Peoplehood: Just Metal

By stern on January 28, 2012

A prelude in two parts.

1. Nathan Rapoport’s Scroll of Fire sculpture was the first sight I visited on my first trip to Israel in 1989. The part of the sculpture that resonated with me was the menorah representing the reunification of Jerusalem, the converse of the Arch of Titus in which Roman soldiers are carrying the same precious (in every sense) metal menorah away from the Second Temple (in the year 70) as a spoil of war. The long-standing history of the Jewish people in a piece of metal, carried out and symbolically returned.

2. Fast forward a few days – we had many discussions with local political leaders, those establishing new development towns, and homeowners who were required by law to build bomb-proof safe rooms, about “security.” It’s a term we toss around quite loosely in the States: we have home alarm systems, we lock our cars, we park in well-lit spaces and we affix “safely” to our wishes for driving, flying or even participating in weekend sports, all to build a sense of security from some well-understood threats of theft or recklessness. The Negev counterpoint: five or six times a month, a Qassam rocket carrying 20 to 40 pounds of explosives is fired from Gaza.

A rocket-proof bus shelter, donated through Operation Lifeshield.

Ten inches of solid concrete, or a two-layer steel roof with blast deflection is the bare minimum to sustain a nearby impact. There are warning sirens that sound as soon as a rocket launch is detected, and if you’re in Ofaqim or a nearby town, you have fifteen seconds to get to shelter – about as long as it takes to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in a clear voice. You wait for the ground-shaking boom that serves as a metallic “all clear”.

And now the story….

While we were walking around the Turkish fort in Ofaqim park, we heard a rocket launch siren. Without a single syllable of raised voice, with a calm and collected demeanor that has to be experienced to be believed, our Israeli group member walked us around a fort wall so we’d be facing away from Gaza – the safest aspect without an appropriate shelter. He said quite simply “We have a few seconds, let’s go.” My body reacted in the way it does when you experience severe pain – first the adrenaline rush, my limbs moved in roughly the right way, and then my brain began to process the potential for danger and my heart was racing. It was a false alarm; we hopped back in our car and continued on our way within a few minutes.

The propulsion end of a small rocket that landed near Kibbutz Erez, now used to hold a tiki torch

Now extrapolate my adult reactions to the children who live in Ofaqim, Beer Sheva and the towns and moshavim (farming communities) in between: they develop fears, they won’t go to the bathroom at night, they won’t sleep alone. This is a fact of life in southern Israel, where you wish for winter rain and get metal from the sky instead.

One of our group introduced us to Yaron Bob, an Israeli artist who collects rockets that have fallen in the Negev and turns them into pieces of art. His business, Rockets Into Roses, returns half of its gross to the local communities to invest in shelters. Once a rocket has detonated, we were told, “it’s just metal.” That statement took on a new meaning after personally hearing a rocket warning siren. Yaron’s work has an intense, visceral feel to it – his flowers and candlesticks are beautiful objects that are equally heavy and dark. Each flower is a single piece of metal, cut, twisted, bent and rolled into art. Yaron turns attempted destruction into an intricate scroll forged with fire.

It’s more than just metal – the Hanukah menorah I purchased from Yaron reminds me of courage, strength, bravery and of my newest friends who stand tall on a daily basis.

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Peoplehood: Carmel

By stern on January 27, 2012

It was windy on the mountain, windy enough that a small scrap of black plastic tarp was blown through the air, into my field of view, and over the top of the memorial. What a shame, I thought to myself, that the quiet, simple scene intended by the memorial’s artist was intruded on by construction leftovers. It didn’t shock me, though, as we had passed a chained-off gate holding a sign probably scolding us for entering the memorial before it was completed, although it was hard to get a definite read on the warning beause (a) it was in Hebrew and (b) was covered in mud from the many other pairs of feet that had the same idea. How very Israeli of us, I thought. No apologies or permission, just action.

Wind-swept trash and I do not agree very well. Between wearing glasses and having previous experiences with cameras meeting rocks that didn’t end well for the cameras, I wanted to get away from more lens-scratching, dust-carrying objects. I looked around for the source of the floating trash and as often happens in Israel, I found what I wasn’t looking for: the “plastic tarp” wasn’t man-made trash.

It was a rectangle of scorched bark.

We were at the site of the Carmel Fire Victims Memorial, a tribute to the 44 people killed last December: 36 Israeli prison service officer cadets, their commander, a 16-year old volunteer, their bus driver and two firemen. The tragedy started when the cadets’ bus was engulfed in flames by a fast-moving forest fire.

Carmel Fire Victims Memorial

The cadets’ mission: help evacuate prisoners incarcerated in a facility further up the mountain. Only three of the cadets in that class survived; the names of all of the victims are set at the foot of the sweeping, oxidized, natural steel arch that commemorates their service and bravery. You see a cross-section of modern Israel in the names: Biblical and modern Hebrew, Russian, Ethiopian (Amhari).

"Kiril", in Hebrew, one of the cadets killed in the Carmel Mountain fire

Prisoners in the Carmel Mountain facility are primarily “security prisoners,” a euphemism for those who have had direct involvement in the murder of civilians. Why did the Israel Prison Service strive, so hard, to rescue people who clearly placed no value on the lives of others? Walking through the memorial, I was reminded of the prayer we recite on Yom Kippur, “who shall live and who shall perish, who by fire and who by water?” It’s not for us, and not for those charged as guardians of other humans, prisoners or not, to decide through action or inaction. As difficult and emotional as it is to deal with a relationship in which there’s clearly unequal respect, that is the Jewish, and the very Israeli, lesson for the American visitors. To do otherwise is to emulate Pharoah in the story of the Exodus, hardening his heart to his treatment of the Jewish people. Marv Ross has probably never been quoted in Torah commentary before, but a lyric from his 1980 semi-hit “Harden My Heart” seems appropriate: if you go down that path, you “turn and leave you [them] here.” Israel Prison Services, the Israel Police, the Israel Firefighters and their families are to be commended for not turning away. The story we recite each spring reminds us what it’s like to be on the other side of such unethical treatment.

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Peoplehood III: Long Tail

By stern on January 9, 2012

Part of our pre-reading for the Peoplehood Project is Erica Brown and Misha Galperin’s Case For Jewish Peoplehood. While it reads at times like the condensed reading room syllabus for a survey course in sociology and religion, the authors make several forays into topics that remind me of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail view of disperse populations.

Anderson uses the long tail to describe distributions of goods that have a “head” – a few blockbuster, high sales volume but low margin products – and a longer “tail” comprising orders of magnitude fewer units of a correspondingly larger cardinality of product. Think amazon.com, where the Top 100 Book (or Electronics, or Toys) bestsellers represent the head, and the next two million books are the long tail. You can buy from either end of the curve with the same simplicity, and if you take the net profit returned (margin per item times the number of items sold), there’s a lot of money sitting under the long tail. Hard problem: how do you move demand from the head of the curve down the tail? It’s about recommendations, networked relationships, and establishing micro-niches.

There are the large, head of the curve things that define our Jewish context: Israel, holidays, bar and bat mitzvahs, the laws of keeping Kosher, even references to food like bagels. Peoplehood, however, comes from those contextual items much further down the curve. It’s nigh impossible to get people to agree on how to observe holidays, how, when and where to attend synagogue, and the degree to which you agree with the myriad policies and positions of Israel. Much easier is identifying ten or fifty much smaller, specific things around which we cluster our interests: Jewish basketball players or rock musicians, proper Yemenite schug, a particular liturgical melody. Peoplehood means utilizes the long tail in reverse. Rather than working from the big items down to the disperse population, the diaspora finds common ground and establishes a way to talk about the larger, harder problems.

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Networking Killed Kodak

By stern on January 5, 2012

I’m watching with both sadness and bemusement (perhaps the definition of schadenfreude) as Kodak limps toward bankruptcy. The company that gave us song titles (Kodachrome), vernacular (Kodak moment), iconic Olympics television ads, and made it possible for the consumer to chronicle his or her life is now about to end its own corporate lifetime. Disclaimers: Kodak was a customer of mine when I was at Sun Microsystems and Kodak sued Sun over some patents. I didn’t, and don’t, benefit one way or the other from this, but I’ve been watching this situation evolve since 1990.

The common wisdom is that digital photography killed Kodak. Digital images were the secondary effect. Networking was the primary. Kodak’s consumer business is about narrative: they thrived because people wanted to tell stories through snapshots of their lifes. The places I remember, to quote the Beatles. Kodak’s tag line was “Take Pictures – Further” for quite some time, a snapshot of both imaging and sharing the thousand words to do justice to the picture.

Kodak had the first digital camera (I had a consumer version of it; it used a floppy disk and took almost ten seconds per VGA quality image). They own a truckload of patents in digital imaging science, color science, and image manipulation. But their business model was predicated on taking pictures, having them developed, printed, and mailed to relatives in Iowa. It wasn’t just film; it was chemicals, paper, and the photofinishing “mini labs” that popped up in every chain drug store, camera shop and mini mall. As soon as that entire vertically integrated business was challenged by kids with smart phones posting pictures to Flickr, Photobucket, and now Facebook, the consumer business entered its denouement. Doesn’t matter that Kodak invested in Ophoto for digital image sharing, or that they make a really nice waterproof digital video camera. The higher end camera companies were able to continue to push professional grade innovation down into the consumer space, and for hack photographers like me, better glass and effectively zero cost of “wasted frames” meant that I began taking many, many more pictures than before. Every picture I take goes into an email, through MMS, up on SmugMug, or onto Facebook. Kodak adds no value to those processes, so I became a Kodak non-consumer.

Kodak bet against networking. Their business model was not predicated on telling analog stories using digital images. Adobe (Lightroom and Photoshop, not to mention the rest of their suite) and Smugmug (for high volume sharing and archival) represent the endpoints that Kodak could very well have defined had they bet that broadband networks would be cheap, ubiquitous and intimately attached to the vast majority of imaging devices (read: camera phones). They would have created a vertically integrated value chain from image capture to context (borders, ribbons, tags, clean up, editing) to archival to personal narrative. It’s not just the consumer business — Kodak also had a large medical business (X-rays and medical films). If you’ve read stories about remote radiology or remote diagnostics, you’ve seen how networking and digital imaging conspired against Kodak there as well. Both aspects are necessary; simply having great digital imaging but no networking capability means you’re making analog prints and using FedEx as your network layer to get a second opinion.

Moral of the story: You can’t stop Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law from disrupting businesses. If your business model changes as a result of netowrking, you need to figure out how to deal with it. Once the publishers realized that amazon.com is a re-intermediator, not a dis-intermediator, and that building marketing, pricing and distribution relationships with amazon.com would actually increase sales of their entire front and back catalogs, they survived. Everyone who had a Brownie camera, who waited patiently for the fat picture envelope to return from Rochester, New York, is a bit sadder that the Kodachrome is being taken away.

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The 2011 List

By stern on January 2, 2012

I never published “a list” last year, and probably for good reasons – 2010 was a rough year. Little did I know that 2011 would be even more strange, with higher highs and lower lows, another ten or twenty decibels of emotional dynamic range. In an effort to at least put a stake in the virtual ground with respect to one of my 2012 resolutions, and to tie up 2011, here’s a list:

Family Moment: Not what you might expect, but having my entire family safe and sound in Jerusalem, when the #71 bus we had been riding earlier in the day was destroyed in a bus station bombing. Shock, fear, powerlessness, anger, relief, and lots of love in the space of about 35 minutes. Tie for second place – moving our daughter onto the University of Pennsylvania campus to start her college years, and seeing our son named to the All-Essex Conference Second Team offensive line.

Work Moment: Starting at Juniper Networks, I faced a fairly steep learning curve of networking protocols, industry standards, and internal code names. After a few months of non-recreational reading, I had a conversation with one of our senior engineers who specialized in network modeling, and we covered graph theory, network protocols, and bin packing algorithms in a conversation in which I finally felt that I was able to hold up my end. Thanks, Chris.

Reading: I’m declaring a tie between the ghost-written Clarence Clemons autobiography “Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales” and Michael Kardos’ “One Last Good Time”. Both reflect a bit of Jersey life as seen through the last-summer spray that blows off of the ocean; both are full of fictional amalgams. And I miss Clarence Clemons.

T-Shirt: “Dr. Fluff’s Powerful Pills” shirt that I bought at a Phish show in June. In addition to being an amazing show with great friends, the shirt has enough subtle humor in it to make me laugh repeatedly, and remember the start of another one of ten true summers (bonus points if you get that reference, too).

Email: Seamus Burke asked me to co-write the foreword to Volume 2 of “Oh, Goodie” in print. Incredible awesome.

Nerd Toy: USB oscilloscope. Very useful for debugging guitar pedal problems. Probably the same quality as the old HP scope that I used in the EE part of my undergrad days, with multiple trigger options, plus the ability to save waveforms in image form to view on your laptop.

Thoughts for 2012: (1) Write on self-imposed deadlines. From blogs to emailing friends (more than requests for things I’ve forgotten) to working on one of three book ideas, it’s mental exercise. (2) Exercise doing things I enjoy: golf, swimming, ice hockey, roller blading, power walking. Phish shows make a great sound track for healthier living. (3) Support small-scale artists. I’m going to fund more projects on KickStarter, ranging from the King Tut City Gardens documentary (close to being in the can) to Seamus’ “Oh, Goodie Volume 2″ to other things that strike my fancy, I’m going to direct my money where my mouth laughs or smiles. (4) Spend more time with my friends. One of my hockey buddies said, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, that being surrounded by good friends was his mark of a life well lived.

Turning the pages on the 2012 calendar, I can look forward to any number of milestones: second (and last) kid into college, being an empty nester, embarking on the Peoplehood Project, hoping for a good Devils run, a solid close to the Giants’ season, and a fun finish to the high school sports experience. As I tick off the “lasts” that come with children entering adulthood, I’m equally looking forward to the continuous stream of “firsts” that those events enable, coupled with turning 50 and celebrating 25 years of being married.

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Team Santa

By stern on December 21, 2011

Twenty-four years ago, I joined Team Santa. The initiation was quick and somewhat forced; the COO of my startup asked me to be Santa Claus for the office Christmas party, holding various small children on my lap for (film) camera photo opportunities. At the time, I had no idea that I even liked kids, or how to be a convincing cultural figure (still don’t), or how to put on a Santa suit. It wasn’t all that harrowing, and it started something of a trend.

My first year of managing a youth hockey team, one of the parents told me that his greatest fear was that someone would spill the beans about Santa Claus in the locker room. That’s what you worry about when they’re nine year olds; when they’re high school students the locker room is much saltier in every dimension.

About five years ago I got to be Santa Claus in Jamaica. One of the hotel staff asked if I’d play the part for the kids on property, and I agreed without realizing that Jamaican Santa rides a power boat up on the beach, and then has kids sit on his lap in 90-degree heat while wearing polyester vest, pants, beard and hair. It was the only time I lost weight on vacation. And it was worth it.

I was recently reminded of my all-time favorite Santa moment, though, when I received an email from a former co-worker. His son climbed up on my lap and announced a wish that was news to his parents; after changing back into normal nerd wear I told them they needed one more gift (an NFL checkers set; I won’t forget it). The Christmas morning surprise wasn’t the checkers set, rather, it was that Santa came through in the clutch. That kid is now in law school, and I hope that when he’s charged with representing someone else’s interests he remembers a little faith goes a long way.

In the intervening 15 or so years, it’s gotten much harder to be Santa. Google searches, amazon.com, Evernote, text messages – there are a dozen covert channels that tip off the mildly skeptical but technologically savvy. On the other hand, it’s not about who puts the boxes under the tree, but why those particular gifts were chosen in the first place. That’s the essence of being on Team Santa, captured wonderfully in this much-forwarded piece. It’s about finding that one way to make a loved one — or a complete stranger — break out in a smile. Team Santa does not discriminate based on religion, race, gender, age, sexual preference, economic status or geography. Anyone can join. It’s the only way to really go global.

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Peoplehood II: Alliteration

By stern on December 9, 2011

Anglicization does strange things to non-English alphabets. My father’s family name (in the Ukraine) was “Shtechter”, probably with a hard “ch” in the middle (like Bach), but it turned into both “Stern” and “Shtier” when the two halves of the family arrived on Ellis Island. Hailing from a rural town – a “mudhole”, in the words of my aunt – that part of the Ukraine was then within the boundaries of the Austria-Hungary empire, otherwise known as Galacia. It’s entirely possible that “Schtechter” derived from something Czech or Magyar in origin, and the name migrated east decades before the family came west. I don’t know too much of the family history before the mid-19th century, and sadly, there’s nobody who remembers left to ask.

Independently of the family name, everyone’s given name went through transmogrification. Aunts and uncles interchanged Jack, Joel, and Julius with remarkable ease considering that none of their native tongues had a “J”-sounding consonant. My second bit of peoplehood backstory stems from a conversation with author Cory Doctorow in which he shared the personal reference point for the alliterative character names in his novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Everybody descended from the Russian side of his family had half a dozen names, dimunitives, family nicknames and chosen preferred first names joined only by initial and context. Doctorow captures the out-of-place experience when you are a true greenhorn, new to culture, language and custom, but simultaneously pinpoints where community spackles over the gaps. It’s easily one of the strangest books I’ve read, but no more confusing than following my family tree or immigration history, and piecing together its stories.

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Peoplehood I: Red Sector A

By stern on December 8, 2011

My wife and I have been accepted into the Jewish Federation’s “Peoplehood Project” of MetroWest NJ for 2012-2013. With our 50th birthdays and 25th wedding anniversary coming up, we thought this would be an appropriate way to celebrate (the trip back to Italy for the prosciutto visit is another story, and decidedly along a different axis of peoplehood). We’ll be traveling to Israel to explore what it means to be a member of the Jewish people, and how we can be better ambassadors between, and within, our countries. In 2013 we’ll visit the Ukraine, from where most of my family emigrated in the early 20th century, and something that will force me to learn Russian beyond “Uncle Ivan lives in Brighton” (as far as I got with the cassette tape Teach Yourself Russian). I’m most eager to see how our collective viewpoint rotates from the Jewish American to the American who is also a Jew, and to experience as many points as possible along that curve.

For me, the “peoplehood” question stems from discovering new lights who identify as Stars of David, whether it’s musicians, athletes, or business executives. I adore Geddy Lee (bass player for Rush, son of Holocaust survivors, and Canadian to boot) and know that “Geddy” is his proper name “Gary” passed through his grandmother’s Eastern European Yiddishkeit filter. Recently Geddy commented that the Rush song Red Sector A was based on a story of concentration camp liberation. Trivia like this is one more level of detail below Adam Sandler’s “Hankuah Song.” It certainly makes me listen to the album differently, changing the relative word order of “Jewish,” “prog rock” and “fan.” Internalizing culture is a foundation of peoplehood. That and falafel, I think.

In our last few trips to Israel and when hosting Israeli students in NJ, I’ve been struck by the contrast between Israelis and Americans when it comes to how we identify with popular culture. What I found among Israelis is an attraction to the facets of our American lives that resemble pop culture, rather than the Jewish aspects that put us in a small American minority. Being Jewish is just table stakes for Israelis – doing something that they’ve seen in a slice-of-American life movie is interesting. They don’t need Adam Sandler’s “Hanukah Song” to remind them of Jewish celebrities; but they will gladly go to a local, non-celebrated football game to sample a different kind of Friday Night lights.

One of the themes I expect to come up is that of sustainability – how do we ensure that our diverse, geographically and culturally distant communities pay attention to and look out for each other? The prospective downside – failure to create diverse but thriving communities – makes Neal Peart’s Red Sector A haunting lyrics a rallyng cry.

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Depth of Field

By stern on November 26, 2011

MKA at Holy Spirit, November 18 2011

Shot with Canon 200mm f/2 telephoto


Digital imaging is the greatest enabler for one of my favorite hobbies – sports photography. I’ve been taking pictures at football games since 1986, but historically the process was: buy high speed film, take a lot of pictures, get the prints made and $150 later, throw out half of them that included a referee’s head, were out of focus, were more motion blur than action, or didn’t show anything interesting. Enter digital cameras, and all cost or time problems are solved – I’m happy to delete more than half of the images I capture, I can adjust for film speed equivalent, lighting conditions and even selected focus point between plays, and the satisfaction (or aggravation) is mine within an hour of the final whistle.

I believe hobbies are cost-constant over long periods of time. When cost comes out in the commoditization of one aspect, it re-enters at the other end of the spectrum. Historically, technology has moved professional grade equipment into the consumer space with alarming regularity – digital cameras, cell phones, video cameras, even protective equipment. The professional grade gear just keeps getting better and more expensive. What I’ve discovered about sports photography is that those long lenses you see on the sidelines of football and baseball games aren’t just for show; you need light, focal length and depth of field control to be able to capture the moment.

[Disclaimer: I am a BorrowLenses.com affiliate. I earn a very small commission on gear that you rent as a result of going to their site as a function of reading about it here. If you click through and spend money, I get a taste. If that makes you discount my thoughts, please know that I'm neither retiring now covering my hosting fees on what I'll make from referral fees. But I do believe in their product enough to promote it.]

The picture above was taken with a Canon 200mm f/2 telephoto at an ISO 800 equivalent, about 18 yards from the line of scrimmage at the back of the end zone. I love the short depth of field; the left guard is in focus (that would be the Bubba) but the quarterback is coming under center out of focus. Specular reflections of the stadium lights give you the sense that it was very dark, very cold and very tiring game. The boys who played it will carry memories of a state semi-final, a record-breaking season and accomplishments that will stand for quite some time. Despite losing, freezing and feeling the strain of carrying that lens up and down the field (there were 11 touchdowns scored in the game) I’ll forever treasure that sense of the here and now, with a lot of field behind the play.

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Season of Joy

By stern on November 19, 2011

It’s a fall Saturday afternoon and I’m typing rather than lugging a telephoto lens up and down the sideline of a football field. High school football season has ended for our Montclair Kimberley Academy Cougars, after a semi-final playoff loss last night. To balance the feeling that last night was the last time some of the seniors will put on footall pads, here’s an open letter to this amazing group of young men.

Your teamwork created a gold standard. From a 1-9 season two years ago, to 5-5 with a playoff bid to 9-2 with a trip to the semi-finals, the journey began with teamwork that led you, consciously or not, to call each other “brothers.” Use that yardstick of measuring contribution, mutual re-inforcement and peer leadership in every situation, and you’ll always move the ball forward.

You had the benefit of outstanding, dedicated coaches who treated you with the love normally accorded your own children. You honored their preparations and advice, you corrected as needed, and you remained focused from the heat of August until a frosty late November night. There are no better courses in leadership and development than having an amazing coach; use them as role models when you evaluate management from any angle. Not many people would equate your coaches and Steve Jobs, but they both got their teams to produce results the rest of the uninformed and uncoached world thought impossible.

You will always play to your standard of integrity. Whether it’s on the field of play, in the sphere of public opinion, or in a closed door discussion, there will consistently be influences that are below or controvert the level of self-discipline and fair play to which you’ve adhered. Bring a high level of competition with even higher senses of fair play.

You will relive the joy. After the label of “last” is applied, it’s easy to fear that you won’t know the happiness that comes from a great team again. Individual memories of well-placed blocks, game preparation that made it seem you knew plays before they developed, flashes of brilliance from all corners of the turf – those feelings will return again and again because you know how to create them, and how to find them, and how to appropriately relish them, on and off of the field. If you doubt that, ask any of your parents how we felt every single week of this season, from spring weight training until driving home last night. We have the benefit of middle age, knowing that the end of the season is merely a pause in the happiness flow.

As I packed up my camera bag one of the fathers thanked me for capturing and preserving memories of the season. I owe the thanks to the team, coaches, and other parents, as I was merely a first hand, close-up observer of what a local newspaper called “the greatest MKA team ever.” The emphasis is on “team,” and I thank each and every one of you for allowing me to join you on the sideline with humor, hard work, humility and grace.

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