism/connected lifestyle movements, which I am committed to making much more prominent in the near future. I would like to do the majority of my dissertation research as a traveling investigator seeking out more organizations of this type and witnessing on a first hand basis their everyday operation and lifestyles of the people most committed to them. I hope to eventually make this evolving project available in multimedia formats so that it may appeal to a wider range of audiences than it might if it was kept it in a strictly academic research form. This will involve both web and video documentary components, both of which are indispensable in trying to reach out to a large number of interested individuals in today's media dense environment.

In the later days of Stalin, soviet propaganda used the term “rootless cosmopolitans” as a euphemism for Jews because outright racism was forbidden. I hope to fulfill this mandate by reinvigorating that lifestyle using my social privilege as a rich, white, English-speaking male. I find my sedentary life and its accompanying routines to be less than fulfilling. I also notice that I consume more junk and meet less people when I have extra space to do everything independent of others. I have continued to upgrade my standard of living since my days in crowded dorm rooms, but I think that I am consistently less happy than ever before. So, when my PhD coursework at UF is over in May 2006, I hope to embark on a long journey of rootlessness. I want to live, work, and learn while being on the move. I believe the growing digital infrastructure and my affinity for doing more and having less makes this not only possible, but advantageous. I hope to travel from place to place spending no more than a few months in any city either domestic or international, doing my research and working wherever I can. Maybe I'll find a place and/or people that I just can't bring myself to leave, but it won't be about money or fame - it'll be about making a positive difference. I am working on building an organization to help me use my inheritance from my mother to locate, fund, and consult for groups who are pursuing the kind of projects I think will be essential to envisioning and creating the kind of world humankind must move towards. Keep in touch and I’ll let you know how all this works out…