A Viable Alternative: The Omni-American Tradition
Next week, American voters and the Electoral College will determine the next U.S. President. Jewel and I exercised our civic duty this weekend by voting early. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you have or will do the same. Whether Harris or Trump wins, it’s a fair bet that our nation will remain deeply divided and politically polarized for the foreseeable future. That’s why civic and cultural leaders should highlight and emphasize the shared American principles and values upon which our republic stands.
The threats to our republic are real. They include but extend beyond the limits of our two-party duopoly and the binary choice between an obviously unfit (Trump) or sadly middling (Harris) presidential candidate. In foreign affairs, authoritarian and dictatorial regimes hate our way of life and actively strive to undermine it. In domestic terms, our classical liberal principles are under attack by illiberal extremes, from the 1619 Project’s narrative of oppression kicking 1776 to the curb as the true founding of the nation to demagogues with millions of followers such as Tucker Carlson, a pro-Russia broadcaster who platformed Nazi apologia. Extremist elements ripping us apart also include radical political Islamists, infecting young American minds with imported resentments and vicious antisemitism.
While the sane mainstream critiques the extremes, it rarely offers a substantive alternative from the cultural and civic center. I hope regular readers of this newsletter realize that a substantive alternative indeed exists: the homegrown Omni-American tradition of music and letters.
Whereas the intolerant extremes nurse resentments and scapegoat “the other,” the Omni-American tradition transforms challenges into strength through antagonistic cooperation. The Omni-American tradition cultivates character and human excellence rather than reducing people to facile categories such as race or color. With blues and jazz at its core, the Omni-American tradition embraces the dynamism of ethnic pluralism, the many and the one of E Pluribus Unum, while avoiding the traps of identity politics or bigoted bias based on immutable characteristics.
The Omni-American Future Project
This tradition informs The Omni-American Future Project, for which my partner Aryeh Tepper and I serve as co-directors. Our project, a collaboration between the Jazz Leadership Project, the American Sephardi Federation, and the Combat Antisemitism Movement, provides an alternative to iliberal extremes through programs that leverage the Omni-American tradition and strive to strengthen our nation’s civic and cultural center.
We present live events integrating jazz and elevated thought. For our Ambassadors Program, we design Omni-American curricula for young, accomplished professionals and students. Through Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast, we’ve provided a platform for thought leaders from various political and ideological perspectives. Next month, The Omni-American Review, an online journal of arts and intellectual life dedicated to exploring and celebrating the depths of American culture, will launch. Like the name of our project, the publication's name is an homage to The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray’s 1970 book clarifying American identity and the role of Afro-Americans in it.
The inaugural issue of The Omni-American Review, dedicated to Albert Murray’s life and work, includes contributions by notables such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Leon Wieseltier, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Warren Zev Harvey, Joel Dinerstein, among other top-notch writers and thinkers.
From the Introduction:
The Omni-American Live Experience’s upcoming event on Nov. 12th will be our third awards event. It will be held in Harlem, New York, at Ginny’s Supper Club, a beautiful venue on the bottom of the Red Rooster restaurant, owned and operated by chef and restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson. Jewel and I inaugurated jazz programming a decade ago at Ginny’s, so this is somewhat of a homecoming. Our most successful show featured grandmasters Ron Carter and Benny Golson, who passed away at 95 last month.
The featured jazz ensemble on Nov. 12th will be the Emmet Cohen Trio, with special guests Coleman Hughes on trombone and Itamar Borochov on trumpet. Our theme is “American Excellence,” so it’s fitting that Cohen, a great young jazz pianist and band leader, is our junior award winner and philanthropist, investor, and multi-instrumentalist Roy Niederhoffer, the senior lifetime award honoree.
The Omni-American Future Project and the Omni-American tradition of letters and music are viable alternatives to our polarized discourse. Jazz is a cultural example central to that tradition, allowing individuality within a collaborative context, as with our democracy. And through a renewed Black American and Jewish relationship, we strive to stomp the blues of racism and antisemitism and demonstrate that even though we are many, we can have one pursuit of civic and cultural excellence.
We’d appreciate your support to help the Omni-American Future Project achieve these worthy aims. To donate and strengthen our movement, go to https://omnigala.combatantisemitism.org/ for tables and tickets to the gala.