Category Archives: Holocaust

On Gaza, Genocide and International Holocaust Remembrance Day

 (Photo by Axel Koester/Los Angeles Daily News)

It’s safe to day that International Holocaust Remembrance Day will arrive tomorrow at a deeply fraught moment for the Jewish community. Just today, we’ve received the news that the International Court of Justice, ruling on a case brought by South Africa, has ordered Israel to take action to “prevent acts of genocide” in Gaza. And later today, a federal court in California will hear a case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Palestinian human rights organizations, Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian Americans accusing Biden and other senior US leaders of being complicit in genocide.

In short, International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2024 is arriving just as Israel and the US government are literally being judged on the world stage for an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

As we contemplate the monumental nature of this moment, it’s instructive to consider the history of International Holocaust Remembrance Day itself. This annual commemoration was created by the UN in 2005, to take place annually on January 27: the day Auschwitz was liberated by allied forces. In its resolution establishing the day, the UN General Assembly made it clear that this observance would not merely be about commemorating the past; it pointedly urged member states “to develop educational programs that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.”

The GA also made it explicit that this remembrance would not be limited to the European Jewry alone, but should also extend to “countless members of other minorities” who were murdered en masse by the Nazi regime. As then Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon pointedly commented during the 2015 commemoration, “More than a million inmates, primarily Jews, were brutally and systematically killed in the place where the Nazis introduced the monstrous concept of ‘industrialized murder.’ Among the other victims were non-Jewish Poles, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, disabled persons and Jehovah’s witnesses.”

In other words, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was purposely established to universalize the memory and the lessons of the Holocaust.

There is of course, another Holocaust memorial day widely observed by the world Jewish community – namely, Yom Hashoah. In contrast, to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah is not universal in nature – it is a day set apart by the Jewish community to mourn their own in a Jewish context, as part of the Jewish festival calendar. While it is altogether appropriate for the Jewish people to honor the memories of our ancestors in such a way, it’s worth noting the history of this particular day as well.

Yom Hashoah was officially founded by an act of Israeli parliament in 1951, immediately following the founding of the state itself. It was purposefully established on Jewish date of the 27 Nisan (April/May) to begin a week of commemoration leading into Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day), concluding with Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day). In this way, Yom Hashoah served to promote the Zionist historical mythology that viewed the establishment of the state of Israel as a “rebirth,” arising out of the ashes of the Holocaust, through the brave sacrifice made by the soldiers who fought in the War of Independence.

Like many Jews growing up in America, I simply accepted Yom Hashoah as an organic part of the rhythm of the Jewish year, observed annually in synagogue services and communal commemorations. I was never taught that it was first and foremost an Israeli national holiday. And of course, I was never taught that the state of Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust was established through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their homes.

While there should most certainly be a communal Jewish day of memorial for the six million, it’s worth questioning the prominent status afforded Yom Hashoah by world Jewry. This is, after all, a day that serves to reinforce the view that the Israel’s founding was a “redemptive” moment for the Jewish people following the tragic cataclysm of the Holocaust – utterly ignoring the reality that the state of Israel was established through the dispossession of another people. I strongly believe we should consider an entirely different Jewish frame for commemorating the Holocaust; in the meantime, however, we should have no illusions about the real agenda behind Yom Hashoah and the problematic narrative it seeks to support.

It might well be said that in this terrifying current moment, the very real implications of this Zionist mythology are being directly challenged by the universal message of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s actually quite staggering to consider: as the world prepares to observe this day, compelling legal proceedings are formally accusing Israel of (and the US of abetting) genocide. Even more sobering: it arrives amidst an increasingly damning verdict in the court of public opinion in which, according to a recent poll, “more than one in three Americans believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.”

I realize how painful – even unthinkable – it will be for many Jews to lift up the lessons of International Holocaust Remembrance Day to suggest Israel that is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. But as I suggested in my sermon this past Yom Kippur, we must find the courage to say out loud the words that must be spoken. If this particular day is truly is to be a day for us to apply the “lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide,” it is all the more critical for us to speak out and name a genocide that is literally unfolding before us in real time. No matter how uncomfortable or painful the prospect.

In this regard, I’m immensely proud to be part of a Jewish community that has the courage to say these words out loud. In a just released public letter to President Biden, the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council is demanding that he “honor the word and spirit of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day by using (his) office to bring a ceasefire to this tragic violence — and to stop blocking efforts toward building a truly just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.”

An excerpt:

We hold the traumatic history of our people with care and sensitivity — and know how painful it is for Jews to grasp that a Jewish state could possibly commit a genocide. Nevertheless, we must agree with increasing numbers of scholars and international rights experts who have determined that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute, in the words of Prof. Raz Segal, “a textbook case of genocide.” 

We support and uplift South Africa’s recent application to the International Court of Justice claiming Israel is in breach of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And now, Palestinian human rights organizations, together with Palestinians in the US and Gaza, are bringing a case against your administration for failure to prevent, and complicity in, the Israeli government’s unfolding genocide against them, their families, and the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. We stand in support of their action as well.

According to a core teaching of Jewish spiritual tradition, humanity was created in the image of God. That means that each and every human being is of infinite value. The UN 1948 Convention on Genocide was created to uphold this very idea. The Torah also teaches that there will always be moments when we must make a critical moral choice. As Deuteronomy 30:19 says, “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.” President Biden, you have chosen death. Instead of using your considerable power to prevent or end this genocide, you have directly abetted it with weapons, funds and diplomatic cover. 

On this day of remembrance in 2021, you noted that, “The Holocaust was no accident of history.” As you stated, “It occurred because too many governments cold-bloodedly adopted and implemented hate-fueled laws, policies, and practices to vilify and dehumanize entire groups of people, and too many individuals stood by silently. Silence is complicity.” 

President Biden, what is happening right now in Gaza is no accident of history — and your complicity has been anything but silent. We call upon you to be true to your word and end US complicity in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us find the courage to speak the words that must be spoken. This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us find the courage to speak the words that must be spoken: Ceasefire now. Never again, for anyone. No more genocide.

Seeking Understanding Amidst the Horror in Israel/Palestine

When I heard the initial reports of Hamas’ attacks on Israel this past Saturday, I will be completely honest – my first reaction was “good for them.” Israel had been collectively punishing Palestinians in Gaza for years with a crushing blockade with little to no care from the rest of the world. Now, amazingly, Palestinians had broken free from this seemingly impenetrable open-air prison. With power and ingenuity, they were resisting their oppression, reminding Israel – and the world at large – that they were still here. That they would not submit.

Inevitably, as the news of the attacks trickled in during the course of the day, my emotions turned to shock and grief. Along with the rest of the world, I learned about the sheer scale of violence committed by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians: the largest single day massacre in Israeli history. At last count, at least 1,200 Israelis have been killed and it is estimated that 150 have been abducted and taken hostage into Gaza. Everyone in Israel and many Jews throughout the world, know people – or know of people – who were killed, injured or taken hostage. Like so many in the Jewish community, my social media feed has been filled with heartbreaking pictures and stories of Israelis who have been slain or are still unaccounted for.

Amidst all the grief, however, I was also deeply troubled by the ominous, growing cries for vengeance voiced by the Israeli government and media, and felt a creeping dread over the shattering military response that would almost certainly rain down on the people of Gaza. And now that day has come. Israel has shut off all electricity and water for over two million Palestinians as the military wreaks complete and total devastation on across that tiny strip, attacking hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment buildings.  As of this writing, the death toll has risen to more than 1,200, with 5,600 wounded. More than 250,000 people have been rendered homeless – and these numbers will almost certainly rise significantly in the coming days and weeks.

In a letter to my congregation a few days ago, I wrote that “so many of us are feeling layers upon layers of intense emotion, in often confusing and contradictory ways. For Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, I know these confusing contradictions are particularly keen.” Even so, I wrote, we simply must lift up the underlying context of this horrible violence. I continue to hold tightly to this conviction. While the sheer scope of our grief may feel incomprehensible, we simply must find the wherewithal to say out loud that the facts of these events have not only been comprehensible, but in fact inevitable.

Indeed, Palestinians and their allies have long been sounding the alarm that Israel was subjecting Palestinians to a brutally violent apartheid regime with impunity – and that there would be terrible consequences if the international community failed to intervene. Over and over, we’ve been warned about the cataclysmic violence that would inevitably ensue if Israel was not held to account. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it recently, “an entire people (has been) living under this kind of incredible oppression, in a pressure cooker. It had to explode.”

As we attempt to understand the context of this recent violence, I believe it’s utterly critical to know where to plot the starting point – and to my mind, this is precisely where most of the media analyses of the past several days have sadly gone astray. To judge by any number of pundits, this current outbreak of violence began alternatively with the US – Saudi deal or the policies of the far-right Netanyahu administration. While it might be said that any of these causes may have provided the most recent spark, I’ve been deeply disappointed, if not surprised, that precious few of these analyses have even mentioned the Nakba in relation to this latest outbreak of violence.

To be sure, the Nakba was an act of violence and harm that has been reverberating through the land between the river and the sea from 1948 until this very day. To put it simply, for the past 75 years, Israel has been violently dispossessing Palestinians in order to make way for a majority Jewish state. And for just as long, the Palestinian people have been resisting their dispossession – yes, often violently.

It is not by chance that this most recent violence has occurred in and around Gaza. As many commentators have observed, Gaza has in many ways been the epicenter of the Nakba – and of the Palestinian people’s resistance to it. To grasp this fully, it is important to understand the history of this region. Gaza’s narrative did not begin with Israel’s blockade or the political ascension of Hamas. What we call today the “Gaza Strip” was artificially created in 1949, when it became a repository for a flood of ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees from cities and villages in the coastal plain and lower Galilee. Before the Nakba, the population of this small region numbered 60 to 80,000 residents. By the end of the hostilities, at least 200,000 refugees were crowded into this 140 square mile strip of land.

At the time, most of the refugees fully expected to return home – some could even see their towns and villages through the fences. Those who crossed the border to gather their possessions or harvest their crops were considered “infiltrators” by Israel and shot on sight. Eventually, it became all too clear there would be no return. Over the years the tents turned into concrete buildings that grew ever higher along that narrow corridor. The numbers of that once sparse territory have grown to a population today of over 2,000,000 people – at least 70% of whom are refugees.

Following the founding of the state of Israel, many of the original settlements and kibbutzim founded on the border with Gaza were military outposts, most of which were built on top of or near demolished Palestinian villages. In fact, the sites that suffered the brunt of last Saturday’s massacres (including Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Re’im and Sderot) were settlements that were originally established in these locations for reasons of Israeli “national security.”

One such site was Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was flooded by dozens of Hamas militants, and where, according to witnesses, at least two entire families were killed, and two more kidnapped and taken to Gaza as hostages. When I heard about the massacre at Nahal Oz, I couldn’t help but recall that this was not the first time this community had experienced Palestinian armed resistance. Back in 1956, a group of Palestinian militants entered Nahal Oz and killed a kibbutznik named Roi Rotenberg. At the time, this tragedy was keenly felt throughout the nascent state of Israel. At Roi’s funeral, the famed Israeli general Moshe Dayan offered a eulogy, expressing himself with brutal and unexpected honesty:

Do not today besmirch the murderers with accusations. Who are we that we should bewail their mighty hatred of us? For eight years they sit in refugee camps in Gaza, and opposite their gaze we appropriate for ourselves as our own portion the land and the villages in which they and their fathers dwelled…This we know: that in order that the hope to destroy us should die we have to be armed and ready, morning and night. We are a generation of settlement, and without a steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house. Our children will not live if we do not build shelters, and without a barbed wire fence and a machine gun we cannot pave a road and channel water. The millions of Jews that were destroyed because they did not have a land look at us from the ashes of Israelite history and command us to take possession of and establish a land for our nation.

Dayan’s words resonate today with terrible prescience. Decades later, the descendants of this original Gazan generation still remain in refugee camps in Gaza, “gazing though the barrier fences as Israel appropriates as its own portion the land and the villages in which their ancestors dwelled.” Dayan’s eulogy also powerfully described a hypervigilant Israeli mindset that has only deepened throughout the decades. Since the Nakba could not and did not result in the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes, Israel has attempted to control them with a “steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon” for the past 75 years. During this time, Israel has widened its regime of violence in order to contain Palestinians in the occupied territories, subjecting them to a daily context of systemic, unceasing state violence every moment of their lives.

It is also telling that Dayan invoked the trauma of the Holocaust in his eulogy – and today, so many decades later, we can clearly see that this trauma was not limited to his generation alone. If anything, it has been handed down to subsequent generations in way that are all too real and all too palpable. Indeed, we can clearly see this generational trauma at work in Jewish responses to this latest violence, which is being openly characterized as “the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.” It is painfully poignant to consider that these massacres occurred in a state that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust in order to safeguard Jewish lives once and for all.

At the same time, however, this Holocaust rhetoric is deeply troubling given the vengeful fury currently being whipped up by a far-right Israeli government that is demonizing Palestinians with unabashedly genocidal language. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently stated “Israel is fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly.” Netanyahu has promised that Israel’s military offensive on Gaza will “reverberate for generations.” One prominent Israeli general has promised to “open the gates of hell.” And perhaps most chillingly, a member of Israeli Parliament has called for a “second Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”

As I write these words, the Israeli military is mercilessly bombarding the Gaza Strip with a ferocity that is truly terrifying to behold. For the past few days, I’ve been combing social media for their postings from friends in Gaza, as I helplessly watch footage of whole neighborhoods and communities completely destroyed along with their inhabitants. One of the last messages I read came from a friend and former colleague at American Friends Service Committee: “Nothing left to say. More than 80 hours without electricity, water, or internet connection. Communication is very limited with everyone inside or outside Gaza. Carnage everywhere, hard to recognize streets, we are all waiting for the time to die.”

It is not an understatement to suggest that the Jewish community is now faced with a profound moral challenge. Even as we mourn our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no uncertain terms. I cannot say this forcefully enough: those of us who ignore this reality – who mourn the Jewish dead exclusively without even a mention of the massive crimes Israel is actively committing against the Palestinian people – will be quite frankly, complicit in this horrific bloodshed.

Over the past several days, I’ve found myself returning to a famous narrative from this week’s Torah portion: the story of Cain and Abel. In the wake of the first act of violence in human history, God says to Cain, “What have you done? The blood of your brother is crying out to me from the ground! Cursed by the ground that opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother.”  From this we learn, among other things, that bloodshed actually has the power to pollute the earth. Later on in the Torah, we will learn that nothing can ever be the same – or considered normal again – when blood is spilled. it must be expiated, or atoned for through a set of very complex and explicit sacrificial rituals. In our day, we can understand these to be acts of reparation, restoration and repatriation. We will only truly make atonement for this bloodshed with very real measures that will restore justice and balance for those who dwell in the land. 

As I read this story, I can’t help but think of the blood originally shed in the terrible days of the Nakba, and how it continues to cry out to us all from the ground. I can’t help but think of the immense amount of blood that has been shed since, whose collective cry must certainly be a searing roar, if only we would allow ourselves to hear it. But we will never heed the cry as along as we remain hardened into sides, into “us and them.” In fact, in this week’s Torah portion, there are no “sides” to speak of. There are no nations, no Israelites, no Canaanites, no Amalekites, no Moabites. There is only one common humanity, struggling how to live together in a too often harsh and unyielding world.

Those it may seem more painfully difficult than ever, let us hearken to this voices that have so long been crying out from the ground. Let us respond with understanding, compassion and action. Even amidst the terrible grief, let us shine an unflinching light on the true roots of this violence – and on the vision of a future based on justice and equality for all who live in the land.

With this in mind, I will conclude now with the prayerful words of my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Alissa Wise:

May the One Who Remembers allow us to hold in one hand 75 years of occupation,
dispossession and violence and in the other a future of peace, justice and freedom;

May the One Who is Slow to Anger soften our hearts and our fists helping us to put down the sword even at the height of the arc of our rage;

May the One of Possibility remind us that a future of peace with justice is possible;

May the One Who Awakens Us to Life hold us in our pain and vindictiveness until we set those down for the sake of life;

May the One Who Endures allow us to act for the sake of the coming generations;

May the One Who is Without Limit expand our senses of what is possible as we reach for justice, freedom and peace for us all.

Amen.

Speaking the Unspeakable on Israel/Palestine: Sermon for Yom Kippur 5784

phot: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

An op-ed version of this sermon was published in Truthout

Jewish tradition teaches that words have a sacred power. In the very beginning of the Torah, God creates the world itself through the power of the word. In the book of Exodus, the Israelites speak as one people at Sinai, thereby entering into a covenant with God. It is said that on Yom Kippur, the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple and utter the otherwise unspeakable name of God – and at that moment the fate of the very world would hang in the balance. On Yom Kippur, we ourselves stand as a community and say the words of our collective confessions together. As our liturgy would have it, we may not be written into the book of Life for the new year unless we speak these words out loud.

In their way, the power of words is akin to energy. Once they are spoken, they are out in the world – and from that point on there are a myriad of ways their impact might be manifest. Sometimes their power will remain dormant. Other times, our words can be the conduit for deep and powerful transformation.

I think a great deal about the impact of our words when it comes to the issue of Israel/Palestine. We have witnessed their power for instance, over the course of this past year, as thousands of Israelis have been holding regular demonstrations against the current Israeli administration and its plans to limit the power of the Israeli judiciary. Week after week, protesters have chanted words in the streets and carried them on signs, expressing their collective outrage over the government’s “threat to Israeli democracy.” More recently, many in the American Jewish community – including many rabbis – have voiced their support for these protests and have even been staging public protests of their own.

On one level, it could be said that these massive rallies have had a powerful impact. They are the largest and most sustained protests in Israeli history and the most massive mobilization of the Israeli left in years. The rhetoric of the rally has also empowered Zionists in general. Many who advocate for Israel will often refer to it as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” I would suggest that the use of this word is powerful for all the wrong reasons. It covers up the reality that while Israel may be a democracy for Jews, it is decidedly not one for Palestinians. Indeed, for many centrist and right wing Israelis these demonstrations are important because they bolster the illusion of democracy. In so doing, they serve to entrench Zionism and strengthen the Jewish state.

It is true that at many of these demonstrations, there have been some chants and signs condemning Israel’s “occupation.” However, this is an oft-invoked word that can mean different things to different people. For some it refers only to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For others it also includes annexed territories such as East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. For still others, the entire land between the river and the sea is considered to be occupied territory. Thus, when the word “occupation” is invoked during the demonstrations, there is little clarity on what it actually means – or what is actually being demanded.

There is yet another powerful word that has recently emerged in relation to Israel/Palestine, and that word is “apartheid.” Last year, three respected human rights organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli group B’Tselem, all released well-researched reports concluding that Israel is an apartheid regime. Over the past year, many surprising figures have also been increasingly using this word in relation to Israel, including a retired Israeli general.

This past year, a letter was posted online by Israeli academics that openly criticized American Jews for “(paying) insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation.” The letter pointedly stated that “there cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.”  The so-called Elephant in the Room Letter was widely distributed and was eventually signed by Jewish leaders and figures – to date it has over 2,700 signatures.

With liberal Jewish leaders increasingly willing to use the “A” word in public, there is every indication that it is losing its stigmatized, transgressive status in the Jewish community. But even here, the meaning of the word “apartheid” depends on how it is used. The B’Tselem report, for instance, claims that Israeli apartheid extends “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” The Israeli general, on the other hand, limited it to the West Bank alone.

There are also those who would say that the term “apartheid” itself doesn’t go far enough – that it is a technical term from international humanitarian law that has limited legal applications. Many would argue that the word “settler colonialism” is much more powerful and meaningful because it is related to decolonization – a concrete process of action that includes the return of refugees and reparations to the Palestinian people.

Yes, all of these words do indeed have a complex kind of power when it comes to Israel/Palestine, and I’m often fascinated by the strategic ways we utilize this power. Years ago, I used to avoid controversial and potentially incendiary words in connection with Israel, feeling that they might well alienate and push away the very people I was trying to reach. I would typically use words I thought were less triggering: “dispossession” instead of “ethnic cleansing,” “non-Zionist” instead of “anti-Zionist,” “occupation” instead of “settler colonialism.”

I feel differently about this now. I actually think it’s important to use words such as these. I believe it’s important to name oppression explicitly and not to soften it with euphemisms. If some words make people uncomfortable, that’s OK. Once a word is said, it can’t be unsaid. It’s now part of the discourse. While some may well recoil from that word, they may well come around to accept it in time.

Words can indeed push the line of what is considered acceptable. But they can also represent one step too far, or the crossing of a line. There is still, for instance, a hard line drawn on the word Zionism. For most Jews, it is still considered beyond the pale to refer to oneself as an anti-Zionist: to break not just with the Israeli government, not just with the 1967 occupation, but with the very concept of an exclusively Jewish nation-state.

Apropos of Yom Kippur, it seems to me that when we say these words and cross this particular line openly, we’re really making a kind of confession. It’s not merely a political opinion – it’s an ethical admission that our Jewish identity has been inextricably connected to the oppression of another people.

When I was growing up, I was routinely taught that Zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. But I was never taught that this “liberation” came at the expense of another people. Like many American Jews, I was raised to view the establishment of the state of Israel as the exclusive Jewish homeland; a Jewish refuge after centuries of persecution; a redemptive homecoming following the collective trauma of the Holocaust.

Our trauma has been compounded by the sense that the world was complicit in it – that the Jewish people were abandoned by the international community. To be sure, the allied nations should rightly bear deep shame for their inaction during the Holocaust and their refusal to accept Jewish refugees following the war. But even as collective Jewish trauma is all too real, it was tragic and profoundly wrong to justify it by inflicting trauma on another people: by establishing a Jewish state on their backs and creating what has now become the largest refugee population in the world.

When Jewish Zionists publicly confess and act on the truth of this history it can often shake their Jewish identity to the core. This phenomenon often reminds me of something James Baldwin wrote in his classic 1962 essay, “A Letter to My Nephew:”

As you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.

Though Baldwin was addressing white supremacy in the US, I think his words are equally applicable to Jewish supremacy in Israel. Zionism has become such an indelible part of Jewish identity that it has caused us to enable – or at the very least tolerate – the oppression of another people. The power of this mythic Zionist narrative manages to keep the truth of this ongoing oppression at bay, lest it causes everything we once held so dear to come crashing to the ground.

I experienced this upheaval personally in 2008, at my former congregation. During Israel’s military assault on Gaza, I experienced deep anguish – and I expressed those feelings in a blog post. While I had often been critical of Israel in the past, this was very different. Rather than using the usual words, calling for “balance” and a plea for “peace on both sides,” I used strong and angry language, explicitly naming Israel as the oppressor. I concluded my post with these words:

We good Jews are ready to protest oppression and human rights abuses anywhere in the world but are all too willing to give Israel a pass. It’s a fascinating double standard, and one I know all too well. I understand it, because I’ve been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it.  

So no more rationalizations. What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza is an outrage. It has brought neither safety nor security to the people of Israel and it has wrought nothing but misery and tragedy upon the Palestinian people.

There I said it. Now what do I do?

Now many years after later, I realize that post was a kind of confession. Though I didn’t know it at the time, when I wrote those words I was actually crossing a line that would eventually force me to leave my congregation. To use Baldwin’s words, it was upheaval so profound that it attacked my sense of my own reality. I was fairly sure I couldn’t continue as a congregational rabbi – and I wasn’t completely sure what kind of Jew I would be either.

But as I said earlier, once our words are out in the world, there are myriad ways their power might be manifested. I was eventually able to recover my Jewish identity along with my Jewish conscience. Speaking those words was unexpectedly liberating. I discovered there were other Jews like me – lots and lots of them. And together we became part of an emergent Jewish community that had the freedom to say out loud what must be said. I have no illusions that there is a distinct minority of Jews on this side of the line, but I also know that there are many who are now crossing over, breaking their silence on Israel/Palestine in unprecedented ways.

In its way, this new Jewish community is creating a new counter-narrative to the Zionist narrative that has been dominant for so long. One critical part of this counter-narrative is the understanding that standing in solidarity with Palestinians is a mitzvah – a sacred act. When it comes to solidarity in particular, words are enormously important. Those who engage in solidarity with disenfranchised people know that while words may have great power, words can quickly lose their power if they do not lead to action.

Indeed, history is littered with the betrayal of empty words, promises unkept and treaties broken. Staying true to one’s word can often be a challenge for those who are trying to practice solidarity in good faith. The growing popularity of land acknowledgements is a good example. Land acknowledgements are significant and important, but as many Native people have pointed out, they amount to empty words unless they contain accountability – unless they exist in a larger context of decolonization and reparation. As President Robert Larsen of the Lower Sioux Indian Community has put it, “An apology or an acknowledgment is one thing, but what are you going to do next?”

The same applies to those of us who express solidarity with the Palestinian people. Yes, the words we say matter, but unless they lead to genuine transformation, they will remain little more than empty words. To return to my metaphor of energy, words represent the initial spark, but once kindled, it takes real effort to sustain and increase its power. We must take active responsibility to maintain that initial spark by acting on our words, lest it eventually sputter out.

Putting our words of solidarity with Palestinians can take many forms, but a core priority requested by Palestinian civil society groups is support for BDS – the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. In this regard, I encourage those who are able to attend our Yom Kippur afternoon program today. We will be hosting a conversation with Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS national committee, whose presentation is entitled, “Repentance, Reparation and Ethical Reconciliation: A Palestinian Vision for Common Liberation.” Omar was deeply honored to be asked to be our teacher for Yom Kippur – but as I told him, I could think of no more appropriate way for a congregation such as ours to observe this day.

I also want to remind our members that Tzedek Chicago was one of the first congregations to sign a pledge from the Apartheid-Free Communities initiative, a newly created interfaith coalition convened by the American Friends Service Committee. In that statement, signatories pledge “to join others in working to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism and military occupation.” Now that we have publicly made this pledge, it will be our challenge to live out these words as a community – and in the spirit of Yom Kippur, I want to encourage us to explore what this will mean for our congregation in the years ahead. By signing this public pledge, it is also our hope that it will give other Jewish congregations and organizations the courage to speak these previously unspeakable truths as well.

In the Shacharit service – the Jewish morning prayer – we say the words, “Baruch she’amar ve’haya ha’olam” – “Blessed is the one who spoke and the world became.” While this literally refers to God but it is also a statement about the potential within each and every one of us. Our words have the power to transform our lives and our world – indeed, to create whole new worlds anew.

So let this be our collective blessing this Yom Kippur: let us find the courage to speak the words that must be spoken. Let our words kindle sparks of possibility, and may they inspire us all to create the world we know is possible: a world of Tzedek/Justice, of Tikkun/Repair and of Shalom/Wholeness for all who dwell on earth. 

Prayer as Resistance: A Shabbat Service in Liberated Dachau

Today marks the seventy eighth anniversary of a public Shabbat service held in liberated Dachau. While it’s not a particularly well-known story, it deserves to be commemorated and widely retold, not least because it illuminates the powerful ways that prayer has historically served as a form of resistance.

The service was led by Rabbi David Max Eichhorn, a Jewish chaplain in the US Army’s XV Corps. Rabbi Eichhorn wrote extensively about this – and many other of his remarkable wartime experiences – in letters that were compiled in (the highly recommended) book, “The GI’s Rabbi.” While Eichhorn experienced a number of well-known historical events during the war, for me, the most indelible moments in the book come from his witness to the liberation of Dachau: from his description of the army’s numbing discovery of masses of naked, emaciated bodies, to the acts of revenge committed by ex-prisoners against their former captors, to his moving description of courageous non-Jews who “had saved Jewish lives at the risk of their own.”

Eichhorn’s most memorable recollections of the liberation of Dachau involve his role in the Shabbat service he led on May 5, 1945. One day before, on Friday afternoon, after leading a service in the women’s barracks, a lieutenant colonel approached him with tears in his eyes. It was the famed Hollywood film director George Stevens, who was in charge of the Signal Corps unit that had been taking official army footage of Dachau. (Stevens’ movie “D-Day to Berlin” is among the films made by five Hollywood directors who were embedded in Europe to document the war effort – a project powerfully recollected in the book and documentary “Five Came Back” – also highly recommended.)

Eichhorn and Stevens made arrangements for Stevens to film the camp-wide service that was scheduled to take place the next day in the main square of the Dachau compound. When Eichhorn arrived the next morning, however, he discovered that no preparations had been made. He was subsequently informed that Polish non-Jewish inmates had threatened to break up the service by force if was held in the main square. As a result, the service was moved to the camp laundry, which only accommodated a fraction of Jews who desired to attend. As Eichhorn recalls it:

While the service was in progress, in a jam-packed room with hundreds of others crowded around the open doors and windows, Colonel Stevens came in, elbowed his way to my side and demanded to know why the service was not being held in the square. His cameras and crews were ready for action and he wanted the event to go on as scheduled…After hearing the “inside story,” he exploded in anger. “I did not give up my good job in the movie business in Hollywood,” he bellowed, “to risk my life in combat for months and months, in order to free the world from the threat of Fascism and then stand idly by while the very victims of Fascism seek to perpetuate its evils.” …He took me to the Camp Commandant, and with a loudness of voice and much banging on the table, George Stevens repeated his anti-Fascistic sentiments.

…And so, thanks to the decent instincts of an American movie director, the camp-wide service was held in the main square. It was attended by every Jewish male and female whose health permitted. As promised, every nationality was represented by flag and delegation. There were an estimated two thousand Jews and non-Jews at the service. And ringing the outer rim of the service with faces turned away from the platform was the American military “guard of honor.” They were prepared to deal with a situation which did not develop. No untoward incident of any kind marred the service.

(from “The GI’s Rabbi: World War II Letters of David Max Eichhorn,” pp. 185-186.)

When I first watched it on YouTube, I found that the very familiar words of these prayers had a powerful new resonance. It was essentially an abbreviated Torah service, with other added prayers relevant to the occasion. It began with a prayer known as the Shehechianu – a blessing of gratitude for having been kept alive long enough to celebrate a sacred moment or season. He followed with Birkat Hagomel – a blessing traditionally recited by someone who has recovered from a serious illness or has otherwise survived a traumatic, potentially life-threatening episode. While I have been part of countless services that have included these blessings, it is indescribably moving to witness them recited by thousands of Jews recently liberated from a death camp. I had a similar response to the recitation of El Male Rachimim – the prayer for the dead – a prayer that has become a staple at Holocaust remembrance services.

In the end, however, it seems to me that the very act of holding the service was itself an act of resistance. I was most moved by the sight of the Torah scroll – the most indelible symbol of Jewish spiritual survival – being held aloft before the liberated of Dachau. It is, in its way, an iconic and redemptive image – one that speaks not only to this historical moment, but to our collective responsibility to a liberative future.

As Rabbi Eichhorn so aptly put it to his “congregation” that day:

What message of comfort and strength can I bring you from your fellow Jews? What can I say that will compare in depth or intensity to that which you have suffered and overcome? Full well do I know and humbly do I confess the emptiness of mere words in this hour of mingled sadness and joy. Words will not being the dead back to life nor right the wrongs of the past ten years. This is not a time for words, you will say, and rightfully so. This is a time for deeds, deeds of justice, deeds of love … Justice will be done.

Hanukkah Is About Resistance. Let’s Resist This COVID Spike Through Mutual Aid

Volunteers from a nonprofit organization provide food supplies to people who line up ahead of Thanksgiving amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on November 20, 2020. (TAYFUN COSKUN / ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Cross-posted with Truthout

With Hanukkah now upon us, the internet is abuzz with articles offering guidance on how to celebrate the holiday in the age of COVID-19. While most of them focus on practical issues such as socially distanced Hanukkah parties and Zoom candle lightings, I’ve been thinking a great deal on what the story of Hanukkah might have to offer to all of us as we gear up for a winter like none we’ve ever experienced in our lifetimes.

Hanukkah, of course, is based upon the story of the Maccabees, the small group of Jews who successfully liberated themselves from the oppressive reign of the Seleucid Empire in 167 BCE. The legacy of this story, however, is a complex one because the Jewish struggle against religious persecution took place within the context of a bloody and destructive Jewish civil war. In contemporary times, the meaning of Hanukkah has become even more complicated given its proximity to Christmas, subjecting it to the uniquely American religion of unmitigated commercialism.

Beyond all these complications, I’d argue that the essence of Hanukkah is the theme of resistance. At its core, the Hanukkah story commemorates the victorious resistance of the people over the power and might of empire. On a deeper level, we might say that the festival celebrates the spiritual strength of our resistance to an often harsh and unyielding world.

In this regard, it is significant that Hanukkah takes place in the winter. Apropos of the season, the festival prescribes resistance to an increasingly colder and darker world by lighting increasing numbers of candles during this eight-night festival. Those of us who celebrate this holiday are instructed to place our menorahs in our windows as an act of “spiritual defiance,” directing the light outward into the night where it may clearly be seen by the outside world.

There have indeed been moments in Jewish history in which lighting the menorah was literally an act of resistance. One powerful example can be seen offered in a single image: the famous photograph taken in 1932 Germany showing a menorah on the window sill of a Jewish home, with a Nazi flag clearly visible across the street. Another well-known moment of Hanukkah resistance occurred in 1993 when, after a brick was thrown through the window of a Jewish home in Billings, Montana, scores of citizens showed their solidarity with the Jewish community by taping paper menorahs in their windows. More recently, on the Hanukkah after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, one local Jewish leader commentedthat the menorah is “not just something that we display in our homes for ourselves … but something we light so that passersby can see. For us, this year that feels like an act of resistance.”

In 2020, we find Hanukkah arriving amid a winter that medical experts are calling “the darkest days of the pandemic” and “COVID hell.” In a recent interview, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said, “the next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic.” Another expert has predicted that more lives will be lost in December than the U.S. saw in March and April combined.

With such an unprecedented and terrifying winter bearing down upon us, I’d suggest that the ideal of Hanukkah resistance is more powerfully relevant than ever. This resistance, of course, presents us with profound challenges. After living with the pandemic for the better part of a year, so many throughout the U.S. are succumbing to “COVID fatigue” — following months of social isolation and anxiety, increasing numbers of people are becoming less vigilant about the pandemic practice of masking and social distancing, even as infection rates spike precipitously.

With the darkest days of the pandemic ahead of us — even as we agitate for rent cancellation, eviction resistance and universal health care — we have another form of resistance at our disposal: We can resist government inaction/abandonment of its citizens by participating in the grassroots, self-organized networks of support known as mutual aid.

While these community-based efforts are not new, they have proliferatedwidely since the onset of the pandemic. As Jia Tolentino pointed out in a New Yorker article last May:

[Mutual aid] is not a new term, or a new idea, but it has generally existed outside the mainstream. Informal child-care collectives, transgender support groups, and other ad-hoc organizations operate without the top-down leadership or philanthropic funding that most charities depend on. Since COVID, however, mutual aid initiatives seemed to be everywhere.

The concept of mutual aid was coined in 1902 by the Russian anarchist/scientist/economist/philosopher, Peter Kropotkin, who arguedthat mutual aid could be traced to the “earliest beginnings of evolution.” Kropotkin posited that solidary provided the human species with the best chance of survival, particularly given the emergence of private property and the rise of the State:

It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependence of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation, the still higher moral feelings are developed.

Some of the most well-known examples of mutual aid in U.S. history, in fact, were the survival programs created by the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the community-based initiatives organized by the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party in the 1960s and ’70s. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself grasped the radical power of these mutual aid projects. In a now infamous internal memo, he wrote that the Black Panther breakfast programs represented “the best and most influential activity going for the BPP, and is as such, the greatest threat to efforts by authorities.”

Another important aspect of mutual aid is the understanding that disenfranchised people cannot ultimately depend on state institutions to save them. According to Puerto Rican scholar Isa Rodríguez, “‘Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo’ — ‘Only the people save the people,’ became a rallying cry for Puerto Ricans following the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017 as multiple organizations — mostly based on grassroots groups that existed prior to the hurricane — quickly organized to channel aid.”

The community-based solidarity of mutual aid is also fundamentally different from the approach of private humanitarian charities in which the needy are “saved” through the beneficence of those of greater means. And it must not be viewed through the lens of “crisis response.” Mutual aid, rather, is rooted in long-term alliances between people engaged in a common struggle. As historian/writer, Elizabeth Catte has observed:

Mutual aid can be a form of resistance, but the practice itself requires discipline. We can’t do it because it helps us sugarcoat our trauma, or because it lets us say we have claimed goodness in a world where it is often lacking. Mutual aid is incompatible with charity and should offer no pleasure to the well-resourced person or do-gooder who hopes to find worthy recipients of their kindness, because the practice of mutual aid is intended to destroy categories of worth.

Since mutual aid is rooted in the ideal of solidarity, the first step for anyone interested is to cultivate genuine and accountable relationships within their own local communities. This will be undeniably challenging in a time of pandemic, when our mutual safety literally depends upon socially distancing from one another.

Mutual aid projects, however, are adapting to meet these challenges through creative use of commercial internet platforms, online databasesand toolkits. Additionally, mutual aid projects in the age of COVID insist on strict adherence to public health protocols.

In the words of anarchist organizer Cindy Milstein: “While ‘social’ aka ‘physical’ distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing are necessary tools to help stop the spread of this virus, they will only be effective if it’s grounded in an ethics and practice of social solidarity and collective care.”

The most famous Hanukkah story says that when the Maccabees entered the Temple to relight the menorah, they only found enough oil to last for one day. Miraculously, however, the menorah burned for eight days. At the core of this seemingly simple parable are profound lessons about the power of sustainability and resilience. We know from history that popular movements of resistance have the ability to succeed even against the most daunting of foes.

The prospect of the coming winter — and the new year ahead — are undeniably daunting. Amid it all lie fundamental questions: Where will we find the strength to meet these challenges? How will we keep the fire of our commitment to each other from burning out? Who can we depend upon to see us through the coming season and beyond?

The resistance embodied by mutual aid provides us with a compelling answer — in the end, we have each other. As Dean Spade, who recently published a book titled Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next), so aptly puts it, “what happens when people get together to support one another is that people realize that there’s more of us than there is of them.”

True resistance can never occur as long as we expect an external human force to somehow show up to save us. In the end, the true miracle of resistance occurs when we show up for one another.

AOC is Right: Trump is Running Concentration Camps on the Border

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Insider the Homestead Concentration Camp, Homestead, FL.

(Cross-posted with Newsweek)

Last December, I was arrested on the border in San Diego while standing with faith leaders to protest, among other things, Trump’s unlawful incarceration of immigrants. My experiences on the border and at immigrant detention centers in my home state of Illinois have left me with no doubt whatsoever that our nation is warehousing humanity in concentration camps—and that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct when she refers to them by this term.

As a rabbi, I am compelled to act on behalf of immigrants because my religious faith and historical legacy demands that I do so. And I’m not alone: most American Jews embrace progressive values of social justice—and understand that we ourselves have a history of oppression at the hands of state violence.

Yesterday, AOC stirred something of a hornet’s nest when she retweeted an article in Esquire by an expert on immigrant detention who characterized Trump’s immigrant detention centers as “concentration camps.” Almost immediately, some Republican politicians, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York pounced, claiming AOC’s “regrettable use of Holocaust terminology to describe these contemporary concerns diminishes the evil intent of the Nazis to eradicate the Jewish people.”

It is deeply problematic, highly partisan—and historically incorrect—to declare that the use of “concentration camps” is to be constrained to the limits of “Holocaust terminology” (itself hardly an academic term.) As scholar Jonathan Katz recently pointed out in the LA Times, the term “was invented by a Spanish official …during Cuba’s 1895 independence war.” FDR, notably, also used the term in reference to his Executive Order to incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. And enough people have pointed out in recent days the usage of the term by the British suppressing the Boer rebellion in South Africa for it to be elaborated on here.

We Jews do not own this term. But in fact, I would argue it is imperative that we Jews use this term whenever these dreadful facilities are imposed on groups of people other than ourselves. History has shown us that the concentration of humanity into forced detention invariably leads entire societies to exceedingly dark places. This practice did not begin with Nazi policies against European Jewry—nor did it end there.

The same is true of AOC’s impassioned and all-too familiar call, “Never again.” As a rabbi, a Jew and a person of conscience, allow me to put it as plainly as I can: AOC’s use of this phrase was altogether appropriate. I do not and cannot view this call as “Holocaust terminology.” On the contrary: “Never Again” means never again for anyone, or else it doesn’t mean anything at all.

The fact that we are even debating these terms shows just how twisted the conversation has become. Rather than parsing the words of a human rights champion like AOC for petty political gain, these politicians and Jewish leaders should be directing their criticism where it truly belongs: at a morally depraved national policy that parses out access to human rights according to origin and ethnicity, tears apart families, and cages children in, yes, concentration camps.

On Alice Walker and Antisemitism

American Masters - Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth

The Jewish interwebs have been abuzz regarding Yair Rosenberg’s December 17 Tablet article in which he criticized the New York Times Book Review for its interview with Alice Walker. In last Sunday’s “By the Book” column, the Times asked Walker what books she had on her nightstand; among those she cited was a book by British antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke entitled, “And the Truth Shall Set You Free.” Walker commented, “In (his) books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”

In his article, Rosenberg listed a litany of odious excerpts from Icke’s book, including his praise of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” his claims that the B’nai B’rith was behind the slave trade and his belief that the Rothschilds bankrolled Adolf Hitler. He also offered a long list of the numerous times Walker has endorsed Ickes’ ideas, including her posting of his video interview (now blocked by YouTube) with Infowars’ Alex Jones, of which she wrote:

I like these two because they’re real, and sometimes Alex Jones is a bit crazy; many Aquarians are. Icke only appears crazy to people who don’t appreciate the stubbornness required when one is called to a duty it is impossible to evade.

Rosenberg also posted in full, a deeply disturbing poem written by Walker in 2017 entitled “It is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud.” This excerpt should give you a good idea about the tone and substance of Walker’s piece:

For a more in depth study
I recommend starting with YouTube. Simply follow the trail of “The
Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way
Into our collective consciousness.

I will sadly confess that I was unaware of Alice Walker’s history of antisemitic attitudes, even though this was apparently common knowledge among many on the left. During the Twitter eruption that followed Rosenberg’s piece for instance, Roxane Gay commented:

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Those of us who were hearing of Walker’s antisemitic proclivities for the first time were particularly saddened to learn that this eloquent champion of anti-racism had been expressing such poisonous ideas toward Jews and Judaism. Journalist/filmmaker Rebecca Pierce spoke for many of us when she tweeted this response:

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In his article, Rosenberg made mention of Walker’s anti-Israel politics, challenging “the progressive left” to call out antisemitism that is “presented in the righteous guise of ‘anti-Zionism.’” Although I don’t share Rosenberg’s conservative Israel politics, I accept his challenge. And yes, it’s painfully true that Walker’s Talmud poem egregiously cites Jewish religious tradition as the root cause of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians (as well as American police brutality, mass incarceration and “war in general”):

For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine,
Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East,
Of the creeping Palestination
Of our police, streets, and prisons
In America,
Of war in general,
It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud.
It is within this book that,
I believe, we will find answers
To some of the questions
That most perplex us.

Walker’s claim that the Talmud is “evil” and “poisonous” – a common antisemitic trope – is worth unpacking here. First of all, what is referred to as “The Talmud” is actually a vast corpus of Jewish civil and ritual law mixed with freewheeling legend and Biblical commentary composed between 200 and 500 CE. Though it is one of Jewish tradition’s foundational texts, Talmudic literature is not, to put it mildly, immediately accessible to the untrained reader. It’s typically studied by traditional Jews in the rarified world of schools known as yeshivot, where students’ primary focus is on the unique pedagogy of Talmudic argumentation.

Like all forms of religious literature, Talmudic tradition expresses a wide spectrum of ideas and attitudes. The contemporary reader would likely find its content to be alternately inscrutable, inspiring, challenging, archaic – and yes, at times even repugnant. It contains passages for example, that are profoundly misogynistic. And as Walker pointed out in her poem, it also contains occasional material that is decidedly anti-Gentile, including a notorious passage that depicts Jesus condemned to suffer in hell in a vat of burning excrement. (Yep, it’s true.) There are also texts that unabashedly claim Jewish lives must take precedence over non-Jewish lives – an idea that was also advocated centuries later by Moses Maimonides.

These texts are undeniably, inexcusably offensive and they must be called out, full stop. At the same time however, it is exceedingly disingenuous to judge a religion on the basis of its most problematic pronouncements. This attitude simplistically accepts these texts at face value, devoid of any context or historical background. It also ignores the fact that almost all faith traditions address the offensive, archaic or inconsistent elements in their sacred literature through the use of hermeneutics – that is, principles and methods that help readers understand their meaning in ever-changing societal contexts.

How for instance, might a contemporary religious feminist read and understand a blatantly misogynist Talmudic text? In an article entitled “When Sages are Wrong: Misogyny in Talmud,” Dr, Ruhama Weiss, of Hebrew Union College offers one hermeneutical approach:

(These Talmudic traditions) caused me a powerful disturbance. They forced me to think and react; to think about mechanisms of power and control and about the ability to be free from them. To make an effort to find and highlight additional voices, earlier voices, buried and hidden in misogynist rabbinic discussions.

Most importantly, these difficult sources teach me a lesson in modesty; from them I learn that unequally talented and wise people with good intentions can bequeath to subsequent generations difficult and bad traditions. I see the moral blind spots of my ancestors, and I am obligated to examine my own moral blind spots. Bad and disturbing sources make me think.

Indeed, this same hermeneutic method can be applied to Talmud’s xenophobic, anti-Gentile content as well. That is to say, these texts can challenge us to see “the moral blind spots of our ancestors and thus to examine our own moral blind spots.” They can help us confront “mechanisms of power and control” and contemplate the ways we might be able to “free ourselves of them.” These bad and disturbing sources can “make us think.”

Of course there are those who will read the texts of their faith through a more literal, fundamentalist hermeneutic. In such cases, it is up to those who cherish their religious tradition and the value of human rights for all to challenge such interpretations, particularly when the lines between church and state power become increasingly blurred.

On the subject of state power, I must add that I find it exceedingly problematic when folks criticize Talmudic tradition for its xenophobic attitudes without acknowledging the fundamentally anti-Jewish attitudes that are embedded deep within Christian religious tradition. It’s also important to note that antisemitic church teachings were historically used to inspire centuries of anti-Jewish persecution throughout Christian Europe, while the Talmud was written and compiled in a context of Jewish political powerlessness.

Today, in this relatively new era of Jewish power, it is certainly important to remain vigilant over the ways Jewish tradition is used to justify the oppression of Palestinians. Indeed, since the establishment of the State of Israel, this subject has been intensely debated throughout Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. As I write these words in fact, I’m recalling a blog post I wrote back in 2009 about then Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces Avichai Rontzki, who made a comment, based on Jewish religious texts, that soldiers who “show mercy” toward the enemy in wartime will be “damned”:

How will we, as Jews, respond to the potential growth of Jewish Holy War ideology within the ranks of the Israeli military?  How do we  feel about Israeli military generals holding forth on the religious laws of warfare? Most Americans would likely agree that in general, mixing religion and war is a profoundly perilous endeavor.  Should we really be so surprised that things are now coming to this?

I do not ask these questions out of a desire to be inflammatory. I ask them only because I believe we need to discuss them honestly and openly – and because these kinds of painful questions have for too long been dismissed and marginalized by the “mainstream” Jewish establishment.

In the end, every faith tradition has its good, bad and ugly. And in the end, I would submit that the proper way to confront these toxic texts is for people of faith to own the all of their religious heritage – and to grapple with it seriously, honestly and openly. And while we’re at it, it’s generally a good rule of thumb to avoid using the bad, ugly stuff in any religion’s textual tradition to make sweeping historical or political claims about that religion and/or the folks who adhere to it.

What is not at all helpful is for people such as Alice Walker to cherry-pick and decontextualize quotes from one particular religious tradition and warn that its “poison” is “winding its way into our collective consciousness.”

Like many of my friends who are just now learning about her adherence to antisemitic tropes, I fervently hope she will come to understand, as Rebecca Pierce put it, that the attitudes she endorses “are part of the same white supremacist power structure she so deftly fought through her written work in the past.”

 

Atoning for Gaza: A Sermon for Yom Kippur 5779

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One year ago, on the morning after Yom Kippur, I traveled to Palestine in my capacity as a staff person for the American Friends Service Committee. Among other things, my trip included several days with our staff in Gaza.

AFSC has a particularly significant connection to Gaza. In 1949, at the onset of the Palestinian refugee crisis, the organization was asked by the UN to organize relief efforts for refugees in the Gaza Strip. The AFSC agreed, believing their service to the new refugees would be temporary. But when it became clear Israel had no desire or intention to let Palestinian refugees return to their homes, the organization’s General Secretary Clarence Pickett, told the UN that they could not in good conscience enable the situation, insisting that there must be a political solution to the crisis. Shortly after, the UN created UNRWA (The United Nations Relief Works Agency), the organization that has served the needs of Palestinian refugees ever since. AFSC has, however, retained its programmatic presence throughout Israel/Palestine to this very day.

As you might expect, I came away from this experience with a myriad of feelings and emotions, most of which continue to resonate powerfully for me even one year later. First and foremost, I’ve been transformed by the collegial and personal relationships I created with our staff and the Palestinian Gazans we met there. I remain moved by the efforts of so many people creating communities of dignity and purpose, doing their best to live their lives with something approaching normalcy while they are so utterly choked off from the world outside. While they cannot access the most basic necessities of life. While they are literally waiting for the next bomb to fall.

Since that time, of course, much has happened in Gaza. They’ve initiated the Great Return March, a popular protest action which has taken place weekly along their eastern border with Israel. Since the first day of the march last spring, the mostly nonviolent demonstrators have consistently been met by live fire from the Israeli military. To date, 170 Palestinians have been killed and tens of thousands wounded and maimed, most of them unarmed demonstrators, including children, medics and bystanders. Over the summer, Israel has also bombarded Gaza with its most sustained military assault since 2014, destroying numerous civilian targets, including the Said al-Mishal Cultural Center in Gaza City.

I’ve written a great deal about Gaza over the years, most of it in the form of commentary and political debate. As you know, I certainly have my own strong opinions – and I’ve engaged in my share of spitting matches on this issue over the years. And I will admit I’m tempted, given the events of this past year, to give an angry political sermon about Gaza. But I’m going to resist the temptation.

I do believe these debates are important as far as they go – but only up to a point. For one thing, it seems to me, these arguments too often end up fetishizing Gaza and Gazans, describing them either as murderous terrorists, helpless pawns of Hamas or poor, passive victims. Since most people only tend to think of Gaza when the bombs are falling and the bullets flying, this is generally about as far as its public image tends to go. Gaza becomes an objectified symbol of people’s fears, their political agendas and their own internalized prejudices.

So today, I’m going to try to do my best not to give that sermon. Instead, I’d like to offer you some thoughts and impressions based on my own experiences and on my growing personal relationship with Gazans. I’d also like share a little bit of Gaza’s culture and history with you. Information is virtually unknown to most of the world but is I believe, critical if we want to understand Gaza in a three dimensional, non-objectified way. And finally, apropos of this Yom Kippur, I’d like to explore what I believe is the moral and religious challenge Gaza presents to us Jews, as Americans and as people of conscience.

I’ll begin with a little geography. What we call the “Gaza strip” constitutes a 140 square mile piece of land on the southeastern Mediterranean coast. While we generally think of “Gaza” as this one little crowded land mass, is was historically actually part of a much larger Gazan territory that has been continuously inhabited for over 3,000 years. In ancient times it enjoyed extensive commerce and trade with the outside world – difficult to imagine given Gaza’s current state of economic and social isolation. But once upon a time, Gaza was a major port and an important stop along the Spice and Incense Route. As such, it was located at a significant cultural crossroad, connecting a wide variety of different civilizations over the centuries.

While this is literally ancient history now, it has left a cultural impact on Gaza that continues to this day. One example that was very obvious to me during my stay last year was the unique nature of Gazan cuisine. Anyone who knows Gaza knows that the food in this region is filled with distinctive flavors and spices that are dramatically different from other regional forms of Palestinian food. One common example is Gazan tahini, which is made from roasted sesame seeds, making it a dark shade of red. Gazan food is also typically made with chiles, eastern spices like cardamom, cloves and cinnamon and lots of dill.

For more on this subject, I strongly recommend reading “The Gaza Kitchen” by Laila El-Hadad and Maggie Schmitt – a cookbook that offers local recipes, placing them in the context of Gaza’s cultural history and politics. The authors point out that since the strong majority of Palestinians living in Gaza today are refugees from other parts of Palestine, other regional Palestinian foods have been introduced into their culinary mix. And the authors point out that many Gazan fast food joints serve Israeli-style food such as schnitzel, which was brought to the region by European Zionist immigrants.

As the authors write:

Now, with Gaza totally isolated, it is easy to forget that for decades thousands of Gazans went every day to work in Israel, that Israeli and Gazan entrepreneurs had partnerships, that both commerce and social relations existed, albeit on unequal footing. Adult Gazans remember this, and many speak admiringly of aspects of Israeli society or maintain contact with Israeli business partners, employers and friends. But for the enormous population of young people who were not old enough to work or travel before Israel sealed the borders in 2000, this is impossible. Because their lives are completely conditioned by Israeli political decisions, they have never laid eyes on a single Israeli person except the soldiers that have come in on tanks or bulldozers, wreaking destruction. And the generation of young Israelis to which those soldiers belong has likewise never met a single Gazan Palestinian in any other context. A terrible recipe for continued conflict.

When most people think of Gaza of course, they don’t think of trade routes or cuisine; if they associate Gaza with anything at all, it’s refugees and refugee camps. But it’s important to bear in mind that the creation of these camps is a very recent phenomenon in its history. As I mentioned earlier, Gaza was historically a much larger district in historic Palestine. Under Ottoman and the British mandate for instance, the Gaza District included what would later become the Israeli cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Sderot, Kiryat Gat and Kiryat Malachi, among others.

The so-called “Gaza strip” was created in 1949, when it became a repository for a flood of Palestinian refugees from cities and villages in the coastal plain and lower Galilee. Before the outset of war, the population of this small region numbered 60 to 80,000. By the end of the hostilities, at least 200,000 refugees were crowded into what we call today the Gaza Strip. The borders of the strip were drawn arbitrarily, determined by the position of Egyptian and Israeli forces when the ceasefire was announced. It ended up being smaller by at least a third than the entire area of the Gaza District during the mandate period.

At the time, most of the refugees fully expected to return home – some could even see their towns and villages through the fences. Those who crossed the border to gather their possessions or harvest their crops were considered “infiltrators” by Israel and shot on sight. Eventually, it became all too clear there would be no return. Over the years the tents turned into concrete buildings that grew ever higher in that narrow corridor. The numbers of that once sparse territory has grown to a population today of almost 2,000,000 people.

Given this context, it was natural that Gaza would become a center for the Palestinian resistance movement. We know from history that when a people are oppressed, they will inevitably resist their oppression. And yes, sometimes that resistance will be violent in nature. As early as the 1950s, groups of Palestinians known as “fedayeen” crossed over the border to stage violent attacks in the surrounding settlements.

One of these attacks offers an important insight into the course of Gaza’s history in ways that reverberate for us even today. In 1956, a group of fedayeen entered a field in Kibbutz Nahal Oz and killed a kibbutznik named Roi Rotenberg. The famed Israeli general Moshe Dayan spoke at his funeral – and during his eulogy he expressed himself with brutal and unexpected honesty:

Do not today besmirch the murderers with accusations. Who are we that we should bewail their mighty hatred of us? For eight years they sit in refugee camps in Gaza, and opposite their gaze we appropriate for ourselves as our own portion the land and the villages in which they and their fathers dwelled…

This we know: that in order that the hope to destroy us should die we have to be armed and ready, morning and night. We are a generation of settlement, and without a steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house. Our children will not live if we do not build shelters, and without a barbed wire fence and a machine gun we cannot pave a road and channel water. The millions of Jews that were destroyed because they did not have a land look at us from the ashes of Israelite history and command us to take possession of and establish a land for our nation.

When I read Dayan’s comments today, I find them to be unbearably tragic – particularly when you consider how much time has elapsed since they were spoken. We have only to change the number of years in Dayan’s speech and the leave the rest intact: “For seventy years they’ve sat in refugee camps in Gaza, and opposite their gaze we appropriate for ourselves as our own portion the land and the villages in which they and their fathers dwelled.”

It’s clear that the descendants of the original Gazan refugees have lost none of their ancestors desire for return. Most of them know full well where their ancestral homes and fields are located, in some cases just a few miles from where currently live. As in other parts of Palestine, the memory of home and the desire for return are a palpable part of Gazan culture. I experienced this in a simple yet powerful way during my visit to Gaza last year. One afternoon, as we traveled north along the coast from Rafah to Gaza City, I noticed a series of colorful concrete benches along the beachfront. My colleague Ali translated the Arabic words on the backs of each bench, pointing out that each one bore the name of a Palestinian city or town where Gazans lived prior to 1948.

It’s not difficult to grasp the sacred significance of these simple seaside benches to the refugees of Gaza. Unlike most memorials, which commemorate what was lost and is never to be found, I’d wager that those who come to these beaches don’t believe their home cities and villages to be lost at all. On the contrary, I believe these benches testify that these places are still very real to them. And to their faith that they will one day return home.

In the end my trip to Gaza affected me in ways I could not predict at the time. Most importantly, for lack of a better term, I find I’m taking the issue much more personally. When Israel drops bombs on Gaza, I invariably get a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and immediately send emails to my colleagues and friends to check on their welfare. When a young Gazan is killed during the weekly Return March demonstrations, it’s not unusual for me to read a grief stricken testimony on social media by a friend, or friend of a friend. I increasingly hear their stories of their loved ones whose visas were denied or who cannot travel to access proper health care – and increasingly, I find myself taking their stories to heart.

Of course, I also take it personally when I hear so many in the Jewish community rationalizing this oppression away or worse – blaming Gazans for their own misery. When Israel was bombarding Gaza with bombs this past July, for instance, I recalled the fall of 2014 and how the American Jewish communal establishment characterized Israel’s war as a moral and religious imperative. In their view, the leadership in Gaza posed nothing short of an existential threat to Israel and the Jewish people – and in the wake of the Holocaust, ensuring Jewish survival is the most sacrosanct commandment of our time.

In early August of that year, Elie Wiesel wrote a public statement that was published as a paid ad in many prominent newspapers, including the New York Times. It was entitled “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.” Wiesel’s words, I think, are a perfect representation of the ways the Jewish communal establishment framed the religious challenge of Gaza:

More than three thousand years ago, Abraham had two children. One son had been sent into the wilderness and was in danger of dying. God saved him with water from a spring. The other son was bound, his throat about to be cut by his own father. But God stayed the knife. Both sons – Ishmael and Isaac – received promises that they would father great nations.

With these narratives, monotheism and western civilization begin. And the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch are forever left behind by the descendants of Abraham.

Except they are not.

In my own lifetime, I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites.

What we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab or Israeli versus Palestinian. Rather, it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death. It is a battle of civilization versus barbarism.

I remember when I first read these words. I remember how deeply, how viscerally, I reacted to them – particularly while I had been reading day after day about Gazan children like the four Bakr boys, who were shot down not as “human shields” but while they were playing soccer on the beach one morning. I remember how desperately I wished there were other Jews or Jewish communities ready to provide an alternative religious understanding of what was going on in Gaza.

There was only one religious response to Wiesel I recall reading at the time. It came from scholar and theologian Marc Ellis, who addressed Wiesel’s statement head on:

The problem is the news that keeps coming from Israel. Israel’s bombing of residential areas, hospitals and UN schools and shelters is international news. In Gaza, even after Israel’s proclaimed “withdrawal,” the death toll mounts. Among the dead are children sacrificed for Israel’s obvious goal – to deny Palestinians statehood, their political and human rights, which include the right to resist occupation.

The question for Elie Wiesel and the Jewish establishment is not about Abraham’s binding of Isaac – a treasure trove for interpreters of all types – but how many Palestinian children in Gaza will be sacrificed on the altar of Israel’s national security.

If God stayed Abraham’s knife, who will stay Israel’s?

“If God stayed Abraham’s knife, who will stay Israel’s?” This, to me is as profound an articulation of the moral and religious challenge presented to us by Gaza as we are likely to find. And I simply cannot understand how Jewish communities can gather for Yom Kippur every year without even thinking to consider this question. This is after all, the season of our cheshbon nefesh – our moral accountability. On Yom Kippur we are asked to come together and dig deep as a community to search our collective soul and confess our collective sins. How many synagogues will include confessions for what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere?

On Yom Kippur we chant over and over an annual liturgy that literally asks “who shall live and who shall die,” while the people of Gaza ask themselves that question every waking day. In a very real sense, Israel is playing God with the people of Gaza. Who shall live and who shall die? In the end, it is not God but Apache helicopters and sniper fire that will provide the answers to that question. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to change the Une’taneh Tokef prayer to read, “Who will we kill and who will we spare?”

On Yom Kippur we gather to confess our sins and vow to do teshuvah – to actively repair what we have broken in the past year. But if we do believe that Israel is oppressing Gazans and Palestinians in our name, how can this day have any meaning for us at all? How can it be anything but an empty ritual? If we do believe this day still has religious relevance for us, what are we ready to do to make this teshuvah we speak of real?

My friend and colleague Jehad Abusalim was born in Gaza and is now earning his Phd from NYU. This past year he joined the Chicago staff of AFSC to work on our campaign “Gaza Unlocked.” I’d like to end with his words, because like so many of the Gazans I’ve come to know, he presents us with a question that highlights what I believe is the current religious challenge of Yom Kippur:

Our message is that we are human beings. Despite 70 years of exile, 50 years of occupation, and 11 years of a blockade, we still can carry signs in Arabic, Hebrew, and English that say, “We are not coming to fight — we are coming to return to our lands!” Gazans who saw wars and blood, who lost relatives to graves and prisons, who have four hours of electricity, who are besieged and tired — these Gazans still have faith that the international community cares. Will the rest of humanity hear them?

On Yom Kippur we plead to God, “Shema Koleynu” – “Hear our voice!” The people of Gaza – indeed all Palestinians – are calling out to us “Shema Koleynu!” Are we ready to their prayer? And if we are, what will we do to ensure our Yom Kippur prayers have not been made in vain?

G’mar Hatimah Tovah – may this be the year we write the people of Gaza into the Book of Life.

 

Recommitting to Solidarity in the Face of White Supremacy: A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah 5778

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Members of Holy Blossom Temple, a Toronto synagogue, form a protective circle around the Imdadul mosque on February 3, 2017, following an Islamophobic shooting at a mosque in Quebec City.  (Photo: Bernard Weil / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Crossposted with Truthout.

When Temple Beth Israel — a large Reform synagogue in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia — opened for Shabbat morning services on August 12, 2017, its congregants had ample reason to be terrified. Prior to the “Unite the Right” rally held in town by white supremacists and neo-Nazis that weekend, some neo-Nazi websites had posted calls to burn down their synagogue.The members of Beth Israel decided to go ahead with services, but they removed their Torah scrolls just to be safe.

When services began, they noticed three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles standing across the street from their synagogue. Throughout the morning, growing numbers of neo-Nazis gathered outside their building. Worshippers heard people shouting, “There’s the synagogue!” and chanting, “Sieg Heil!” At the end of services, they had to leave in groups through a side door.

Of course, this story did not occur in a vacuum. It was but a part of a larger outrage that unfolded in Charlottesville that day, and part of a still larger outrage has been unfolding in our country since November. I think it’s safe to say that many Americans have learned some very hard truths about their country since the elections last fall. Many — particularly white liberals — are asking out loud: Where did all of this come from? Didn’t we make so much progress during the Obama years? Can there really be that many people in this country who would vote for an out-and-out xenophobe who unabashedly encourages white supremacists as his political base? Is this really America?

Yes, this is America. White supremacy — something many assumed was relegated to an ignoble period of American history — is, and has always been, very real in this country. Now white supremacists and neo-Nazis are in the streets — and they are being emboldened and encouraged by the president of the United States.

While this new political landscape may feel surreal, I believe this is actually a clarifying moment. Aspects of our national life that have remained subterranean for far too long are now being brought out into the light. We’re being brought face to face with systems and forces that many of us assumed were long dead; that we either couldn’t see or chose not to see. Following the election of Trump many have commented that it feels like we are living through a bad dream. I would claim the opposite. I would say that many of us are finally waking up to real life — a reality that, particularly for the most marginalized among us, never went away.

It is certainly a profoundly clarifying moment for American Jews. With this resurgence of white supremacist anti-Semitism, it would have been reasonable to expect a deafening outcry from the American Jewish establishment. But that, in fact, has not been the case. When Trump appointed white nationalist Steve Bannon to a senior White House position, there was nary an outcry from mainstream Jewish organizations. The Zionist Organization of America actually invited Bannon to speak at its annual gala.

Israel’s response to this political moment is no less illuminating. During a huge spike in anti-Semitic vandalism and threats against Jewish institutions immediately after the elections, it wasn’t only Trump that had to be goaded into making a statement — the Israeli government itself remained shockingly silent. This same government that never misses an opportunity to condemn anti-Semitic acts by Muslim extremists seemed utterly unperturbed that over 100 Jewish institutions had received bomb threats or that Jewish cemeteries were desecrated across the country. (More than 500 headstones were knocked down at one Jewish cemetery alone in Philadelphia.) And when neo-Nazis with tiki torches rallied in Charlottesville proclaiming “Jews will not replace us,” it took Prime Minister Netanyahu three days to respond with a mild tweet. Israel’s Diaspora Minister Naftali Bennett, whom one would assume should be concerned with anti-Semitism anywhere in the Diaspora, had this to say:

We view ourselves as having a certain degree of responsibility for every Jew in the world, just for being Jewish, but ultimately it’s the responsibility of the sovereign nation to defend its citizens.

This is a clarifying moment if ever there was one. Support for Israel and its policies trumps everything — yes, including white supremacist Jew hatred. Just this week, Prime Minister Netanyahu said this about Trump’s speech at the UN:

I’ve been ambassador to the United Nations, and I’m a long-serving Israeli prime minister, so I’ve listened to countless speeches in this hall. But I can say this — none were bolder, none were more courageous and forthright than the one delivered by President Trump today.

Why would the Israeli Prime Minister call a president who panders to anti-Semitic white supremacists “brave” and “courageous?” Because Trump pledged his support to Israel. Because he called the Iran nuclear deal an “embarrassment.” Because he vowed American support to allies who are “working together throughout the Middle East to crush the loser terrorists.”

Historically speaking, this isn’t the first time that Zionists have cozied up to anti-Semites in order to gain their political support. Zionism has long depended on anti-Semites to validate its very existence. This Faustian bargain was struck as far back as the 19th century, when Zionist leader Theodor Herzl met with the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, an infamous anti-Semite who encouraged the Kishinev pogroms that very same year. Plehve pledged that as long as the Zionists encouraged emigration of Jews from Russia, the Russian authorities would not disturb them.

This Zionist strategy was also central to the diplomatic process that led to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced his government’s support for “the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people.” Although Balfour has long been lionized as a Zionist hero, he wasn’t particularly well known for his love for Jews or the Jewish people. When he was prime minister, his government passed the 1905 Aliens Act, severely restricting immigration at a time in which persecuted Jews were emigrating from Eastern Europe. At the time, Balfour spoke of the “undoubted evils which had fallen on the country from an alien immigration which was largely Jewish.” Balfour, like many Christians of his class, “did not believe that Jews could be assimilated into Gentile British society.”

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that Israeli leaders are loath to condemn the rise of white supremacy. After all, they have a different enemy they want to sell to us. They want us to buy their Islamophobic narrative that “radical Muslim extremism” is the most serious threat to the world today. And you can be sure they view Palestinians as an integral part of this threat.

We cannot underestimate how important this narrative is to Israel’s foreign policy — indeed, to its own sense of validation in the international community. Netanyahu is so committed to this idea in fact, that two years ago he actually went as far as to blame Palestinians for starting the Holocaust itself. In a speech to the Zionist Congress, he claimed that in 1941, the Palestinian Grand Mufti convinced Hitler to launch a campaign of extermination against European Jewry at a time when Hitler only wanted to expel them. This ludicrous historical falsehood was so over the top that a German government spokesperson eventually released a statement that essentially said, “No, that’s not true. Actually, the Holocaust was our fault.”

Meanwhile, Netanyahu is pursuing an alliance with the anti-Semitic populist Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. When Netanyahu recently traveled to Hungary to meet with Orbán, leaders of the Hungarian Jewish community publicly criticized Netanyahu, accusing him of “betrayal.”

If there was ever any doubt about the profound threat that white supremacy poses to us all, we’d best be ready to grasp it now. White supremacy is not a thing of the past and it’s not merely the domain of extremists. It has also been a central guiding principle of Western foreign policy for almost a century. To those who claim that so-called Islamic extremism is the greatest threat to world peace today, we would do well to respond that the US military has invaded, occupied and/or bombed 14 Muslim-majority countries since 1980 alone — and this excludes coups against democratically elected governments, torture, and imprisonment of Muslims with no charges. Racism and Islamophobia inform our nation’s military interventions in ways that are obvious to most of the world, even if they aren’t to us. It is disingenuous to even begin to consider the issue of radical Islamic violence until we begin to reckon with the ways we wield our overwhelming military power abroad.

So, as we observe Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, where are we supposed to go from here? I would suggest that the answer, as ever, is solidarity.

Let’s return to the horrid events at Temple Beth Israel in Charlottesville. As it turned out, the local police didn’t show up to protect the synagogue that Shabbat — but many community members did. The synagogue’s president later noted that several non-Jews attended services as an act of solidarity — and that at least a dozen strangers stopped by that morning asking if congregants wanted them to stand with their congregation.

Another example: Last February, when Chicago’s Loop Synagogue was vandalized with broken windows and swastikas by someone who was later discovered to be a local white supremacist, the very first statement of solidarity came from the Chicago office of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Their executive director, Ahmed Rehab, said:

Chicago’s Muslim community stands in full solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters as they deal with the trauma of this vile act of hate. No American should have to feel vulnerable and at risk simply due to their religious affiliation.

Here’s another example: last Friday, protests filled the streets of St. Louis after a white former city policeman, Jason Stockley, was found not guilty of the first-degree murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, a Black 24-year-old whom he shot to death on December 20, 2011. The St. Louis police eventually used tear gas and rubber bullets against the demonstrators. Some of the demonstrators retreated to Central Reform Congregation of St. Louis, which opened its doors to the protesters. The police actually followed them and surrounded the synagogue. During the standoff, a surge of anti-Semitic statements trended on Twitter under the hashtag #GasTheSynagogue. (Yes, this actually happened last week, though it was not widely covered by the mainstream media.)

Just one more example: last January, a 27-year year-old man entered a mosque in Quebec City and opened fire on a room filled with Muslim worshippers, killing six men and wounding another 16. The following week, Holy Blossom Temple, a Toronto synagogue organized an action in which multifaith groups formed protective circles around at least half a dozen mosques. It was inspired by the “Ring of Peace” created by about 1,000 Muslims around an Oslo synagogue in 2015, following a string of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe.

This must be our response to white supremacy: that a threat to any one of us is a threat to all. That we are stronger together. This is the movement we need to build.

However, even as we make this commitment to one another, we cannot assume that oppression impacts all of us equally. This point was made very powerfully in a recent blog post by Mimi Arbeit, a white Jewish educator/scientist/activist from Charlottesville, so I’ll quote her directly:

Jews should be fighting Nazis. And — at the same time — we White-presenting White-privileged Jews need to understand that we are fighting Nazis in the US within the very real context of centuries of anti-Black racism. I have been face to face with Nazis and yes I see the swastikas and I see the anti-semitic signs and I hear the taunts and I respect the fear of the synagogue in downtown Charlottesville — AND please believe me when I say that they are coming for Black people first. It is Black people who the Nazis are seeking out, Black neighborhoods that are being targeted, anti-Black terrorism that is being perpetrated. So. Jews need to be fighting Nazis in this moment. And. At the same time. If we are fighting Nazis expecting them to look like German anti-Semitic prototypes, we will be betraying ourselves and our comrades of color. We need to fight Nazis in the US within the context of US anti-Black racism. We need to be anti-fascist and anti-racist with every breath, with every step.

To this I would only add that when it comes to state violence, it is people of color — particularly Black Americans — who are primarily targeted. While white Jews understandably feel vulnerable at this particular moment, we still dwell under an “all encompassing shelter of white privilege.” We will never succeed in building a true movement of solidarity unless we reckon honestly with the “very real context of centuries of anti-Black racism.”

I’ve said a great deal about clarity here, but I don’t want to underestimate in any way the challenges that lay before us. I realize this kind of “clarity” can feel brutal — like a harsh light that reflexively causes us to close our eyes tightly. On the other hand, I know there are many who have had their eyes wide open to these issues for quite some time now. Either way, we can’t afford to look away much longer. We can’t allow ourselves the luxury to grieve over dreams lost — particularly the ones that were really more illusions than dreams in the first place.

On Rosh Hashanah, the gates are open wide. This is the time of year we are asked to look deep within, unflinchingly, so that we might discern the right way forward. We can no longer put off the work we know we must do, no matter how daunting or overwhelming it might feel. But at the same time, we can only greet the New Year together. We cannot do it alone. Our liturgy is incorrigibly first person, plural — today we vow to set our lives and our world right, and we make this vow alongside one another.

So here we are. We’ve just said goodbye to one horrid year. The gates are opening before us. Let’s take each other’s hands and walk through them together.

Shanah Tovah.

To be Black and Jewish after Charlottesville: A Guest Post by Lesley Williams

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This is a text of a speech given today by Lesley Williams at a “Call to Renewed Action Against Racism and Neo-Fascism” held by the Resist, Reimagine, Rebuild Coalition of Chicago. Lesley spoke on behalf of Jewish Voice for Peace – Chicago, one of the member organizations of the coalition.

I stand here today as a Jew by Choice and the child and grandchild of the Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans fled racist terror in the South only to encounter redlining, discrimination and police violence in the north and midwest.

Like all of you, I have mourned and raged over the overt racism and antisemitism seen in Charlottesville. I have watched in horror as avowed racists defiantly parade in Klan robes and swastikas. I have listened to the anguish of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as they are forced to confront the historical trauma of the Nazi era.

As both a Jew and an African American, I recoil from the white supremacy and antisemitism on display this week. I have been gratified to hear Jewish leaders and organizations call for the destruction of racism, speaking eloquently about the shared history of oppression Jews and African Americans have faced.

Yet, I confess to a certain discomfort in the many appeals to recognize the twin evils of antisemitism and anti black racism in Charlottesville. I’ve thought about this a lot over the past week, and here’s  what I’ve realized: for Jews, Nazi symbols evoke a terrifying, traumatic past. For African Americans, they evoke a terrifying, traumatic, unending present. White Jews may be shocked at this undeniable evidence of US racism; African Americans merely see more of the same. Black people did not need to be reminded by hoods and swastikas that we live in a dangerously racist country.

White Jews are not under the same level of threat as people of color. In short, white Jews need to accept that they are white and that whatever harassments or humiliation they may experience from antisemites, they nevertheless dwell under the all encompassing shelter of white privilege. Police do not murder them in custody, their votes are not systematically undermined; they do not overwhelmingly live in poverty or adjacent to poverty. The two documented lynchings of American Jews, though horrific, pale in comparison to the nearly four thousand lynchings of black men, women and children in US history.  The lifestyle and life expectancy of the average white Jewish American is not materially different from that of the white non Jewish majority; there is no institutional antisemitism.

Furthermore, white America is generally more accepting of discussing and acknowledging the history of anti semitism than they are the currency of anti black racism.

As James Baldwin wrote in a classic 1967 essay:

One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering.

For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him.

For white Jewish Americans, the US has always been the Promised Land. Yet African Americans know it is Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Not only do white Jews of good conscience need to acknowledge that they are not the primary victims of white supremacy, they need to look at how their own institutions have not only failed to challenge, but in some cases are openly complicit in its preservation.

For example, the Anti Defamation League, which presents itself as a champion of civil rights and “tolerance” once spied against the NAACP and the African National Congress. A 1993 lawsuit regarding the ADL’s extensive spying on Muslim, Arab, anti-apartheid and other political activists also revealed that the ADL spied on and passed information to South African authorities on African National Congress leader Chris Hani, shortly before his assassination.

As JVP points out in our Deadly Exchange campaign, the ADL, and other Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and Chicago’s own Jewish United Fund  all organize police, ICE and Homeland Security training exchanges in which American and Israeli police officers share tactics of oppression, teaching each other the aggressive, militarized police strategies which have led to the deaths of African Americans like Philando Castile, Freddie Gray and Laquan Macdonald; and Palestinians such as Mahmoud Khalaf Lafy, Omar Ahmad Lutfi Khalil, and Siham Rateb Rashid Nimer.

Meanwhile, according to their own tax filings, many cities’ Jewish Federations, including Chicago’s Jewish United Fund contribute generously to groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as leading anti-Muslim extremists,  groups like the Middle East Forum and the Investigative Project on Terror, which laid the intellectual groundwork for Trump’s Muslim Ban. It’s no coincidence that these groups are all tremendously supportive of Israel’s brutal policies toward Palestinians.

All of this is done in the name of Jewish security, either in the US or in Israel. So I ask my white Jewish friends and family: is the perceived safety of people who look like you worth the continued oppression, incarceration and murder of people who look like me?

Last summer when African Americans challenged white America to support the Platform for Black Lives, nearly every Jewish organization in the country condemned its indictment of the genocidal oppression experienced by Palestinians in Israel .None was more critical, dismissive and patronizing than Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the ADL, who urged African Americans to “keep our eyes on the prize”, and to remember that it is Jews, not African Americans who “know from genocide”.

I hope that the obscenity of Charlottesville will lead all Americans to examine their complicity in tolerating institutional oppression. But in particular, Jewish Voice for Peace calls on our own Jewish community to condemn and disavow our organizational support of racism and Islamophobia, both past and present. We must embrace a vision for safety that does not come at the expense of communities of color. Only then can we truly claim to stand together in genuine, rather than merely symbolic solidarity.