On Multiculturalism

Me. At the Grand Opening Party of the Ko Shing Rice Shoppe in Chinatown, Manhattan, in 1976

By now, the dust is settling on a disturbing incident that took place in late April in a public elementary school in the Birmingham, Michigan School District.

I am sure you heard about it, and I will get into it more later this week, but to sum it up, a parent in the school district on what should have been a positive learning experience about different cultures allegedly thought she could best “rep” Middle Eastern culture by scattering around stickers among the display tables that contained language like “Fuck Zionism,” “Occupation is Not Freedom” bordering a picture of the Palestinian flag and worst of all, an image of an assault rifle resting on what appears to be a page of newspaper print, with all Arabic writing in black on top of a matting of blood red.

Local government officials, including Jewish ones, the local Jewish Federation, and the Michigan Anti-Defamation League have all sounded off, met with school officials, and are not allowing this incident to be quickly forgotten once the news cycle moves on.

For the long term, there seems to be growing interest in a free course entitled “Zionism, Antizionism, & Living in the Modern World as a Jew or Ally” that will be taught by a highly qualified mediator and academic from MSU’s center for Judaic Studies who is steeped in the practice of conflict studies, civil discourse and interfaith dialogue.

I hope that those outside of our Jewish silos sign up, especially the alleged woman in question who thought it a great idea to bring those stickers into an elementary school to represent her culture and the many on her Instagram page who cheered her on with likes and hearts.

But before I give you my take and analysis of the news of the moment in a future post, I thought I would offer some memories of what constituted multicultural education from the distant and recent past and what multicultural education is shaping up to be right now.

What is culture?

What is American or Western Culture?

Do we have the right and duty to preserve and protect it?

Tablet Magazine founder and editor ruminates on these questions by looking for the answers through a Zionist lens in the essay Zionism for Everyone. One standout thought from this essay: to know a country, a culture, is to know its sound and taste. Does it have a song, a sound, and a taste that is distinct from others?

Should countries hold onto their distinct cultures and not cede them to others, even as they welcome immigrants from other countries?

Growing up in Staten Island, my elementary school was mostly middle-class and mostly white. The “diversity” in this class could be described as such: There were Italian and Irish kids, or Italian/Irish kids, or kids with Polish, Scandinavian or Greek backgrounds. I was one of the few Jewish kids who passed for white. My Christian classmates could not understand that – no - I did not believe in Jesus Christ or Santa Claus. And for a few years, that’s as far as it went.

There were a few kids from more recent immigrant families. They included kids from families who were from India, Pakistan, Korea, China, or Taiwan.

I distinctly remember going to play at a friend’s home who lived within walking distance from school. I was asked by her mom to take off my shoes when I entered their home, and was given a pair of slippers. That’s how I began to learn about Chinese culture.

Then, I would visit my friend Maria around the corner, and her Italian family had converted their yard into a huge garden where they grew beautiful tomatoes. The first time I had Italian peppers on the barbecue was from our over-the-fence neighbor, Dom, who played Frank Sinatra on his radio all summer.

And these are memories of my multicultural childhood.

Growing up as a kid in New York City meant school trips to Manhattan. On one trip during elementary school, we explored Chinatown and Little Italy, two distinct lower Manhattan neighborhoods that backed right into each other. We went to the Chinatown Museum, actually, which was an arcade on Mott Street that existed from the 1960s to the 1970s, with its famous chicken that would play you in a match of tic-tac-toe and you could get some free fortune cookies as a prize if you won. It was Americanized Chinese culture at its finest.

Multiculturalism, when you were growing up as a Jewish kid in New York City, meant that outside of the cooking from my mom, aunts, and grandma, you could head out in the neighborhood to eat at the local pizzerias and Italian markets that made fresh-baked bread and fresh ravioli or stuffed shells that you could bring home in a box.

For something truly exotic, we went out or ordered in Chinese food.

Chinese food was a huge part of my Jewish American childhood.

This was the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a time when I lived near my grandparents and cousins and extended family who lived primarily in Brooklyn and Queens. And for some reason, all roads led to Chinatown.

On a monthly basis, we met friends and extended family at one Chinese restaurant, the long-gone Ko Shing Rice Shoppe. My grandfather knew the owner. We were often the only non-Chinese patrons in the plain dining room. My grandfather never ordered off the menu and just listed off to the many waiters who knew him what we would be eating. There were seasonal special offerings of dishes written only in Chinese that were taped on the wall. At the Ko Shing Rice Shoppe, I learned how to eat with chopsticks from one of the waiters. As kids, my brother and I would sometimes get invited back into the kitchen, briefly, to see how our food was cooked.

After dinner, we would sometimes wander around the narrow streets of Chinatown, where all the signs were in Chinese, live fish would swim in huge tanks, my grandmother and mother would go into one shop to purchase a new health food called tofu, freshly made on the premises. Sometimes, after dinner, we would go to nearby Mulberry Street to get a cannoli in Little Italy. And we did all this feeling not as Jews but feeling completely American, because to us, having Chinatown right next to Little Italy was one of the great things of being American.

Why am I telling you all this? Because this is the kind of American multiculturalism I experienced as a proud Jewish American kid that made me feel at home, safe, welcomed and never threatened.

As I wrote in one of my earliest Substack posts, my third grade culminated with a multicultural festival in celebration with food, dress, and hearing music from where we all came from. The United States was the great American Melting Pot. We may have come from different places, but as Americans, we ultimately share the same common set values and beliefs. Meaning, there was a time when the public-school education system served as the great leveler of society, the first exposure to American civics, history and life, when multiculturalism was taught as a way to show that there was exceptionalism in the values of American culture and not divide us into boxes of oppressor or oppressed.

In middle school, I had a great social studies teacher who began teaching about what makes a culture by sharing a story from his own childhood.

He was a kid growing up in an apartment building in Brooklyn in the 1950s. One day, he went to school and one of his classmates, a child of recent Italian immigrants, showed up in the lunchroom with a sandwich and a thermos full of red wine.

Because in Italy, that is the cultural norm.

His parents were called into school, where they were told that children drinking wine may be part of the culture in the country from where they left, but to be part of American culture, they must assimilate and not send their child to school with a thermos of wine.

To my teacher, this was a prime example, a lesson he wanted to teach us about how being American meant to assimilate into American culture and not expect American culture to accommodate to the people who were becoming citizens of it.

Going back to Staten Island now, there are still lots of Italian eateries and pizzerias around, but not as much as there used to be. Driving on the main strip, Hylan Boulevard, the Italian salumerias and other Italian markets and pizza joints of my childhood are being replaced by vast Asian vegetable and fish markets and, yes, some great Chinese restaurants, so there’s no need to make a trek into Manhattan anymore for great dim sum.

But traveling further down the Boulevard, there are other restaurants. One, a Yemeni restaurant, has bold Arabic letters written in the shape of a huge sword over its entrance, and the words “Resist for Palestine” painted on another wall.

That is not the multiculturalism that filled me with a feeling of being at home in the city my family called home for five generations.

Decades later, when my son was a high school freshman in 2018, the parent-teacher organization announced that they were putting on a district-wide multicultural fair with “inventions” as the theme. The voluntary event was organized not by teachers but by parents. Volunteers – either students or families working alone or in groups, were invited to pick a country and create a presentation that highlighted innovations and inventions from that country.

There was a sign-up spreadsheet so anyone in the district with the worksheet link would be able to see what countries would be represented.

Many countries, including many Middle Eastern countries, including “Palestine” were going to be represented. There were three separate displays for Syria, three different displays planned for India and Iran, and about four for Hungary, but no one had yet signed up for Israel, so you get the point. The rules were that flags were not allowed, but one could put up school-approved maps of represented countries.

And in this rule alone, one could see this being problematic. Outside of maybe the border between India and Pakistan, I can only think of one other region in the world, and one country in the world, where even a map with defined borders can be a triggering hot point of controversy.

And that country is Israel.

Seeking more volunteers to help me out, I posed the question to a local Jewish moms Facebook group to point out that no one had yet signed up to create a display about Israel.

Then a lively chat with dozens of comments ensued.

Parents from other districts offered to give me the materials that they created about Israel for similar events.

People offered to loan me their SodaStream machine, complete with inserts to make the fizzy flavored drinks, which never materialized.

Some Jewish moms said they were sitting this event out.

They said that the event was being mobilized by families of Middle Eastern countries who planned to hang up a map that erased Israel with “Palestine” and chose not to participate as a form of protest.

Some went as far as saying that the event was not appropriate for young children.

But if all Jewish families in the district stayed away and boycotted the event in protest, how would any families or any children learn about Israel, and know that this country, as tiny as it is, exists and has offered the world so much in its technological, medical, culinary and agricultural innovations?

So my son and I, set out to work on the project.

Actually, if we are being honest, it was me who did most of the work.

I created a presentation that included the usual suspects of Israeli innovation: the cherry tomato, drip irrigation, the swallowable PillCam, the many algorithms and software and technological innovations that have come out of the start-up nation.

I also crafted paragraphs that showed the multicultural nature of the Israeli people – how there are mostly Jews but these Jews have ties from all over the world and living with them are also Arabs who are Muslim, Christian and Druze.

I have to say, overall, participating in the multicultural night was a wonderful experience.

Sure, walking into the school’s enormous entryway where the fair was held, you were met with a huge banner that heralded the One Thousand years of the World of Islam, complete with a timeline of innovations from the Islamic world.

But the people who made it the most wonderful were the mothers who visited my Israeli table. And these people were women who were Iranian ex-pats.

Now in their 40s and 50s, they recalled when they were little, how, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, there was open business, trade, and cultural and academic exchanges between Israel and Iran.

“My father used to travel to Israel for business all the time,” one woman told me. “He would bring us back gifts from Israel.”

They expressed how sad they are that since the Islamic Revolution, all these ties and opportunities for cultural and economic exchange between the two countries have ended.

Now it is 2026. I wonder what these families and their children are thinking now about the war. Are they the ones going to protests and maybe waving the true flag of Iran, not with the IRGC logo but with the lion, and partnering with those waving Israeli and American flags? I sure hope so.

And now?

Imagine you are a Jewish elementary school kid in suburban Detroit who goes to a good school but there are only a few Jewish kids in your class. Since March 12, you cannot go to your house of worship because it was the target of a Hezbollah terrorist attack. Since March 12, you have had to go to Hebrew school in a different place, and your friends who are having their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs are having them in different synagogues or different spots around town because your Temple’s building was so badly damaged by smoke, water, fire and chemicals that it may not be useable until maybe the fall.

Then you go to a multicultural event at your school, a place where you are supposed to feel welcomed and safe and included, and you see a whole room for the “Middle East” where not only is Israel not included, but there are stickers with such hateful messages and words that should not be said or heard by anyone in an elementary school. And on one sticker is a picture of a gun, a gun just like the kind the terrorist was holding when he rammed into your house of worship with a truck full of flammable liquid and fireworks.

And even though the school principal said to the media that these stickers were not present before he signed off on the event during their final run through, somehow they showed up.

And even though they were quickly taken away, some kids did see them and that cannot be unseen.

And a whole school district, at least the Jewish families in the district, once again are rattled and unnerved.

And this is not a one-off.

There have been multiple, similar incidents reported across the country where one group (the Jews) was made to feel very uncomfortable by the presentation of another group.

And I’ll give you a hint: It wasn’t the Italian presentation.

In my next posts, I’ll share what is happening with pushes for multiculturalism in Birmingham Public Schools and then Ann Arbor Public Schools.