One of Our Inspirations

David listed a few things that inspired our creation of Sons of the Revolution: George Carlin’s very funny speech on the war-like nature of our country, the Gary Sinise character from Forrest Gump, and of course, the Oklahoma City bombing and the first Persian Gulf War.

I would like to list a few others over the next few weeks.

One "inspiration" is definitely my early realization that terrible brutality against Jewish people didn’t start and end with the Holocaust.

I remember in the early 1980s getting hold of a 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Irving Howe called World of Our Fathers. Yes, I was 12 – I WAS a VERY precocious child... (Seriously, I have always read a lot - and that has helped immensely with my part in the writing of this play.)

The book I read oh, lo, those many years ago...was about the 19th-century Russian Jews escaping the bloody pogroms of the shtetl to come to the “relative peace” of America. However, when these Jewish immigrants arrived here between 1888 and 1910ish – after passing through Immigration – they were met with hatred and even violence – the same sort of hostility America often still has today toward many other immigrants.

Anyone who has read or seen Ragtime (the movie or the musical, both based on the beautiful E.L. Doctorow book) has some idea of the violence and its affect on American history.

I still feel so lucky that David and I were able to include this aspect in our play. I believe it adds a powerful facet to the questions our script asks about humanity and its application of brute force and violence.