A FORTY-YEAR OLD TALE OF MY OWN “PROFILING”

At the outset, let me make clear that this is not a missive about “who’s got it worse.” The discrimination that Jews have suffered here at home, however egregious, holds no comparison to that of African Americans, from slavery, to Jim Crow, to racial profiling. As a product of the Jewish upper middle class, though, I cannot resist relating my own experience with “profiling” – at least in an attenuated sense – however like or unlike that of Henry Louis Gates.

Four decades ago, I was one of the protesters who marched through the streets of Chicago during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention, albeit that I was pretty clean-cut and respectful, as befitted a yeshiva bochur (orthodox Jewish seminarian). In the convention’s aftermath, I attempted to attend the equally infamous Chicago Seven trial, at which leaders of the protest were tried for everything from disturbing the peace to sedition. The mood was, as one might expect, a frenetic, highly-charged mix of courtroom angst and countercultural buffoonery.

A spectator’s seat was nearly impossible to procure, but I waited my turn and was seated for an afternoon session. I remember dressing neatly; appropriate to the behavior of a yeshiva bochur, down to the yarmulke (skullcap) I always wore back then, a mandatory sign of devotion of the orthodox Jew to the One Above.

Upon being called to order, courtroom-tension as thick as ever, a marshal pointed to my yarmulke and signaled to remove it. I moved to the aisle to explain.

“Take off the beanie.” The marshal was adamant.

“It’s not a ‘beanie.’ It’s . . . “
My explanation was cut ominously short.

“I said, take off that beanie.”

But, giving me no time to either explain or remove it, he wrenched my arm and pulled me out of the courtroom, where a marshal grabbed me under the other arm and dragged me down a hall. At this point, I remember being only too willing to walk under my own strength, but every insistence just ratcheted up the dragging.

“Should we arrest him for ‘disorderly’?” one barked at the other.

“Too much trouble,” the other answered.

With that, they threw me in an elevator and boxed me into a corner. When we got downstairs, they slammed me against a wall and threw me through the door, warning me to “Get your ass out of here, and don’t come back, or you don’t know what hell is.”

The story made a box in next morning’s Sun-Times. I heard that Abbie Hoffman, the clown-prince of the conspirators, shouted out in open court, “It’s a shondeh for the goyim (a shame for the gentiles)! They’re taking a yeshiva bochur away!” for which he was cited for contempt.

That is the kind of tale you tell your grandchildren, worn like an achievement badge or a pair of tix to Woodstock – the day that Zayde got roughed up by the cops. Can you imagine that? Zayde? Truth be told, though, except for an occasional brush with low-grade anti-Semitism, I have lived a charmed life in which the cops have been my friends and no one has demanded that I remove my “beanie.”

But my 40-year-old singular experience with thugs-at-law is also a cautionary tale. It means that estrangement from basic justice and the presumption of innocence, the violation of personal integrity and decency, are an ever-present danger to anyone who dares to be different – much more so by dint of the color of ones skin.

So you see, once upon a time, decades ago, I lost my own presumption of innocence to the profile of a timid, nerdy yeshiva bochur, just trying to explain that my “beanie” defined whom I was. Is it that too much unlike Professor Gates defining himself by the color of his skin as a source of pride, not shame nor suspicion?