When it comes to issues of race and racism, we live in tumultuous, conflict-ridden times. Often in the media and sometimes in our daily lives, we don’t see positive examples of cross-racial or cross-cultural solidarity. So it’s understandable that we would highlight the positive examples of this solidarity when we’re given the opportunity to do…
It can be tempting to remember the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. as a quiet dreamer whose vision of racial equality involved nothing more than prayers for peace and hopes for an end to racial tension. It’s easy to rework the civil rights leader’s tremendous achievements and writings as a plea for tolerance that…
Residents of Leesburg, Virginia, discovered fliers purporting to be distributed by the racist terror group the Ku Klux Klan over the weekend. According to local news channel WTOP, the fliers denigrated Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is celebrated nationwide on Monday. “The timing of it we think was pre-emptively planned by this individual…
Happy to wake up to clear blue skies Saturday morning, and with the long Martin Luther King Day weekend before me, I decided to take Leo the Labradoodle on a proper walk around my Central Harlem neighborhood (as opposed to the corner-and-back approach we took in the rain on Friday). Rather than putting on the…
Just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the National Library of Israel has unveiled a timely letter from its Martin Buber Archive. In 1965 Buber, just before his death, joined a group of Hebrew University professors in writing to President Lyndon B. Johnson to emphasize the importance of the end of King’s brief incarceration following…
I will never forget the first time someone called me a racist. In the fourth grade, I got into a pushing match in the cafeteria with Umar, an African-American classmate, the cause of which I can no longer remember. The two of us were sent to the principal’s office, and when asked why he hit…
(JTA) — Rabbi Saul Leeman, a longtime leader of Conservative congregations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and a civil rights activist who marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, has died at 100. Leeman, who served the Cranston Jewish Center on Rhode Island and later Temple Shalom in Medford, Massachusetts, died April 5. The Providence Journal…
“An unjust law is not a law,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from his Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell. The letter is well known – less so the fact that King was writing to fellow church leaders who disapproved of his breaking the law in the name of civil rights. I was saddened to…
