I spent a few days in the Boston area with my parents this week, and at one point as we turned a corner in Brookline, my mom said, "there's my elementary school." Proud of myself for remembering a detail from her childhood, I piped up, "The Devotion School?" Not anymore, mom told me. Turns out Edward S. Devotion, who died in 1744, had not only donated his remaining wealth to build a school near the center of a town once called Muddy River, but had among the inventory of his estate "one Negrow" valued at £30.








Brookline was ahead of the national reckoning currently underway that has doomed statues of slave owners including Teddy Roosevelt; raised anew concerns about men honored my alma mater, Yale University, as well as Columbia; and, as Talya Zax reported this week, even called into question the name of Missouri's largest city, St. Louis, because of the anti-Semitism of the French King Louis IX. Brookline's "town meeting," an olde New England form of local democracy that still governs the left-leaning and heavily Jewish suburb, voted 171 to 19 in May 2018 to remove Devotion's name from the school, where John F. Kennedy was also a student (a few years before my mom).  This fall it will be renamed for Florida Ruffin Ridley, one of the first black schoolteachers in Massachusetts and a suffragist who edited her mother's newspaper, called Women's Era. 

I'd never heard of Ridley -- nor of Ethel Weiss, who owned a local toy and card store, or Robert Sperber, a former Brookline school superintendent, the two other finalists in a process that considered more than 100 possible names. I realized I also new nothing about the background of my own elementary school in neighboring Newton, Mason-Rice, so I looked it up: David Haven Mason was a U.S. District Attorney under President Ulysses S. Grant, sat on the Massachusetts Board of Education, and served in the state legislature; Marshall Spring Rice was Newton's town clerk for 27 years. They lived in the 19th century, after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. Phew. 

What's in a name? The last time I asked that question in writing was when my husband and I  combined our surnames in 2006. "It's just a made-up moniker, but it is made up of our commitment to equality , with a nod to family history and a dash of out-of-the-box creativity," I wrote then of our having taken the first three letters of his father's name and the last four of my father's to create our new family moniker. "Most important, it is a name we share and will share with our potential offspring. To me, there is no sound as sweet."

The act of naming things for historical figures -- and, especially, erecting monuments to them -- seems inherently fraught, since we humans, even seemingly heroic ones, are so inherently flawed. The tearing down of such monuments feels satisfying but is also fraught -- are we erasing not just the history of that flawed hero but of the fact that some later generation felt compelled to honor him (yes, it is virtually always "him")?  Our contributing columnist Ari Hoffman wrote powerfully this week about "the idolatry of smashing idols," one of the stories, along with Talya's about St. Louis, that we've pulled together for you in a PDF you can download or print via the blue button below.
 

Also in there is the first column by our new food contributor, the Israel chef Erez Komarovsky, about the amazing breads he has been baking with leaves and flowers from his garden, profiles of fascinating Black Jews in Chicago and Los Angeles, a searing essay recounting the racism one mother felt around her biracial family, and the triumphant tale of how two teenage trolls took on President Trump's Tulsa rally. 

This week we also had an amazing Zoominar on why Yiddish songs are so popular now (watch the video) and debuted a new YouTube series of Yiddish yoga (try it here). And over on Urban Archive, we're celebrating the start of summer with a trip to "the poor man's paradise" -- Coney Island.  Coming up, I'm hosting "A Jewish conversation for Pride Month" at 12:30 p.m. EDT on June 30 (sign up here) and, in conjunction with the Jewish Week, and An Exit Interview with Amb. Dani Dayan on July 8 (sign up here).

By then, some more statues will likely have fallen, some more names changed. I wonder whether Brookline's future students will learn more about Florida Ruffin Ridley than my mom did about Edward S. Devotion or I did about Messrs. Mason and Rice, which is to say: nothing. And I wonder whether Brookline's interim solution of calling it simply the Coolidge Corner School, after its neighborhood -- or one alum's suggestion of keeping just "Devotion," after the principle not the person -- might not be a good guide for how to avoid the danger of idolatrous impulses in naming public places and institutions going Forward (see what I did there?).

Shabbat shalom, 


Jodi Rudoren
Editor-in-Chief
rudoren@forward.com