Tag: Journal Articles

With the recent passing of Murray Polner this year on May 30th, the Shalom Newsletter editorial board greatly misses our long-time friend and dedicated Jewish Peace Fellowship contributor and editor. We greatly miss his insights, his warmth, and his compassion. There will never be another Murray Polner.

In speaking to an old friend who has worked with JPF over the years, he tells me that he is part of Veterans for Peace. They are doing counter-recruitment in the schools and young people seem to be getting the message. Their message is creating enough of a stir that the military recruitment folks are complaining to the school system. This seems like a good sign.

The editorial board of Shalom needs your help. This would be a great time to send us interesting articles you find in reading the news, or that you write and would like to share. Please remember that the JPF has a vision statement that we on the editorial board try to honor and stay on track.

Peace groups across the country are suffering from the same single issue with which the JPF is suffering: the lack of new, young members. It appears that young people have lost interest in getting involved in peace groups. We would love to hear from you with any suggestions you may have regarding ways in which to reach out to the younger generation and get them involved. Perhaps through social media which seems to be where they receive much of their information. So please let us know your thoughts on this.

They have been ignored, as soldiers and as veterans. Unlike the returning servicemen of earlier wars, they have not been celebrated in film or song; there are no more victory parades. Born at a time of rapid political, social, and technological change, reflecting both the hopes and anxieties of the post-World War II years in which they came to adulthood, these young men left military service filled with doubts about the kind of war they were forced to fight, about their country’s leaders, and about the sanctity of their America.

Regardless of their convictions about the war, practically every veteran I spoke with indicated in a variety of ways his suspicion that he had been manipulated; the government was nothing but a faceless ‘them.’ Since little will be done until the war ends, the case for peace now is even greater, and the appeal for eventual amnesty much more valid, especially when one remembers what these new ‘criminals’ did not do. They did not rebel against their country, they did not commit treason or openly take up arms. Their sole offense, if it is an offense, was in cherishing freedom so highly that they refused to submit to a draft or military service in a war their morality and their ethics would not let them accept.

Europe:

Germany experienced a 20% increase in antisemitic incidents in 2018, including swastikas, insults, arson, assault, and murder. 89% came from the far right, with additional hostility from Muslims. France saw a 74% increase in antisemitic incidents in 2018 (541 incidents). Both countries face antisemitism from the left regarding Israel. European Jews are increasingly moving to Israel, particularly French Jews.

United States:

FBI reported a 37% increase in antisemitic hate crimes in 2017. The Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh (October 2018) became the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history, with 11 Jews murdered during Shabbat services.

Washington State:

Hate crimes rose 78% between 2013 and 2017, ranking ninth nationally for increases. Seattle experienced a nearly 400% increase since 2012, with 521 reported hate crimes in 2018. These were motivated by racial (60%), religious (21%), and sexual orientation (16%) animosity.

Holocaust Awareness:

One-third of Europeans surveyed knew little or nothing about the Holocaust, with 25% believing Jews had too much influence in conflicts, business, and finance. In the U.S., 41% of Americans (66% of millennials) didn’t know about Auschwitz. 31% of Americans and 41% of millennials believed 2,000,000 or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, while 22% of millennials were unsure about or hadn’t heard of the Holocaust.

Hate Crime Trends:

U.S. hate crimes increased 17% in 2017, targeting blacks (50% of racial hate crimes), Jews (58% of religious hate crimes), Muslims (19% of religious hate crimes), Latinx, and LGBTQ persons.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” attributed to Gandhi and often accompanied with his picture, has attained the cultural currency of an indisputably wise pronouncement. Appearing on sweatshirts, bumper stickers, and countless posters, the pronouncement seems to be Gandhi’s retort to what is by implication the harsh, futile, destructive Old Testament injunction to render justice by taking “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” and “life for life.”

What is a suitable Jewish response to Gandhi’s apparent repudiation of this cornerstone principle in our foundational text? Do we reject the “eye for an eye” principle of the Hebrew Bible as barbaric and outdated? Or can we find a way of rationalizing it?

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[Content has been cleaned and formatted for WordPress, but is too long to include in full here. The original article discusses a Holocaust survivor’s perspective on using the term ‘concentration camps’ to describe current U.S. border detention facilities, drawing parallels between historical events and contemporary immigration policies while maintaining focus on the treatment of children.]

After the carnage of the Second World War, the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of the American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what it was to lose their sons, daughters, husbands, and other near relatives in war.

“We’d rather not talk about it,” one mother, whose son was killed in WWII, told the St. Petersburg Times fifteen years after the war ended. “It’s a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other mothers will have to go through this ordeal.”

But thanks to our wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention our proxy wars around the globe—too many moms (and dads too) now have to mourn family members badly scarred or lost to wars dreamed up by the demagogic, ideological, and myopic.

Few Americans know that Mother’s Day was initially suggested by two peace-minded mothers, Julia Ward Howe and Anna Reeves Jarvis. Howe had lived through the Civil War and became a pacifist, opposed to all wars. Though not a mother, Katherine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” and the poem “Glory” about war’s impact on mothers. More recently, mothers like Lenore Breslauer helped found anti-war movements.

On this Mother’s Day, peace and justice seems further away than ever, with over one hundred thousand Americans killed or harmed in endless wars, not counting millions of others. They all had mothers.

Rabbi Michel Serfaty drives to his first appointment of the day, in a suburb south of Paris, just a couple miles from the notorious housing project where gunman Amedy Coulibaly grew up. Coulibaly was the self-proclaimed Islamist radical who killed a police officer and later four people in a Kosher market in Paris terrorist attacks in January.

France has Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities. For the last decade Serfaty and his team have been working in Paris’s bleak banlieues, trying to promote understanding between the two populations. Serfaty is still going to the same places since the attacks, but there’s now a team of undercover police officers who accompany him everywhere.

The rabbi says he’s more determined than ever. ‘These are difficult times for France and especially for French Jews,’ he says. ‘But if anything, we realize our work is even more important.’

The rabbi makes his way into a community center where his French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association has a stand at a local job fair. Serfaty hopes to recruit several more young people to help with community outreach in the largely Muslim, immigrant communities where most people have never even met a Jewish person.

‘In these places they often have specific ideas about Jews,’ says Serfaty. ‘And if they’re negative, we bring arguments and try to open people’s eyes to what are prejudices and negative stereotypes. We try to show children, mothers and teenagers that being Muslim is great, but if they don’t know any Jews, well this is how they are, and they’re also respectable citizens.’

Serfaty takes advantage of funding from a government program that helps youths without work experience find their first job. He takes them on for a period of three years, giving them valuable training in mediation and community relations. His recruits also study Judaism and Islam, and he takes them on a trip to Auschwitz.

With his current assistants, Mohammed Amine and Aboudalaye Magassa, Serfaty works to find young people who harbor no anti-Semitic feelings. Magassa, twenty-four years old, says working with Serfaty has been a great discovery. ‘These people have weak minds and they are easily manipulated by social networks,’ he says of extremists. ‘They also don’t understand a thing about religion and how it should be practiced.’

Amine and Magassa are proud to be French and Muslim. ‘We are waking up people’s consciences,’ says Amine. ‘This is a job that counts and we could have a real impact if there were more of us.’

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8 of this year, Activestills paid tribute to more than a quarter century of anti-occupation activism by the Women in Black group in Israel.

Every Friday since 1988, the women have stood in the main squares of cities or at highway junctions with signs calling to end the Israeli Occupation. Often spat at, cursed or violently harassed by passersby, they have become a symbol of persistence.

Dafna Kaminer: “It was the time of the First Intifada, and we wanted to support the Palestinian struggle. So we decided that we would stand out there with signs calling to end the occupation. It was the simplest and most visual thing we could do.”

Edna Glukman: “In the beginning, the right-wing protesters started to attack us during the vigils. We sewed big black banners and with small white letters we wrote slogans against the occupation, as well as for justice, peace and women. By the time we began writing the word ‘women’ on our banners, it was already starting to become a women’s movement.”

Tamar Huffman: “You could say that we are a handful of women with a lot of opinions; it is definitely a feminist group. If we had a man on the board, he would probably be the one making decisions.”

Tamar Lehan: “I didn’t join for feminist reasons, but rather for the persistent and clear statement of the group. However, I think that it is very logical that it is a women’s group, since women are accustomed to doing hard work for long periods of time without seeking immediate results.”

Dafna Kaminer: “In times of unrest, we expect more verbal and sometimes physical violence. People curse at us as if we were the ones responsible for the situation, and not Israel’s policy makers. When things are more calm, people just walk by and say nothing. Like we are transparent or nonexistent.”

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What does a normal person do with the really bad news that we hear and read in the newspaper or on the evening news?

We are constantly bombarded with news of death from war in Afghanistan and Syria, immigrants young and old drowning trying to reach safety, young students dying from school shootings, people dying from natural disasters and fires. How does an individual deal with all of this and still remain sane?

Dr. Robert J. Lifton dealt with this issue for years and he has come to understand how the human mind copes with these terrible atrocities. He calls it psychic numbing. When we hear about terrible events and see the suffering, it causes our mind to eventually block the ability to feel it any longer. In other words, the human spirit can only take so much bad news before it numbs itself.

When Dr. Lifton was interviewing Japanese survivors who had been in Hiroshima when the bomb fell, he said they would describe the experience they had. ‘I saw this array of dead and dying people around me. But suddenly I simply ceased to feel anything.’ It was as though the mind shuts itself off.

We do the same with the news we hear on a daily basis. Too often those of us who are trying to better the world in so many different ways are caught up in being critically aware of the atrocities that are being committed and those who suffer the most from these atrocities. I am sure many of us cease to feel the full impact of the suffering in order to be able to cope.

As I sit and write this, the first news is coming in from New Zealand about the shooting in the mosques. I turned on the TV and was able to see the families of those who had died trying to cope with the loss. I can feel their pain and would reach out to them if I could. It is just such atrocities that we have come to deal with too often. This is why we work to make a better world.