Originally aired on HuffPost Live on July 22, 2013.
I was invited to be part of a discussion about the role of men in the abortion debate on HuffPost Live. Watch the full segment below.
<a href="http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/should-we-engage-men-in-reproductive-rights/51e720472b8c2a354600019e"><em>Originally aired on HuffPost Live on July 22, 2013.
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First published on The New York Times, December 21, 2012. Read the original here.
IRVINGTON, N.Y. — Painted in gold leaf, the words “Knowledge is Power” adorn the entrance to the reading room in the Town Hall of Irvington. The lettering is elaborate, the phrase itself like an incantation. As a child, I read it nearly every day as I entered the library. The words seemed to promise something the room did not deliver, something more than institutional lighting and faded encyclopedias.
The room contained other hints of forgotten grandeur: the swirling blue glass mosaics that surrounded the windows, the gilded quotations on the ceiling beams (cousins to the one above the door, but dust-covered and dull). Daydreaming, I’d make up stories about the room involving heiresses, artists and priceless antiques. I had no way of knowing that I wasn’t far off; the reading room had a secret, or perhaps I should say the reading room was a secret, forgotten by the world.
“I wasn’t aware of the room when I moved here,” said Michael John Burlingham, a great-grandson of its famous designer,Louis Comfort Tiffany. Mr. Burlingham had come to Irvington to research a book about Tiffany. He knew that Tiffany had begun visiting Irvington in 1863, when Tiffany’s father purchased a summer home there, but that was all. By the time older residents told Mr. Burlingham about the room, the unusual circumstances surrounding its creation had left it in a state of limbo.
In 1892, a group called the Mental and Moral Improvement Society donated the land for the town hall to the village, but with one condition: that the village maintain a free reading room in the hall. Helen Gould, the daughter of Jay Gould, the railroad magnate, donated $10,000 to have the reading room designed and decorated by Tiffany.
In the century that followed, Irvington expanded rapidly. By the late 1990s, it was clear that the library would have to move to a new, larger building. But the conditions of the original gift meant that the Tiffany room would have to stay in the town hall. By then, the room was in poor condition and used for storage.
Hoping to inspire a restoration, Mr. Burlingham wrote a letter to the town newspaper in 2004, saying “I can count on the fingers of one hand Louis Tiffany’s intact interiors: the Veteran’s Room of the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York, theMark Twain House in Hartford, the Ayer Mansion in Boston and the reading room in Irvington’s Town Hall.”
In response, Irvington residents formed the Tiffany Room Committee and hired a local architect, Stephen Tilly, who had previously restored the Tiffany-designed interior of Congregation Shearith Israel’s Beaux-Arts sanctuary on Central Park West. Tilly and his building conservator, Mary A. Jablonski, found little documentation of the original room. “We had no plans, we had really no pictures. We had a few fragments of a paper trail. But we had the room.”
The room was in bad shape. It was not just in need of fresh plaster and paint; many of the furnishings, including more than a dozen handcrafted Tiffany turtleback lanterns, were in deep storage. The clock, a signature Tiffany piece of glass mosaic work done in a stunning, watery palette, no longer functioned. The mosaics were missing tiles. The chandelier had disappeared, and no one had a clue as to what it looked like.
Together, Mr. Tilly and the committee interviewed residents, searched photo archives, and called upon the Irvington Historical Society and curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Barbara Denyer, a local artist and a committee member, designed a new chandelier.
The village contributed $75,000 toward the renovation. The remainder of the approximately $280,000 cost came from private donations by Irvington residents and local businesses. Two years of restoration turned to three, which turned to five, which turned to eight, but the committee kept going.
The fruits of all the work were finally made public on Sunday, Dec. 9, when the Tiffany Room officially reopened. What had once seemed like a cramped classroom was revealed to be a beautiful, almost meditative space. The restored mosaics suggest the nearby Hudson River, while tables and chairs designed by Tiffany Studios give the room a sense of gravitas. Most stunning are the handcrafted lanterns in the newly minted chandelier and restored wall sconces. The room blends Tiffany’s Arts and Crafts background with his mastery of Art Nouveau design, as well as the period’s penchant for Japanese decoration.
The library’s director, Pamela Strachan, says she plans to use the Tiffany Room for book club meetings and other programs. But for the most part, the room will be open for village residents to use as they see fit, exactly as the Mental and Moral Improvement Society intended a century ago. And though the room’s secrets have been revealed, it will still be a fine place to daydream.
The Tiffany reading room is located in Irvington Town Hall, 85 Main Street, Irvington, N.Y. For more information:irvingtonlibrary.org/tiffany.htm or (914) 591-7840.
First published in Brain World Magazine, April 2012. See the original here.
When I was 12 years old, I developed superpowers. I went to bed a normal middle-schooler and awoke to find my senses heightened. My alarm clock sounded like a siren, the sun burned my eyes, and my cereal milk tasted like a cereal milkshake. I could smell the furnace in the basement. Like many ’tween boys, I was a comic book junkie, and thus understood what was happening: I’d transcended humanity and was about to join a loveable gang of mutant heroes who risked their lives fighting evil. Since my other option was the seventh grade, this sounded great.
Sadly, an hour later I found myself crying in an armchair as my first migraine moved out of its aura phase and into what is succinctly (and accurately) known as the pain phase.
It felt like someone took a finger and was pressing it onto my skull. Behind my left eye, my migraine throbbed like a second heart. This one-sided pain is the most common of migraine symptoms, and it gives them their name, which comes from the Greek hemi, meaning “half,” and kranion, meaning “skull.” Hemikranion. (If I’d really been a superhero, Hemikranion would have been the name of my home planet.) But my superpowers were simply side effects: photophobia (sensitivity to light), and phonophobia (sensitivity to sound).
In a way migraineurs are like mutants—or snowflakes: No two are alike. Some of us don’t have the aura phase. Others see bursts of light when we have an episode. A few experience facial numbness. Once, my friend went blind for a day—a particularly terrifying experience because it was a migraine without pain, and it took doctors hours to figure out what was happening. Synesthesia, nausea, vertigo, phantom smells, tingling in the extremities; migraines can produce a stunning variety of symptoms, and last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
This is part of the reason it’s been so hard to find their cause. Some studies have pointed to constricted blood vessels as the prime mover. Arteries in the brain spasm, cutting off blood flow in the occipital lobe, which houses the visual cortex, creating the hallucinations I experience. When blood flow rebounds, vessels in the scalp dilate and leak. As each heartbeat forces more blood out, nerve cells interpret this leakage as throbbing waves of pain—which is why I felt like I had a second heart inside my head.
Other studies point to a phenomenon known as cortical spreading depression (CSD) as the main cause of migraines. During a CSD attack, neurons hyperactivate in a slowly spreading wave, like the domino theory of Communism. In its wake, this wave leaves exhausted cells depleted of potassium ions, and neural functioning slows or halts. This in turn triggers swelling, inflammation, and a lack of oxygen in the brain—similar to what happens during a stroke.
But the evidence is conflicting, and suggests multiple causes—chemical, physical, situational—interacting to create this mother of all headaches. Recent studies have even pointed to genetic factors, so my dreams of mutanthood were not that far-fetched.
Regardless of the cause, however, about one in 10 people worldwide will have a migraine at some point in their lives. These days, I get one or two a year. In college, when I was permanently stressed, dehydrated and exhausted (all conditions thought to trigger migraines), it was more on the order of one every two months. Most times, I shuttered the windows and dragged myself to bed, to emerge a day later feeling raw, as though my first two layers of skin had been burned away.
Worse were the days I wasn’t home. During one particularly bad episode, I couldn’t walk the last quarter mile to my apartment. Each step sent a blistering wave of pain through my skull, and I was forced to lie beneath a tree on the college quad until the attack subsided—about eight hours.
Yet despite it all, I’m thankful for my migraines. No, I’m not a masochist, but that extraordinary first hour of supersenses kindled in me a visceral understanding of the potential of the human brain. Now I know firsthand that our brains and bodies are capable of things beyond our current understanding or control.
It is a beautiful thing to know that somewhere deep inside you have a reserve of untapped potential. It took a young lover of science fiction and made him a lover of science, which I think of as the study of daily miracles. Who needs to be a mutant? I’ll take humanity, and all that comes with it—seventh grade, splitting headaches, and the vast and exciting treasures locked inside my skull.
First published in The Writer's Chronicle, March/April 2012. Purchase the original here.
As the literary descendent of biography and journalism, it is no wonder that memoir (as a genre), has a rocky relationship to the truth. Like the artistic child born to scientific parents, it defies expectations. On the one hand, it is reportage, expected to convey facts; on the other, it is art, expected to reinvent the world. There is no greater proof of the unease this duality creates than the constant battle over what constitutes truth in nonfiction. Every year, another sensational memoir is released, only to be torn apart by investigative journalists – and rightfully so. These are not books that play with objective truth in order to better recreate the author’s subjective experience, but ones that toss the truth aside entirely for the author’s gain. For these writers, truth is simply a marketing ploy, and readers are right to feel angry and manipulated. But is it possible for writers who perceive the world as a collection of competing truths, where the “real” answer may never be known, to honestly write a work of nonfiction? And if so, what would it look like?
In the aftermath of World-War-II, the entire concept of truth in literature came under question. The brutality of war tested the belief in perfection and progress. Authors tried to replicate for their readers the state of not knowing what was true or good. They moved away from nonfiction like George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which tried earnestly to set down the “truth” of the Spanish Civil War. Instead, they wrote books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, in which the impossible brushed up against the all-too-real. They found inspiration in the formal experimentations of the great modernist writers, like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. They mimicked the linguistic playfulness of these earlier authors, but with an entirely different intention: instead of breaking language apart and looking for its purest form, they used words to undermine meaning, and embraced the ironic.
As the children raised in this chaotic literary moment begin to write their memoirs, it is not surprising that they are looking to recreate this sense of confusion. For these authors, it is not enough to assume that readers acknowledge the unknowability of objective fact. They are consciously creating books in which the unreliable narrator is themselves. They are not trying to report on their lives from the outside, but rather, to replicate for the reader the experience of living them.
Like the original postmodernists, they are interested in exploring those areas where the metanarrative of truth is at best useless, and at worst, stands in the way of actual comprehension. By highlighting their own bias and doubt, they are presenting a more honest depiction of life. Furthermore, while they diminish the trust of the reader in the author-as-narrator, they strengthen the reader’s trust in the author-as-writer: in a genre rocked by scandal, the writer who admits her own faults seems more reliable than the writer who presents herself as perfect. This is a dangerous line to walk, and the writer who goes too far stands the chance of loosing all authority and being disregarded.
So how to do it? The old adage “show, don’t tell” applies in creating the narrative “I” in memoir, as much as in fiction. The postmodern memoir experientially creates in the reader a conscious resistance to the narrative, which replicates the author’s own ambivalence towards the possibility of orderly narratives in life. What follows are three techniques some contemporary writers are employing to this end: switching from first-person to second or third, creating a nonlinear structure, and using fiction (openly) within the memoir. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather a starting point for finding commonalities in this new form. As more authors create their own unstable histories, this list will grow.
Purchase the full version here.
First published in The New York Times on January 6, 2012. Read the original (with videos!) here.
ON the roof of a small row house in Brooklyn, a black powder fuse flared brightly against the gray sky. Hissing and sparking, it burned through a platform installed inside a repurposed Ikea bookshelf, sending four colored balls into action, lighting camp stoves, swinging fly swatters and knocking over books in a frenetic burst of organized chaos. In less than a minute, the final ball had dropped to the ground and was pocketed by Joseph Herscher, 26, the kinetic artist behind this real-worldRube Goldberg machine.
“That’s it for now,” Mr. Herscher, a slim, dark-haired New Zealand native, said. Highly energetic, he resembled one of his own devices as he ran around grabbing the other balls before they bounced into the construction site next door. The wind was picking up, and he wanted to get everything inside before the November storm hit. Since his workroom doubles as his kitchen, he also hoped to get things put away before his roommates returned with groceries. Mr. Herscher shares his small apartment/laboratory with two friends and a hamster named Chester, who is in training for a lead role in Mr. Herscher’s latest creation.
“I’m trying to make it as absurd and useless as possible,” Mr. Herscher said of the contraption, which will turn off the lights behind him when he leaves the room. It is the first in a series he calls Ecomachines, which will perform simple, energy-saving tasks in elaborately wasteful ways.
“You hear that it’s good to recycle everything,” Mr. Herscher said, “and then you hear it takes more energy to recycle paper than it does to cut it down. It’s really hard to know what the right thing to do is. This is a way to express my own frustrations.”
The project is also an attempt to inject larger meaning into a form he already loves. Four years ago, with no particular training in sculpture or mechanical engineering, Mr. Herscher built his first Rube Goldberg machine in the living room of the large house in Auckland, New Zealand, where he lived. Like his current projects, it was constructed mainly out of recycled materials and dollar-store finds, like Solo cups and paper-towel tubes. The result was a massively complex installation with an elementary school mad-genius aesthetic: balls rolled through tubes, bounced and dropped from one platform to another. A teakettle filled a plastic cup with water until it tripped a lever. Whirling sledgehammers slapped the balls forward until a final hammer swung down and smashed a Cadbury Creme Egg into a satisfying splat of chocolate ooze.
“I spent seven months on the thing,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t know why. I didn’t have a plan. In the back of my head, I was thinking it would be really cool when my friends came over.”
Indeed, his friends were amazed — as were the more than 2.3 million YouTube viewers who watched the resulting video,“Creme That Egg.” His landlords, however, were not. Two weeks after the machine was completed, Mr. Herscher and his roommates were evicted.
“We pulled it all down and left about 500 pinholes in the wall,” he said, laughing. But the video had already become popular. Soon Mr. Herscher was appearing on talk shows, leading workshops for children and designing machines for corporate functions. Much of that ended, however, when he moved to New York in 2009.
“I wanted to save some money for a change,” he said. He spent his first two years here working full time as a computer programmer (which he still continues part time today) while living in a crowded duplex apartment that sometimes boasted upward of 15 roommates. “My parents are musicians,” he said, “so I really avoided going down the path of the struggling artist. That’s my biggest fear in life.”
At first, he tried to create a machine that would peck out Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano piece “The Entertainer” in rudimentary percussion, but space constraints made it impossible. He continued leading occasional youth workshops around the world. During the 2011 Venice Biennale, he organized 40 children to create a Goldbergian plant-watering devicein the shade of the Greenhouse at the Venice Giardini. He had been invited by the Italian arts organization Microclima, whose members had seen his work on YouTube. Mr. Herscher, however, had to find private investors to finance the event, which he did by appealing to the national pride of his fellow New Zealanders. While these workshops were fun, he said, he missed having the freedom to create things by himself and on his own time. So he decided to find an apartment that would let him build again. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t an easy search.
“Joseph had quite specific requirements,” said Mr. Herscher’s roommate Olivia Lynch, 25, a communications coordinator at the British Broadcasting Corporation who is an old friend from New Zealand. These included private roof access, ample common space and — perhaps most important — roommates who would put up with an inventor’s workbench next to the kitchen sink and the possibility of something out of the children’s game Mouse Trap taking over the living room.
After looking at more than 20 apartments, Mr. Herscher called Ms. Lynch at work to explain that he’d found the perfect place. There was just one small problem: two other people had already put down deposits, and if they didn’t sign the lease in the next 20 minutes, the apartment would be gone.
“I said, ‘Joseph, tell them we’ll pay six months in advance,’ ” Ms. Lynch recalled. “So he jumped on his bike and wrote a check for $17,000.” By June, they had moved in. After a few trips to Ikea (where most of Mr. Herscher’s supplies came from), he was back in the Rube Goldberg business. But one issue remains: what to do with the machines when they are finished. As of now, Mr. Herscher has no idea; he has no gallery representation and has never sold a machine.
“It’s going to be hard to find a place that will show them,” he said, looking down at a ceramic bowl that had shattered in two during a test of the fuses. His planned devices will incorporate things like hot irons, chemical reactions and live animals, and he worries they will be a difficult sell. But he’s not letting that stop him. “I hope that New York’s such a complicated place that there might be somewhere that’s interested.”
First published on The Daily Beast on January 4 2012. Read the original here.
Until recently, the term “Scandinavian import” evoked blond wood and incomprehensible instructions, not tightly packed and darkly intricate crime novels. Stieg Larsson’s Swedish shockwave The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo changed that, making northern Europe a hotspot for mystery—and misogyny, as reviewers worldwide debated whether his books exposed violence against women, or recreated it. Now, thanks to Danish novelists Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis, there is an alternative for readers who want twists and thrills without Larsson’s undercurrents of sexual sadism—The Boy in the Suitcase.
(Just to get it out of the way, the title isn’t a rip-off. Kaaberbøl says “in our part of the world, the Larsson books don’t all have titles that start with ‘The Girl Who.’” The original Swedish title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women. The English title didn’t come about until 2008—the same year that The Boy in the Suitcase won the prestigious Harald Mogensen Award for best crime novel. And was short-listed for the Scandinavian Glass Key Award for crime fiction. And began being translated into 10 languages. And … well, you get the picture.)
The protagonist of The Boy in the Suitcase is Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse with a passion for dangerous circumstances. Equal parts humanitarian and adrenalin junkie, she works at a refugee center for undocumented women and children in Copenhagen. Her job brings her into contact with an unending stream of human misery, but it’s an old friend from nursing school that nearly gets her killed, when she asks Nina to retrieve a suitcase from a locker in a busy train station—the suitcase contains a boy. Alive, drugged, and nonverbal, the pursuit of his identity leads Nina to the edges of Danish society, where the ultrarich take whatever they want from the poorest of the poor, including their children.
While the plot is made up, it’s not implausible. Friis and Kaaberbøl did extensive interviews and research into the lives of undocumented children in Denmark. “What we discovered was really rather frightening,” says Kaaberbøl. “Over the past seven years more than 600 have quite simply disappeared from the refugee centers.” Through Nina, Friis and Kaaberbøl explore the chilling possibilities behind these disappearances.
For a book set in such a dark demi-monde, where teen prostitutes, human trafficking, and sexual abuse are frequently referenced, The Boy in the Suitcase is remarkably empathic. Much of the violence happens offstage, and what remains is neither sugar-coated nor wallowed in. We experience brutality’s aftermath (both physical and psychological), and Nina notes injuries in a nurse’s clinical tone. But Jucas, the Lithuanian petty thug who enacts most of the novel’s violence, is more likely to spend a beating thinking about his victim’s psychological sense of safety than the face beneath his fists. This was a conscious choice by the authors.
“When you’re very graphic about how people are being killed, and raped, and tortured and so on,” says Friis, “it’s almost as if what you’re writing is a how done it, where the how is almost more important than the who—and certainly more important than the why.”
The Boy in the Suitcase is haunting precisely because it is less interested in the mechanics of violence, and more interested in the causes. You feel as much the tragedy of lives wasted as the brutality of lives ended. But don’t worry, this isn’t some moody continental novel where the characters chain smoke and argue quietly about existentialism. The Boy in the Suitcaseratchets along at a breathless pace, skillfully switching points of view in a tightly choreographed arrangement. Perhaps this comes from the fact that Friis and Kaaberbøl are both acclaimed young-adult novelists, accustomed to writing for audiences that don’t do boring.
But more than the pacing, or even the actual mystery itself, the character of Nina is Friis and Kaaberbøl’s triumph. Socially responsible but parentally negligent, caring but capable of clinical detachment, she has a very real mix of flaws and strengths. Unlike many mystery protagonists, she is both someone we admire, and someone we feel we could be. She is not intrinsically, impossibly more skilled than we are (unlike a certain girl with a certain tattoo). But she does the things we only imagine doing.
“Like most people,” says Kaaberbøl of herself and Friis, “we just pay a certain amount to charity organizations and hope other people do the dirty work.”
Nina Borg is the fulfillment of that hope. At the end of The Boy in the Suitcase, when a panicked phone call brings a fresh mystery in the middle of the night, we know she cannot help but act. It’s what we wish she would do. It’s what we wish wewould do. Thankfully, the next Nina Borg book has already been published in Denmark, and should be on American shelves late next year, so we won’t have long until our hopes are realized.
First published in The New York Times on November 25, 2011. Read the original here.
THE basement auditorium of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side is a sincere space. Big, brown and bare, it suggests a school gym, a place for officially sanctioned fun — which made a recent concert by Schmekel, a raucous klezmer-core punk band made up of “100% trans Jews,” all the more surprising.
“Schmekel” means little penis in Yiddish, and is a play on the fact that all four members were born female but now identify themselves on the masculine side of the gender spectrum. It’s an appropriate name for a band that started as a laugh.
“I made a joke at a diner about how it’d be funny if there were an all-transmasculine band called Schmekel that was all Jews,” said Lucian Kahn, 29, a guitarist and vocalist.
On the spot, Nogga Schwartz, a bassist, and Ricky Riot, keyboardist and vocalist, both 26, joined up. Within a few weeks they had found a drummer, Simcha Halpert-Hanson, also 26.
The wry and slightly naughty name is part of the band’s hallmark style, which is earnest without being innocent, and funny without being ironic. Their influences include Frank Zappa and Mel Brooks, and their lyrics — about subjects ranging from Dumpster-diving to Jewish religious ceremonies — are personal, political and pointed.
The music itself merges traditional klezmer scales and rhythms with the aggressive energy of early gay punk bands likePansy Division.
If the musical satirist Tom Lehrer were to write a hard-core anthem about sex reassignment surgery, with a driving guitar lick, a “Hava Nagila” breakdown and a keyboard line lifted from Super Mario Brothers, it might approximate the Schmekel sound.
In the year and a half they have been together, the four band members have performed for audiences around New York City: gay, straight, Jewish and gentile. They recently finished recording an independent album, “Queers on Rye,” and they embarked this month on a small tour of colleges in the Northeast. They have garnered attention from general-interest publications like New York magazine, as well as identity-based outlets like Homoground, The Jewish Daily Forward andJewcy.
“I don’t know if Schmekel could have existed 15 years ago,” said Sarah-Kay Lacks, 33, senior director of institutional programs at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. To her, the band members are emblematic of a sea change in mainstream Judaism.
“What has become so particularly amazing now is all of the places you get to layer your identity,” she said. To her mind, people used to have to choose a single broad-stroke identifier, as though they were characters from an ’80s movie: nerd, jock, Jew or trans. Now, Ms. Lacks said, more and more young people are unwilling to leave any of their identities behind to fit into regular Jewish space.
“The Venn diagram on musical, Yiddish and queer leads to a very small shaded area, but they live in it,” Ms. Lacks said. “This is à la carte Judaism. Or you could do a different frame, and it’s à la carte queerdom.”
But while the freedom to express multiple identities simultaneously in conventional contexts may be a recent phenomenon, the band is quick to point out that such complexities have existed for millenniums.
“There are six recognized genders in the Talmud,” said Mr. Schwartz, who was raised, in his words, “conservadox.”
These include the standard two with which we’re all familiar, and four more for others including eunuchs and people who are raised as girls but develop male characteristics at puberty.
When Mr. Schwartz started to prepare for his bat mitzvah, he began questioning everything from his religion to his gender, and he sought support from his temple. “My rabbi sat down with me and we had many conversations,” Mr. Schwartz said.
The rabbi told him that his soul was “probably a more masculine one,” and that he had to “live in the female experience to learn both sides of the coin.”
That, in Mr. Schwartz’s view, is what Judaism is all about. “We’re supposed to better ourselves as human beings, not as male or female,” he said. “That’s the ultimate goal.”
Indeed, for all the band’s irreverence, the foursome is serious about Judaism. Mr. Riot wears a skullcap, was born in Israel and grew up in Fair Lawn, N.J., in a modern Orthodox community. Mr. Kahn identifies as an atheist but holds a master’s degree in religious history from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. And Simcha Halpert-Hanson (who prefers not to be identified with gendered honorifics or pronouns) grew up in the Reform movement but has always been drawn to a stricter interpretation of Judaism.
In the end, it may be their respect for and knowledge of their history that makes the band groundbreaking. They are not fractious rebels storming the castle of traditional faith, though they are fierce critics of homophobia, transphobia and misogyny in organized Jewish life. They see themselves as grounded in a strong Judaic tradition, even if the rest of the world doesn’t — yet. But they are reaching out, and the mainstream is reaching back.
As they finished their set at the Jewish Community Center’s Halloween show, they made a smooth transition from an original song, “Surgical Drains,” to “Hava Nagila.” As one, the crowd joined hands and began to dance the hora. Androgynous individuals in butterfly costumes and women in traditional Orthodox dress whirled joyfully through the auditorium, a perfect vision of the world as seen through Schmekel’s eyes.
First published on The Daily Beast on October 14, 2011. Read the original here.
For 10 years, Maria (not her real name) was beaten, raped, and forced into prostitution by her husband, a New York City resident. He often refused to allow her food, locked her in a room without a toilet for days at a time, and made her buy drugs for him. As a non-English speaker induced to enter this country by the very man who tortured her, she had few options or resources.
“I was made to be a sexual slave,” Maria said, “to make him money.”
Over the course of a decade, she was arrested repeatedly on prostitution and drug charges, garnering a long and damning criminal record before her husband finally disappeared, leaving her with psychological scars—and a criminal record.
Maria, now a professional in the health-care field, is a survivor of human trafficking, a crime that may affect as many as 12 million people worldwide, according to the International Labour Organization, a U.N. human-rights agency. The most extraordinary part of Maria’s story is not the hell she went through, but the fact that she escaped and put that life behind her.
Or at least, she tried to. Unfortunately for Maria, a criminal record stays with you forever. On every job interview, loan form, credit check, or visa application, she must disclose her arrests. In this Kafkaesque twist of the legal system, Maria is a victim indelibly marked as a criminal. Few offenses carry a greater stigma than prostitution, which makes finding work (or becoming a citizen) a near impossibility for her and other survivors.
Until recently, their options were few: lie, or find work in the shadowy world of undocumented labor. But this past spring, Maria became the first person in the country to have her record wiped clean of crimes she was forced into as a result of trafficking, thanks to a new state law that is the culmination of years of political organizing.
“There was no way to go back and erase a criminal conviction in New York,” says Sienna Baskin, co-director of the organization that helped Maria, the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center. SWP is a legal advocacy organization that helps sex workers of all kinds, from trafficked individuals to those who freely engage in commercial sex. In 2007, SWP helped create the New York Anti-Trafficking law, which made human trafficking a statewide offense.
“We wanted to have as part of that law a remedy for people who’ve been convicted of prostitution,” said Baskin, but it wasn’t included in the final bill. So in 2010, they drafted and were instrumental in passing Criminal Procedure Law §440.10(1)(i), which allows judges to vacate convictions directly related to an individual’s history as a trafficked person. This law, the first of its kind in the nation, gave Maria and other survivors the chance to truly leave their pasts behind. It also sparked a wave of similar organizing around the country.
“We were really interested in the law because we were seeing the same types of issues coming up with the clients we work with,” said James Dold, policy counsel at Polaris Project, a national group that tracks and assists state-level anti-trafficking organizing. Within a year of the New York law, vacating bills were passed in Nevada, Illinois, and Maryland, and other bills are pending or being organized in California, DC, Hawaii, Virginia, and Washington. These bills have wide bipartisan support, but certain provisions have caused some lawmakers to balk. Virginia’s bill, though it was Republican-sponsored, failed to pass on its first try because of concerns about “decided cases” being “re-opened.” Because prostitution is a state-level offense, Polaris Project and other organizers must adapt their bills to local realities.
“In all the states, we start out with something that is similar to the New York model,” said Dold, who referred to Criminal Procedure Law §440.10(1)(i) as the “gold standard.” Similar, however, doesn’t mean identical. For example, under the new Maryland law, Maria’s criminal charges would have been expunged, not vacated. What’s the difference?
“Expungement does not effect your criminal record for purposes of immigration,” said Baskin. “Immigration can still look at those criminal records and use them to deport you.” As many survivors, like Maria, are not U.S. citizens, this is a potentially dangerous loophole, which organizers like Baskin hope will be closed through amendments to the bill. These and other issues (including lack of funding for lawyers working with survivors) have slowed the implementation of these laws to a crawl.
Even in New York, with the “gold standard” law, only three survivors have seen their convictions vacated in the year the bill has been on the books. “We could bring a hundred of these motions tomorrow, if we had a hundred attorneys to work on them,” said Baskin. Although trafficked individuals are likely just a small portion of those involved in commercial sex, more and more have come forward as legal remedies have been created to help them. But funding, assistance, and education around the new laws take time.
As for Maria? “My whole life is different now,” she said. She has been reunited with her family, holds a T-visa (a special visa created for individuals trafficked into this country), and is in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen.
“When the door opens for you, your whole life changes.”