Category: Journal Articles

On Feb. 22, 2019, a federal judge in Houston, TX, ruled that requiring only men to register with Selective Service is unconstitutional, violating the equal protection clause. The decision comes as a government-appointed Commission studies Selective Service and is expected to make recommendations to Congress on the future of draft registration within a year.

Constitutional challenges to a male-only draft date back to the Vietnam era. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that a male-only draft was not unconstitutional because women were excluded from combat. However, over the past 38 years, women’s role in the military has expanded, culminating in the 2015 Obama Administration decision to open all combat positions to women.

The National Coalition for Men case has been pending for several years. While the group takes no position on whether there should be a draft, they argue that if one exists, it should apply equally to both genders. This ruling does not automatically require women to register with Selective Service, as only Congress has the authority to extend the law. The registration requirement for males between 18 and 26 continues, and the ‘Solomon’ laws penalizing non-registration remain in force.

Public comments are being accepted at inspire2serve.gov/content/share-your-thoughts. For more information or to register comments, visit centeronconscience.org or contact CCW at 1-800-379-2679 or 1-202-483-2220.

The publication of the second edition of The Holocaust and the Christian World couldn’t be more timely. Holocaust scholars were stunned last year by the results of the April 2018 survey of Americans and the Holocaust, according to which 31% of all Americans believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust, while 41% of Americans cannot say what Auschwitz was. Additionally, 22% of millennials haven’t heard or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust.

The volume’s contributors are among the leading Holocaust scholars of their generation. Two impulses drive the text: the frank admission of the role played by Christianity in the Holocaust and the current project of completely ridding Christianity of all anti-Judaism. They paint the institutional anti-Judaism of Christian churches, the negative depiction of the Jewish people in Christian preaching and liturgy, and the process by which the Jew became ‘the other.’

Although the authors clearly state that Christianity cannot be seen as the cause of the Holocaust, they nonetheless convince readers that Christianity prepared the way and then allowed it to happen. As a result, the Shoah is accepted here as part of Christian history, indeed as ‘a Christian tragedy.’

Having clearly established the anti-Jewish bias of traditional Christianity, the text then moves to the contemporary task of ridding Christianity of its anti-Judaism. It explains what has been done since 1945 and what still needs to be done now in the 21st century. The book’s authors offer several strategies to strengthen interfaith dialogue and enable Jews and Christians to move forward together in hope.

The authors discuss the importance of Holocaust education, developing Christian liturgy on the Holocaust, and the faithful observance of Yom HaShoah. They examine problematic New Testament passages and their antisemitic potential, address issues of conversion, and emphasize the churches’ responsibility to condemn criminal acts by legitimate governments.

The text concludes with discussion of Pope Pius XII and the announcement that Vatican archives regarding his pontificate will be opened for consultation by researchers in March 2020. The Holocaust and the Christian World never seems excessively accusatory, recognizing that responsibility lies in the present, in the creation of a world where another Auschwitz would be unthinkable.

When I was young, my father always opened our Passover Seder by telling everyone at the table that we Jews had been celebrating and retelling the Passover story for more than three thousand years. I never forgot that. Now, I begin our Passover Seder with the same statement, namely that we have been telling and retelling the narrative of slavery-to-freedom so that every generation celebrates and remembers this extraordinary journey.

Years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt some changes to our Seder. We wanted to emphasize issues we felt the original Haggadah did not. For example: that the drops of wine for the plagues represent what we experienced in Egypt. We realized they were not the same issues we experience today. So we added an option for people at our Seder to add in their own words the things in their lives that challenge and haunt them.

As a result, some interesting conversations have resulted. Some of the more vivid life events encountered by our Seder companions have been racism, age discrimination, police brutality, financial hardships and many more. Our changes have brought the whole issue of the Passover story into the twenty-first century.

But we didn’t stop there. We realized we had to think and talk about the meaning of freedom in our time. What are we modern Jews freeing ourselves from? In the original Passover story we were slaves in Egypt. But are modern Jews slaves? We certainly don’t suffer from lack of freedom, or from oppression or tyranny. But there are some in the world who still suffer under these conditions; and some modern Jews have roadblocks in their personal lives that prevent them from living the kind of life we want to live, regardless of what society and some traditions demand of us.

Why, then, is it so important for Jews to sit every year and retell this story? Because it emphasizes some of the more critical ethical values on which Judaism places so much importance. For example: we cannot and should not occupy or maltreat others — a valued lesson for young and old alike.

Every Passover we have the opportunity to embark on a transformational journey, just as our forefathers and mothers did thousands of years ago when they began their journey with no idea where it would lead them.

The Jewish Peace Fellowship and the editors of Shalom wish you and your family and friends a most happy and healthy Passover.

Why would hardliners in Iran want to forego the prospect of becoming a nuclear power, especially when faced with hardliners in the US and Israel, both in possession of nuclear weapons?

The question is raised again by the condescending little lecture on the American constitutional system, delivered by forty-seven Republican Senators in the form of an open letter. Without Congress or the next president’s approval, they told Iranian leaders, no agreement by President Obama would be honored by Washington.

Undermining the full faith and credit of the US has now been extended from financial matters to foreign policy. Republicans, who lament our supposedly weak president, work relentlessly to weaken him. (Don’t think Vladimir Putin fails to take notice.)

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When Barack Obama first campaigned for president, I felt there would be a change in the wars (Afghanistan, Iraqi) in which America had been involved for too many years. My pacifist desire was to see our country sharply reduce our endless involvement in international conflicts.

Obama seemed to dislike war as much as I did and wanted to change the course of America. Yet over his two terms, I came to realize that he could not stop the wars or tame our bellicose war lovers for long, though he did keep his promise of scaling them back.

Now a new group of politicians, all but one of whom ever served in the military, hope to capture the presidency. I listen carefully, but in neither party do I hear anyone really resisting our culture of permanent war.

Is it so preposterous to hope that sometime in the near future we will stop flexing our American muscles, policing the world, and believing that more and advanced weapons can settle any and all disputes? Sadly, I don’t think so.

The Iran Agreement has brought to the forefront the misunderstanding of what another war will do to our and other countries. If the rich and powerful would put their own sons and daughters in the front lines of any new conflict, they would surely spend more time considering the cost in human life rather that urging other parents’ children be sent to fight in the Middle East or elsewhere.

I believe it is critically important to speak up, individually and as part of coalitions. I did so when, at age eighteen, Selective Service wanted to draft me for a war that should never have been fought and which left a trail of blood and death throughout Southeast Asia and among the US military and their grieving families.

Now, more than ever, we need more people to tell those in power how they feel about young men and women dying on the battlefield. We need some courageous politicians and media pundits to say loud and clear: No More Wars. Is that asking too much?

William Pfaff died almost six months ago, on April 30, 2015. His death is nothing less than a serious loss to the shrinking number of American daily newspaper columnists who question and contest American “exceptionalism” and its “unnecessary and unwinnable” wars. Pfaff was the singular heir of American writers who preceded him in condemning our historic addiction to war.

The more he criticized the US for shooting first and thinking later, the fewer America dailies printed his columns. The New York Times, which owns the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) where his work regularly appeared, rarely if ever published his piercing anti-interventionist columns. He was, after all, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq invasion when the paper went overboard in favor of the war.

His few daily newspaper outlets were limited essentially to Newsday and the Chicago Tribune, though liberal journals like The New York Review of Books, William Shawn’s New Yorker (which printed some seventy of his pieces), and Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, always welcomed him.

Pfaff was no outsider, despite his dissenting opinions. Reared in Iowa and Georgia, educated at Notre Dame, he served as an infantry officer and Special Forces member during and after the Korean War, unlike the many hawks who had never worn a military uniform. He never denied that he had worked for the CIA-funded Free Europe Committee, a Cold War group that sent broadcasts and literature behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1915, a mother’s protest against funneling children into war became the theme of a new American song, ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.’ Although the ballad attained great popularity, not everyone liked it. Theodore Roosevelt, a leading militarist of the era, retorted that the proper place for such women was ‘in a harem — and not in the United States.’

Roosevelt would be happy to learn that, a century later, preparing children for war continues unabated. That’s certainly the case in today’s Russia, where thousands of government-funded clubs are producing what is called ‘military-patriotic education’ for children. Accepting both boys and girls, these clubs teach them military exercises, some of which employ heavy military equipment. There, children as young as five years of age spend evenings learning how to fight and use military weapons.

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How long will we continue raising our children to be soldiers?

My family came to this country long enough ago that I heard no foreign accents, let alone languages, while growing up. My forbears in Europe were not poor shtetl Jews. My birth father’s parents came from families of professional musicians. My mother’s father’s family was an interesting mix of wealth and poverty (on one side, property owners and entrepreneurs; on the other side, tanners). My maternal grandmother’s family was descended from a long line of distinguished rabbis and also owned a publishing house.

[Content continues with personal history through education, rabbinical training, and career, ending with philosophical reflections on dialogue and acceptance]

I accept people as they are. I do not expect to convert anyone away from their opinions, but I do hope for light to be shed on questions we discuss.

The cabinet on Sunday unanimously passed a resolution completely rejecting the UN decision Thursday to upgrade the Palestinians to non-state observer status. “The Jewish people have natural, historical and legal rights to its homeland with its eternal capital Jerusalem,” the resolution stated.

Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader in exile, has rejected any concessions over a future Palestine state at a rally marking the 25th anniversary of the armed Palestinian group. “Palestine is our land and nation from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, from north to south, and we cannot cede an inch or any part of it,” he said.

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