much of my time, religion and race took a backseat to top-notch journalism. But while I had friends who were not Jewish, my contacts with black students never evolved into friendships. For example, I worked with Adele Logan, a Radcliffe student from a prominent black family, when I directed Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul for the Harvard Opera Guild, which I founded with a couple of other students. Many of us who worked on the production became friends, but Adele, whose choreography on some very difficult scenes was wonderful, vanished the instant the final curtain came down. Never once had we talked about anything personal. We literally did not discuss anything that did not have to do with the opera. Considering that The Consul was about resistance to post–World War II totalitarianism, a discussion about race could well have come up. But it didn’t, as neither of us tried to navigate the racial waters that separated us.
Only on the fringes of campus life was a transformation detectable. A handful of students were strumming guitars and talking about things I didn’t study at Harvard. One conversation in particular that I recall was about the legendary singer Bessie Smith, who died after a horrible car accident; it was said she was turned away from a white hospital in the South.
“At a hospital?” I asked. “Did that really happen?”
“They let her die outside the door,” I was assured. “The same thing could happen today.”
I didn’t know whether the story was accurate. But it made me think. Stories were coming out of the South about lynchings and how segregated everything was. I remember lying in bed replaying what I’d been told about Bessie Smith. The Hippocratic oath was ignored. Those doctors let her die, and for no other reason than the color of her skin. It boggled my mind. I wondered if the Southerners I had known at Culver would have let that happen. On and on these thoughts rippled out, troubling me. The doctors had to know it was wrong. But I don’t remember connecting it to myself, or thinking about how my family treated Bill and Lorraina. Back then, their smiling faces and healthy looks covered up what I would later see as a connection.
The story of Bessie Smith, ironically, was where any similarities between being a Jew and being black in America ended for me. I was sure those same doctors would never leave me to die on the steps of a hospital, just as I was fairly certain that I could look at more or less anyone I pleased without being lynched. This was America, not Nazi Germany.
After college, anti-Semitism was rarely an issue for me, although I did have a passing incident where racism touched me. After graduating, I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in Texas as an army officer for six months. Then, I worked in the theater before law school, and I lived in New York City. These were all places and, with regard to the military, a station in life, where anti-Semitism was not overt—or at least not to me. Race, however, was different. When I was stationed at Fort Sam, I attended an integrated dance somewhere off base at the edge of San Antonio and quickly learned a sharp lesson about the South. There was a local law, I was told later, that said you couldn’t drink past midnight on the day of a local election, and there we were drinking past midnight. I was outside the dance hall when the cop cars came roaring into the parking lot. Standing by my car smoking a cigarette, I remarked to an approaching cop, “That’s the biggest flashlight I’ve ever seen.” He punched me in the face, and I spent the night in jail. The cops must have known that blacks and whites were dancing together, I thought. But being white and an officer as well, I was released the following morning.
* * *
Back in New York City, it seemed that many Jews thought another Holocaust could strike us at any time, even in America. But I rarely gave that a thought. Every now and then I would read in the newspapers about Jewish graves and temples being desecrated in Brooklyn. For me, however, such events seemed to occur in a different world.
Slowly, however, thoughts about race prejudice were penetrating my thinking. Southern school-integration struggles and lynchings would be on the news, and I would tell friends the story of being slugged in Texas. But day