Addressing our Anti-Semitic Reality

These have not been two optimal years for Jewish Americans.  Hatred of Jews as people who stay separate dates back perhaps to Pharaoh, who addressed his perception of our communal power by implementing a slavery system, one created by our own successful immigrant ancestor Joseph.  Most of our history has us as a successful subset within a larger dominant population.  We created internal institutions in response to our circumstances.  Places of worship, a religious court system for internal disputes, economic wealth, enduring literature, effective educational systems.  Selected individuals or families would periodically gain prominence amid the majority culture.  But we experienced expulsions and massacres when prevailing cultural values shifted.

While America affords Jewish people our free exercise of religion, recently individual intruders have entered sacred spaces or targeted individuals at worship.  My congregation, and most others, have entrance monitors, often in police uniform, limiting access.  Doors are heavier, reinforced, and fitted with locks to enhance security.  We have had drills during worship, guiding us through a safety procedure for an active assailant.  When I travel, I email my intent to attend a synagogue as a visitor.  I miss the more open-door era, one where a synagogue welcomed all comers without challenge. Though my personal encounters as a Jewish target have been nil, I know people who were victims, including the doctor killed at Tree of  Life.

The American Jewish Committee released the results of its survey on anti-Semitism, seeking opinions of Jews and a broad representative sampling of Americans.  I was one of the Jews surveyed.  I do not recall my individual responses. There seems to be not only more American anti-Semitism, but it has been repackaged as anti-Zionism. And they know who the Zionists are and how to recognize us.  Have I ever personally experienced an incident?  No.  Or really Not Yet.  Do I behave differently?  In a minor way.  When I keep my tallis bag on the back seat of my car, I place it with the Jewish insignia side face down on the cushion.  Anyone passing by can only see a maroon velvet pouch.  I still wear my kippah wherever I want.  While I conceal my tallis bag to protect my insurance carrier, who would have to pay a vandalism claim, I do not hide my person.  If I need to wear my kippah, indeed want to wear my kippah, I do it without reservation.  Most of my sports coats have a lapel pin with American and Israeli flags adjacent to each other.  I've never been challenged, even at receptions where people in the gathering might start taunting me if I wore the same jacket to a university campus.  

I adamantly control my social media platforms, divesting myself of most of them.  As I try to be helpful to the participants of the r/Judaism forum, younger people post their own harrowing experiences pretty much daily.  They know no life without Facebook and its competitors.  Divesting carries a price for many.  Or maybe Twitter is the new nicotine, an intervention designed by experts to create and exploit addiction.  None of this will predictably ease off.  "Doc, they are tormenting me.  They have to change."  The introduction to many a Dear Therapist query.  And any skilled psychologist would advise that you only have the ability to change how you respond.  The discussion in the Jewish community has shifted to a blend of personal responses and communal responses to an adversity that, over a short time, has established a measure of predictability.

Our advocates exist, amassing ample resources and expertise.  I attended a local seminar, a class for seniors via Zoom at my state university.  The guest speaker was the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.  As she used her time to extol her organization's legacy and educational efforts to minimize anti-Semitism, two questions from the electronic audience stayed with me.  One viewer asked something to the effect of, "if you are so good at this and have been doing it for a hundred years, why haven't your results been better than what we encounter?"  Her agency and another of similar mission had each named new directors.  The previous CEOs had been statesmen of long tenure.  The new heads came from Democratic Party high profile backgrounds.  A Zoom viewer asked her how that shift from diplomacy to political bona fides had changed the agencies.  She did not have an answer to either question that would satisfy a room of retired successful professionals and executives.  Maybe they aren't so good at it.  Maybe our philanthropic representatives have tunnel vision.  Maybe they own the approaches that created their comfort zones.  That online meeting took place during the Covid pandemic, 2000 when people could no longer meet in a classroom or auditorium, places where we could poke the guy in the next seat to express our skepticism as the speaker displayed her Power Point Slides.  In the ensuing five years, we are now back in person, to be harassed as Jews even more mercilessly, both in person and through our electronic global media.

People in that audience and much of the American Jewish public have been through college.  We took courses in psychology and sociology, some requiring independent term papers.  Many of us have careers where we had to assess what the public might find appealing and what they would reject.  We assess efficacy commonly in our business activities, the medicines the doctors among us prescribe, how well our elected officials perform.  Failures and rebound are part of our experience, part of Jewish communal resilience that we grasp as our heritage.  If pouring massive donor funds into educational programs leaves us worse off, it does not take a lot of saichel to explore other options.  But that might mean schecting some very Sacred Cows.  One that cannot be removed is the centrality of Israel to our Jewish narrative.  It appeared in our daily prayers for all the centuries when we lacked sovereignty.  With sovereignty, we made that territory prosperous.  Ownership cannot be negotiated away.  Conquest has been attempted.  We not only have economic prosperity through effort but and effective military as a high priority of that sovereignty.

As Americans, we watch mostly from afar.  Like the Israelis, American Jews have built an imposing presence from very little, but mostly through a combination of staying within the bounds of American rules.  NY Times editor Bret Stephens recently offered an assessment of the situation.  In his highly publicized presentation, he basically advocated writing off the anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QMTjVuo9dE  The communal parallel to putting our own masks on first in popular American travel culture.  We've already done the experiment.  Major cities have hospitals with Jewish names that medical students rank as top choices for their residencies.  They exist from an era when Jewish doctors of similar talent could not get appointments at the flagship university centers.  Our mega law firms carry the names of Jewish founders, as do brokerage firms.  People seek out entertainment of Jewish creation.  Cities have Jewish museums, or even secular ones with wings named after Jewish donors.  His theme, we have the talent, we have the track record of offering opportunities to Jewish people when others begrudged us.  More controversial than strengthening our own offerings to our people, was his suggestion to use the resources from ineffective, futile efforts to marginalize anti-Semitism through public education to expand our own communal growth.

Are we ready to write off our most enduring advocacy groups as ineffective?  Perhaps not.  While anti-Semitism in America, from tacit slurs to deadly shootings, has not disappeared, it was also those agencies that helped bring us entry beyond the niches we created for ourselves into the mainstream.  Jews have representation today in those academic centers, international corporations, and private clubs that once impeded our access.  Making anti-Semitism disappear through education may be a financial boondoggle.  Keeping us mainstream and prosperous, the people that other groups may envy as they promote their own prosperity gospels, still has immense importance.  Making Jew hatred less publicly acceptable remains a laudable undertaking.  Holocaust programs in public schools, Jewish donor names on cultural magnets, and public rallies have not accomplished this.  One track might be to see what efforts have better efficacy.  Faculty at several highly respected universities now have departments that study which initiatives have the most impact.

Ultimately, The Times editor set a correct priority.  The successes that Jews have had in America came from projects of self-help.  Seminaries, summer camps, Jewish schools from pre-school to university, synagogues based on denominational structure, publications of superior quality issued to Jewish audiences, Workmen's Circles at a time when Jewish laborers had vulnerability.  Some thrive today, others succeeded so well as to make their continuance obsolete. He suggested day schools as a foundation, which nobody would dispute.  But within the structure that we have now, a Big Tent model, not everyone finds a welcome.  We have significant attrition, too much of it for adverse experience or other cause.  We have to take great pains not to target our own as expendable, or worse, unworthy. 

What the editor did not include in his remarks is the untapped public goodwill that already exists.  Isolation with internal development offers a lot, but partnerships need a place in the communal agenda.  Can we make anti-Semitism crawl back under the rocks?  Our global platforms, where any malcontent can post with little adverse consequence and find adherents in the thousands makes that unlikely.  Refocus our resources, for sure.  Treat everyone as valuable no matter how challenging, a bit more of a project but within possibility.  Think fundamentally differently than a one-hundred-year ingrained legacy, big challenge.  Possible, high payoff.  High priority.  

Driving Through Neighborhoods

My town doesn't really have neighborhoods.  There are areas with expensive homes, others with marginal housing and crime.  We have a shell of a downtown.  But homogeneity rules.  At one time Jews lived in one place, Italians in another, African Americans of all incomes largely together.  We have largely dispersed, with enclaves notable primarily for housing prices.  Our major employers have succeeded in creating ethnically diverse payrolls.  We do not even have a dominant university where young adults cluster.

Visiting family in Pittsburgh a few times, taking a tour by bus, and now driving around to get to different places around town, my impression is very different.  My family lives in a once run down area being revitalized, but still with a ways to go. The main street, where I have walked and driven, contains small businesses.  After a meal out, I counted places to eat over each of three blocks we walked returning to the house.  The tally:  5-8-4.  All these places are small, no chain franchises.  Each restaurateur must have a dream of creating something from scratch.  None seemed to be magnet eateries attracting guests citywide.

Pittsburgh has lots of schools.  The closest to where I stay is Duquesne, a Jesuit university which I visited by walking tour.  Not an enormous number of kids out.  I went to the bookstore where I purchased a souvenir mug.  Then I walked past classrooms, their relatively new Osteopathic Medical School and affiliated hospitals, probably some dorms and an athletic complex.  Squeezed in were a city fire station and an aging red brick church of uncertain denomination.

After returning to my hosts, I had an event to attend in Squirrel Hill.  This section remains predominantly Jewish, both by residents and by institutions.  My route took me past three large synagogues, including the Tree of Life Building, where a massacre during worship occurred in 2018.  It had construction fencing around it.  The other two congregations have massive buildings, cramped grounds.  In Squirrel Hill, I drove past two Jewish Day Schools, a Mikvah, two start-up Orthodox synagogues, but no hangouts.  Housing appeared mostly single-family with two-story masonry, many fewer driveways than I would have expected, and some light shopping at its perimeter.  I encountered almost no pedestrians.

My hosts recommended lunch in a section known as Shadyside.  Restaurants and specialty shops without national franchises re-emerged.  Few driveways but a city parking facility nearby, as street parking took me a few blocks to find.  The place we visited for lunch has a specialty cuisine.  At noontime most tables were filled by young adults.  I found the housing more mixed.  Apartment buildings and houses subdivided for tenants seemed to dominate.  The buildings seemed worn but rehabbed.  Few yards.  Essentially no litter.  And no pedestrians until arriving near the two business streets.

Driving to my host's house took us through a few more places.  Carlow University I'd not heard of before but we drove past an impressive campus center.  The University of Pittsburgh is well-known.  They have a spiring tower at its center but hoards of young people in hurried transit at noontime on a Friday.  Big football game there the next day.  A little farther took us past the synagogue we would attend on Sabbath, the current home of Tree of Life.  It had a cathedral appearance.  As a Reform Temple, its members had no reason to walk from home on the Sabbath but those living within easily walking distance occupied mansions.

For Sunday, my hosts wanted to shop for baby clothes at a thrift store.  Getting there from their South Side neighborhood brought us through two tunnels and up hills with tricky driving curves.  The housing seems more spread out, likely a place where members of the United Steelworkers lived.

Downtown I saw only from the car, but tall buildings marked its place.

No doubt, places I did not drive past would house people like my wife and me.  House with two-car garage and driveway.  They must be there, maybe outside the city limits.

Pittsburgh's leaders seem to have thought their future through a little better than most city officials.  I don't even know where the steelworks once stood.  Perhaps even a few still do.  Yet in the absence of a primary industry, I saw elements of commerce, hi-tech, a food industry, medical centers to match others across America.  Places seemed crowded, some quite worn, but with little neglect.  A Jewish enclave remains recognizably Jewish.  A major and secondary universities teem with students.  Big Box stores did not clutter the city landscape.  A city of character attracting people of character.

Pick One

The more preferable of two goods.  In an electoral world of objectionable choices, this one seemed welcome.  Two invitations arrived by email, one directly with ample notice, the other in a more backhanded way on much shorter notice.  Neither anticipated.

First, a program on addressing anti-Semitism to be held at the Museum of American Jewish History on a Wednesday evening.  The topic interests me, though as an American, my Jewish identity has been mostly secure.  A few snide comments by fellow university classmates along the way, but no personal threats, or even limitations.  Yet, the past several years have added to my exposure.  The physician gunned down at the Tree of Life massacre I knew well in college.  On a trip to Pittsburgh to visit family, I reserved a Saturday morning to worship at the repackaged Tree of Life Congregation.  Four years later, it was no longer the multiplex of several simultaneous services in a single building.  The survivors assembled as a single worshiping community in a rather opulent space, part of a more cathedral-formatted Reform synagogue.  The President introduced himself to me as a visitor.  No one else did.  They still spoke of that fateful day, after four years, during their Dvar Torah discussion.  

The Monsey Hanukkah attack enabled me to generate an essay for our local Jewish magazine.  I knew the geography well.  I kept up with its transition from secular Jewish of my childhood to the Haredi dominance today.  Animosities are understandable.  They seem more generated by the experience of proximity and negative consequences for a secular minority than to scripted anti-Semitism.

I've had minor interactions with Islamic anti-Zionism repackaged as a form of negative transference reaction to American Jews like me committed to a vibrant, secure Israeli nation-state.  There seems little role for education where people are pre-scripted, yet that has remained the focus of our own legacy advocacy agencies.  Protective, enforceable laws and an unequivocal national policy with minimal wiggle room seem a better option for keeping everyone safe.  Some, however, rationalize the compromise of physical safety in the guise of free expression.

While this forum took some planning, and I am grateful for the invitation I received, I never received a formal agenda.  The session had been assembled by an educational institution of Jewish auspices, but I did not know whose presentations I would hear.

On much shorter notice, a brief mention in the weekly OLLI newsletter that arrives by email every Monday morning disclosed that Robert Putnam would be speaking at the University's main campus at a time that largely coincided with the Jewish event.  Like many others, I have held this Harvard professor in high esteem for a long time.  In addition to becoming thoroughly engaged as I read through his landmark book Bowling Alone, I've had occasion to hear him speak.  He came to my town about five years ago.  I paid $30 for seats in the auditorium, along with a minor parking imposition.  He did not speak about Bowling Alone, which I had read maybe three years earlier, but about his latest work focusing on childhood poverty and economic inequality's harmful effects that pass down through generations.  As compelling as his presentation was, the benefit to me came afterward.  The Delaware Community Foundation, which sponsored Prof Putnam's appearance, set up tables in the foyer outside the auditorium.  They had representatives recruit those in attendance for the many ongoing projects that the Foundation oversees.  I expressed interest in reviewing scholarship applications.  Once signed on, I remain active with this project.  Each spring for five years, I review some twenty-five applications.  Some come from high school students seeking assistance with college.  Others originate with people already attending medical and law school, needing some relief from tuition and loans.  Along the way, I've made a couple of friends and offered suggestions that get implemented for subsequent years.

This time Bob, which is what the Professor likes to be called, has a new book and a Netflix movie called Join or Die.  I got to this in a very indirect way.  After supper, I often retreat to My Space, where I watch YouTube videos.  I particularly learn from Rev. Dr. Russell Moore, who produces a new podcast on modern evangelical Christianity each week.  His podcast usually interviews authors of new books with a social message.  While the host is an Evangelical, though one who has kept his distance from the political alliances of the Christian Right, the people he interviews originate in many backgrounds, including Jewish.  He recently interviewed Bob Putnam, a show I had to watch.  When Bob told Russell his brief bio, he noted that as an undergrad he took a liking to a sweet Jewish girl of the opposite political party who sat behind him.  They went on an outing to the Kennedy Inauguration.  After graduation, they married, he converted to Judaism, and more than sixty years together brought them an expanded three generational family and shared professional accomplishments.

After the interview, I watched the Netflix movie, taking three sessions to match my limited attention span.  Only after seeing the movie, did I notice the OLLI announcement of his visit.  I contacted the University sponsor, which offered seats in the rather limited auditorium for my wife and me.

Which to attend?  From a content perspective, I think my prior fondness for Bob Putnam's insight and my appreciation to the Delaware Community Foundation for welcoming me as a participant gave them an advantage.  So did my wife's interest in accompanying me to that event.  Logistics cannot be discounted either.  I've been to both the National Museum of American Jewish History and the University's Trabant Center in the past.  The University placed its parking garage adjacent to this student union where Bob would speak.  Some traffic anticipated, minor annoyance registering my car and paying the fee at the garage kiosks, but just a minor stroll from my car to the event.

Philadelphia requires more planning.  I have an unlimited transit pass and the event planners made provisions for use of a garage a block or two from the museum.  To get there and back by public transit, I would have to take light rail from a station near my home, sit on the local train for multiple stops comprising a little under an hour, then transfer to either the city subway or bus to the Museum.  The driving option would require me to deal with some city traffic and with a significant diversion from the interstate to city streets before accessing the garage, then walking as darkness approaches going and fully established on the return.  The light rail schedule would leave me with either slack time with an earlier train or a rush with a later one, then return well into the evening.

Both content and logistics favored Prof. Putnam.  That's where I went.  He gave a suitable presentation.  At the end, I got to ask him a question.  I also got to greet the CEO of the Delaware Community Foundation to remind him that Bob's previous presentation connected me to his agency.  Some light snacks at the end with small talk with a contemporary who I had not met previously.  Then uneventful drive home.

I made the right choice.

Immersed with Others

My personal interactions have seriously atrophied, maybe even dangerously atrophied.  Partly retirement which took me out of circulation, but not exclusively.  Covid isolation made a significant contribution.  While OLLI and much of the rest of the world compensated with Zoom offerings, introducing some outstanding exposure to people of professional prominence not previously available to me, they could not duplicate those personal interactions that occur in the lounge sipping coffee.  As our masks got set aside, other people became better able to venture in public places, though not yet returning to baseline.  

With this paucity of personal contacts, made worse by not only excessive screen time but by the moguls of cyberspace interactions and idea exchange who devalued our need to connect in a meaningful way to sell us things instead, I am very much among the many who recognize isolation, loneliness, and languishing.  While FB brings me to Friends, some real, some an illusion, I signed myself off for the month of July to escape much of its toxicity.  As I return in a more cautious way a month later, the distribution and frequency of who posts what, or at least what their algorithm approves for my passive feed, has not changed in a noticeable way.  I had one real meeting with one real friend in NYC that month after paying long overdue respect for people to whom I was once close at a cemetery just outside the city.  Visited my son and daughter-in-law.  A few real chats competing with screens, along with a shabbos morning at Tree of Life Synagogue's current reality.  Shared remembrance of one of the victims with the congregational president was my only meaningful personal interaction that morning.  And my synagogue, which should be my principle weekly outlet of personal contact, has largely trivialized it with its perfunctory "good shabbos, nice tie" as the surrogate for floating ideas about Judaism or about events of the days that preceded shabbos.  

This past week I selected my OLLI courses using their new flat fee, unlimited course registration format.  I targeted only classes that meet in person without a Zoom alternative, making an exception for one half-term course given from downstate by an instructor who did an ace job last time.  Talking heads gone.  What has not returned post-pandemic, though, seems to be those small in-person discussion based sessions, limited to an enrollment of under twenty.  

Could I even retain the skill now to immerse myself with others, particularly strangers?  That got tested yesterday, demonstrating that not only I could but that it restored a personal feeling of having meaning.  I volunteered to check people into on-site OLLI registration, even though I really didn't know how.  This being the final day, nobody showed up, which left me with two other volunteers.  We talked about OLLI, food, inflation, doctors.  All the things that would have made chat in the OLLI lounge between classes, and hopefully still can as on-site enrollment ticks upwards.

Then I went to Sprouts, not my usual store but the best option for premium produce.  For practical reasons I checked out in the line with a cashier.  It had been my custom when shopping in large places to opt for self-checkout where there is usually no wait and I sense control that I don't have to defer to a cashier.  But this time, having somebody else do this, even if the only interaction was to tell me the total, seemed preferable to being totally on my own.

After a couple of months away from the Blood Donor center due to a setback in eligibility, I self-treated the problem while I await formal medical care for it and wanted to see how successfully I did this. Over the years, few things have given me more satisfaction than my periodic platelet donations.  In addition to benefiting somebody I will never meet, since retirement this has become among my most reliable social interactions, even if limited to 6-8 week intervals.  Each time I am greeted, then interviewed, and if my Hb> 13g/dl I am taken to a reclining chair where ladies, or rarely a gentleman, insert two IVs, takes samples to assure safety and future eligibility, then leaves me alone to watch Netflix with occasional returns to check my progress or reset their collection device when an alert appears.  I've done this frequently enough that some of the veteran RN's know me by name and face.

I passed screening this time.  IV's inserted, Queer Eye video started, but afferent IV failed.  Donation aborted, as they are only permitted to reposition an aberrant IV line, not repuncture the skin.  Still I had a pleasant few minutes in the post-donation canteen with some diet Sierra Mist and two chocolate chip cookies served by that room's volunteer.  I could have gone to Costco's or Cabela's instead but decided to just go home.  Having left my cell phone in the car for the donation, which also serves me as an escape from being reached or being lured to cyberspace, I returned to my car to find a message from the last remaining first cousin with whom I maintain contact.

We mostly share my late father as our common bond.  He lives in Florida now, not far from Dad's resting place which I'd like to visit not too many months in the future.  Modern cars now allow me to talk safely with the cell phone via audio boost from the car, so once in the optimal lane on the highway, I returned his call, really needing only a finger or two to do this.  We spoke about platelets, our doctors, his intraocular injections, retirement activities, general chat that too often eludes me.  We agreed to do our best to get together when I travel there, which gives me a significant incentive to complete my airline and hotel reservations, starting with specific dates.

Our Torah text begins with a lot of It Was Goods.  There aren't too many It Was Not Goods, being alone perhaps the most famous of the few.  While I cannot realistically return myself to a daily pageant of circulating among throngs, I can reduce screen time, be more personally assertive when OLLI resumes next month, target a new place to be with people I've not met before each week, or make an effort to invite myself onto the blood donor schedule as my eligibility allows.  As my home reaches its suitability to entertain guests, I can be more consistent with invitations.  Being back in circulation in a serious way yesterday, after a substantial absence, reinforced the benefits of this, and its personal importance.

Massacred

I've never known a terror victim before, or even somebody murdered on the street.  Along the way patients, mostly minorities from the cities, have related a child or other relative who had been murdered, though I never knew one personally.  Shootings are common, appearing in the news pretty much every day.  Terrorist explosions have become all too common.  But those are other people with names, with families, but known personally to other people.

An old friend from college, however, became the first for me, a victim of a mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue where he attened Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation that rented space in the building.  I suspected it might be him as soon as the names with ages were released the day after the assault, confirmed within an hour or two.  Jerry Rabinowitz, UPenn C'73/M'77 had been my friend in college for four years.  We served together on the freshman rowing team, both as coxswains, he departing wisely at mid-year when the coach had a hissy-fit and made us all run beyond our reasonable capacity.  Jerry went on to excel at his studies, gaining admission to UPenn medical school and then settling in Pittsburgh as a primary care physician.  I would learn from the tributes and more formal obituaries that he got in on the ground floor of managing AIDS, being among the first to introduce anti-retroviral medicine as it became available to those with low CD4 counts.  We lost contact, and when the photographs appeared in public media, I probably would not have recognized him in a social situation but the identity would click in a minute or two with name tags at a UPenn event.  I remember Jerry as kindly and maybe somewhat direct in our conversations.  I do not recall him going to shul or having a girlfriend.  I cannot even remember for sure his major, though I think it was biochemistry as we shared classes into our junior or maybe even senior years.

Forty years of separation can be reconnected up to a point in an obituary.  He had only been married 21 years, he served as a pillar of the Reconstructive synagogue that rented space where the massacre occurred during shabbat morning worship.  In doctor fashion, his first inclination was to attend to the wounded in his presence.  His mother and his in-laws survive, though he had no children.  Some relatives, likely on his wife's side, had made Aliyah with many characteristic Israeli names among the survivors. 

For a while, I considered driving to Pittsburgh for the funeral.  That was not to be, as I had a deadline project that would delay travel and unknown to me, the funeral took place this morning, the first set of funerals for four of the eleven murdered.  I just could not have gotten there.

Does knowing a victim change how a mass murder of this type registers?  I do not know yet.  There is the function brain part of me that is well aware of targeting of Jews through history, whether by spontaneous pogroms, pre-meditated Holocausts or inquisitions, assassinations targeting individuals, or terror attacks where randomness that creates a who's next is integral to the plan.  The hatred that drives this is never rational, but there is usually an agenda from not allowing Jews who Islamists regard as dhimis from owning land to diffusing perceived economic power, to keeping the Church free of non-believers.  While murder usually gets condemnation, at least in America, the underlying desire to identify an external target to avenge one's social travails, often does not.  That's where we seem to be now.  Prosecution of perpetrators does not stop this.  Elections sometimes do.  We have an opportunity for this in just a couple of weeks.  My friend Jerry's shooting was random, but indirectly enabled.  It has to be disabled and I am optimistic that enough people will have connected to this to make for a return to some of the decency that America's electoral leadership has not seen as important enough to protect.