Come Together: A Thematic Collection of Times Articles,

Essays, Maps and More About Creating Community

By Katherine Schulten
Sept. 19, 2018

Playing soccer, washing dishes, cramming for a math test, eating soft-serve, in church,
on the Internet, during a hurricane or at a roller rink: As this collection of pieces shows,
we “come together” with others all the time, in all kinds of ways — even as many worry
that our shared public spaces are being neglected, that technology is making us more
alone, and that democracy is suffering as a result.

To create this collection, we worked with Little Free Library, a nonprofit organization
that seeks to build community and inspire a love of reading by fostering neighborhood
book exchanges around the world. From now until January, the group’s Action Book
Club is inviting readers to discuss works on the theme “Come Together.” You can sign
up your group, whether you’re friends, classmates, family, a local community
organization, or even an existing book club.

To help, the organization has created a list of recommended texts at every level,
including some we know are popular in schools already, like “Dear Martin” and
“Refugee,” as well as recent critically acclaimed works like “An American Marriage,”
“There There” and “Little Fires Everywhere.” We’re joining the effort by choosing pieces
on the theme from across sections of The Times. Our articles can be read on their own,
paired with any of the recommended books, or matched with the texts of your choice.

Our mutual goal? As The Action Book Club puts it, “to celebrate the power of unity,
equity, and understanding in what can feel like a divided world.” As you read, you might
think about why that matters and how the theme resonates in your own life and
community.

**Below, some suggested questions that can help you get started when
you’re done reading and discussing.**

 Have you ever needed to interact with someone whose views were different from
yours? How did it go?
  What would you want people to know about you to understand you better?
 What makes your experience different from others? What could others learn from
that experience?
 When has “coming together” benefited you or your community?
 Why is it important to understand and respect other perspectives, views and
experiences?
 Where and why do people come together in your community?

How We Come Together...

Playing Sports

Opinion

Can Ultimate Frisbee Save the World?

One group is using it to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together. So far, it’s
working.

By Jennifer Finney Boylan

Contributing Writer

They’d gathered for supper one night in July, at the summer camp at the Kfar Silver
school, in Ashkelon, Israel. For the last couple of weeks this group of kids — some from
Israel, some from Palestine — had been trying to learn something about conflict
resolution, by playing Ultimate Frisbee. Some of them had become friends.

That was when the air raid siren went off.

The rockets came from Gaza, part of the ongoing clash between Hamas and the Israel
Defense Forces. The missiles didn’t land in Ashkelon. But they did score a direct hit on
the hopes of some of the people who had looked to the camp as an oasis of peace.
“Well, we’re not trying to bring peace to the Middle East,” said David Barkan, who
volunteers as the chief executive of Ultimate Peace, which sponsored the camp. “That’s
not the goal. It’s about changing a mind-set through the values of the sport that we know
leads to peace between people.”

As I interviewed Mr. Barkan by phone last week, I felt the temptation to roll my eyes. As
he described his hope of changing hearts and minds through Ultimate Frisbee, all I
could think about were those incoming rockets, and the long tragic history of that
endlessly conflicted region. I struggled to imagine how Frisbee — seriously, Frisbee? —
might succeed where a half-century of diplomacy had failed.

And yet, when Mr. Barkan talks about “the values of the sport,” it’s not just idle talk.
Ultimate — which is kind of a combination of football, basketball and soccer — has a
unique twist: There’s no referee. The sport is wholly self-regulated by its players, and
competitors from opposing teams are called upon, when there’s a dispute upon the field,
to come to an agreement among themselves before play can resume.

I asked another Ultimate player, Steve Mooney, to explain this to me. (I’ve known Steve
since the late 1970s, when we were both students at Wesleyan, and my roommate, David
Garfield, was one of the game’s pioneers.)

“Let’s say I’m about to catch the disc and you hit me in the arm,” Steve said. “I say it’s a
foul, and you don’t. The game stops, and we essentially have a conversation, you and
me, over whether it was a foul or not. And at most levels of the sport we resolve it.”

If the conflict can’t be resolved, the disc goes back to the thrower, and the play starts
over. But most of the time, the players work it out together. Occasionally, members of
your own team come over and tell you, “Actually, I think you did foul him.”

While Mr. Barkan and Mr. Mooney were shepherding their campers, I was watching the
World Cup — with its flopping and shirt-pulling and endless deceptions. The sport they
were describing seemed to belong to a whole different universe.

“If you win,” Mr. Barkan said, “but you don’t gain the respect of your opponent, then
what have you won?”

Let’s pause to agree that over the years there have been plenty of unlikely scenarios for
bringing peace to the Middle East. Yitzhak Natan, a former principal of the Thelma
Yellin High School for the Arts, in Tel Aviv, suggests that there be two states with the
same borders, each governed independently. “Instead of splitting the prayer shawl,” he
says, “everyone takes the prayer shawl.” The writer Lior Aziz, meanwhile, proposes a
third state, in addition to Israel and Palestine, the “Peace State.”

There are other proposals too, each one slightly more far-fetched than the one before.
And yet even the most harebrained peace plans seem, on the whole, less ridiculous than
the ones devised for the waging of war. Is the idea of bringing about understanding
through Frisbee really more ludicrous than the United States Air Force’s 1958 proposal
for nuking the moon? Or the plan — developed by both the Soviets and the Americans —
to use dolphins in combat?

What’s clear is that the Jews and Palestinians who’ve been part of the Ultimate Peace
project have begun to see each other in new ways. “We’re talking about deepening
understanding and building empathy for people you’ve always seen as your enemies,”
Mr. Barkan told me. “They become best friends with these people, and they know that
all the stuff they’ve been indoctrinated with is just a bunch of crap.”

At the end of one tournament, Mr. Barkan told me, a Jewish boy named Uri Sapir, 13,
threw an incomplete pass, a mistake that cost his team the game. As he walked away
from the high-five line, tears in his eyes, Ali Hamam — the 14-year-old Arab boy he’d
been playing against — put his arm around him, and the two boys walked off the field
together, arm in arm.

As for that missile attack, Mr. Barkan says that in its immediate wake, the camp fielded
over 300 calls from worried parents. But not one child left the camp that night. Instead,
when the all-clear signal was given, the children began to sing, in Arabic and in Hebrew.

At first their voices were tenuous and uncertain. Then they got louder.

With Family (Biological and Otherwise)

Celebrating the Fish Fry, a Late-Summer

Black Tradition
Catfish, hot sauce, a few sides: For many African-American families, these are makings
of a time-honored gathering that feeds a sense of community.

By Korsha Wilson
Sept. 11, 2018

The chef Todd Richards remembers the fish fries that his mother hosted for their family
in Chicago: The gatherings would spill into the street from their front yard.

Tables packed with platters of cornmeal-crusted fried catfish, hand-cut fries, bottles of
beer, homemade hot sauce and plenty of lemon slices sat waiting for waves of guests to
enjoy at their leisure. Music from the family’s record player would drift into the street
outside their home on the city’s South Side.
“She made the fish in batches, and would talk and hang out while the fish was cooking,”
Mr. Richards recalled.

Today, at Richards’ Southern Fried, his restaurant in the Krog Street Market in Atlanta,
he serves fried catfish (cornmeal-crusted, of course), his own version of the fish fries of
his childhood.

On its surface, the fish fry is a humble get-together exalting the simple pleasure of crispy
fried fish, flecked with orange-red hot sauce, resting on a slice of white bread alongside
various side dishes. But the tradition has deep roots, and special meaning, in black
communities across the country. For many families, late summer is prime time for the
fish fry, which becomes a wistful embrace of the season’s last days.

“The fish fry is not unique to the black community: Any group living near a body of
water or an ocean would fry or grill fish,” said the food historian Adrian Miller.

But the tradition took on a different meaning in the South during the era of slavery.
“The work schedule on the plantation would slow down by noon on Saturday, so
enslaved people had the rest of that day to do what they wanted,” Mr. Miller said.

Those who finished work early could go fishing and bring back their catch to be fried
that night; plantation owners didn’t mind, Mr. Miller said, because it was one less meal
they had to provide. “So the fish fry started as a Saturday-night thing on plantations,
and it was like an impromptu get-together,” he said.

In the decades after Emancipation, the tradition became a business for many African-
Americans, who brought fish fries with them as they migrated from the South to other
parts of the country. “There were three types of cheap restaurants during the Great
Migration: barbecue, fried chicken and fried fish,” Mr. Miller said. The fish fry was also
used as a popular tool to raise money for churches.

As black families moved to cities, the tradition moved to Friday nights. “One possible
explanation is the influence of Catholics in cities, who would eat fish on Friday nights,”
he said. “Fish markets would have sales those nights, so it was cheaper to fund a fish
fry.”

In Los Angeles, Georgette Powell is the second-generation owner of Mel’s Fish Shack,
named after her father, Mel Powell, who opened the business in 1982 after moving to
the city from Georgia. “People kept telling him to open a Mexican restaurant, but he
opened a fish fry,” Ms. Powell recalled.

She has run the small takeout operation, which serves fried and grilled seafood, since
2001, when her father died. “A lot of our customers come here because they remember
their grandmother or mother bringing them here, and it brings back that nostalgia,” she
said.
Ms. Powell serves catfish, tilapia and snapper. But the type of fish and sides in a fish fry
can vary from place to place. In the South, bone-in or filleted catfish is king, with
whiting and tilapia close behind because of their relatively low price. In the Midwest,
perch and carp are big; in the Mid-Atlantic States, porgy is an option.
Side dishes also showcase regional differences in the fish fry. Coleslaw is popular across
the country, while hushpuppies and meatless spaghetti are part of the spread in the
Carolinas. In the South and Mid-Atlantic, hushpuppies are common.

Ashley Faulkner, the chef at Bucktown, a casual restaurant in Providence, R.I.,

remembers hushpuppies and her mother’s potato salad on the table at her family’s fish
fries in the Bronx. “Every summer cookout we had was a fish fry,” Ms. Faulkner said.

Her mother grew up in Kinston, N.C., and Bucktown was inspired by her Southern
recipes. Now Ms. Faulkner hosts late-summer fish fries at the restaurant, serving
macaroni and cheese, collard greens and other Southern side dishes alongside the
catfish and shrimp. New England seafood like skate wing and calamari are also added to
the spread. She is working on opening a second location in Boston, where she wants to
offer summer fish fries featuring cod as well as catfish.

Condiments, too, are an essential part of any fish fry. Different types of fish require
different accompaniments. “Catfish is already an oily fish,” said Mr. Richards, the
Atlanta chef. “So if you use tartar sauce, that’s like oil on top of oil.”

At Mel’s Fish Shack, Ms. Powell makes a garlic dill sauce instead of tartar sauce, and
says lemon’s acidity is a must for fried fish. “And you absolutely have to have some good
hot sauce,” she added with a laugh. “You can make good fish taste bad with bad hot
sauce.”

Mr. Miller, the historian, said hot sauce “is absolutely critical. Some farm-raised fish can
be mild in flavor, so you want the extra flavor that hot sauce brings.”

But perhaps the most enduring part of the fish-fry tradition is the sense of fellowship it
brings. “It’s a simple way of gathering, and it doesn’t require much in terms of
ingredients,” Mr. Richards said.

The homemade version may be on the wane, Mr. Miller said. “Fewer people are frying
fish at home because they don’t want to deal with the smell, or they think it’s
unhealthy,” he said. “So it’s kind of like a treat to have it now.”

Ms. Powell sees her restaurant, Mel’s, as a means for her community to continue the
tradition. “We’re busy every Friday night.”
Class Work:

In groups of 4, pick one of the two stories, read it, discuss and then answer the
**questions above**. You must compare the community mentioned in the story with our
own (Colombia).