I spent last Shabbat with students from Harvard Hillel and was reminded, again, how important a generational movement IfNotNow is becoming. I don’t think most older American Jews grasp it yet. This is our Black Lives Matter. IfNotNow is the Jewish wing of a youth-powered activist awakening that the United States has not seen since…
How do you punch a Nazi in Yiddish? Maybe deliver a khsime, or “signature,” as in putting a “signature on someone’s face.” Or give them a shmir, an open-handed smack to the face, like lathering schmear on a bagel. Or maybe it takes der gubernator, “the governor,” jabbing your thumb into a person’s ribcage. Obscure?…
Artist and political activist Gustav Metzger died on March 1st the age of 90 at his London home, according to publicist Erica Bolton. Outside of the art world, Metzger’s name might be a little obscure, but if you’ve ever seen a video of The Who destroying their guitars, then you’ve seen the impact of Metzger’s…
On my desk, there is a small black and white photograph depicting the late Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland, his face bloody from a beating that he suffered at the hands of segregationists in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer of 1964. It is now more than a half century later, and from what I…
Not long ago I had to get an MRI for a condition that might have been serious. It wasn’t; I’m fine. But I didn’t know that when I pulled up to the radiology building and saw it was on Activist Street. A message, I wondered, for someone facing mortality? If time is limited, then I…
Jews were well represented at Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. But with attendance estimates as yet not definitively calculated but ranging in varied sources from “several hundred thousand,” to “far exceeding the turnout at Friday’s inauguration,” to “1.5 million,” most nationalities were as well. Still, in protests ranging from the Civil Rights era, to the…
The Forward asked three generations of the Pogrebin family to recount their experiences at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Here the grandmother, a veteran feminist activist and writer, describes how this protest left her soaring. Read daughter Abigail Pogrebin’s account here and granddaughter Molly Shapiro’s essay here. Pardon the hyperbole but yesterday was one…
We were made for this. The Jewish people and Jewish tradition itself were designed for survival. We were designed for social transformation. Now, with Donald Trump threatening the norms and institutions of our democratic society, we must come together to resist and respond to any attempt to set us back. We all hope that our…
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