Our reporter heads out to find out whats up in Lower Manhattan

Occupy Wall Street

It was a nice sunny day, a little cool, but it seemed like just the right weather to occupy Wall Street. At least for a couple of minutes. So off I went. The anti-bank movement known as Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, when protesters flooded Lower Manhattan and took over Zuccotti Park, at the intersection of Broadway and Liberty Street. Since then, similar protests have broken out across the country and around the world, and have earned both cheers and jeers from politicians, pundits, and regular citizens. Violence has broken out in several cities, most notably Oakland, California, where protesters and police have clashed several times. What the eventual effects of the OWS movement will be remains an unknown. I wasnt headed to Lower Manhattan to make a political statement or protest anything. Even if I would be of the personal and
political inclination to do so, that would of course be questionable for a journalist, as two liberal employees of National Public Radio and Public Radio International recently found out when they were canned by their respective employers for taking part in the Occupy Wall Street protests. (Of course, if I were inclined to take part in OWS, I wouldnt be working for Ami to begin with.) I was heading down, instead, to answer some questions. The major one was, What kind of nutty folks were these, sleeping out in public in New York City? I knew that the most likely answer was the obvious one: regular old nutty people. But going down to see would be the clearest way to tell. Another question: Was there rampant anti-Semitism, as some news reports and commercials placed by conservative groups had claimed? Would I be grabbed and clubbed and spit on and may42 A M i M A g A z i n e / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / 1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2

movement that was attacking capitalists (read Jews)? So I had some things to find out. And, as I said, it was such a nice day. I came, I SaW, I OccupIed Wall Street was definitely occupied when I arrived, but not by protestors. The police had barricades running down streets and the passageways between buildings, and they were yelling at people to keep moving. Sheep that I was, I kept moving. Not protester material at all. When I finally located Zuccotti Park, I realized that only in New York would they call it a park. Back in the West, where I come from, or even in the suburbs of the East, we wouldnt call a stretch of grass that extends only one block in either direction a park, even if it had some trees. Especially not if it was located in between a number of huge skyscrapers. As things stood, Zuccotti Park was no longer looking like anyones conception of a park. Covered in tents of various sizes, there was hardly any green visible. Rings of tourists were circling the park slowly, and I fell in step with them. Scruffy-looking people were sitting on or in front of the wall surrounding the park, holding signs, reading selections from tracts aloud, or shaking collection tins and plates. Some were standing on top of the wall, loudly expostulating to no one in particular. I passed a group that was using the infamous OWS human microphone. Since amplification is not allowed in the park, the crowd repeats the words of anyone who is speaking so that all can hear. I stopped to watch. Mike check! the man in the center yelled. Mike check! yelled the crowd. I want! he yelled. I want! repeated the crowd. to welcome! he said. to welcome! came the crowds yell. our friends! he yelled. our friends! the crowd repeated. from the Bronx! he finished. from the Bronx! the crowd roared. I walked on. I could hear the human microphone going strong behind me, but I wasnt interested.
1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2 / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / A M i M A g A z i n e

By Yossi Krauz

be even insulted if I showed up in my black hat and suit, looking obviously Jewish? Would I be called a banker? (I guess, knowing the state of my suit, the answer to that last question was obvious from the outset. Even crazy people could hardly mistake me for a banker.) There was one final question that I was interested in answering. I had seen pictures of a large gathering for Kol Nidrei and had read about people putting up sukkahs in Zuccoti Park, the site of the OWS encampment in New York City, as well as at other sites around the country. That these people were making Judaism a visible part of Occupy Wall Street was something that made me, as well as many other people I knew, nervous. Who were these people? What was it that they were espousing in the name of Judaism and, by extension, the Jews? Werent they somewhat worried about being attached to a

43

Had I been in the crowd, I would have probably yelled back, Welcome them yourself! Have something better to say if Im going to repeat it! Not protester material. I told you. I skirted a few hot dog stands, ducked around a news team that was busy filming someone, passed an older woman knitting furiously, and headed for the west side of the park. I could hear the drums. The constant drum circle that had been a fixture in the park since the beginning was becoming a real irritant to residents of the surrounding area, and there had been reports that the general assembly that theoretically was running the protest site had been unable to stop nighttime drumming. The west side of the park was rather noisy. A young man on one corner was reciting from a book, holding a sign that indicated who he was quoting. It was unclear whether anyone could really hear him. The drums were going strong. Several unkempt men were banging away with sticks. What the point was I couldnt tell. On the far corner, two men with hand-lettered signs were darshaning to the crowd. One of the mens signs seemed to indicate that any number of conspiracies were at fault for the worlds financial troubles. I scanned it quickly to see if he pointed out that the Jews were behind them all. I didnt really see anything, but that might have been the subtle subtext. On the other hand, severe mental illness might have been the subtext. I really couldnt tell. I saw a cop, leaning against a barricade, watching the park. More interesting than some other parts of town, I guess, I offered. He laughed. Its not that bad, he said. But he looked like he wasnt particularly pleased to be watching the goings-on. By the time I had made my way back to the east side of the park, I had seen a large clutch of other weird folk, as well as the bicycle generators. The fire department had removed the encampments gas generators more than a week before, claiming that they were fire hazards. So the group had brought in electric generators powered by bicycle. Two people were pedaling away as I passed. In their cycling clothing, they looked considerably less like vagabonds than most of the other people I had seen. Even the obviously hipstertypes looked greasy, especially with the ski-caps that they seemed to favor on. Ski-caps make anyone look like theyve been living in a park for weeks. Now I needed a picture of myself in the encampment. Every tourist in New York needs some souvenir. I didnt have a camera. But there were plenty of people wandering around with professional looking equipment. I had been on the outskirts of the park until now, a bit intimidated by the occupiers. But I saw a man with a camera in the park itself, so I wandered down the path leading inside and toward him. There were tents of all sizes inside the park, a majority of which were regular camping tents, not the jerry-rigged things I had expected. Many had their openings tied down, presumably so that strangers did not occupy the owners tents. Apparently there were

the drumS Were g

limits to the collectivism favored by some of the occupiers. The photographer I had seen was taking a video of a tall man with orange dreadlocks, who was crooning some song. I figured Id wait until he was done. As I waited I realized that he was singing in Hebrew. I noticed a few signs in Hebrew letters on the floor next to his silver-colored tent that looked like it had been made out of scrap material. I introduced myself to the photographer and asked him if he would take my picture. He assented in a British accent, and then told me his Jewish name, which I promptly forgot. (Sorry.) The first two people I had run into had coincidentally turned out to be Jews. Can I take a picture with you? I asked the man with the dreadlocks. Sure, he said. We set up a nice shot of him giving me a pamphlet. (Looking at it later, I saw that I was looking rather disheveled from the subway ride. The other gentleman in the picture looked much more puttogether than I did, dreadlocks notwithstanding. I looked like I had come for the occupation.) I quickly gave my new dread-locked friend a mini-interview. His name was Leo, he was originally from Tel Aviv, and he had been in America for 11 years. What was he pushing? Arvut, as he put it, a society in which people felt responsibility for one another. I just grinned at this rather nave-sounding utopian idea. After all, I was in the middle of a park full of utopian thinkers. I didnt want to know what they would do to people who might disagree. Did he encounter any anti-Semitism? Not really, he told me. If people are angry about various things, he said, that just

44 A M i M A g A z i n e / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / 1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2

re gOIng StrOng.
shows that there are things that need to be fixed. Yes, I thought. But I wouldnt personally like to be caught in an occupied park, somewhere among the tents, with any sort of angry people. the OrganIzer I had gotten a feel for the Occupy Wall Street movement in my little perambulation around the park. I had even met a few Jewish representatives of the group. Then I met Daniel Sieradski. I had found out, by searching news stories and blogs, that he was the organizer behind the Kol Nidrei and sukkah at Occupy Wall Street. I figured he would be a good guide to what Jews had been doing in the movement. Daniel turned out to be a 32-year-old man, slightly shorter than average height, with a full beard and a bald head covered by a skicap with a sort of baseball-cap brim jutting out of it in front. We found a place to talk, and I found that he was exceptionally articulate. I first asked him about his background. It turned out that he was from an originally chassidic family. When my family stopped being frum, I stopped going to yeshiva. That was when I was about 10. It became clear from the ensuing conversation that he was still fairly conversant with Jewish terminology. He sometimes used Ashkenazi pronunciation and sometimes Modern Hebrew pronunciation, which made sense for someone who had grown up in a yeshiva environment and then moved to a liberal, non-Orthodox one. Ive been working in the Jewish community for the last 10 years,

doing digital strategy and online marketing for Jewish non-profits. Ive been working as a community activist, mostly around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The chassidic group his family originally came from is anti-Zionist. Ironically, his transformation into a liberal left him an antiZionist, although his description was a bit complex. The way I describe myself is that Im religiously anti-Zionist, Im ideologically post-Zionist, Im pragmatically progressive Zionist, and if you back me into a corner, Im a Kachnik. I run the gamut. I believe in the two-state solution because I believe that Israelis and Palestinians will kill one another if theyre together, but ideally Id like to see a redeemed world, where people live side by side in peace. Redeemed world. The religious-sounding terms that I knew were popular among a certain set of Jewish liberals were starting. (To his credit, he never mentioned tikkun olam, the usual bywords of liberal irreligious Jews.) So thats the cause that drives you personally? I asked. No, he said. The cause that drives me personally is the redemption of the world. Geula. So Ive been involved in a lot of activist causes over the years, because I believe that the way that you walk in the world as a Jew is to see the divine in everyone. If you go with Yeshayahu, that means breaking the bonds of wickedness, clothing the unclothed, feeding the hungry, helping the homeless. Caring for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. And not only in our communityin all mankind. A person who honors all creation and has kavod for all briyot. This was, of course, very lofty language, and more than a bit incorrect, religiously speaking. I was about to ask him a slightly more down-to-earth question about his involvement, when he got there himself. Personally, my mother and father are going through bankruptcy and foreclosure, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans. They had stocks, and they had a nice house, and an investment property. When the market went down, they lost their jobs, they lost all their investments, now theyre losing their home, and they cant afford to pay for insurance, so now they cant pay for my dads medication, and he needs that to live. The day that the bank came down to assess my parents assets in their home, to pay off their bank bills, I was so livid and enraged that I wanted to throw a newspaper box through a bank window. Here were these people who had violated all the ethical rules of, well, human beings, and for those among them who were Jews, of Yiddishkeit. They created toxic assets that were dangerous to be on the market, and knowing full well about the danger, they bet against them, knowing that they would tank and they could fill their own pockets with the money. Then they go into the community and give charity to help the people who they just put in the poorhouse, when they could have just not put them in the poorhouse to begin with, and then they wouldnt need their charity.
1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2 / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / A M i M A g A z i n e

45

So I really feel that thats something I need to stand up against to fight, and I got involved in what was going on down on Wall Street to express my anger at the corruption in the system. I saw it as a way to express my Jewish values, as well. Im also involved with other Jews who are going back into our communities and saying that we are doing in our own communities what we are criticizing Wall Street for doing. The richest and most powerful people are in control, and they make all the decisions, and they do so in a way that disadvantages other people. If you have the cash to get your seat in the boardroom, then you get your say. Unfortunately, most wealthy Jews diverge ideologically from the majority of American Jews, particularly on the subject of Israel, and they push through an agenda, and everyone else doesnt feel represented. Ah. The anti-Zionism his chassidic forebears might have approved of. The rest of his spiel? Not likely. dOWn tO the prOteSt, up WIth the Sukkah I started going down to the protests to see what was going on. I was skeptical to begin with. My friend had been at the original organizing meeting, and it hadnt been well-organized. He wasnt certain that it was serious. But then I had other friends who started going when they actually took Wall Street. I started going myself, and I became fond of the movement. I wanted to join, but I wasnt sure how to. I used to be an anti-war activist; I used to be an anti-globaliza-

tion activist; I used to be a member of an affinity group, which a small activist group of people who used to do things like laying down in traffic and chaining ourselves to buildings and hanging banners from bridges, in opposing the war in Iraq or opposing the policies of the World Bank, which impoverished Third-World nations so they could exploit their resources. But when I went away to Israel for a fellowship program in 2004, I fell out of touch with that activist community. I didnt have any ties with that community. Instead what I had was the Jewish community, where I had been working and active and had made a name for myself. I had great relationships and friendships, particularly with a ton of observant Jews who were really progressive, forward in their outlook, and cared about social action and social justice. I had actually spaced out at this point, thinking about him chaining himself to something. I figured that I should mobilize those people. The first thing I did, the Shabbos after Rosh Hashana, was to organize a Shabbos there, a potluck. I put out an [electronic] call Erev Yom Tov, and 30 people showed up. My wife cooked a cholent, and we had a nice Shabbos meal. I didnt ask about the details of the Shabbos potluck. Beside the kashrus questions, there is no eruv I know of in Lower Manhattan. But that wasnt a conversation I was interested in getting into. I thought, This is nice. Were down here, with 30 people, showing our solidarity with the movement and our Jewish values. Shabbos, for example, is a day when workers get a day of rest from their servitude, and their rights are respected under Jewish law. Beyond that, the idea of taking one-seventh of the GDP out of the economy every week is interesting. A few days later I got an e-mail from a [non-Orthodox] rabbi I know. I told him about the Shabbos potluck, and he told me, We should do something for Yom Kippur. I told him, Youre crazy; its in three days. Yom Kippur? Youre crazy? But Daniel decided to try it anyway. He sent out an electronic message announcing the Yom Kippur service. He planned to take the plaza across from Zuccotti Park without a permit, against the law, and, as he put it, daven in solidarity with the protest. The first day, 100 people had signed up. A few hours later, there were 300. The next day, 600 had signed up. Right before Yom Tov, I thought, Yeah, 600 people, sure. Thanks for showing support, guys. He didnt think many would show up. Instead, over 1,000 people showed up for Kol Nidrei. No shul in New York City got the turnout that we got.

When I fInally lOcated zuccOttI park, I realIzed that Only In neW yOrk WOuld they call It a park.
46 A M i M A g A z i n e / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / 1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2

ami 100111:neshei 0908.qxd

9/27/2011

16:38

Page 1

Those who officiated were all non-Orthodox rabbis. Beside the lack of an eruv, at least one woman served as a chazzan, and there was no separation between men and women in the main crowd, though Daniel arranged an area that was reserved for men and women to daven separately. David found that many people were inspired by the Yom Kippur davening. People came up to me and told me, I havent been in shul for years. There still is a line of people coming up to me telling me that it was the most meaningful Jewish experience of their life. Obviously, the fact that a non-halachic Yom Kippur davening was so meaningful to these people came from ignorance and a lack of attunement to a true Yom Kippur davening. Daniel decided to set up a sukkah in Zuccotti Park. He called a Chabad friend who got him a popup sukkah. It was illegal to have any kind of structure in Zuccotti Park. The police were breaking down any tents that had been constructed. We came with legal observers and the press and a mob of Jews and a klezmer band. The cops came over and asked what we were doing, and we said, This is a sukkah. Its a Jewish ritual structure that Jews sleep in on the holiday, and they said, Oh, religious? Were not messing with that. So the sukkah stayed up, and Daniel slept in it every night. The next morning, the police were going to do a cleanup of the park, assumedly so that they could keep people from re-entering the park afterwards. David was planning to remain in the sukkah and force the police to face the possibility of dragging a Jew out of a sukkah on Yom Tov. In the morning, 5,000 people showed up, including a number of people with lulavim who entered the sukkah. The police decided not to attempt the cleanup. The popup sukkah broke after several days, and Daniel went to Crown Heights to buy an expensive sukkah. Twelve cities around the country and three in foreign countries had sukkahs. In Seattle, Denver, and Oakland, the police destroyed the sukkahs and arrested the people inside. So there was a pogrom in the

United States, where cops violently arrested people in their sukkahs and destroyed their sukkahs. Ill admit; I didnt bother to challenge the ridiculousness of this statement. Others began making structures and claiming that they were sukkahs. Mostly, the police tore them down. (In one case, the police told them, Thats not a kosher sukkah, as they broke it apart.) They got many visitors to the sukkah. Daniel was there 15 hours a day, and he tied the ideas of Sukkos into the Occupy Wall Street idea. Ill leave that to your imagination. During the week, a medical tent was put up. The police came to take it down, and they also suddenly decided that the sukkah had to go. Protesters surrounded both structures to keep them from being taken down. Suddenly, Jesse Jackson showed up out of nowhere and told the cops that they would have to arrest him to take down the tent and the sukkah. So he saved the sukkah. (While the nausea associated with thinking about Jesse Jackson saving a sukkah is dying down, I may as well point out the recent denunciation of Jesse Jackson by Martin Luther King, Jr.s niece, who lambasted Jackson for suggesting that Occupy Wall Street is a continuation of Kings legacy. Alveda King said that her uncles movement was peaceful. This movement is not peaceful.) After the medical tent stayed, everyone else began to set up tents. The organizers credited Daniel with causing that. There was a large Simchas Torah gathering, as well. Some of it was copied from Reform services, involving what Daniel called things that frum Jews get really nervous about. Daniel spent so much time at the encampment that he quit his main job, but he wont be going to Occupy Wall Street regularly for much longer. He told me that he and his wife are moving to Upstate New York in the near future. SOme queStIOnS After he had described his time at OWS, I

The very best in fine

photography and video

www.mendelmeyers.com
718.232.8466 | 516.568.4284 201.862.0288

had some things to ask him. Number one, was there anti-Semitism at OWS, as had been reported by some? The only people who yelled at us for being Jewish were rightwing Jews, he told me. They told us that we were with socialists and Nazis, and that we were self-hating Jews. This other night we had a Shabbat dinner, and this person came and had our grape juice, had our challah, had our kugel, and then he started yelling at us, Youre a bunch of kapos! You come to my Shabbat dinner, and then you call me a Nazi, a grandchild of four Holocaust survivors? I asked Daniel about the propriety of supporting Occupy Wall Street when a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League showed that 19 percent of Americans believe that Jews have too much influence in Wall Street. Arent you reinforcing a movement that inevitably paints Jews as being in charge of the economy and corrupt? I asked. Its true. Conversations about these sort of subjects can easily lead toward anti-Semitic views being expressed. I think that a lot of what we experience as anti-Semitism is just ignorance. Its coming from people whove never met any Jews and who dont know any Jews. They just say things that are ignorant. Then there is a pernicious culture of seething anti-Semites: neoNazis, white supremacists. Theyre 15 percent of society. Theyre out there; they exist. But Occupy Wall Street is an anti-fascist movement and an antioppression movement. If youre racist, youre not supposed to be there, and if you do, people scream at you to go away. This guy [with anti-Semitic signs] who was being trumpeted as a sign of the anti-Semitism of Occupy Wall Streethes a drunk homeless guy who was hanging around Wall Street for months before there was Occupy Wall Street, holding that sign. People stand around him holding signs that say, This guy doesnt speak for Occupy Wall Street. Or Hes an idiot. And people scream at him to leave, but the cops say, If you have the right to be here, he has the right to be here, and they wont allow us to get rid of him. What I found, instead [of anti-Semitism], was that, easily, 20 percent of the people down there are Jewish. I asked him what the point of an encampment was. Why not just have an organization without a physical presence? Its all about the values of the encampment itself. Its a village thats organized in a totally different way than the rest of society. Everything that happens there happens through anarchy, which means the absence of hierarchy. That doesnt mean chaos, that doesnt mean disorder, that doesnt mean confusion. No rulers, no masters, no bosses. He went on, discussing the sanitary committees, the free kitchen, the free medical care, and so on. Its all being done by volunteers, without anyone bossing anyone else around. You have a fully functioning anarchist village right there. A fully functioning anarchist village. Hmm. The point of the encampment is to demonstrate that possibility. Its geula. Its messy and its imperfect and bad things happen, but

theyre not going to stop until they get it right. I made what I thought would be a simple objection. Is it really an example if, when people look at it, theyre seeing a tent city that looks like a cross between a homeless shelter and a hippie commune? I can say that I see that, too, and I like it. But if you dont show up and get involved in a working group and attend a general assembly and camp out there, you know nothing. All you know is what you read in the newspapers. Democracy means using your own brain. Im not sure that really answered the question. Will Occupy Wall Street survive the winter? I asked him. I think so. I hope so. The only thing that worries me is that only the most hardcore, rugged people will be able to survive the winter. Im afraid that the politics of those people are more radical than the rest of the 99%, and theyll be left to represent the movement. At the same time, I think in the spring it will come back with such a force that it aint gonna matter. I asked him what he would say to readers of the magazine who have more conservative political views than his. (Im assuming that accounts for most everyone.) I would tell them that 40 percent of Jews in New York are below the poverty line, and most of them are charedim. These people are suffering, and theyre largely suffering because of the organization of the economy, the way it benefits the people at the top of the food chain. If they care about those people, Im not going to say to fully, willy-nilly, support this movement, but I will say that you should think about how the policies you support and the party you support is contributing to the widening of the gap. I understand real libertarianism, but I dont understand Republican conservatism. They say that they are all about policies that support the free market, but then they put in place policies that benefit only certain industries. I just think that a frum Republican is an oxymoron. We used to have kehilla taxes. I thanked Daniel and grabbed a subway ride back home. That the Jews had such an effect on the Occupy Wall Street encampment wasnt something I had known. That wasnt necessarily a positive thing either. The thin silver lining in it was that Jews who were estranged from normative Judaism found some sort of meaning, however twisted, in Jewish practice. Daniel himself is certainly not a self-hating Jew, as some had referred to him as. Nave and confused Jew, yeah. But with a respect for Jews and some form of Judaism. Perhaps one day he and the other OWSers might find the meaning they are looking for in real Judaism. I left unconvinced, to say the least, of Daniels general thesis. The encampment at Zuccotti Park, to my eyes, looked like a homeless/ hippie/hipster campground, not an example of what society might one day grow to become. And Im unconvinced that their movement will cause lasting change, for good or bad. But I am tempted to buy some drums. l

48 A M i M A g A z i n e / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / 1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2

Occupy Wall Street prOteSt FOrceS KOSher caF tO lay OFF WOrKerS
Jewish restaurateur scoffs at their purported goal of job creation

By NesaNel GaNtz
According to their own website, Occupy Wall Street is supposed to be working for a better quality of life for the 99 percent. The government, it insists, only cares about the rich and powerful, instead of helping regular folks find jobs. Many businesses around Manhattans Zuccotti Park, epicenter of the OWS movement, have been adversely affected by the barricades that have been set up by police, effectively cutting off access to their establishments. While pedestrians are technically allowed to pass through the blockades, getting anywhere involves navigating a maze of tents and detours. One such business is the Milk Street Caf, owned by Marc Epstein of Boston, Massachusetts. The Milk Street Caf is unique in the fact that it has separate meat, dairy, and pareve kitchensall under the supervision of the Orthodox Union. The restaurant has seven different food stations, and maintains strict separation of each category of food. Fronting an outdoor pedestrian mall, it can seat 150 people. The Milk Street Caf is a large operation with many employees, 21 of whom were recently let go because of the protests. What was beautiful is now ugly, Mr. Epstein said recently, referring to the ongoing disruption. Founding the Milk Street Caf was my lifelong dream, he explained. I invested a lot of money, time, and effort to provide a unique kosher dining experience. When the protesters first started camping out, the police put up metal barricades. While that severely limited the number of customers, I figured it would last for a few daysa week tops. Little did I know it would still be going on six weeks later! I had no choice but to let go of 21 excellent workers, ranging from busboys to kitchen staff. Business was limited to select times during the day, so I was trying to do more catering. But I could not continue to lose money. I was afraid I might have to shut down entirely if it continued.Several Milk Street Caf employees have publicly voiced their criticism of the OWS movement. Shamil Cepeda was one worker who lost her job. I support their freedom of speech, but the whole thing is hypocritical if it makes people lose their jobs, a tearful Cepeda, 23, said. I asked Mr. Epstein to comment on the obvious irony. The irony is greater than you can imagine, he said. Everyone needs to understand that actions have consequences. Thats the real issue. We are now in the third year of a terrible recession, and you can react to a recession in many different ways. Here I went and borrowed money in order to create a new business in the heart of New York City, to put people of all backgrounds to work. I just wonder whether the protesters have internalized the result of their actions. Is that really the right way to deal with adversity? Banging on drums and taking over a park doesnt create any jobs. Amazingly, those barricades may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Mr. Epstein. After local business owners complained, the police finally removed most of the barriersincluding those blocking off the Milk Street Caf. Public reaction has been very sympathetic to Mr. Epsteins plight, and in recent days more customers have begun frequenting his establishment. Coupled with the added media exposure, Mr. Epstein may end up more successful than before. Occupy that!
1 2 c h e s h va n , 5 7 7 2 / / n o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 1 / / A M i M A g A z i n e

49