Tag Archives: resist

More Jews for Justice

The People Speak

Ever since Trump and Musk began to take a chainsaw to the work of generations, I’ve been hearing, “Where is the outrage?” Go to a protest near you; you will find that outrage.

On Thursday, March 26, I went to Tufts for a rally against the abduction the day before of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at the school. She was snatched by masked federal agents as she walked toward a friend’s house, handcuffed, and driven away in an unmarked car. Before a judge could order that the government not take her out of Massachusetts, she had already been spirited away to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

Ozturk was grabbed without any form of due process. She was in the United States legally on a student visa. She had done nothing wrong. About a year ago, she objected to Tufts’s refusal to divest from Israel in an opinion piece in the student paper. Trump & company have decided that anyone who uses their freedom of speech in a way they don’t like is a threat to national security, maybe even a terrorist.

Outspoken international students are low-hanging fruit. Trump means to pick them and throw them somewhere to rot. He doesn’t have to abduct all of them, just enough to shut the rest of them up.

But students are not shutting up. Ozturk’s abduction, added to the equally outrageous detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student, three weeks ago, and the rendition of  more than 250 Venezuelans to the worst prison in El Salvador with no proof that any of them were criminals or gang members, has pushed many into activism.

The Tufts rally comprised about 2000 people, most with handmade signs. Never mind the speakers, whom I couldn’t hear anyway. This is what their signs said:

An injury to one is an injury to all.
Free Rumeysa!
Democracy NOT deportation protects Jewish students
We will not be silenced!
Silencing dissent is the REAL cancel culture
If not fascism, then why fascism-shaped?
Democracy > Deportation
Release all prisoners of the secret police
Democracy is under attack!
Speak out against injustice or you’re gonna be silenced next
I love inclusion, equality, diversity
Stop doing evil shit
Abolish ICE
ICE out of our communities! Free Palestine!
Jews Against Deportation
This Tufts alum affirms the equal dignity and humanity of all people
Nice Jewish Students for Democracy
(a ten year old with a rainbow sign) RESIST!
Jewish Civil Liberty
Hands off our neighbors
Find courage/ find community/ fight fascism
They want us scared/ We’ll show them our strength
This is fucking insane
Free Rumeysa – Free speech
It starts with students!
You wanna mess with our freedoms? You gotta go through me!
Stop kidnapping students.
You can’t appease a dictator!
Show your face when you steal our students.
This is OUR Somerville.
Immigrants make us great.
Don’t sleepwalk through fascism.
Stand together.
Never normalize kidnapping.
Melt ICE
Silence is complicity.
When speech is silenced, Revolution speaks.
First they come for the scholars.
Against Genocide Anywhere.
(More signs from a small, poorly organized protest in Harvard Square the next day:)
In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America
Hands off legal students and visitors
Stop the fascist assault
I(ncompetent) C(ruel) E(xpensive)
Due process rights for ALL people (see the 5th amendment)
Our tax dollars fund genocide
In the name of humanity, let in asylum seekers and refugees
Deport ICE not students
1st amendment? Hello???

Project 2025 indicates that it won’t be long before Trump uses the military against peaceful demonstrators. There will be tear gas, pepper spray, and water hoses, mass arrests, and eventually, rubber bullets or worse.

Meanwhile, Trump is damaging everything we love: our communities, education, alliances with other democracies, the environment, and most of all our rights. Democracy is clearly under attack. As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something.

The protests are becoming more frequent, and the crowds keep getting bigger. If you’re not on the streets already, I hope you will join us soon. The homemade, passionate, outraged signs at every rally help me to believe that maybe we can save democracy. Not leaders or heroes, or the corporate-owned Democrats. We, the people. 

I Believe in Magic

I’m 76 years old. I’ve been homeless, crazy, sick, lost people I love, seen good things turn to shit. And I still believe in magic.

I believe in the magic of loving kindness. I have seen it, felt it. Tried to practice it. And I’ve been watching a long time, and it works. I’ve seen it work.

I felt it in the streets in the ‘60s and at protests and vigils and marches ever since. For every useless war, every awful court decision, people come out in the street to say no together: No, please, not again.

I’ve felt that magical fellowship in congregations of many faiths, at neighborhood barbeques, at music and art events, parks, and beaches. I even felt it once in the Manhattan terminal of the Staten Island ferry, when a woman’s parrot got loose and many teams of strangers instantly formed to get it back.

The meek are everywhere. We take comfort in one another’s presence. We get along peacefully. We’re all colors, genders, religions. We exist in every country.

Some big ape starts hooting and beating his chest, and all the other big apes start hooting and beating their chests. Usually it’s just noise, and boys marking their territory, but sometimes it gets serious and leads to war.

This has nothing to do with protecting mothers and children. It’s anger, insecurity, arrogance, and pride, all the worst parts of our nature, roused up, encouraged. Feeling things are going their way, the big apes can strut their supremacy. They have the power now; they think it’s done. But this is not over.

We are the people of peace, and we must win. Magic lives in our hearts. The secret is to practice it together, in solidarity, across every issue, and to never give up.