The musical, West Side Story, has fascinated me since childhood.  When I saw it for the first time as a movie in 1961, I thought of it as primarily a story about juvenile delinquency.  How wrong I was!

As a high school senior in humanities class, my classmates and I studied the text of the play and the songs in great depth.  It was obviously a modernized version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and featured the bitter conflict between the Puerto Rican youths and the Polish-American youths.

From 2008-2019, I served as the spiritual leader of Hebrew Tabernacle in Washington Heights, NYC.  Many years ago, many of the inhabitants of the area were German Jews with a substantial number of Holocaust survivors.  At the one period of time, Washington Heights was known as "Frankfurt on the Hudson."  Today, while Washington Heights is a ethnically diverse community, a large percentage of the local inhabitants are Dominican.  One of the goals of my rabbinate was to build ties with the Latino community.  We rented our facilities to a predominately Latino church.

Hence, West Side Story is a major motif in A Human Rights Odyssey.  Rabbi Levin studies the musical while at University City High.  In a dream, he envisions a dance taking place in high synagogue social hall and imagines himself as the rather clueless DJ.  In the movie, the white teenagers dance only with with other white teenagers and the Puerto Ricans also dance only amongst themselves.  However, in the dream the white teenagers and the Puerto Ricans dance together!  

Based on that dream, Rabbi Levin was determined to organize an interfaith and interracial Thanksgiving program in which people of different religions and ethnic groups work, pray, and break bread together.  His dream was fulfilled as interracial mingling did indeed take place at his event! However, Rabbi Levin acknowledged that while he flipped the script, he only rewrote only once scene in West Side Story.  Rewriting the musical could only take place over a long period of time and involve interfaith and interracial cooperation on many social action projects.

One of my former congregants commented that perhaps, West Side Story, is antiquated.  However, Steven Spielberg, saw fit to direct a very powerful remake of the original movie.  In our very divisive society, West Side Story is more relevant than ever.