Margot Susanna Gliedman

All Souls Quarterly Review Vol. XIV, No. 3 Summer 2009

WHO WE ARE A FEATURE HIGHLIGHTING THE ‘OUTSIDE’ LIVES OF THE MANY VARIED AND INTERESTING MEMBERS OF THE CONGREGATION.

—by Lois Chazen

MARGOT ADLER, a familiar voice on National Public Radio for 30 years is a correspondent in the New York Bureau. She is often heard on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” Over the years she has created and produced innovative programming. She helped originate and was host of “Justice Talking,” a long-running series in debate format principally relating to the Constitution. Experts from various fields including historians, legislators, lawyers and politicians were invited to take part. She was co-producer of an award winning radio drama, “War Day.” The topics she covers range from the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo and the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, to the right to die, adopting children with disabilities (which helped to change the laws regulating the process) and homeless people living in the subways. Margot’s professional and spiritual life is a rainbow of “multi-

Margot Adler plicities.” She has attended All Souls since 1985 and been a member since 1992.

As a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was very active in the Civil Rights movement. Student action groups were numerous and addressed a myriad of reforms at the time. However, Margot was also encouraged by her mother to question political and social norms. Mrs. Adler was a teacher in the York City school system and was a community activist, inspiring Margot to question the status quo. In her senior year at Berkeley, she volunteered several hours each week to Pacifica radio’s local West Coast station to report the nightly news. In the midst of the usual senior year quandary of what to do next, she lapsed briefly into depression. Then voilà, it was so apparent! In 1970, she earned a MA at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Margot returned to Pacifica radio at its New York affiliate WBAI after completing journalism school. The Pacifica network is a low budget programmer open to new and often controversial ideas. Where else could one hear non-commercial treasures such as a noted music authority wax eloquent on opera and classical music for an hour each week, hear a young poet read his work, or a philosopher discuss radical ideas? Margot was surprised and challenged when she was told, “Women can’t read the news. Their voices are too high.” Margot overcame this astounding attitude in a supposedly liberal atmosphere. In short order, she was on the air to report the nightly news. Margot created two talk shows: Hour of the Wolf in 1972, which is still running, and some time later, Unstuck in Time. She stayed at WBAI for eight years and joined NPR as a general assignment reporter in 1979, the same year her first book was published. She was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982. This highly coveted distinction is awarded to outstanding journalists to spend a full year of study at the university.

In the early 1970s, she started reading Thoreau, Emerson and environmental writers such as Rachel Carson. “I realized that this literature was about our whole relationship to the universe; it demonstrated that everything was interconnected,” Margot wrote in a feature article for the November/December 1999 issue of UU World. Two essays she read at the time were pivotal in her search for a spiritual home: “The Religious Roots of Our Environmental Crisis” by Arnold Toynbee and “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” by Lynn White. Both articles discussed pagan, animistic traditions and each writer’s theories on the divine and its presence in everything. She recalled that great explicator of mythology Edith Hamilton, the Joseph Campbell of a somewhat earlier period, visiting her grade school and all the excitement that engendered. The progenitor of this school of research, compilation and compelling writing was Sir James Fraser’s mid-nineteenth century 12-volume work, The Golden Bough, and Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala, essential reading and songs for every school child in Finland.

A lifetime passion for music, singing and chorus and piano study in childhood led her to choose the High School of Music and Art. She cultivated her talent there. At Berkeley, she sang in the college chorus and continued to do so throughout her lifelong spiritual journey.

Margot’s grade school years were spent at the City and Country School founded in 1914, the first “progressive” school in the country. It was here that she became attracted to earth-related pagan ritual and other early religions and practices. The class was taught early medieval May Day carols and on the first day of May, the class was invited to the home of their teacher’s sister. The children danced and sang songs and gathered armloads of flowers that they brought back to school and strewed around the building. Two years later, an intensive course on ancient Greek gods and goddesses enchanted Margot to the point that she had a secret desire to actually become Artemis or Athena. “I became an early religions and ritual junkie,” she said. Her enthusiasm was so strong that she wrote a musical play about The Trojan War.

Margot’s father, Dr. Kurt Adler was a highly regarded psychiatrist in New York, born in Vienna, son of a pioneer of modern psychology, Alfred Adler. The senior Dr. Adler developed new concepts such as self esteem and the inferiority and superiority complexes: Individual Psychology. A member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Dr. Alfred Adler resigned from the Society when he broke ranks with Sigmund Freud. Adler’s work influenced other psychologists including Bruno Bettelheim, Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan. Margot’s father Kurt was a founding board member of the Alfred Adler Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy until his death in 1991 at the age of 92. Margot’s grandfather Alfred died before she was born. Alfred’s daughter, Margot’s aunt Alexandra, was also born in Vienna and arrived in the United States in 1935. A neurologist as well as a psychiatrist, an expert in schizophrenia, she named and did the definitive study of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and taught at the Harvard University Medical School. Margot holds a large collection of her papers that are promised to the Library of Congress.

In the UU World article referenced above, Margot also wrote, “When I was five, I asked my father what religion we were. ‘An atheist from a nominally Jewish background,’ he told me. ‘We believe in the brotherhood of man.’” She adds that her best friend had put on a lovely white dress and received holy communion. “I wanted to be a Catholic…. My mother said that I was Jewish and my family celebrated Christmas. So I come from a background of religious confusion and even conflict.”

Margot Adler is the author of two books. In 1979, thirty years ago, Drawing Down the Moon: Druids, Goddesses-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America was published by Viking Press; it was revised in 2006. The book was one of the first and most comprehensive volumes written on American neo-pagan circles, A second book, Heretic’s Heart: A Journal Through Spirit and Revolution, appeared in paperback and hardcover in 1997 published by Beacon Press. She has contributed numerous essays to volumes about Eco-feminism, earth-centered pagans and contemporary ritual. In 2002, she contributed an essay for The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, and the following year, for a book titled Sisterhood is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for a New Millennium. She has been interviewed on numerous occasions on a wide range of topics from civil rights to the war in Kosovo and her ongoing spiritual journey. She said that she needs ecstatic spiritual sustenance and community, joyful music and that All Souls provides part of that. For ten years, she served on the board of advisers of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. At one time, she conducted regular meetings of a coven in her Upper West Side apartment. She continues to be a Wiccan Priestess in the Gardnerian tradition and an elder in the Covenant of the Goddess, and is accredited to perform marriages.

“We work and live in a world of multiplicity. There are many pathways to follow. Most people are afraid of change. Spiritual reflection and practice should make everyone more comfortable in the world,” Margot said. “I am drawn to religions based on practice rather than scripture.” Although she is now less active in Wiccan circles, she still gives workshops in Paganism, ritual and chanting, and attends Pagan festivals as much as her full professional and family life permits. Margot attending the Rites of Spring festival in Massachusettes in 2008

Margot’s husband, John Gliedman, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard. He completed a PhD in Psychology and Linguistics at MIT. He is a science writer for technical and popular publications and is the author of three books. His major interests are in Quantum Physics, Space Travel and Astronomy. Their 19-year-old son Alexander, born in 1990, has just graduated from the Dalton School in New York and has begun his first year at Bard College where he plans to major in Computer Science.

	Margot with her Husband John and son Alexander on the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. “In a world of multiple realities, I also need to be a worldly, down to earth person,” Margot said. She is an imaginative intellectual with an open mind and an open heart. “I believe that the things of this world and existence matter, that matter matters, and the sacred resides in the here and now. I love the fact that Unitarian Universalists have a good many atheists among them…. I’m still very much a child of my skeptical, rational upbringing.”