Does the “Real Housewives” franchise have anything to tell us about American politics today? I have been pondering this question for a while, but my thoughts began to congeal this morning in a bit of a circuitous way. It all started as I was perusing the Christian Right websites, thinking about what to write for my weekly post covering the Christian Right beat.

A Student at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, from the college website

It was easy for the Left to be smug during the debate over violence in political discourse that opened up in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The days when violent discourse – and violence – were most popular on the Left are decades behind us, while the Right seems to be constantly ratcheting up the level of verbal violence. But we don’t have to draw crosshairs over opponents’ faces to turn them, rather than their ideas, into targets. Violent rhetoric may or may not spark acts of violence – but there is no doubt that targeting individuals rather than ideas snarls the debate on which democracy depends, and weakens the connection between progressive ideas and the generous, embracing notion of humanity in which they are rooted.

I learned the importance of speaking respectfully of and with those with whom I violently disagree from the most conservative people I’ve ever known personally: the students at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University who had visceral objections to my return to teaching as an openly transgender faculty member. To those most deeply identified with the homo- and transphobic strains in Orthodox Jewish culture, I was a walking billboard of sin and transgression – but no one showed me the slightest disrespect. Indeed, student after student responded to my presence by affirming, in lunchroom discussions, in webchats, in the school newspaper, that it wasn’t up to them to judge whether my actions constituted a sin. Such judgments were God’s business. Their business, as Jews and human beings, was to acknowledge that I was suffering and respond with compassion.

Let me tell you a story from the 1960s. As so often happened in those fabled times, students at a major university occupied the university President’s office to protest a war-research laboratory. After a few hours, the President appeared and said “Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. You have really performed a public service. This is what democracy is about. I am going to study this question now. Certainly, there will be reforms.” The students stood up and began to disperse. Then one of them confronted the President: “How stupid do you think we are?” he asked. The sit-in continued. I actually don’t know what happened to the lab.

When will Americans stand up and say to Obama, “How stupid do you think we are?” From the first moment that the demonstrations appeared, everyone knew that everything rode on the attitude taken by the American administration. Every word spoken by Obama, Biden, Clinton and others would be scrutinized as to how much of a revolution the Americans would allow. Of course, the administration has constantly revised its position so as to stay ahead of the demonstrations, and to give the appearance of supporting the aspirations for democracy and freedom that are so palpable and moving in Tahrir Square, but anyone who thinks that that public face represents the actual American maneuvering does not understand history.

As a very young person, the access that I was given to highly classified information was an awesome sign of trust and came with an awesome amount of responsibility. It also came with a lot of training, restrictions from accessing information unless I had a “need to know” and a lot of discussion about “what ifs.” It would have taken an unfathomable “what if” for me to even consider disclosing information to which I had access to the public, as PFC Bradley Manning is accused of having done.

If guilty, he will face severe punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Until he is tried, he deserves to be treated like any other prisoner facing trial, yet reports from his lawyer indicate that his treatment is anything but normal. I may not be able to stand with PFC Manning if he is, in fact, found guilty of leaking classified information, but I and others SHOULD stand up FOR him right now. Why? Read on!

Naomi Chazan (Photo by Patricia Smith Melton, www.PeaceXPeace.org)

Naomi Chazan, the former Meretz Knesset member who now serves as the New Israel Fund’s president, is in New York this week for an NIF board meeting. So I saw her twice this past weekend at shuls that I occasionally attend on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. First, she was the guest speaker in front of a standing-room only crowd at a Seudah Shlishit (the ceremonial third meal that traditionally concludes Shabbat with study).

An impassioned speaker, she surely left a striking impression for the moderately liberal Conservative-affiliated synagogue, Ansche Chesed. The audience was unfailingly polite and mostly receptive to her message, which contrasted the massive upheavals for democracy and human rights going on in Tunisia and Egypt right now (including spillovers in at least a couple of other Arab countries) with a contraction of democracy and civil rights threatening to take hold in Israel. Dr. Chazan spoke powerfully of a crescendo of legislation up for imminent approval by the Knesset which, for example, seeks to criminalize the act of mentioning the “Nakba” (the Arab term for the catastrophic events that occurred in their community during Israel’s war for independence), to investigate the funding sources of human rights NGO’s, to outlaw any kind of boycott, and to facilitate discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel in housing.

Still, the first questioner during the Q & A strongly dissented. He expressed alarm at the chorus of strident anti-Israel voices erupting at our university campuses, as well as other places. (He mentioned the late Tony Judt in this connection, overstating Judt’s ill-considered characterization of Israel as “an anachronism,” as if he actually advocated its destruction.) Dr. Chazan responded on the need to distinguish between reasonable criticisms of Israeli government policies and moves that seek to delegitimize Israel’s existence.

I have yet to meet a person who likes criticism. Instead, what most of us do is contract inside when we hear a criticism. Sometimes we respond defensively, sometimes we add the criticism to our pile of self-judgment, and sometimes we deflect and ignore what’s being said. In the process, we rarely manage to make use of the vital information and opportunities that useful feedback can provide: learning, better teamwork, or simply insight and understanding.

On the other end of this painful and familiar dynamic, it is well known that both in personal life and in the workplace most people dread giving feedback. Knowing how painful it can be for people to hear a criticism, and how rarely feedback leads to productive conversations or satisfying change, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that giving feedback can have beneficial consequences. Add to that how few people have been trained in concrete skills for giving usable feedback, and you get a recipe for disconnection, resentment, or teeth gritting when time comes for performance evaluations or less formal feedback giving.

And yet feedback loops are essential for any individual and group to function at full capacity and potential. Knowing how our actions affect others and the larger whole of which we are a part can support us in learning when and how to change course to contribute to others around us.

Since all of us need feedback, let’s take a look at how we can offer it to others in ways most likely to create the effect we are hoping for: increasing performance while building trust and supporting goodwill all around.

Fair comment today on Al Jazeera

I feel as if I know the young people who organized the demonstrations in Egypt. I am a Professor of History at the New School for Social Research, which has been connected to the forces of protest and revolt for almost a century. Begun by figures who were fired for speaking out against World War One, it welcomed refugee Jews from Germany in the thirties, sixties refugees and survivors, Samizdat East Europeans and Russians and intellectual avant-gardes. Today it has many politically-oriented students from Latin America, Japan, China and the Middle East. There is no litmus test, but the overall culture is on the left. Arendt, Foucault, Marx, Habermas, feminism supply the normal coin of the realm.

Last month I visited Ecuador. The occasion was a government-sponsored conference entitled “New Directions for the Left.” I had the honor of meeting many figures in the government. They reminded me of my students: young, smart, political, savvy. They are trying to build a government based on social justice, economic redistribution, recognition of indigenous rights, feminism and ecology. They identify themselves as a “new left.” In Egypt, of course, the mix would be somewhat different, with a strong dose of social conservatism at least, and a place for Islamism.

In 2008 I along with many other Americans hoped we were electing a President who could see the winds of change, and recognize that a new generation was coming into its own all over the world. At that point it was very hard to imagine that a young, educated African-American with a Muslim name could be anything but sympathetic to the aspirations one sees among youth everywhere in the non-Western world. That Barack Obama chose to identify himself with everything reactionary in American life, with the banks and the military, with the very forces that had put people like Mubarak in power and kept them in power for decades, this was a tragedy.