The second phase of this memo are 281 photos taken by our son-in- law, Brian, of the 45th consecutive week at TYBEE. They are photos of Dagny and Blake, Stella and Max, Abby and Brian, Lynn and me and Daniel and Tamara.
This is what life should be about. Family and cousins at the beach.
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Our mensch of a cousin, Eli Evans , passed away and his burial is today in Durham May his soul RIP. His wonderful Judy is now together with Eli.
Eli Nachamson Evans
July 28, 1936 - July 26, 2022
Print Email
Service
Beth El Synagogue
1004 Watts Street
Durham, NC 27701
Friday 7/29, 1:00 pm
Cemetery
Durham Hebrew Cemetery
Across from 840 Kent Street
Durham, NC 27707
Friday 7/29
Eli Nachamson Evans, 1936 by Roy HoRman
Eli Nachamson Evans, a philanthropic leader who championed Jewish
culture, urban initiatives, and education, and wrote a celebrated
memoir inspired by his North Carolina Jewish upbringing, died of
COVID complications in Manhattan on July 26, 2022. The president
emeritus of the Charles H. Revson Foundation and author of “The
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Provincials: A Personal History of the Jewish South,” and other works,
was 85 years old.
The twin paths of Evans’ career – strategic giving and creative writing –
were interwoven. In 2001, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
inducted the alumnus of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and
Yale Law School for “his dual contribution to American letters and as a
philanthropist of uncommon originality and leadership.”
At Revson, Evans’ ambition, as he wrote, was helping realize “the
American dream: that minorities can be protected from the tyranny of
the majority, that pluralism is possible, that respect for all peoples is
not an impossible wish.”
Drawn to “the power of the idea,” he gave early support to projects
that became cultural milestones, like public television’s “Heritage:
Civilization and the Jews,” and Bill Moyers’ “Genesis: A Living
Conversation.” The Revson-backed “Rechov Sumsum,” an Israeli
Sesame Street, evolved into a Palestinian-Israeli co-production
engendering cultural dialogue.
His executive demands dovetailed with the joys of family and literature.
A week during his Revson tenure, 1977 – 2003, might fnd him at the
New York ogce selecting emerging civic leaders for the Charles H.
Revson Fellowship, heading downtown for a stroll with beloved wife,
Judith, son, Joshua, and their westie, Zelda, then speaking at a book
event. In a 1990 colloquium on the South on the Mississippi riverboat
Delta Queen, he was joined by authors William Ferris, Alex Haley and
Shelby Foote, and blues great B.B. King.
A warm, often ebullient storyteller who played banjo and wore his
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Carolina blue Tarheels cap with attire both business and casual, he was
equally at home in Manhattan, Jerusalem, and the American South. His
admirers ranged from Mississippian Willie Morris, the Harper’s
magazine editor who commissioned “The Provincials,” to Israeli
statesman Abba Eban, who said of Evans, a passionate supporter of
Israel: “The Jews of the South have found their poet laureate.”
“The Jewish South,” as Evans said on PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show,”
summoning Faulkner, “is my Yoknapatawpha.”
His devotion to engaging and helping others was rooted in his
boyhood.
Eli Nachamson Evans was born July 28, 1936 in Durham, North
Carolina. His father, Emmanuel Joshua “Mutt” Evans, who owned Evans
United Dollar, was elected as the city’s frst Jewish mayor, serving four
terms, 1950 – 1963. His mother, Sara Nachamson Evans, was known as
“Hadassah’s Southern accent.”
Eli’s elder brother, Robert M. Evans, who became a CBS foreign
correspondent, died in 2017.
For young Eli the love of family and commitment to social justice were
intertwined. In “The Provincials” he alternated lyrical recollection in
chapters like “Growing Up in the Family Store” with topics like “Anti-
Semitism in the South.” Threading his personal story through
discussions of the founding of Israel, the Civil Rights Movement, and
Jewish-Christian relations, he made the formerly peripheral study –
Jews in the Dixie diaspora – central to the American experience.
“Jews were not aliens in the Promised Land,” he wrote, “but a bloodand-
bones part of the South.”
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That mingled identity drove his literary quest: “I am not certain what it
means to be both a Jew and a Southerner – to have inherited the
Jewish longing for a homeland while being raised with the Southerner’s
sense of home.”
That quest played out in later books.
His 1988 biography, “Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate,”
explored the dramatic life of the Secretary of State to Confederate
President JeRerson Davis, “the Confederate Kissinger,” as Evans called
him. Historian C. Vann Woodward praised the book as “spellbinding.”
His 1993 collection, “The Lonely Days Were Sundays,” took its title
from the diary of his maternal grandmother, Jennie Bloom Nachamson,
born in Lithuania, parent with Eli Nachamson to eight daughters and
one son, North Carolinians all.
A painting of Jennie and her children – Evans’ mother Sara the eldest –
was the cover art for a 2005 reprint the “The Provincials.”
“His dedication to community made his literary accomplishments all
the more remarkable,” said writer Roy HoRman, whose interview with
Evans is in the Eli N. Evans papers at UNC Libraries. “Eli found a dynamic
balance between a writer’s interior life and a public servant’s call to
action.”
His vita tells the story: UNC-Chapel Hill, B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, 1958; U.S.
Navy, 1958-1960; Yale Law School, class of 1963; speechwriter,
President Lyndon Johnson, 1964; aide to former North Carolina Gov.
Terry Sanford, study of the states, 1965; program ogcer, including a
project on voting rights, Carnegie Corporation, 1967 – 1977. Charles H.
Revson Foundation, president, 1977.
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In Manhattan he found a Southern Jewish bride. Judith London, raised
in an Orthodox Jewish home in Montgomery, Al., worked in New York as
an ogcer with the fnancial institution TIAA-CREF. On Nov. 15, 1981
the couple were married at the St. Regis and settled into an apartment
oR Gramercy Park. The Brotherhood Synagogue, a block away, became
the center of their religious life.
When their son was born at NYU hospital, Evans took a vial of dirt from
North Carolina into the delivery room, as he described in the essay,
“Home”:
“With one hand I held Judith’s hand, and with the other clutched the
southern soil … I wanted him to know his roots and I believe that one
had to create family legends early. So whenever I reported to my
mother that Joshua wanted his shoes oR or was diving into some grits,
Judith said on the other line, ‘the dirt’s working!’”
Judith London Evans passed away on Sept. 12, 2008.
Joshua Evans, a New York-based SAG-AFTRA actor and voice-over
artist, said of his father’s legacy: “It took me a long time to realize that
my father’s superpower was his warmth and charm. My dad could, and
would, talk to anyone – and by the end of that conversation, you felt as
if you were the only two people on earth. His gregarious personality
always embarrassed me as a child. However, as I have grown older, I
have come to recognize a small hint of this trait in myself and I could not
be more proud to carry that part of him with me forever.”
Eloquent and sociable, in recent years Evans remained a captivating
speaker at synagogues and book festivals, with honorary doctorates
from Union Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and UNCChapel
Hill, where he helped create the Carolina Center for Jewish
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Studies.
“The sages tell us,” Evans wrote, “that every man should have a child,
write a book, and plant a tree.”
It was “beshert,” he would say in one of his favorite expressions,
Hebrew for destiny, that he was blessed to fulfll them all.
He is survived by his son, Joshua and daughter-in-law Jenna Spivak
Evans (New York City); sister-in-law Gail Evans (Atlanta); brother and
sister-in-law Jack and Bonnie London (The Villages); nieces and
nephews Jason and Kathy Evans (Atlanta), JeRrey and Laurie Evans
(Los Angeles), Julie and Greg Caplan (Washington D.C.), Joel and Lori
London (Atlanta), and Cary London (Atlanta).
The funeral will be held on July 29, 2022 at 1pm EST at Beth El
Synagogue (1004 Watts St, Durham, NC 27701) followed by burial at
Durham Hebrew Cemetery. The family will be sitting shiva in New York
City on Sunday, July 31 , 3-8pm, and Monday, August 1 , 5-8pm.
Please email EliEvansShiva@gmail.com for more details.
One fnal note – Eli’s son Joshua would like to thank the staR at 305
West End Assisted Living for the care they provided Eli starting in 2019.
Their love and support helped both Eli and Joshua through the fnal
years of Eli’s life.
st st
Hudson Funeral Home left a message:
Please accept our deepest condolences for your family's loss.
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Lear is a genius and with "All In The Family Lear" was willing to touch the third rail. The problem with Lear is he also is a raving liberal and does not know there is another side. He talks a good game but he is a committed liberal and sees his world through that prism.
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On My 100th Birthday,
Reflections on Archie Bunker and Donald Trump
Well, I made it. I am 100 years old today. I wake up every morning grateful to be alive.
Reaching my own personal centennial is cause for a bit of reflection on my first century — and on what the next century will bring for the people and country I love. To be honest, I’m a bit worried that I may be in better shape than our democracy is.
I was deeply troubled by the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — by supporters of former President Donald Trump attempting to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Those concerns have only grown with every revelation about just how far Mr. Trump was willing to go to stay in office after being rejected by voters — and about his ongoing efforts to install loyalists in positions with the power to sway future elections.
I don’t take the threat of authoritarianism lightly. As a young man, I dropped out of college when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. I flew more than 50 missions in a B-17 bomber to defeat Fascism consuming Europe. I am a flag-waving believer in truth, justice and the American way, and I don’t understand how so many people who call themselves patriots can support efforts to undermine our democracy and our Constitution. It is alarming.
At the same time, I have been moved by the courage of the handful of conservative Republican lawmakers, lawyers and former White House staffers who resisted Mr. Trump’s bullying. They give me hope that Americans can find unexpected common ground with friends and family whose politics differ but who are not willing to sacrifice core democratic principles.
Encouraging that kind of conversation was a goal of mine when we began broadcasting “All in the Family” in 1971. The kinds of topics Archie Bunker and his family argued about — issues that were dividing Americans from one another, such as racism, feminism, homosexuality, the Vietnam War and Watergate — were certainly being talked about in homes and families. They just weren’t being acknowledged on television.
For all his faults, Archie loved his country and he loved his family, even when they called him out on his ignorance and bigotries. If Archie had been around 50 years later, he probably would have watched Fox News. He probably would have been a Trump voter. But I think that the sight of the American flag being used to attack Capitol Police would have sickened him. I hope that the resolve shown by Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and their commitment to exposing the truth, would have won his respect.
It is remarkable to consider that television — the medium for which I am most well-known — did not even exist when I was born, in 1922. The internet came along decades later, and then social media. We have seen that each of these technologies can be put to destructive use — spreading lies, sowing hatred and creating the conditions for authoritarianism to take root. But that is not the whole story. Innovative technologies create new ways for us to express ourselves, and, I hope, will allow humanity to learn more about itself and better understand one another’s ideas, failures and achievements. These technologies have also been used to create connection, community and platforms for the kind of ideological sparring that might have drawn Archie to a keyboard. I can only imagine the creative and constructive possibilities that technological innovation might offer us in solving some of our most intractable problems.
I often feel disheartened by the direction that our politics, courts and culture are taking. But I do not lose faith in our country or its future. I remind myself how far we have come. I think of the brilliantly creative people I have had the pleasure to work with in entertainment and politics, and at People for the American Way, a progressive group I co-founded to defend our freedoms and build a country in which all people benefit from the blessings of liberty. Those encounters renew my belief that Americans will find ways to build solidarity on behalf of our values, our country and our fragile planet.
Those closest to me know that I try to stay forward-focused. Two of my favorite words are “over” and “next.” It’s an attitude that has served me well through a long life of ups and downs, along with a deeply felt appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition.
Reaching this birthday with my health and wits mostly intact is a privilege. Approaching it with loving family, friends and creative collaborators to share my days has filled me with a gratitude I can hardly express.
This is our century, dear reader, yours and mine. Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.
Norman Lear produced “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times,” among other groundbreaking television shows. He is a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and Kennedy Center Honors. An activist and philanthropist, he co-founded and serves on the board of the advocacy organization People for the American Way.
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