Naomi Binder Wall interviews, May 2020

Ulli Diemer interviewed Naomi Binder Wall by phone on May 6, May 20, and May 27, 2020. The interviews were transcribed by Janice Acton. The transcript has been edited for brevity.
Naomi died on October 18, 2020 at the age of 81.

Contents

• First Interview, May 6, 2020
• Second Interview, May 20, 2020
• Third Interview, May 27, 2020
• Related Resources

First Interview, May 6, 2020

Ulli: I’m going to start with my usual question: “How did you get to be who you are?”

Naomi: I want to start by saying that that journey is definitely not over yet – defining who I am. But there is a trajectory that goes back to the fact that I was born into a left-wing family on both sides, where there were communists, and socialists, and union organizers – and my own parents. I was born into that. And my sister, who is three years younger than I am, often talks about our good fortune having been born into a family with the values we grew up with and passed on to our children. So that’s a big part of how I got to who I am now. That I was never anyone else.

Ulli: And how far back does that go in your family? I mean by that, the left-wing tradition.

Naomi: I only know the relative histories of my grandparents on both sides. I know nothing about their parents. I know some of their siblings. But I don’t know the generation that pre-dates my grandparents. That’s where it all starts, just to sort of locate myself in all of that. That I, like so many white-skinned Jews who ended up in various parts of North America, I have relatives – grandparents – from what was then Poland, Austria, Russia. Both sets of grandparents most likely ended up in New York City in or around 1911 – 1910 or 1911. And they emigrated on those ships and ended up at Ellis Island. That history is very much my history. All of my family started out in New York City. My grandparents, their children, their siblings – I remember I had great-aunts, great-uncles – and my relatives. I was the oldest of my generation. I was the first of my generation of cousins, and the oldest. I may be, at this point in my life, the oldest in my family. Certainly, I think I do have one cousin who’s maybe even 10 years older than I am – I’m 81 now.

My history is very much Ashkenazi Jewish history, where the first language, in fact, spoken by everyone, and the first language I heard as a kid, as a child, was Yiddish. Also, that – most of my parents’ generation in the family, and their fathers – my parents’ fathers, were anti-Zionists. I was also born into an anti-Zionist family, although it was not talked about. So, I didn’t hear an anti-Zionist narrative growing up, I just felt tension around the issue. I remember that I had an aunt who left for Israel, for Palestine, to fight with the Haganah in 1937 and she never came back. And her father didn’t talk to her for 30 years. He finally gave in and went after 30 years. So there was that.

It was very – it was just a very, kind of social justice environment, and to a certain extent I think my parents were very uncomfortable with the Zionist Jewish narrative that was all around. And I think that may be why my father made the decision to move himself and my mother to Washington, DC – to sort of be able to establish their own lives. And also because at that time, it was the Depression and he had had the good fortune of getting a college degree, which was free, in New York City. The US government in Washington was hiring anyone with a college degree – any man with a college degree. My father went to Washington DC – he had a college degree in English Literature – and they hired him to work in the newly-developed technology called “computers.” Because they were desperate for people who had some kind of post high school education to help figure out how to run these things which were as big as rooms. I’m sure you know that. The original computers were as big as a room and you used punch cards to operate them.

Anyway, my father wanted to be an English professor at a university somewhere and he thought that this was going to be temporary. He just wanted a job. He just wanted to get out of New York and establish himself with my mother in another place. He thought it would be temporary. But almost as soon as he was in touch with those machines, he fell in love with them. He spent his entire life in computer technology. He still loves poetry, but he really loved those computers. So we ended up in Washington DC, which is where I was born, in 1939.

My entire life, to this point, and including this point, has been sort of framed by one war or another. And in a couple of those – the Vietnam War had the most important effect on my own life personally, and politically. But there’s never been a time that I’ve been alive and breathing, when there hasn’t been a war going on that primarily the US has instigated and carried out. I know I’m jumping around a lot but the next really major – there’s an awful lot to tell. My parents were caught up in the Cold War. They had friends who went to prison. In fact, my parents knew one of the witnesses at the Rosenberg trial who was subpoenaed. During the Cold War my parents had friends who were arrested, who were called before HUAC, whose lives were just ruined. Somehow my parents – I don’t think – were ever directly targeted, which became a big issue for my father because he was employed right through McCarthyism at the US government, still working on computers. He didn’t leave the US government until 1956. I was just a young teenager then, and so I don’t know what the dynamics were, but I do know that the Cold War had a powerful impact on my parents’ ability to live their lives as progressives.

Ulli: Were they ever members of the Communist Party?

Naomi: My mother was, yes. My mother was a member of the Communist Party. My father’s father, who was probably the most committed of them all – his dying words – he died quite young, or we’d now consider it fairly young, he was 75 when he died – his last words to my dad were, “Stop Nixon!” I mean, he was fully committed. My mother’s father was more what you would call a free-thinker. He was born and grew up in a shtetl in, I guess, Eastern Russia. He was a member of the Jewish Bund. They had a printing press. I remember he told me they had a printing press in the attic of their stetl home, and they were doing propaganda, and they fully believe – they got out of Europe just before the 1917 revolution. The Russian side of my family was my mother’s family. They were Russian. My father’s family was Polish and German or Austrian. The women were conservative – both my grandmothers were politically conservative, although their backgrounds were very different. But both my grandfathers were very left-wing, and I remember that we would have Seder – which was the only Jewish holiday that my family, and my grandparents celebrated. I would go to New York for those Seders. And I didn’t understand Yiddish – the whole ceremony was conducted entirely in Yiddish. The word Israel was never mentioned. It never came up as anything to talk about. I remember everybody just laughing because it turned out, I learned later, that – I didn’t understand Yiddish – that my grandfather was, you could say, “sending up the Passover service” by just turning it into one big joke. I’m sure there was some respect for it, but he was – they were all atheists, primarily. My parents were very progressive in allowing me to go to any church I wanted to go to because I grew up in a primaryly not-Jewish neighbourhood. I went to Baptist churches with friends, and Catholic churches, but they never took me to a synagogue. Ever. I don’t think I have ever been in a synagogue with either of my parents. They were just anti-religious. I think in some ways both my parents – although my dad was never an activist – I think both of them were just profoundly iconoclastic. Kind of anti-establishment. Certainly, that’s what I am and have always been since I was a child.

Can I tell you my first political act?

Ulli: Absolutely. You can tell me anything.

Naomi: It just reminds me – talking about my parents. This is a story that my father told me which, I believe, is probably not exaggerated because he prided himself on always telling the truth. He told me a story about when I was just walking – just learning how to walking from one side of the room to the other – they hadn’t quite baby-proofed the apartment and they had these little glass figurines on a coffee table and they hadn’t taken them off yet. I went for those figurines and I picked one up. My dad took it from me and said, “No”, and he put it back. And I picked it up again. And he said again, “No!” And he took it out of my hand again and put it down, and I picked it up again. And he said, this time I looked him right in the eye and he took it from me and he slapped my hand and put it down. And I picked it up again.

And when he told me this story, he said that’s when he knew there was going to be trouble. And there was, and it was very much guided by my mother, who was quite radical. She wasn’t a joiner. She was in the Communist Party, briefly I think, but she was primarily an artist. She was a musician and a music teacher – and quite a brilliant music teacher. But she had very left-wing politics, and I think that she was raised on her father’s side by a bunch of communist aunts and uncles. And also because in the context, a lot of people from that time, when the Communist Party was growing like wildfire everywhere, often people will say, who are familiar with that time, that the Communist Party was the only party that was offering some kind of support in Spain, for example. Like, my mother grew up in the generation that collected aluminum foil to send to Spain – so that it could somehow be converted into bullets. There were the labour strikes, you know, it was the Depression.

My mother was quite radical and I’ll just share one quick story with you to show how she was more of an individualist, she wasn’t really a joiner. At her wedding that was in 1937, there was a strike of food workers across New York City, across Manhattan. And they were striking in front of the centre where they were going to have their reception. And so they approached their guests, there were picket lines around the building, and my mother refused to go in. She wouldn’t cross the picket line. And everybody else was absolutely – everybody else wanted to go in, you know, that this was not an appropriate time to do this, and yes, it was wrong, but we have to go in. So she said she would only go in if, when they got in, they would sing “The Internationale”. [laughs] Which they did. [laughs]

So that’s kind of who my mother was. She also picketed her father’s grocery store [laughs] with her own placard because he wouldn’t allow his one part-time assistant, to unionize, to join this union of food workers. She operated that way. But her radical politics [doorbell][short interruption in interview].

Naomi: Anyway, now I can’t remember where I was.

Ulli: They were singing “The Internationale” at the wedding reception?

Naomi: Yes, so my mother – yes, that’s the sort of thing that she would do. Oh, I was just going to share this one story. I got into – I became fairly rebellious – What year were you born if you don’t mind me asking?

Ulli: 1948.

Naomi: 1948? Well, you know, you’re not that much younger than I am. So, to be born and to come – to do that adolescent thing in the ’50s, was very difficult. That was when psychoanalysis was taking hold, pharmaceuticals had taken over. Drugs, which had been, prior to that you’d go and get them over the counter, even morphine, without any trouble. I’m not saying we should be able to do that but it was a completely different story back then, and there was just so much going on. There was red-lining, ghettoization of neighbourhoods, it was all post-war stuff. We were caught up in the rush to the suburbs. And Black Americans were moving up from the South and settling, often, in places like Washington, DC, and further west and also further north. And so there were all those types of changes going on in the midst of a virulent McCarthyism. An anti-communism, that had actually developed prior to World War II, until that is we became allied with the Soviet Union. That wasn’t really put on hold at all, it was just sort of moved behind closed doors. As soon as that war was over, the Cold War took hold. No one who held progressive values, or had been identified as having progressive values – for example, my father was approached – he was a supervisor of a department in the computer laboratory – and he was approached to name – to let his supervisor know who the progressives on the staff were and he refused. But his expertise had reached a point where they didn’t do anything. They didn’t fire him or anything. It was a scary, scary time.

And then there was the Korean War of course. Which was touted as some kind of – the same thing as Vietnam. In ’54, there was Guatemala, there was all this stuff going on. And so in my home, on the coffee table you would find left-wing magazines: The New Republic – that was the one that was in my home. I was identified by teachers as coming from a left-wing home. Here’s another interesting story. This also happened. This was a time – and this might’ve been true – I’m sure you also had to deal with ritualistic, kind of nationalistic behaviours, as a child but we had to salute every morning and say the Lord’s prayer. I remember there was a boy in my class – this must have been in the fourth or fifth grade – his parents had lobbied the school to excuse him from that. So every morning he would get up and walk out. When I was in the fifth grade – that would have been the year that Truman ran for the Democratic Party and Dewey ran for the Republicans. Dewey was a right-winger and Truman was also a right-winger, but he was [laughs] disguised as a Democrat. So what happened was the teacher wanted a mock election. Well, my parents were voting for that socialist – I can’t remember his name – he had been – I think he at one point was Roosevelt’s Vice President?

Ulli: Wallace?

Naomi: Yes, Henry Wallace! My parents were going to vote for him and I knew that. So the teacher handed out ballots. It was going to be a secret ballot. She writes on the blackboard “Truman” and “Dewey.” So I wrote “Wallace” on my ballot.

And I do have a memory – it didn’t occur to me that I was doing anything that might get me in trouble. It was just that’s the only name I knew in regards to the election, and my parents talked about it all the time. So, I voted Wallace. Well, then she got some kids to help her, and she comes to my ballot, and she says, right away, “Who voted for Wallace?” So I put my hand up and nothing more happened, except that I told my mother what happened, and my mother went to the school and complained. I don’t remember anything after that. That would have been the year you were born.

Ulli: Yes.

Naomi: Yes, that’s when that would have been. So that kind of stuff was going on and in some sense the few Jewish families that lived in the neighbourhood where I grew up were Zionists, and my parents were targeted as anti-Zionist because they didn’t contribute to any of the fundraisers, they didn’t go to the neighbourhood synagogue, they didn’t do Friday shabbat – they didn’t do any of that stuff. I probably grew up knowing more about Christianity than Judaism. Simply because I grew up in a, basically, working class, white, Christians from the South who had migrated north as far as Washington.

I did grow up, and we lived in Washington until I was 17 and then moved to Philadelphia. I spent 17 years in a Jim Crow city. Segregated. [temporary interruption] The schools were segregated, the theatres were segregated, movies were segregated, restaurants were segregated. I don’t think public transit was segregated – but that may be because my memories of riding on buses where there were African Americans may have followed the end of those Jim Crow laws in Washington, but I don’t think so. And the hospitals were segregated.

Yeah, I grew up in that environment in a family that was kind of marginalized by that culture, both by choice and also because nobody would talk to them [laughs], except their like-minded friends of whom they may have been three or four in the community where we grew up. Actually, the story that I wanted to tell – I think it highlights the degree to which my mother radicalized my thinking, to the point where I became a bit of a risk-taker. Socially, and politically. Because she really did encourage a radical perspective. But she did so not from her experience – because she was always, I guess, cushioned by what became increasingly a middle class life, a bourgeois life – a beautiful home, all the needs, everything. But she still held these radical politics. At some point, I can’t remember exactly when – I may have been 18 or 19 years old, I did a shoplifting excursion at Garfinkel’s in Philadelphia. What had happened is that I had bought – I always worked, that’s another thing I can talk about [laughs] I started working at 15 – actually before, because I babysat whenever I could. I got it into my head, and I was actually right, that if I could earn some of my own money, I’d have more freedom. And it turned out to be true and I always worked.

I had bought this lovely, lovely winter coat and it had a sash belt. And I lost the belt. But the coat was on sale and there were other belts. So all I had to do was go and get a belt. So I did. I took a belt, off this coat, that was still on sale. And I felt so bad about it that I told my mother. My mother said – this was her position, “Don’t do that, because you’ll get caught. And that is a serious thing to get caught stealing.” She said, “Don’t feel that you’ve done anything morally wrong, because you haven’t.” And then she said my favourite words, she said, “They steal from us all the time.” So [laughs] I grew up with all these homilies. My mother was not someone living in a project who had to worry about her next paycheque or meal. She was very privileged by the time she had her children, because my dad worked really, really hard to provide her with all of the good stuff, which is what was going on for suburban housewives. So I just grew up with that kind of mindset. But it really wasn’t ’til I got myself to Canada that it really took off.

Ulli: How old were you when you came to Canada?

Naomi: 24. I’ve been here 56 years.

You know, I get some pushback from other American friends, and I must say that my closest friends of my generation do tend to be, what we like to call ourselves, American ex-patriots. We came up a long time ago, most of us having to do something to do with the Vietnam War. Not me, I came before that. But certainly, my daughter is a Vietnam War baby. That history is very important but we are all so glad we came. It’s not that we’re not critical of Canada, certainly we are. But it’s a completely different thing going on up here. I get very agitated with my family who are still in the United States, and who continue to refuse to understand that this is a different country, we have a different mode of governance up here. We don’t have the history they have. We’re not a two-party government and we have more in common with the UK than we have with the US. It’s very, very frustrating to have that discussion all of the time. My life did change at 24 when I came up here.

The first thing that happened was I came up with a man, Marty Wall, who was offered an assistant professorship in the Psych Department at U of T – that would have been 1963. I came up here from a country where the Communist Party was illegal, and the Cuban Revolution was being touted as the worst thing that had ever happened. I come up here, and we rent an apartment, two weeks after, there’s a knock at the door. It was either a provincial or a federal election, and a Communist Party candidate was standing in front of me with a Communist Party button on his coat. I thought – I said, “Oh my god, do you want to come in?” [laughs] And so I thought, well – there was something I took to immediately. It was as if those radical roots, that hadn’t really caught on in the US when I lived there – I got into theatre – that’s where I became a member of a repertory company in Philadelphia, so I wasn’t really politically active but this thing really affected me. Then through my husband, through people he knew, I ended up being invited to join the Canada-Cuba Friendship Association.

So I knew, after I had been here a month, that I wasn’t going back. That I wouldn’t be going back. That somehow, I had found a place that I preferred to be, imperfect as it was.

And then I learned about Tommy Douglas. I learned that Canada has a much richer social democratic history than the US, which has none. I just knew that I was gonna stay here, and if I was gonna to have a family, then I was going to raise them here. And it happened. I never went back.

So that was a pivotal change in terms of how I viewed the world, and then to have had the experience of coming to Toronto in 1963 when it was a British, provincial town, where if you wanted a Chinese restaurant to eat in you were hard-pressed to find one. There was a lot of bread pudding. A kind of – British, I don’t know, a British kind of culture. There was diversity, but it was all a kind of ghettoized diversity. There was very little mixing. To have been here, and to have watched and experienced the enormous change that took place over the years I have here, it’s just been miraculous. It really is. I know there’s a lot of people who want to get out of Toronto, but I’m not one of them.

So my really pivotal, important or effective experiences in terms of social justice really did happen here. I campaigned for John Kennedy in 1960. That is to say, I knocked on doors. I got involved in the theatre from a very early age and, in fact, when I first moved up here, I was in theatre up here. I did theatre at Hart House. I did it with community groups. Then what happened – and then maybe we can stop me [laughs] with this story. What happened was – this is how my political and social activism started in Toronto, I auditioned for a group that was known as Toronto Workshop Productions and the guys worth looking up to, like George Luscombe, it’s all over, they’re all gone or have died – he did some really amazing social justice theatre. He was amazing.

I auditioned and I got into the company and, I think, the week of the first rehearsal I got a phone call from an organization. I’m sure you’ve heard the Student Union for Peace Action, SUPA. Student Union for Peace Action is the organization that actually started the train of resources and services provided in Canada to American boys who wanted to dodge the draft. They began to provide the service of, “Okay, you wanna come up here, get in touch with so-and-so. We’ll see if we can find you a place to live and try to get your papers together so that you can dodge the draft.” I got a phone call from, maybe, someone who knew my husband and knew that I was definitely against the build-up for the war in Vietnam. In any case, I got a call from someone in SUPA who asked if we could house Americans if they started coming up. I said yes.

We started housing Americans who started coming up, eventually in droves, and that was really my first really overtly political act here. Then it just took off, and I never looked back. Then I called George Luscombe and I said, “I’m so sorry I can’t make the first rehearsal,” and he said, “You’re fired!” Rightly so, it was a professional company, I was going to get paid and everything. I’ve never done theatre since. Not once. Once I think I did some as part of a campaign, we ended up...

Oh yes, and then, the next major moment was my introduction to feminist politics, and that was through the Women’s Press. I have a friend who I worked with, who once said that I was the type of person who would walk to the edge of the cliff and jump off, just to see what it would be like. But don’t laugh, because when I was a child there was a manhole just outside our apartment building, and I jumped down into it to see if I could get myself out, because it looked to me like I’d be able to. But I couldn’t because the sides were – the earth was loose. I remember an older couple coming by, hearing my [laughs] cries for help and pulled me out. But I did do that. Or I dreamed I did it. That was the kind of thing – I didn’t always think clearly but I harboured a kind of angry politics, so when the counter-culture came along, or the anti-war movements, the invitation, “If you want to throw off the shackles of middle America and all that stuff, and be your own person, you can do that now.” Multiple relationships, having children out of wedlock, and all that stuff that was going on, and love-ins, and fuck-ins and all that, that was all part of the mindset, because it could kind of free you up in your thinking to embrace the things that, you know, you might not have otherwise. Of course, the civil rights movement was going on in the US, in tandem.

You know Chandler Davis?

Ulli: Yeah.

Naomi: You must interview Chandler Davis. Oh my god. First of all, he is now 92 or 93 and he – I don’t even want to start – because I could tell you some of his history – but he is definitely worth talking to.

Ulli: I know a lot of his history. We see each other fairly regularly.

Naomi: Did you know that he organized the first teach-in on the Vietnam War in Canada.

Ulli: I knew he was one of the people, yes.

Naomi: He was very instrumental. He would deny he organized it, but he was very instrumental. And that was an eye-opener. That was when I first heard from Tom Hayden himself who was invited up here about class oppression. It was really quite something. So, he has that history. He has a lot of history.

Ulli: Yeah.

Naomi: How is this interview going for you?

Ulli: Very well. But you were saying you might want to pause it for now and resume it in a – did I understand you correctly?

Naomi: I was wondering if you, from what we have talked about so far, I’ve tried to keep it on a particular trajectory, so that there are highlights, but there’s so much woven into each of the moments. Because the context was so important.

Ulli: Of course.

Naomi: Because, you know, this wasn’t just going on with me. For example, one of the crazier things I did was, during the Vietnam War, we formed a group – which had already been formed earlier – by a young man who had left and gone back to Texas, called the Toronto Anti-Draft Program. In fact, I first met Miriam during the alternative health movement in Toronto, I think I met her through work she may have been doing on Dupont Street. This was a long time ago. And then it moved to Rochdale after that.

The plan to build Rochdale – those plans were made in my living-room when I was six months pregnant with my son, David. I served the coffee. Those plans were made because my husband, Marty Wall, was very involved in organizing the plans for Rochdale. In fact, he lived there for quite a while. We broke up and then he – yes, I was in and out of Rochdale all the time, and so were many Americans. We had deserters we were counselling who jumped out of windows at Rochdale. Yes.

When you consider all the social distancing going on now, it was like night and day then. It was like, there was no social distancing. It was all about people being together. So, the context is very, very important. And so is marijuana. Very important. There were two demonstrations in front of the US consulate that took place at that time. One had to do with Selma, Alabama. Did you ever hear the name of a man named Henry Tarvainen?

Ulli: Yes.

Naomi: He was involved. He’s the one – he heard about Selma. He picked up a placard – he was an undergraduate at U of T. There were no blocks or security around the US consulate at that time. He picked up a placard and he wrote something on it about “National Guard to Selma” – a message to the federal government to send the military to Selma to protect the people there. He took that placard and he started marching in front of the US consulate on University Avenue, and within days, there were hundreds of people there with him. This was February. For a whole week, people brought tarps, restaurants contributed tureens of soup, and we slept out there. And Chandler was among us, and so was Judy Pocock, [laughs] Nancy Pocock’s daughter. A lot of activism was born there. We were there for a week.

At some point, a group of kids from Selma got a bus, rented a bus and went to Ottawa, and passed through Toronto. I think they passed through Toronto and went to Ottawa. And Rocky Jones, who you may know that name.

Ulli: Yes, uh-huh.

Naomi: At that time, he was working at the Treasury Department at Queen’s Park Circle. One day, he heard about what was going on in front of the consulate. He, one day at lunchtime, wandered down and he never went back [laughs] to the Treasury Department. [laughs] I mean, he may not have left the Treasury Department that day, but he certainly was among us very soon after he took that walk. That was going on and Chandler part of that. There have been other people who have come to the vigil that we’ve been doing for 19 years – we stopped because of the virus – but we’re still in touch with the vigilers and we will go back.

I guess you could say it isn’t that much different from now because when you’re an activist, you just are always an activist however you’re doing it.

By the way, I checked out your website and it is very impressive and I am very honoured that you would consider housing my little collection here. At the same time, it’s very true, when I looked down through what your collection includes and what your mission statement is – my stuff is just made for you.

Ulli: Yes, for sure.

Naomi: It really is. It’s community-based. It’s all grass roots.

Ulli: I just want to throw in something about that Selma demonstration in front of the consulate. Which is that, there’s a family story that that was the first demonstration that Miriam ever went to, because her sister, Carol, who is eight years older than her was going down, so Miriam would have been eight or nine. And her sister took her down one day because Miriam wanted to know what was going on. So that turned out to be her first political demonstration that she went to.

Naomi: That’s wonderful. That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s the connections, over the years, Toronto has such a rich history of activism and people who just stayed active for as long as they could. And I also knew Miriam when, I think she worked at an immigrant centre.

Ulli: The Immigrant Women’s Health Clinic, yes.

Naomi: Oh, yes. Because that’s when I was working with Women’s Counselling Referral and Education Centre and we had an office in the same building, on College Street.

I think another kind of thread through my own history of activism has to do with the fact that I had two children and I was a single mother. Both fathers were sharing custody with me but when those children were with me, I was a single mother. So I had to work and I needed to apply my skills to finding work. “Okay, I have to work, what am I going to do?” Well, I had been a teacher and I had been teaching ESL – that was the work I had done – ESL and literacy to English speakers who had fallen through the education system here. I had been teaching ESL for quite a while and because of that I had familiarity with the needs of particular immigrant women’s communities. I became involved with Women Working with Immigrant Women. I was hired, and through the years I have been able to work with grass roots organizations which has always provided me with a low, but reliable income. So, much of my knowledge and experience of social justice issues comes from – not direct, in terms of me experiencing poverty, but I’ve been very close to it. I think that has been very significant in my development as a social justice activist. I know that my son, David, right now, who wants to become a community worker, he’s now in his placement – well, he has no placements – but prior to the virus outbreak, he began to experience a different knowledge, or a new knowledge of poverty, rather than the intellectual understanding of it because he was placed in a shelter. It changes your thinking. I had that experience, and because I had the experience I was able to find work at the grass roots. I think that’s very, very important. I mean, if you’re teaching immigrant women in a class and their social workers are fussing around them all time, to have them prove they’ve been going to their English classes, you get a sense of just how cruel the system is. So having that knowledge, I’ve had a lifetime of access to work that has only made me smarter. I have to say, at 81 I still have a long way to go. [laughs]

So I think I’ve hit upon some of the important turning points, or aspects. Then there’s my anti-racism training, where I was trained by the best. But that’s another whole story. When I stopped teaching ESL I began working with Beverly Bain. Do you know her?

Ulli: I don’t think so, no.

Naomi: She’s worth looking into. She’s in her ’60s now. She’s a Black woman who has done anti-racism work since she came up from Trinidad. She’s also very active in the LGBTQ – she’s a prof at U of T, she’s a great scholar. She invited me to join her as a co-facilitator in anti-racism trainings for women who wanted to provide support groups for women dealing with violence. So we worked with the Women’s Counselling Referral and Education Centre and we provided anti-racism training so that these support groups wouldn’t be inappropriate.

When I looked at your website, I just think it’s so inclusive and it’s so detailed and so full of stuff!.

Ulli: It is. And there’s a lot of material in our archive that hasn’t yet been catalogued or put online. So in a sense it’s the tip of the iceberg. [laughs]

Naomi: Yeah, it’s great. I hope I was useful. Or if you want more.

Ulli: I would at some point. Maybe we could do another one – I’m certainly interested in, for example, the history of the vigil and your involvement with anti-Zionism. I’m interested in detail about that. Maybe we could do that another time?

Naomi: That is something I definitely want to do, so I’ll leave the time up to you and perhaps we would focus on that. It goes back to the mid ’80s in terms of the involvement really catching on. The ’80s is very important. So that whole context, and time, was a very exciting time in terms of, for myself and others as well, coming to terms with Zionism. And the diversity amongst the woman who did, for example, the Jewish Women’s Committee – we weren’t all Zionists. Anyway, I won’t go there now, but yes, that would be a good thing to talk about.

Second Interview, May 20, 2020

Naomi: Do you want me to start?

Ulli: Yes, if you’re prepared.

Naomi: Well on the question of the influences in the first time we spoke, I talked a lot about the family I was born into. I talked a lot about the people who influenced me: my mother, my father, the fact there were communists in my family, there were anti-Zionists. So I grew up in quite a leftwing environment, including my two parents, in particular, grappling with being Jewish. The problem was that the issue of Zionism was never – my parents didn’t talk to me about it. I just kind of picked things up as I went along. But Palestine didn’t really become a part of my activism until, probably not really until the early ’80s. Around the same time as Nicaragua. The two sort of coincided.

That brought me to the fact that another very important influence in my life was always that I had to work. Once I left my parental home and separated from my first husband when I was still quite young, I had to support myself. So I worked from actually quite an early age, even in my teens. By the time I got to Canada jobs that were accessible to me all came from my having gotten in just at the right time to teaching English as second language to new immigrants coming into Toronto. At the time I entered that field, and that would have been 1978-79, you didn’t need to do anything but speak the first language in order to get a job with the Toronto Board, and teach it, so there was no training, and there were no requirements and there really was no accountability. I mean, if you spoke English as a first language, and you were interested in teaching free ESL classes, where immigrants could come right in off the street – there was no red tape, you know, it was easy to get into the field. So I got into the field quite early, around 1978, and it became my livelihood for 20 years. And as a result of that encounter with English as a Second Language, at a time when it was so readily accessible, before it was sort of taken over, in the sense of becoming very structured, with lots of accountability, for example, the reason I eventually left it after over 20 years of teaching it – this was adults. I taught adults, not children – I was suddenly being asked by women’s social workers – because women were on welfare, who were in my class – and it was either go to class, get a job – you know go to class or get a job. So the social workers wanted to see my attendance records, to make sure that these women were attending my classes. Well, for one thing, I didn’t want them to see my records because I wasn’t taking attendance, because I knew the pressures on these women were extreme and so I didn’t take it. They came, they came. I knew they wanted to come. Their interest in learning English was huge. So, I quit, because I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t, you know, play cop.

So what happened was as a result of gaining that skill of engaging with quite a wide range of immigrant communities and languages, that led me to political work that was going on. For example, there were immigrant groups – grassroots groups – Winnie Ng was part of that – the Women’s Health Centre, Miriam was involved with that. I mean, that was a very exciting time. And so, because of my skill in ESL, I was often invited to sit on boards of grassroots community organizations and I was often hired. For example, the Toronto Board of Education seconded me from my ESL teaching position, which is in Continuing Education, seconded me to set up a literacy class in Regent Park.

So because I had to work – I had to work because no one was supporting me and I had two children to raise, although I was getting help from- – there were two fathers involved, and one of them was very supportive and the other wasn’t – but I was essentially raising two children and had to support them and pay the rent, buy the food and so on, and so I always had to work. So I didn’t do a lot of volunteer activism. A lot of my activism was through grassroots organizations that were not mainstream. Only once in my adult life did I actually have a mainstream job – mainstream in the sense that it was institutional – it was an elementary school. I was teaching in an elementary school, I taught one year and couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was very difficult. And this is a fun kind of story [laughs] although at the time it didn’t seem like fun at all. I was teaching the year the Vietnam War ended. I was even hired by the Canadian Council of Churches to work in opposition to the Vietnam War, they funded us to start an organization called The Toronto Anti-Draft Program. And they paid us to counsel Americans coming up wanting to avoid the draft, or desert the military.

Even then, I was able to work. So anyway, what happened was – I hope I can remember this train of thought, I’ll probably get back to it but there was an interesting, kind of fun thing going on with the Toronto Anti-Draft Program and the Americans coming up. I actually went so far – this would have been at the time of the FLQ crisis in Quebec. Americans were coming into Toronto in droves, more women than men, actually, because Toronto had been identified by the US counterculture, as a better counterculture than the US counterculture, if you get what I mean. Because the Toronto counterculture at that time – and this would have been around the same time as that demonstration in front of the US consulate that Miriam went to, as you told me. The counterculture was happening also at the same time as that. And that would have been in 1964/65, around that time. So Toronto was a hub of counterculture activity, at the same time it was dealing with civil rights issues coming up from the US, and the Vietnam War, the beginnings of consciousness of that war, in Toronto – among activists in Toronto.

So what was going on for me was that I was connecting with a very, very diverse – I was connecting with all Toronto had to offer at that time. And, as compared to when I moved up here in September 1963 at the age of 24, having not really been an activist in the US – it’s a tremendously more difficult country to be an activist in [laughs] because it’s all rooted in this notion of individual rights. Up here I could see very quickly – see and hear and feel – that things were somewhat different, and the history was different, and that we actually had more in common with the European countries than with the US, in terms of our governance. But, when I came up here that is what I eventually became – very involved in, and my whole life changed once I was here at the convergence of three historical events: one would have been the Civil Rights Movement that spilled over into Canada, and which in a way was a shame because we weren’t giving much attention to the need for a civil rights movement in Canada; and the advent of the Vietnam War in terms of our consciousness of it; and the advent of the American boys coming into Toronto before the real exodus began; and the trouble that was brewing in Latin America. So, all of these things converged and what happened with me was, I was able to connect with all of it. And that was largely the result of the diverse network that had come about as a result of the work that I did over many years. I hope you’re able to follow this. [laughs]

I had to work to support my kids and myself.

Ulli: So what -- in the years between 1963 and ’78 – what kind of work were you doing then?

Naomi: Well, first of all, in ’63 when I came up, I didn’t start getting paid for my political activism until I got pregnant with David in 1966. And that was my first encounter with political work. Was when I got a phone call from someone from the Student Union for Peace Action at U of T – they had a small office there, and they were an anti-nuke group – I wish I could remember the name of the guy that ran that because he was amazing. I think his first name was Arthur, and he ended up moving out West and I don’t know what happened to him. But he called me because I was a professor’s wife, and they had contacts at the University of Toronto, and, “Could we house Americans coming up,” because they were starting to come up. And unfortunately [laughs] without checking with my husband, I said, “yes.” ’Cause, you know, it would have been a good thing to check it out with him. So we started housing draft dodgers.

The other thing I was peripherally involved with – because of my husband’s connection with the university – was the advent of Rochdale. Meetings to build and organize Rochdale were held in my home. And I was pregnant. And I served the coffee. My husband at the time was very involved in the development of Rochdale, and he lived there for several years until its demise. We were very involved with Rochdale.

So between ’63 – when I moved up here I was a theatre person. I had been in a rep company in Philadelphia where I’d gotten paid. I came up here looking for theatre work and I found it. I did a lot of work at Hart House. I did a lot of work on campus at U of T. And then I was asked to house draft dodgers and possibly deserters who were still coming up underground. We had to, you know, work with the Canadian government to make sure that these guys would be safe up here. Then the FLQ crisis happened. They started coming up, and we started housing them in ’66 and they continued to come, and we formed this organization, which was originally formed without support – by a young man who went to Texas. And then work began to happen was I also ended up going to Washington DC as part of the Civil Rights Movement, and then what began to follow – Vietnam sort of coincided-- that would have been 1979. So in 1969, I became very involved in Vietnam. Very, very involved. To the point where it consumed my life. I had a three year old son and I was very involved in that life, and that was around the time I began going to Teachers’ College at U of T. I taught at a [unintelligible][00:16:07] public school. I taught Grade four and quit. It was just too structured and too authoritarian because I, by that time, was used to a much looser expectation. I was kind of marginalized from the mainstream as a result of my upbringing.

Also, I should say that as part of my theatre and part of looking for work in the theatre, I was actually hired by Dora Maver Moore to teach children, her children’s classes, two of them on Saturday mornings. She expressed concern about hiring an “American”. But she said she’d do it anyway, because I did have a lot of experience from the US. I was relatively new – I think this would probably have been in 1963 or ’64- probably ’64. In any case, I was teaching these classes for her around the time of the outbreak of violence in Selma, Alabama.

And, I think I asked you this last time, if you knew the name Henry Tarvainen, who became a CBC producer, I think. Anyway, he wrote a placard, “US send National Guard to Selma”- and he started marching around all by himself in the middle of February in front of the US Consulate. And within two days there were 100 people there. In the snow. In the blizzard, with tarps. It was a week-long demonstration and I actually took students – one of whom was the son of her lawyer – I took them down to the demonstration. I thought they should see it. I thought it would be very relevant to dramatic arts. Well, their picture got on the front page of one of the newspapers, and I was promptly fired. She told me that she never should have hired an American. And a very sad part of this story is that the only family – and I taught two classes – it was probably about six kids in each class – the only family that called to give me support was the mother and father of the first gay man to die of AIDS in Toronto. His name was Tim, and we became very, very close friends. At the time, he was a 10 year old boy when I taught him in this drama class. He took the information that I had been fired home and his parents phoned me and we got together and we talked. And I followed his adolescence and followed him through his life.

That’s a kind of an interesting story, but I have to say my life has been filled with those kinds of connections that came about through my workplace. There’s definitely a connection. I mean, I certainly did a lot – I did International Women’s Day every year, and went to demos and I did a lot of volunteer work, but because of my connections, again, I fell on, I guess you could say, fell on the wrong side of the abortion issue. Because I was working with immigrant women, many of whom had religious opposition to abortion, but needed the abortion in any case, struggled tremendously with the issue of abortion, even though they got abortions. And so myself, and a group of immigrant women I worked with at Women Working with Immigrant Women, which came about around the time of a wave of immigration into Toronto, including Vietnamese refugees, known as “boat people”. And we taught them English.

As a result of my connection with immigrant women, and being on the board of Women Working with Immigrant Women, we were in opposition to not dealing with the emotional impact of abortion but they wouldn’t even – it was a “white women’s movement” and they wouldn’t even talk about it.

Ulli: Like, the idea was just go ahead.

Naomi: Yeah, we can’t go there because that’ll mess all up and we have to deal with the fact that it’s a right. It’s a woman’s right. It’s choice, that’s what it is.

Ulli: So what you were saying is there should be some kind of counselling or support?

Naomi: That there should be some recognition that there was an emotional impact. That it wasn’t an easy decision. But they wouldn’t go to that place. They just wanted to talk about the legality. They followed Morgentaler. It really was Morgentaler’s movement. Which, I’m not opposed to that, Morgentaler was a hero, mine as well as everyone else’s. At the same time, I could see, through the work I was doing, some of the results of racism that were not being discussed. And one of those results was a very myopic way of understanding the impact of – women were being thrown out of their parents’ homes. It really was very much a white – I believe this – I’m sure there are people, men and women who disagree with me, but I know there are women who agree with me, because I worked with them. We went and we said, “Can we not broaden the discussion?” But they didn’t want to deal with, for example, the Catholic women who went to church and always had. You know, they believed in a lot of the ways in which they were raised and you can’t just dismiss it.

Anyways, that is, I think very much a part of how I came to be the way I am today. As a result of being a divorced woman, and then coming out as a lesbian in 1980, I’ve always had to pretty much support myself, and I’ve been pretty independent, and I’ve always had to work. And, that work, because of that skill I developed in teaching English literacy to – I taught English literacy for years to, not immigrants, but to Canadian-born, Ontario-born – people who had fallen through the educational system. So those skills I developed through the work I did, simply as a result of being in the right place at the right time, which is in the city of Toronto during waves of immigration from Europe, from Latin America, from Chile – the revolution happened there, and it was quashed – and from Central America, and having had that skill of teaching English, I was connected to a very broad, and very beautiful diversity of communities in this city. And I actually was the founding president of the first CUPE local of adult ESL instructors in Canada. A CUPE local, which had 350 of us. Then the merger came to destroy progressive Toronto, and we merged with all the support workers at the Toronto Board which then became all of the boards, six boards together, and we disappeared into a 4400 member local. So that was a heart-breaker, but we did organize that union and it did win the vote. And CUPE was great in helping us get there.

So again, even that, being a trade unionist, was part of my work. And, I think I’m bringing this up because I think the fact that so much of the privilege that I have had the honour of holding in terms of the diversity of women who have coached me and guided me and taught me and mentored me, I mean, it is endless. As a result of the work I was doing, because I had been teaching ESL, and continued to teach ESL – because I didn’t only teach ESL all those years. We were piece-workers and that’s why we formed a union. So I might work 36 hours a week in five different locations, two hours here and then four hours later, three hours over there. We called it piece-work. So I understood the need for trade unions because I was in a situation where I needed one. You know what I mean!?

Ulli: Uh-huh.

Naomi: So there was this synergy, always, between my work and my politics. It was almost as if what I learned from my parents just kind of divulged itself through my life, cause I saw it, actively – like, the social worker came to me and said, “I need to see your attendance records.” And I go, “What!!!” [laughs] You know what I mean! Like, I was always marginalized. I was the only Jewish kid, maybe there’d be four Jewish kids in a school with 200 kids, things like that. My parents were weird lefties in a Zionist community. The other Jews in our community, which were very few and far between, were Zionists and my parents weren’t and it was a small enough community that everybody knew they weren’t Zionists, so I was always an outsider – all of us in our family basically were.

But it really was through the work I did and through the networking I was able to do, and through the guidance I had through all those years. Through what I learned, either by living it directly or witnessing it. I mean, I worked in Regent Park. I knew Regent Park was not the “nasty ghetto” [laughs] that people were saying it was. There was great stuff going on in Regent Park when I worked there. Gardens, people were growing gardens. The first foodbank started in Regent Park, in a woman’s apartment. It was before the era of foodbanks. I was working in Regent Park in the community centre, running literacy and ESL classes for adults. I just think that’s an important point, and it leads to where I am today at age 81, writing my dissertation at OISE based in Indigenous-feminist scholarship.

Ulli: So, you were going to talk about Palestine/Israel – that sphere of involvement?

Naomi: Oh, right. Yes, I’ll just go back a little bit. How I initially ended up, while I was teaching English as a second language, I organized in 1979, which was the year of the Nicaraguan revolution, I started organizing adult ESL and literacy teachers to take an adult educators’ tour to Nicaragua. We finally were able to go in 1983, which would have been four years after the revolution. I was the coordinator of the tour and – I won’t go into that, that’s a whole other interview. That was a bit of a nightmare – not because of the Nicaraguans but because of the Canadians who were [laughs] just absolutely outrageous with their cameras and their disrespect and – you know, we hadn’t done our work. We needed to have some anti-racism sessions before we went, because they acted like tourists, American tourists at that!

That was an unpleasant experience for me, but at the same time I learned tremendously. Nicaragua was a young revolutionary country. It was before all the bad stuff happened and Ortega became a bit of a monster, so many years later. I learned a lot. And I learned a lot about how I needed to work locally when I got home. That it was all well and good to support the Nicaraguans in their revolution and to understand the impacts of poverty, but there was an awful lot of poverty in the city I lived in, and I needed to go where to that was. And that’s how I ended up applying for a job with the Toronto Board to go into Regent Park.

So, I had a kind of agenda. I knew there was a need for literacy in Regent Park, English literacy for women on welfare who couldn’t read or write English, who were English-speaking. I had learned that. That’s what I did. What I did was, I took the slides from Nicaragua – in those days it was slide shows, there was no computer, there was no nothing, there was just slide shows, unless you could get your hands on a good movie – but I took my slides from Nicaragua and information from women in Nicaragua, and connected the women in Regent Park, who I was teaching literacy to, to women in Nicaragua.

That was 1979. And then I spent several years working in solidarity with Central America, particularly Nicaragua. I ended up working with the Latin American Working Group, with LAWG, and I was hired, once again, to produce and design Central America Update; and through discussions with people there, Palestine began coming up and the connection was being made and I was being asked about it. That would have been around early ’80s. I would say it was in the early ’80s.

In the summer of 1985, my dad asked me to go to Israel – Palestine – to see his favourite sister. He had had four sisters and they were all gone, and he was worried she might be ill. She had gone to a kibbutz. I don’t know, she went to fight with the haganah in 1937 was all he knew. And this was in an anti-Zionist family and she had a very difficult time connecting with relatives and she never came back to the US. So my dad wanted me to go to Palestine.

Ulli: Had they not kept in touch by mail or anything?

Naomi: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, he had been there. He had seen her. But he wasn’t well enough to travel and he just wanted me to go. So I took my, at that time, 13 year old daughter and we went to Palestine. We also went to France and Italy. We traveled the Mediterranean. It was a wonderful trip. And, we went to Palestine. I was already very much in tune with Palestinian solidarity because all I asked my aunt about was, “What’s going on with Palestinians here?” Her kibbutz – was a bike ride from a city, a small city, called Affoula, which was a Palestinian town. And I would bike there every day with my daughter. So I wasn’t really educated, but I was in Palestine and I knew I needed to find something out about it, so everywhere I went I asked about it and fortunately, my aunt’s son-in-law was pro-Palestinian, though he lived inside the Green Line and he, you know, lived on a kibbutz.

I was dumb-struck by the level of racism that I encountered among the Jews in the kibbutz. And my aunt, she was too old to leave, but she was very unhappy. She was devastated by how things had developed. And the reason she had stayed was she married an Israeli and mothered his daughter, who he’d had with another ... Anyway, so that is, I would say, the early ’80s is when it – it obviously was part of what I was thinking about, and then I joined a group called Jews... it was one of the many proliferation of Jewish groups that started popping up around that time. I can’t remember, but David Rappaport was in that group, Ester Reiter was in that group, Judith Weisman ... Robert ...

Ulli: Was this also in the context of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982?

Naomi: Oh no. That was – you mean the invasion of Lebanon in 2006?

Ulli: No, 1982.

Naomi: Yeah, it would have been. For sure. Oh yeah. Sabra and Shatila you mean?

Ulli: Yeah.

Naomi: Oh yeah, absolutely. No, but there were groups before that.

Ulli: Alright.

Naomi: But yes, definitely we were dealing with that and many other things as well. Jews – ah, I can’t remember what it was called, but interestingly enough what happened within that group, which continued to happen, and still happens in Jewish-specific groups was the fear of anti-Semitism on the Left. So it was very difficult to get our group to engage with the Left, to go outside the boundaries of “Jews” against the occupation. And I was struggling with even the need for a Jewish organization, let alone being part of one. It wasn’t that I denied being Jewish. I didn’t at all. I felt I had a responsibility as a Jew to speak out. But I found that the Jewish organizations that I was invited to join, maybe two or three of them, had this fear of anti-Semitism on the Left. I was at events where Jewish women expressed that fear, in sometimes inappropriate ways.

So, that was when I began to look for a Jewish women’s organization. And I found people like Rachel Epstein, Amy Gotlieb, Lois Fine, Lois Sinclair, Judith Weisman, again – we worked together a lot and she’s 89 now – and the Jewish Women’s Committee Against the Occupation was formed. That would have been sometime – I mean someone closer to the group now, well, the group has disbanded. That’s another whole story. We worked politically from officially from the late ’80s right through-- well, Sue Goldstein and I would consider ourselves sort of an offshoot of the Jewish Women’s Committee. But that was the pivotal point in my life for learning what anti-Zionism really meant. And if you’re an anti-Zionist, what do you do? What do you say? And the vigil was born in October 2020 at the time of what’s called the Second Intifada.

Ulli: Not 2020!

Naomi: No, no, no, no. 19, 20 years ago! [laughs] Whatever 20 years ago is – I have terrible math. 19..

Ulli: The year 2000?

Naomi: Yeah, the year 2000. That’s what I mean. That was the start of the Second Intifada in October that year and what we... I’m not even sure we had... the Jewish Women’s Committee had a name and we kind of, if I remember correctly, we kind of piggy-backed a vigil that had been set up for Bosnia. And women were vigiling in the new City Hall Square. And some of us, who then ended up shortly after that setting up the Palestinian solidarity vigil, we went to some of those for Bosnia. That’s how we came to be known as inspired by Women in Black. Because I think that the women who set up the vigil for Bosnia – and I don’t know what happened to it – said they were “inspired by Women in Black”. And there’s a Women in Black inspired vigil still going on in Tel Aviv every week, just like we used to before Corona.

It would be nice to be able to say that there was a neat kind of transition from civil rights to Vietnam to Nicaragua to Palestine, but there wasn’t. It was a conundrum of activities and political possibilities and actions and things you could join. I think what really solidified my... I talked with my son, David, about this – he’s 53 now – and he’s been grappling with, “Okay, I’m Jewish, what does it mean? What do I have to do? What does a Jew do?” Because there really is quite a big fuss made about being Jewish, “doing Jewish”. Since I grew up in a family that didn’t do that I kind of had to invent it. But David has truly invented it for himself and his family, and so has my daughter whose father is not Jewish. She has brought Judaism into her children’s lives. So they’ve both gone beyond me. But David really does believe that... well, he and I agree that my consciousness developed because I’m Jewish I had to do something. Because Israel never interested me. Until I became a solidarity activist, it didn’t interest me. By 1985 when I went to see my aunt, it interested me. But all through my years in the US, and up until the early ’80s in Canada, it wasn’t an interest. I didn’t see my need to engage with it. I didn’t like it. But it was the increasing engagement with other Jews and particularly the Jewish Women’s Committee, women like Sue and women Miriam knew, anyway Miriam was there. Miriam was very much part of the vigil.

Ulli: Can you talk more about the vigil, what it was like on the ground: who was there; what reception you were getting from passers-by; the actual dynamics of it, and the actual life of it?

Naomi: Well, first of all, the vigil was shut down, I guess, in mid-March and those of us who organized the vigil, we continued to send out handouts [laughs] to the vigilers so they’ll come back when we can set up again. But your question? There’s no single answer because we’ve been on that line for close to 20 years and so there have been changes.

In the beginning- and in the middle and more closer to now- things were pretty bad and people were pretty nasty. But the mindset of people in Toronto has evolved over those 20 years. People aren’t in the same head space. So we get a lot more positive feedback. And another thing that became very important in the life of the vigil, we did get nasty shit. We got some very nasty stuff. We got spit at, we got pushed. Just recently, Chandler Davis got pushed and he’s a 92 year old senior. So, yeah, we get nasty stuff, but as the vigil has evolved over 20 years, as this particular movement has evolved, and as information, and as information about Palestine has evolved, people are just more conscious of Palestine than they were when we started.

For example, when we’re doing the vigil, we print 75 handouts every Friday and we get rid of all of them. Now, I’m not suggesting that everyone we hand them to reads them, but a whole lot of people thank us now. So history has been going on the last 20 years, and there’s been a lot that has gone on around Palestine the last 20 years, and people’s response to the vigil reflects some of that. So that is not ... there’s no single answer to that. And of course, on the other hand, we don’t really know.

Another thing that was very important to the vigil was... 2 years ago this summer, in July -- it’ll be 2 years this summer – the Israel Consulate decided to move. Now we know they didn’t move because of us. As a matter of fact, probably no one from the Consulate was even in the building when we held our vigils because it’s the Sabbath and they probably shut down at four, and we never started ’til five. But of course, they knew we were there. There were several years where the RCMP or the OPP or municipal cops would come and we could never tell if they were there to protect us from rabid Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists, and sometimes they came to harass us. So we don’t see them anymore. They haven’t come for, I don’t know, three or four years now. But we had to move location because the Israeli Consulate decided to move from 180 Bloor Street -- were you ever there?

Ulli: Oh yeah. Sure. I was there.

Naomi: Oh yeah, you must have been. Well, that was our location from the early, early, early days of the vigil until two years ago. And they decided to move to the Hudson Bay Building at #2 Bloor Street East, which is a fabulous location! The 180 Bloor at Avenue Road location, we were kind of stuck with it. It was not a good location. It was narrow. There was always construction going on because they were either... we watched the Crystal go up. [laughs] We watched the Crystal being built on the ROM.

It just wasn’t a very good location. There wasn’t a lot of room and we were only allowed to stand on the public space and it was very narrow.

So when they moved, we moved with them. Sue made this great placard that said, “You can run but you can’t hide.” And we moved to... we stood in front on the northeast side of Bloor Street facing the Hudson Bay, up against the planters in the public space, and it is a great space. And one of the things that happened as a result of that space is that the entire diverse population of Toronto is there. Every rush hour. Coming off six subway exits. It pours people, those exits. And we had this banner – this huge and these wonderful placards – most of which Sue made – and people come up and they want to talk to us. It’s like being part of a carnival almost, because on the one side of us, the Jehovah’s Witnesses set up their stand, and often on the other side of us, a busker will make music. It’s like being in New, that’s all I can say, before New York became what it is today. It’s like being in the New York subway. It’s entertainment. It draws people, plus it draws people to information. Countless people have told us since we’ve moved two years ago, “Oh, I didn’t know this.” Because they’re drawn – when we were at 180 Bloor Street and Avenue Road, people wouldn’t stop, really, to look at our stuff, because there wasn’t any room. Anyway, it’s made all the difference and we all want to get back to it, although when we’re going to do that I have no idea. It’s really a heart-breaker ’cause that thing was going so well and we were going to have a commemoration of 20 years – not because we’re so great ’cause we’d been there for 20 years, but because we – this thing is still going on. It has to end. We don’t want to be here.

Anyway, I hope that clarifies some of that.

I began to grapple with Palestine when I began to grapple with, “What is my responsibility here?” You know, because I didn’t have much of a Jewish life. I think I began to grapple with “What is my responsibility here?” though people like Judith Weisman, who had been an avid Zionist as a younger woman and had lost that. It was the Jewish Women’s Committee that was where it really happenes – that would have been from, for some reason for another, around the same time as I began doing a lot of volunteer work for Nicaragua.

I went to Nicaragua four times. I organized two tours, one an adult educator’s tour and the other one, honest to goodness, I can’t remember the second tour. Oh! We picked coffee! A coffee-picking – we went for several weeks on a campesino farm in the hills and heard the war, whatever those monsters were called that were being [laughs] funded by the US. That was the other thing, because I’d come from the US, you see, so there was some responsibility, which I no longer feel. I have no feeling. I mean, I was 24 when I came here and I’m 81 now so really I think I have the right to say I am no longer American.

But you’d be surprised, I have progressive, leftwing American friends who may not have been here as long as I have – which is 56 years – but they believe that they’re still American and they’ll always be American. They have this kind of crazy allegiance which I’m distanced enough from at this point in time, that I don’t have to worry about that. I mean, I don’t have the allegiance. I don’t think I had it when I lived there because my mother didn’t have it. My mother thought that patriotism was evil and did evil things. And that you couldn’t separate it from imperialism and the two were connected. You had to have patriotism in order to destroy other people. [laughs] That was my mother. I was very drawn to that quite radical politic, but again, I was not an activist in the US. It wasn’t ’til I came here.

Ulli: Were you involved in other organizations that were related to Palestine?

Naomi: Oh yes, I can’t remember the names of them. I’m involved in one now: Women in Solidarity with Palestine, which is what became of the Jewish Women’s Committee. It morphed into Women in Solidarity with Palestine. I’m peripherally involved with Independent Jewish Voices although I won’t join because I do not see the need to congratulate ourselves. Jewish organizations will sometimes congratulate themselves for a successful campaign. I’m not comfortable with that. It may be a way of gaining membership but I’m also uncomfortable with the idea of prioritizing building a Jewish organization’s membership. We don’t have time, why do we need to do that? I’m also very close to the work that Sue and Rachel are doing at the Winchevsky Centre where they’re developing a much more critical, accountable position on Palestine and their position, and they’ve come in support of Palestinian solidarity. It’s in their newsletter every week. So I’m close to them.

Also, I hadn’t mentioned, but I did work with Robert Meeropol.

Ulli: On the Rosenberg Fund?

Naomi: Well, what happened was, he is a good friend of both Richard Lee and Chandler from the old days, although Richard’s quite a bit younger, I think, than Chandler. What happened was, I was working with the Winchevsky Centre and we invited Robert up – this was years ago, this would have been, oh my god, maybe 1996 / ’97? Something like that? Winchevsky invited him up to an event where he made a speech and he needed a place to stay so he stayed at my place. And I gotta tell you, I had a house at the time in what was known as Little India and he was taking a nap in my bedroom and I was walkin’ around downstairs, “Mom, I wish you could be here! Mom!! Ethel Rosenberg’s son is sleepin’ upstairs [laughs] in my bedroom!!” ’Cause my mother was totally caught up in that case and totally devastated by it, like so many other people and there he was!

And so he began to talk to me about wanting to set up – one of the recipients of the award for the first time was given to a child outside the US and it was Robin Pitawanakwat who is now, an adult with three children of her own. At the time she was a teenager, a late teenager. And her brother, Brock, and Robin had received the first award outside the US from the Rosenberg Fund. She had become one of the Rosenberg Fund’s children. And Robert wanted to set a Fund up here for Indigenous children. So he asked if I would be interested in helping to get that started. And that’s how he and I worked together and we worked together for years and we were able to give out several awards up here to Indigenous children, including an Indigenous boy from Mexico. And we worked with Robin. Gradually it just became – I was responsible for all the paperwork and all the infrastructure and it became much more reasonable because Robin had become an adult and she had become an activist. She was very, very active particularly around children’s rights in Saskatchewan and Winnipeg, which is where she’s based – no, Regina! She’s in Regina. So, anyway, we moved the Fund to Regina.

And so Robert and I eventually just lost touch. He retired from the Fund, from the CEO of the Fund, and his daughter is now running the Fund. He’s probably he’s eight years younger than me. He’s probably 80 – not 80, he’s probably 70 or 71 now. And I’m assuming his health is okay. But did that answer your question?

Ulli: Oh I--

Naomi: Oh, one thing, though. It was very difficult to speak with him about Palestine. As I discovered with so many progressive Jews, and maybe it really had nothing to do with his being Jewish, but he had a difficult time going there. He wasn’t expected to talk about it at his talk – his talk was to raise money for this Indigenous fund – but it was difficult. There are so many progressive Jewish activists who I know, some who identify as Jewish and it’s important to them, some who will identify if you ask them, but it’s not a priority for them, they don’t think about it much – they don’t “do Jewish”. I know numbers of Jewish activists, one way or the other, who will not engage in that discussion. They’ll talk about everything else but they won’t talk [laughs] about that and the issue, of course, is if you don’t talk about that what is the point of talking about anything else? Because that is the central issue. That is it! You’ve gotta get rid of that government. Netanyahu, I mean. You’ve gotta get rid of that, you know, it’s gotta go! Not the Jews. They don’t have to go. That state has to go. Anyways, it’s difficult to deal with relatives I love, who will not go there. I mean, hanging on to support for that place is – I just don’t get it.

Now coming from my background it’s not surprising that I would protest. But it really is surprising. It’s sort of like the same kind of surprise that there’s still Trump, that they didn’t get rid of him. They didn’t get rid of Netanyahu. Does that answer your question?

Ulli: Well, yes.

Naomi: It’s all a big – Sue and I talk about it a lot because we stand at the vigil for Palestine. And she and I will want to bring other issues in that we think are relevant to Palestine. But we have vigilers who say, “No no no no, we’re just here for Palestine”, “Our focus is Palestine!” And so, you know, it’s an exciting place to be. When we’re set up again please drop by.

Ulli: I will. Yes. Let’s hope that’s sooner rather than later.

Third Interview, May 27, 2020

Ulli: Okay, so, do you want to talk about [you becoming a feminist]?

Naomi: Yeah. I’m hoping this is relatively well organized and it really is only dealing with that in connection with, again, my need for work. So, in 1969, the Vietnam War was raging and I was involved with – which is already, I think, in the interview – with an organization here in Canada, based in Toronto, and we did a conference in Montreal in 1969, which was an effort on the part of American anti-war activists and Canadian anti-war activists, including Quebec anti-war activists, to pull together a conference in Montreal to talk about the war. And of course, numbers and numbers of Americans who were already here and dodged the draft, were at that conference as well. There was a long, long table upon the stage at this huge – I don’t know what it was – it wasn’t a community centre, it was auditorium somewhere in Montreal – and there were hundreds of people there. And I was the only woman on the panel. There were probably a total of ten of us: American activists, Canadian activists, Quebec activists – and I was the only woman.

So, we start the conference and almost immediately a woman from the US grabs the mic and says that they will not allow the conference to continue until women are assured equity at the mics. Well, this was unheard of at the time. And all hell broke loose. And I [laughs] took the mic at the table at the front, the panelists’ table, and I said that, “We would deal with the issue of women’s rights once we had ended the war in Vietnam.” I was booed and hissed by women in the crowd, and there were hundreds of them, and I was invited – a Quebecois woman took the mic from the floor – and invited me to a “feminist caucus” because I obviously needed an education. And so, at the break, I went to the feminist caucus and got my education.

So, I never did that again. And I truly began to try to understand, because I was so involved with wanting to end – for that war to be over. I had seen, myself, so much of the tragedy of that war, based on the young men and women I met. So, that was my first encounter. And then at some point shortly after that, I took a trip out West at the point where the war ended, which was '75. I took a trip out West with my young son and I read Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Woman's Consciousness, Man’s World [editor's note: Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World was written by Sheila Rowbotham] and I was blown away. I read it on top of a mountain in British Columbia [laughing], and I was just blown away. The ideas were new to me. You know, it was just wonderful. And that was probably around 1975.

Ulli: So that would have been six years after that conference?

Naomi: It was around the same time as that conference. It was sort of a transitionary period for numbers of women who had been involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. When that ended, there were so many indications of a growing feminism all around us. Feminist presses were popping up, feminist organizations to protect abused women. All kinds of grassroots women’s things were starting to happen, sort of a burst.

My first encounters were 1969 in Quebec, and then shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, reading Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. So then, what happened was in 1976, or sometime just prior to 1976, I had taken a typesetting course. ’Cause, I needed to be employable. I was always going to school to learn something that would make me more employable. I took a typesetting course at George Brown, the one on King Street – that was before desktop publishing, that was before computer technology took off. Computers were huge in those days, and you typeset onto these yellow tapes, and then you ran those tapes through another machine, and the machine de-coded the holes in the tape. Anyway, I had learned to do that, and I had learned on a couple different typesetting systems.

So, the Latin American Working Group and what was then called Women’s Educational Press [Canadian Women’s Educational Press] – they were collaborating at the time on a book called Population Target [Population target : the political economy of population control in Latin America by Bonnie Mass ] – which was about forced sterilization of Indigenous women around the world, and I think even at that time, including Canada and the US. And they needed a typesetter.

So someone working at the Women’s Press remembered that someone named “Naomi Wall” had taken a typesetting course. And so they hired me. That got me my job, but it also connected me with a feminist organization for the first time, which was a collective; the Women’s Press was a collective. So not only were they publishing women’s books, one of the first, in fact, I think the first published book was called Women Unite, which I think was published as early as possibly 1972 and it still reads like – you know, it’s just brilliant.

So that really launched me – I was now working for a feminist publishing group / collective. I then became a member; at the same time, I was a member of the collective. We would have meetings every couple of weeks and we’d talk about Marx and feminism – we did a lot of that kind of thing. We became, many of us, active in a choir called “The Red Berets”. And my life just took off. And I came out. [laughs] Not until 1980 but I did. I guess I’d want to make it clear that I’d been what is known as bisexual since I was a teenager. That’s a long time ago. But I didn’t come out as a lesbian until 1980. It actually, for me, became a political issue because of the lesbophobia I was experiencing in the adult ed classrooms where I was teaching, which is a whole ’nother story.

In any case, it really was the advent of a structured, organized kind of defining feminist culture that I guess, in a way, even overwhelmed my life. But fortunately – I mean, in a good sense – but fortunately, again, related to the jobs that I had as a result of the skills I was developing. I came into feminism with a – I think, a budding intersectional perspective. I could see there were class issues. I could see there was racism in the so-called women’s movement because I was working with people who were experiencing these things, and talking about them. The feminism I embraced was what we – I remember calling myself a “socialist feminist”, but then I had to add “anti-Zionist socialist feminist” and the list got very, very long. But really, the advent of a feminist consciousness in my life somehow brought all those streams together. And now I’m, I guess what you could call a “raving feminist”.

Ulli: A what?

Naomi: A raving feminist.

Ulli: Raving?

Naomi: Yeah [laughing]. It’s very central to how I see the world-- for example, the dissertation I’m trying to write right now, really what it’s about is grounding a disruptive pedagogy for adult learners in the scholarship of Indigenous feminists. Sort of like tracking the colonial genocide in Canada through Indigenous feminist scholarship. It just, I think – it was very, very – it was seminal, I guess you could say.

And there’s just one other point I want to make and that is, the advent of desktop publishing was a very difficult transition for people like myself to make, who were dependent on typesetting. We weren’t as long ago as metal type, where you had to actually set the letters, but the early years of typesetting – which I learned, and was quite skilled at – which did begin to evolve very quickly from one kind of system to another. By the time desktop came around and we were all trying to grab one of these teeny-weeny little Macs and figure out how to do that, that put a lot of us out of work, and there were a lot of women in that field.

And also design – like book design, design of articles. Remember the Gestetner machine?

Ulli: Oh, for sure, yes.

Naomi: Yes, well that’s how we were doing everything. Everything was hands on. We would need to do layout on big boards. And some layout – I mean, it was an art. It was a hands-on kind of time. And so, I learned how to design a book – did several of them actually – with others, with other people. So becoming feminist, and working with other feminists was more than an ideology or an idea. It really in many, many, many women’s cases became a way of life, and it became work. We learned new skills, and we learned them very rapidly – because the transition from the typesetting that I was doing with so many other women – in fact [laughs] Janice Acton and I, we forged a company of two and we called it Hack Enterprises and we would typeset for anybody. We could typeset on a number of different pieces of equipment but it was before desktop, so there were no individualized computers. In fact, Coach House Press had – you know Coach House?

Ulli: Oh yes.

Naomi: Yeah, Hack Enterprises rented, I think, or found a way – we were able to use their computer equipment to print out our yellow tapes [laughs].

Yes, so that’s basically it. It, again, connected me through employment. I learned a skill so that I could be employable, because things were changing so rapidly technologically.

Ulli: Right, yeah.

Naomi: And my employment did depend on a hands-on access to things, and also because I was involved then in publishing. Oh, there’s a couple of books I really should give you for the archives. One was, I think, among the very first children’s books, started in Quebec and then the Women’s Press bought the rights and translated it into English. It was called, or still is – I have millions of copies of it – Mommy Works on Dresses and it’s about piece work.

Ulli: Oh, wow, okay.

Naomi: Oh, you’ll love it. And then myself and a friend, as members of the Women’s Press got a grant to do a book called Come With Us which really did – even Michele Landsberg who, I think reviewed it – that was published in 1978. And it dealt with racism, unemployment, immigration, the specific racism that’s faced by Indigenous children in the regular public school system so, all of that came through the Women’s Press.

The Women’s Press really was a highlight of my life. And then, like other so-called feminist organizations, it was challenged by women of colour who had been excluded not only as members of the collective, or staff, but had been excluded in terms of what the Women’s Press was publishing. So, the Women’s Press then split into two presses: one was inclusive; the other remained largely exclusive. And that would have been in around – I don’t know exactly when. But it was happening to other feminist organizations that were mostly dominated by white women, they were being challenged. All those groups were being challenged.

Ulli: How long did you remain involved with the Press?

Naomi: Until it broke up into two.

Ulli: You weren’t part of either?

Naomi: Well, no, because I had moved on. I had become – I had moved on from the Women’s Press because I had found more stable and more lucrative employment over the years. But also, I did become involved in the anti-racism campaign within the Women’s Press because I did remain a member. Also, I was published in a couple of the books that they did, anthologies. So, yeah, I remain connected to the Women’s Press, and in a way I still am. Because I’m still in touch with some of the people.

Do you know Liz Martin?

Ulli: I don’t think so – the name is possibly familiar, but no, I wouldn’t say so.

Naomi: She was very, very important at the Press and she taught me everything I know about layout and design. Brilliant book designer.

So, that’s basically it. About that topic.

Ulli: And the feminist perspective you were saying, it informed everything else you were involved in after that?

Naomi: Absolutely. Well, I was always attracted to what I guess you could call “renegade points of view”. And so one of my very earliest, I guess you could call it “political” acts, was when I was in high school – it would have been 1955 – and my high school in Washington DC – where the schools had been desegregated for only one year at that point – they had sororities – yeah, high school sororities – and my high school was predominantly white middle class. It was segregated. Even a year after desegregation, it was still segregated.

I was asked to pledge at a girls’ high school – I was in, I guess I was in Grade 11 – and so I go to the pledge meeting, and there’s a little bit of an initiation, and then they start picking and choosing who they’re going to let in. There were about, I don’t know, maybe six of us were invited to this pledge party. I got in, a couple of others got in, but then there was this group that didn’t get in. They were told to go home. So I refused to join unless everyone could join. And I didn’t do it out of some kind of, you know, political understanding. I just couldn’t bring myself to join if these other people couldn’t join – the discomfort was too great for me. And, I guess it wasn’t something that I really wanted. It wasn’t a priority. I don’t think it was that hard to let it go, and I didn’t want to be part of a group that would do such a thing. But it wasn’t a political understanding. I just couldn’t do it.

Yeah, I don’t remember your question but ...

Ulli: I was asking about how it informed your life afterwards. Like, this is “before” ...

Naomi: Well, I think I was always a renegade. I was in trouble a lot whether it was in school or with a group I belonged to. I had a big mouth and I opened it, all the time. Well, not all the time, but I mean I had a big mouth and if I was upset about something that as going on I would say something about it. But I think what began to happen when I moved to Canada, where everything just seemed so much more accessible in terms of ideas, and connecting with people. And I began to develop an analysis, a perspective. It took years. I’m still doing it.

Ulli: You’re still developing it?

Naomi: Yes. I came here, you know, as a kind of outsider; renegade. I didn’t know what I believed in. My first argument, of all things, was with poor Dan Heap. I had been here maybe three years – no actually, by that point it was six years – anyway, he was running for the NDP for some election in the early ’60s and he knocked at my door. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t even know what the NDP was and he tried to solicit my vote. I started arguing with him about electoral politics, which I grew up with believing was bullshit. But at the same time I campaigned for John Kennedy before I moved up here, so I didn’t have an analysis. You know, I was going to go to Israel when I was in my second year of university in Philadelphia, with a group of Jewish students – that would have been 1957 – a group of Jewish students called a meeting and met in the cafeteria and said, “We’ve gotta go save Israel.”

So, I had no analysis but I had an understanding that I was really not a mainstream person. I felt like an outsider. I don’t know how to reconcile those things and, I guess, it’s very good that I came up here. I did get to do some anti-Vietnam War work in States, because we were networking back and forth all the time – and it was different there than here. We have a greater diversity of influences here. I don’t just mean population-wise, but we have a greater influence politically, socially, and historically than there.

Related Resources

Subject Headings

• Abortion
• Anti-Zionism
• Ashkenazi Jews
• Cold War
• Communism
• Democratic Party (U.S.)
• English as a Second Language (ESL)
• Guatemala
• Jim Crow
• Marijuana
• McCarthyism
• Nicaraguan Revolution
• Palestine
• Republican Party (U.S.)
• Rochdale
• Russian Revolution
• Socialism
• Toronto/Regent Park
• Union Organizing
• Vietnam War

See Also

• October Crisis
• Population target : the political economy of population control in Latin America by Bonnie Mass
• Rosenberg Fund for Children
• SUPA - Student Union for Peace Action
• Winchevsky Centre (Morris Winchevsky School)
• Woman ’s Consciousness, Man ’s World by Sheila Rowbotham