This post deals mainly with:

• dating

Last Tuesday, as I flipped between channels, I was endlessly enthused by the number of people over 65 giving live interviews on television, and the number of people of all ages invoking their parents and grandparents.

Seeing older people acting as crucial sources of perspective in an election year, not as cute and endearing characters led onto camera or into stump speech anecdotes just to win our hearts over, was moving, orienting, and a joy.

The names and faces flying through his head were Martin Luther King, President Johnson, President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, the “countless individuals that stood in those unmovable lines in Selma,” and those young people who gave their lives for the cause.

Before Tuesday, I had never calculated that my parents were 16 months old when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated - I had never integrated the timeline of Civil Rights history with the timeline of my family history…to figure out when it was that, as my father proudly reports, my immigrant grandmother passionately encouraged him to join the movement.

Last night I heard a lecture by Kenyan-born author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He said he remembered two things when the race was called last Tuesday. First, he imagined the first African captured and taken to America, and second, he remembered the story of an African-American man who, when Obama won the Democratic nomination, ran to the graveyard of his parents and grandparents. He had not expected or planned to do that, Ngugi recalled, but when the moment came, he just “wanted to be with them.”

In a way, I think we’ve all “run to the graveyard of our parents and grandparents” with this news in our hearts - in honor of them, in honor of those buried around them; out of elation, gratitude, and nostalgia; with questions; for information, confrontation, and celebration; to be sobered, to be reminded, to be made grateful, to relate the news, to receive an blessing, to herald a new day, to recall the old hours - just to spend time with the soil in that they were buried.

As Jews, we know that history is always relevant, reliving it an imperative, and as women, we can be confident that the stories less aired have just as much to teach. Maybe we, as a nation, are too scared to take the long (and wide) view sometimes, but a shared, popular, primetime willingness and excitement to do so is one of the lots of phenomena of this election that I hope sticks around through January and beyond.

–Anna Schnur-Fishman

Source: Election