​Antisemitism in the News & Our Lives: A Time for Reflection & Action

Antisemitism is not what I particularly wanted to be talking about right now, but the week's events have forced it back into the fore, and our reflection and action is now needed. While you won't be hearing stances about antisemitism from the bima during the holidays, let us not ignore this issue either. Not while a Community Statement from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle claiming to be a "consensus statement" was released this week. An effort to block such claims of consensus and speak out with a different perspective has been circulated as an Open Letter to the Federation in response, and the authors are inviting individual signatories. Grappling with these developments may be unwanted, and yet, a feeling of obligation stirs in me. And, I ask you to grapple with these developments as well - consider joining me in signing the open letter.[1]

We see that antisemitism is being debated all over the world right now. This week alone, t​he United Nations General Assembly released a report linking critique of Israel to antisemitism without even mentioning the rise of white nationalism in the US.[2] The president of the United States was accused of using antisemitic tropes during his speech to the GA.[3] And, while Bari Weiss released her book How to Fight Anti-Semitism earlier this month, this week Jewish Currents published a review of it from Judith Butler.[4] Meanwhile, this summer, in locales from Vancouver to DC to London, public debates rage about how to define and legislate antisemitism.

It has been a lot to process while baking honey cake.

With local and global news on the topic pulling our gaze, Kadima has chosen to not endorse the Federation’s "Community Statement," and was not alone in making that choice. Fighting antisemitism is core to Kadima's founding principles and current actions, but for many reasons, the board officers could not support the Federation's Statement. Amidst my own hair pulling about this situation, I have chosen to wholeheartedly sign the open letter and reach out personally to my valued colleagues at the Federation. I encourage you to do the same.
 
Whatever your thoughts and feelings connected to these two local public articulations of antisemitism this week, more connection, relationship building, and analysis sharpening could go a long way in 5780. We will be working to provide and support spaces to connect and to sharpen our collective analysis at Kadima after the holidays and beyond.

Finally, as we enter the High Holidays, we may be reminded that antisemitism is both pervasive and very personal. As school, work, and most else around us fails to acknowledge these important days for our community, we are reminded that being Jewish (or non-Christian in any way) inside Christian hegemony takes a toll on so many of us.[5] And, our physical safety and access is paramount and being addressed at Kadima for events and services in this season. Know that we face this all together, and may our collective resilience shine. Our ancestors, and the children of our children, are daring us.

On with the holidays.

L'shanah tovah u'metukah & tizku l'shanim rabot, ne'imot v'tovot,
Rabbi David

PS -- We want to encourage inclusive community dialogue in a way that the Federation's process did not. Would you consider sharing your voice on antisemitism in the weeks ahead? Write an op ed, send me your thoughts, talk to your neighbors. While the Open Letter mentioned above is one such example of community engagement, we value all those articulations that already exist[6] and those that continue to emerge aiming to fight antisemitism in the name of collective liberation. Let us keep the conversations going!

[1]  I am particularly humbled by the words of Greta Thunberg at the U.N. Climate Action Summit this week. Speaking of the climate crisis, she closed her moving speech with "The eyes of all future generations are upon you...Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not." Clearly not speaking about antisemitism, her words have reverberated with me throughout the week and feel applicable to instances such as this where we find ourselves at existential crossroads. Read/watch in full.

[2] UN releases ‘unprecedented’ report linking anti-Semitism to BDS movement

[3] Trump accused of using antisemitic trope during UN speech

[4] Bari Weiss’s Unasked Questions

[5] What is Christian Hegemony?

[6] Many articulations of antisemitism from a collective liberation framework already exist. Here are just a few of note that have affected my current analysis: Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s Understanding Antisemitism, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, by April Rosenblum, Why the Origins of Antisemitism Matters audio from “The Others” on WNYC radio, Why Criticism of Israel isn’t Antisemitism video from Al Jazeera+, Latin@s, Israel and Palestine: Understanding Anti-Semitism by Aurora Levins Morale, Treyf Podcast’s many episodes on antisemitism, and so so many more.

Below is a note written by Mollie, Kadima's Youth & Family Organizer, after the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October of 2018. This week, 6 months after Pittsburgh, the Jewish community is again grieving after the shooting at Chabad of Poway in California. These words are still painfully relevant, and just as true as they ever were.

--

Hello, dear precious humans,

The only way I can think to start this email is just with a reminder that we've got each other, and that we get to keep having each other. It was so life-giving to get to be with those of you who came to the Havdallah Open Mic on Saturday (circus acts and toddler singer-songwriters and free form dancing and soul piano and so much more!) and also at the powerful and connecting community-wide potluck and service on Sunday night. And for those of you who have been tending to your souls in other ways, you also make this community, and your presence is felt. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me, Rabbi David, our brilliant teachers, each other -- let's stay connected as we settle into this week of continued collective grief.

And as we keep on, we will continue recognizing and naming the numerous and profound ways that this past Shabbat's violence in Pittsburgh is deeply tied to violence against so many other communities, we will continue to move through our own processes in only the ways each of us can, and we will also go to work, and to school, and to keep our days full and alive. And we will continue to hold each other, and all the precious young people in our community, with so much love and tenderness.

We will have Tuesday School as usual tonight, Shabbat School as usual on Saturday, a concurrent Shabbat Morning Service where you and anyone you want to bring is welcome, and will love on your kids unconditionally through it all. We are working hard to support teachers in supporting students in age-appropriate and young people-centered ways, and welcome any particular desires you'd like to share. Please remind your young people of the many adults here at Kadima who are available to them should they want to talk, hug, play, etc. For me personally, it is a true honor to be able to love each and every one of your kids as fully and openly as possible.

This article, Helping Children Exposed to Shocking Events, from Hand in Hand Parenting, may provide some useful framework about what your kids might be needing at this point, and tools to support them as they move through their own feelings. We also were sent this list of resources from Reform Judaism, Jewish Resources for Coping with Acts of Terror. If you find something in there, or somewhere else, that particularly speaks to you, please do share!

I also want to add a special plug for Community Signing tonight if you want to move some things through you with song. It will be in the sanctuary while Tuesday School is happening. Come and go as needed -- you are welcome at any point!

We are holding each of you, and each of your precious children, with so much love this week. Thank you for being in community.

With love,
Mollie

Rabbi David shared these words on 3/18/19 at the Muslim Association of Puget Sound at their invitation during a Vigil and Anti-Islamophobia Teach-In responding to the horrid attack in Christchurch, NZ.

Yitgadal v'yitkadash, sh'may raba. (Amen)
May the name of the holy blessed One be made great and holy.
Asalaam aleikum, family.
With ahava rabah - a deep love and a caring spirit, today I am here to convey the Jewish community’s embrace and love for our Muslim siblings here in the Salish Sea region and throughout the world. We see you, and we are with you. We are you.
We know that violence can have different forms and particular targets. But I stand here today to tell you, my Muslim siblings, that we are one, and none of these hanieous violent acts of racism and Xenophobia will keep us from pursuing a we that includes us all.
I am here in these most mournful of circumstances, reliving the deep heartbreak of the attack on us all at the Tree of Life Synagogue by a white supremacist with aims similar to this past Friday's murderer.
Let us all rise up boldly together against the sacrilegious vile of white nationalism recognizing our own sins and complicity in feeding the growth of their movement. Let us continue to reach to one another as we have in synagogues and masjids, in the streets and at the coffee shop, in churches and neighborhood associations, in our workplaces and with our families of origin.
Let us not doubt that history is being written at this moment. Now it is more important than ever for the Jewish and Muslim communities to unite, and join our Black and Brown advocates for justice, in combating the forces that threaten all of us!
The Rabbi Joachim Prinz said at the March on Washington: “Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept.” Together as neighbors, let us find our innate courage and our human resilience, our depth of compassion and our solidarity of protection, let our ancestors guide and our grandchildren demand, that while we mourn, we connect, and then we act, and we celebrate, even.
Years from now, we will have to answer what, if anything, we did to defeat the scourge of white nationalism and the plight of white supremacy. Let our answers be based in our actions of today. Let us keep trying. I believe in what we can do together.
And then. And then. And then we will have realized the prayer of the mourner's kaddish and have made great and holy the name of our oneness.

The ancient rabbis called used the named Yom HaKippurim for what today we call Yom Kippur. That holy day, a full half-year ago and just over a half-year away (because of the leap year), could be seen as the full reflection of the holiday now upon us - Purim.

Yom HaKippurim, literally, the day of the (multiple) atonements, has been drashed over and again as the day that is like Purim: yom (day) ha'k' (the likes) purim (of Purim). 

But what does Yom Kippur and Purim have in common? For one, they are both days well beyond the ordinary. On one, we express this by abstaining from any food or drink, while on the other by excessive eating and drinking. Both Purim and Yom Kippur draw upon our relationship to uncertainty - one acknowledges the ways in which our enemies might strike arbitrarily (cursed be Haman) and the other acknowledges that we are lacking control in our lives in the refrain who shall live and who shall die. In each, we have a reluctant s/hero - Jonah who at first avoids prophecy and runs away from his calling, and Esther/Hadassah who does not want to hear Mordechai's ask of confronting the King.

Yet perhaps the most striking is the possibility in each of these holidays for reconciliation. Yom Kippur perhaps sets this up slightly more obviously: we are told that Yom Kippur atones for our relationship with G-d, but for relationships with other people, we must do the work of making things right. Similarly on Purim: we are told to go out and deliver treats to our neighbors and friends - mishlo'ach manot. In the days ahead, perhaps let us use this mitzvah of going out of our way to bring treats to others to notice who we feel hesitance to approach. For whom bringing a treat might be a confrontation of our own broken relationships. Perhaps this time can be used, should we choose, to reach out beyond the comfortable and bridge these two seemingly disparate holidays on opposite sides of the year - and in doing so, bridge a divide between ourselves and another human. May it be a season of increased joy uncovered through the repair of our relationships. Hag Purim simcha!
-Rabbi David

PS- Passover is coming! Check out this link for a preview of events, mutual aid, host-guest pairing, and more.

This is the text of the talk given by Dan Berger to the Kadima community on erev Rosh Hashanah

Thank you for having me. I have to admit, it is strange to be up on stage on Rosh Hashana. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I am shocked to be part of a congregation that would have me as its High Holidays speaker. Then again, I never thought I would be part of a synagogue whose High Holiday theme was intersectionality.

I have the difficult task of trying to talk with you about intersectionality in ten minutes or less. Intersectionality is an exciting but often misunderstood topic. At its root, intersectionality names the fact that, as the poet and socialist feminist Audre Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The term is often used to name the inseparability of identities and issues: that we do not just live along the axis of race or class or gender (or anything else) but need to account for the ways that they shape, inform, nurture, and determine each other.
 
The term has become something of a Rorschach test, meaning different things to different people. I want to note, though, that the idea itself came from Black feminist scholars and movements. The term was coined by the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, who used it to describe the particular discrimination Black women faced. She had in mind the employment segregation of General Motors in the 1970s. At the time, African Americans could only work on the shop floor, and women could only work in the office. This was already a problem. But Black women could not get a job in the clerical staff because they were Black, nor could they get a job on the shop floor, because they were women. Intersectionality is how Crenshaw named the convergence of discrimination Black women faced, which both corporations and the legal system participated in. I encourage you to check out Crenshaw’s work with the African American Policy Forum. And if you haven’t done so already, I would encourage you to learn more about the history of Black feminist activism that inspired Crenshaw—particularly the 1978 statement by the Combahee River Collective, a socialist group who articulated the concept even before the term had come into circulation.
 
I want to use my time today, though, to talk about how intersectionality works in practice by focusing on one of the most important issues of our time: prison. Prison is an example of something a friend of mine once called “bad intersectionality.” Like the General Motors example Kimberle Crenshaw writes about, prisons index inequality. I am sure many of you know that the US has the world’s highest incarceration rate. With 2.2 million people incarcerated on any given day, the country also has more people living in cages than anywhere else on the planet. That number is bounced around a lot, but it is even more shocking when you consider that 10 million people pass through US jails in a given year. 70 million Americans, about one-fifth of the country, has a criminal record. The US is the only Western country with the death penalty, and the only one to put people in solitary confinement for years or even decades (even though the United Nations considers more than 15 days of isolation to be torture).
 
Of course, the people locked up in prison come from the most marginalized and oppressed sectors of society: Black and Brown people, people with mental or physical disabilities, Indigenous people and undocumented people, queer and trans people, survivors of domestic abuse and people who grew up in foster care, and people who occupy the intersections of many of these identities. And, Paul Manafort notwithstanding, the near totality of people in jails, prisons, and detention centers are poor and working class who couldn’t afford the costs of adequate legal representation. Prison is a form of racism and settler colonialism, a form of sexism and transphobia, a form of ableism and economic injustice.
 
I have said that prisons are an example of “bad intersectionality,” of the way repressive institutions prey upon people who are already disenfranchised. But my goal here today is not simply to provide a public service announcement on the evils of mass incarceration. Rather, I want to highlight the movement for prison abolition and transformative justice as an example of “good intersectionality.” By that, I mean movements that are grounded in people’s whole selves and that offer both immediate and long-term possibilities for change. To think about prison from an intersectional standpoint means recognizing our stake in ending mass incarceration. 70 million Americans, about one-fifth of the country, has a criminal record, as compared to about 14 million who belong to unions. We are all made through criminalization, in different ways. Many of us in this room likely either have a criminal record or know someone(s) who does.
 
I am especially glad to be speaking today, the final day of a three-week strike that prisoners in at least 17 states (and Canada) have participated in—including people incarcerated at the NW Detention Center. As with much of the history of prisoner organizing, the strike was planned and led by Black people who created a set of demands and coalitions that encompassed a broad, multiracial, multiethnic struggle against state violence. The strike is an example of good intersectionality in practice. The strike has raised specific demands for reforms, including a restoration of educational opportunities, parole, and voting rights for currently and formerly incarcerated people. They also call for an overhaul in prison conditions around the country.
 
I want to leave you, then, with a call to action for 5779.

• First, read the demands of the strikers, which you can find online. Read about the history behind these demands: the policies that keep people in prison for longer periods of time in more punitive and isolating conditions, the laws that have restricted voting rights for people convicted of felony offenses.
• Second, read a book this year about mass incarceration—preferably one written by a currently or formerly incarcerated person. (I would be happy to recommend some!) What you will find is that the monstrous policies that the current presidential administration has put in place at the border develop out of decades of get-tough criminal justice policies.
• Third, support the efforts aimed at ending mass incarceration. I have been overjoyed to see Kadima participate in the protests against the construction of a new youth jail in the Central District and join solidarity demonstrations at the NW Detention Center in Tacoma or the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac. If you have gone to any of those this last year, I thank you. But we will have cause for many other such demonstrations in the year(s) to come, and I hope you will be able to show up again or for the first time.
• Finally, I ask that you correspond with an incarcerated person or find other ways of offering emotional (or financial) support to the people and organizations dealing most directly with the horrors of mass incarceration. Doing so will help us all unlearn the scripts that we have been taught about what prisons are, who is in there, and why.

 
What makes the prison strike and the prison abolition movement intersectional is their emphasis that people are not disposable, no matter what they are accused of doing. The humanness of people needs to be preserved and protected, and in fighting to preserve it we become more human ourselves. And we all have a role to play in that process. Much as we all lose when humanity is oppressed and abused, so too do all win when humanity is upheld and affirmed.

I find this idea of intersectionality evident not only in the prison strike but in my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. I’d like to close with one of my favorite poems: Linda Pastan’s “A Short History of Judaic Thought in the Twentieth Century”:

The rabbis wrote:
although it is forbidden
to touch a dying person,
nevertheless, if the house
catches fire
he must be removed
from the house.
 
Barbaric!
I say,
and who may I touch then,
aren’t we all dying?
 
You smile
​your old negotiator’s smile
and ask:
but aren’t all our houses
burning?
 
​The horror of the Trump administration reminds us daily that all of our houses are indeed burning. A half-century of mass incarceration reminds us that they have been burning for a very long time. But the courage and bravery of people in jails, prisons, and detention centers reminds us that even if the fire cannot be quelled, the people inside can be provided sanctuary.