Strangers in a Strange Land

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger: You were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).

The Passover service reminds Jews that once we were slaves in Egypt. We also remember that not so long ago, millions of us were herded into concentration camps to be tortured, worked, or poisoned to death. These memories should encourage us to feel empathy for the people who are currently suffering under cruel regimes.

Most Americans are now aware that the Trump administration is a consistently cruel regime. Some of the meanest people Trump could find are running our government. Times are hard, and about to get harder, for anybody with little money. For immigrants, life has become not just hard but terrifying. Not much prevents ICE from disappearing any of them into some hellhole in El Salvador for no reason at all.

Jews left Egypt because Pharaoh had made life unbearable for us. But after our miraculous escape into the desert, some missed their old homes, especially the pomegranates and figs. We were free, but the migrant life brought us a new set of troubles. Few people leave home if they don’t have to. We love the landscapes, people, and communities where we grew up. If we can stay home and make a living in peace, that’s what most of us prefer to do. But if staying home means that our families are subject to violence, extreme poverty, or other forms of oppression, sometimes we have to leave.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, there were around 48 million immigrants in the USA in 2022. Some came because their relatives were here and could find jobs for them, or to study at our great universities. However, many of them were fleeing terrible conditions in their home countries. They had to leave. They crossed deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges to get to this country, where they hoped to be able to live in peace.

Immigrants look for work in sectors where there are labor gaps, in agriculture, health care, or construction. They include doctors and software engineers as well as farm workers and care providers. Together, they generated $4.6 trillion in economic output in 2022. Often they pay taxes without gaining the benefits citizens expect from the government. Without their youth and vigor, our country would not be able to support our aging population as it retires. We owe them a lot.

In addition to what US citizens gain in needed labor and new business ventures, we get a range of wonderful new food and music to enrich our lives. Anybody who visits a major city in the US can find and enjoy nearly every culture in the world. This has always been part of why most of us love this country: everybody is here. People from Iran and Iraq, China and Japan, Russia and Ukraine, manage to live together in America. Within a generation, they are as American as it gets.

Yet instead of welcoming these people who went through so much to get to our country, our government treats them like criminals. Democratic presidents have not done much better than Republicans in this regard. It’s easy to blame immigrants for situations that are clearly not their fault – like the American appetite for opioids, which has fed the growth of violent gangs worldwide. No American government wants to admit that our country’s cynical support for South and Central American dictators nurtured the drug trade and devastated the lives of their citizens. Yet we bear heavy responsibility for the brutal conditions that have made so many flee their homes.

The worst irony for many Jews this Passover is that another cruel regime causing tremendous suffering is the state of Israel. Jews who realize how badly Israel has treated Palestinians since the state was founded are struck with deep shame and horror. Most pro-Palestinian demonstrations include a strong showing of supportive Jews. We remember when we were the victims of cruel regimes. Now we must do whatever we can to stop the cruelty, even if the perpetrators of oppression and violence claim they’re doing it for our sake.

I would like to add two prayers to this year’s seder: May everyone in Israel/Palestine live together in peace someday. And may the United States learn to respect and protect all those strangers who honor us by coming to live here.

by Jane Collins
Please email me at janecollins1@gmail.com if you would like me to add you to my regular readers’ list.

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.

In Vietnam, if you don't work, you don't eat.

Vietnam: Some Women We Met

Everywhere my daughter Margaret and I went in Vietnam this January, we met lively, friendly, fearless women. Given the Vietnamese reverence for family, strong women are probably not a new thing for them. But these women were powerful personalities far outside the family sphere. Or maybe, through sheer force of character, they become the mother or big sister wherever they are.

The first such woman we met didn’t even speak to us. I had contracted the norovirus on our long trip over. I was kneeling by the toilet in our hotel when the New Year’s fireworks began. Days after the worst was over, I still felt shaky and faint. We couldn’t decide whether I should go to a hospital. Margaret thought we could use a massage first.

I’m not even five feet tall, but my masseuse made me feel like a giant. Margaret suggested a Thai massage, which she said meant “they do yoga to you.” The hostess told us to say “It hurts” if the massage was too rough. I did say that a few times. My masseuse ignored me. She kept pulling, pushing, and twisting me as she thought best. After an hour of this, my dizziness was gone, and it never came back. That tiny beast of a woman had fixed me.

After the crowds, excitement, and smog of Hanoi, we went east a few hours to the fresh air and fabulous landscapes of Bai Tu Long Bay. Huge limestone karsts thrust up from the water like surreal sculptures, vertical, pocked with caves, crowned with greenery. Our guide to these wonders was a young woman named Windy. She told us her name in Vietnamese meant Number Four, so she gave herself a name she preferred.

Windy had been orphaned at age 12. She worked wherever she could, learning English by talking with tourists. She did not tell us how she lost one eye. She was neither pretty, graceful, nor ingratiating. She was just outspoken and hilarious. Her narration was full of jokes, many seemingly improvised on the spot. She treated all of her fellow crew members like younger brothers, and had several play fights with them from which she emerged grinning with victory. Among all the crews on all the boats in that popular bay, she is the only female. Windy: long may you wave.

In Hue, Margaret took a cooking class from Yong, husband of Lisa, another magnificent woman. They were among the kindest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. Lisa took us shopping with her after dinner, along a sidewalk market where everybody seemed to know and like her, and then to her local Buddhist temple where we could meditate for a while with the monks.

Lisa and Yong knew that visiting the war-ruined Demilitarized Zone would be a difficult emotional experience for us, so they decided to take a day off work to keep us company. It was a windy, rainy day when we went. Crossing the bridge dividing the North from the South, Lisa kept her arm around my waist. In the Vinh Moc tunnels where 600 villagers lived for six years 100 feet underground, she stayed close, along with Margaret, to keep me from slipping on the steep, mossy steps. We only spent two days with the couple, but their warmth made us feel like close friends.

I keep thinking of some people I never met or spoke with – the ones up to their knees in the rice paddies. They might find some comfort in the peaceful green landscapes around them. It’s likely, though, that the comfort doesn’t amount to much when your back aches, your feet hurt, the mosquitos swarm, in the broiling sun or driving rain. What chance do they have to escape such a life, in a country where most people’s education ends at age 11?

And I think of the people so old they couldn’t stand up, whom we saw sweep the sidewalks in front of some shops. In Vietnam, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Their families must make sure they have some shelter, because you don’t see homeless people sleeping in doorways or on park benches. But in Vietnam, as in today’s United States, the government doesn’t do much for the oldest or poorest of its people.

In Vietnam, people are not free to demand change. In the US, we can still do that. The resilience of the Vietnamese people, after decades of horrendous bombing and poisoning by our country and others, should be an inspiration to us. All of humanity is our family, and the whole earth is our home. I hope the American people will begin to insist that our country act accordingly. The kind and hardworking women of the world, and the men and children they cherish, deserve better.

Prayer for the New Age

Children crying from hunger.
This is the age of cruelty.
It ends now.

People sleeping in doorways.
This is the age of poverty.
It ends now.

Styrofoam washing up on beaches.
This is the age of garbage.
It ends now.

Neighbors burn down neighbors’ houses.
This is the age of hatred.
It ends now.

People with no hope pick up guns.
This is the age of violence.
It ends now.

This is the age of new creation.
It begins with you.

By Jane Collins and Christina Starobin

Christina is the author of CORONA WILDFIRE & POEMS OF PROTEST, This Changes Everything, KALEIDOSCOPE CAFÉ, & A Human Being Is Not a Remote Control Device, the beginning of a series; all available through Cyberwit or Amazon.

Here Come the Clowns

On November 16, around 150 people, nearly all white men, marched against abortion in Boston. I was proud of our city. The counter-protest was about ten times larger than the march. Approximately one in ten counter-protesters came dressed as clowns. There were a few Antifa people in black and a few communists with pamphlets and a bullhorn, whom everybody ignored.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm for the season. My son and I arrived late to the planned rally at the bandstand in the Boston Common. We thought we might have missed the whole thing. Then we saw a couple of cute young female clowns coming up the path. They told us the march was delayed but should be arriving any minute. Some student journalists from Emerson College, intrigued by his Veteran Healing sweatshirt, interviewed my son. Their questions boiled down to, Why are you here? His answer was, To fight fascism.

According to an NBC News report, police made nine arrests earlier in the “National Men’s March to Abolish Abortion and Rally for Personhood”. The report’s headline called it “a large anti-abortion march”, even though the only large crowd was the one that came out to oppose it. All the news reports I’ve seen feature many photos of the stern-looking men in black suits or priests’ clerical robes, and few photos of the much more colorful and numerous counter-protesters. There were almost as many police as marchers, some in full riot gear; the photographers liked them too.

The counter-protesters carried handmade signs: “Thomas Jefferson disagreed with you! He believed in the separation of church and state.” “Wealthiest Nation with highest Maternal Mortality.” “Life begins at ejaculation/ Mandate vasectomies.” “Letting men decide about women’s healthcare is like letting your dog make decisions about your car because he likes to ride in it sometimes.” And my favorite: “He who hath not a uterus should shut the fucketh up; Fallopians 19:73.”

Trying to drown out the speakers, people blew whistles and horns, rang cowbells, and shouted slogans like “Racists, sexists, anti-gay/ All you fascists, go away!” “Pray! You’ll need it! Your cause will be defeated!” “Pro life? That’s a lie/ You don’t care if people die.” Pleasanter noise came from the Clown Band, about two dozen musicians, heavy on the brass. When the Men Against Abortion entered the cordoned-off bandstand, the band greeted them with the Imperial March from Star Wars.

Some of the police looked ready to attack the clown-inflected protest crowd. Two cops, though, stood right in front of the anti-abortion folks’ worst sign. It was a huge blow-up of a dismembered full-term fetus, which if it was real at all must have been from the delivery of a stillborn child in a last-ditch effort to save the mother’s life. Maybe those cops didn’t mean anything by blocking that sign for a few minutes. Or maybe they were wishing they had taken a sick day.

When the rally was over, and the marchers left the Common behind walls of police and metal barricades, clowns and friends lined their route with middle finger salutes. Most of the men in black marched on with jutting chins, looking straight ahead, and the few male children with them seemed to share the smug arrogance of their fathers. But I saw two boys, probably eight and ten years old, who hung their heads and looked completely miserable. Those poor little ones might already have been wondering which marchers were the real clowns.

What we do now

There will be no way to avoid a succession of horrors in the coming four years. It’s no use waiting for the Democratic Party to tell us what to do. It has become a creature of corporate interests, out of touch with the needs of the non-rich. We have to tell the Party what to do.

The non-profit sector is a mess of single-issue organizations competing for attention and money. We are not single-issue people. Whether you are on a board or just a member, pressure your group to join other groups in as many coalitions as it can manage. All our issues are connected under the banner of peace, justice, and a survivable environment. Progress on any of our goals helps us to achieve all of them. Solidarity is key. We must stand up for one another.

More than changing institutions, we need to change minds. Leave your comfort zone. Don’t stick to preaching to the converted. If you can get access, go on Fox or the bro podcasts. Wait in line for a call-in radio talk show. Try to reach new audiences. Don’t talk down; persuade. Explain what you believe, and be ready to back it up.

We need big change. That means our actions must be non-violent. Violence is not change; it’s just part of the same cruel culture that is wrecking our world. If you are part of a protest, do whatever you can to keep things civil, no matter the provocation.

Expand your social set. Meet people who are not like you. Listen to them with respect. Everyone has something to teach. You don’t have to leave the country to find whole new worlds to explore. Besides, we need you here.

Most of all, keep yourself and your friends from wallowing in despair. If we think there’s no hope, we’ll stop trying, and then there really won’t be any hope.

Day of Atonement 5785

I’m an American Jew, and this year the High Holy Days of my religion have a special, and terrible, meaning for me. Another year of violence in the Middle East has brought tragedy to millions, and contributed to a surge in anti-semitism around the world. Last Monday, I found some comfort in the company of others who feel, as I do, that our community should mark this Day of Atonement with more than personal acknowledgement of what we have done wrong.

A year after a vicious Hamas attack on Israeli civilians turned long-simmering violence into open warfare, a couple of thousand non-Zionist Jews and our allies gathered in the Boston Garden. We met to grieve — not only for the more than 1200 Israelis killed on that day, and the hundreds kidnapped, but for the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the bloody year since then, and for the Lebanese who are now also under Israeli attack. The event was organized by IfNotNow, a group devoted to ending American support for Israeli apartheid and aggression toward Palestinians.

Late on the damp Monday afternoon of that sad anniversary, before most of the crowd showed up, a young rabbinical student led us through an ancient Jewish ritual called Tashlikh. This ceremony is performed during the “Days of Awe” between Rosh HaShanah – the Jewish New Year – and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One symbolically casts off one’s sins by throwing something in flowing water to be washed away. Usually people throw bread crumbs, but out of concern for the fish in the pond, we threw pebbles or dead leaves instead. The pond water wasn’t washing anything away, which also seemed symbolic to me.

The theme of the main event was “Every life is a universe”. Speakers included Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rabbi Toba Spitzer, Imam Ahmad Barry, and Rakeea Chesick Gordis. That young woman gave eloquent testimony to losing close friends and family members during the Gaza war, including both Israelis and Palestinians. She spoke of drowning in grief, feeling overwhelmed by waves of it. Again and again, the speakers insisted: Jews cannot be safe if Palestinians are not free.

After an hour of speeches, prayers, and songs, rain began to drip through the trees. Mosquitos emerged from the mist over the pond to ensure our discomfort. Considering the suffering we were there to commemorate, nobody complained. At one point, volunteers handed out small strips of cloth we were to rip, as a sign of mourning, and attach to our clothes.

October 12 is the Day of Atonement in the current year 5785 of the Hebrew calendar. I believe that American Jews have a lot to atone for. I am not refering to personal sins; Jews are no more or less hateful, thoughtless, or selfish than anybody else. I mean the Jewish community as a whole. For the most part, we have supported Israel for the 76 years of its existence, no matter what it did. We have pressured the US to continue sending more than $3 billion a year in military assistance to Israel, and ignored what Israel did with all those weapons.

Ever since the Holocaust killed six million Jews in Europe and the Nakba displaced three-quarters of a million Palestinians in Israel, both sides have committed too many atrocities to list. The difference is that American weapons have turned the Jewish state from David into Goliath. Israel has become a paragon of military might. Nearly all of its people are or have been soldiers. They believe they are fighting for survival, which excuses all their violence as self-defense.

According to the United Nations, from 2008 through 2020, 5590 Palestinians were killed in the ongoing hostilities, compared to 251 Israelis. There are many conflicting estimates of the casualties since the founding of Israel in 1948, but on one thing they all agree. Far more Palestinians have died than Israelis. This conflict is deeply lopsided, and not only in lives lost. The longer it goes on, the more territory originally set aside for a Palestinian state disappears into Israeli hands. Even the rubble that was Gaza is likely to get rebuilt into beach towns for Jewish tourists.

Now it seems that many American Jews have decided to drop their indifference to religion and rejoin the Jewish community. During most wars, previously apolitical people tend to rally around the flag. This is “my country, right or wrong” time. Jews everywhere have been taught to believe that Israel, and not the Torah, is the central element of our religion. In many ways, Israel has become our religion.

After 9/11, the US squandered the world’s sympathy by starting two completely unnecessary and unprovoked wars. Instead of hunting down the gang of Saudi terrorists that bombed the World Trade Center, we invaded and occupied Afghanistan and then Iraq. We killed hundreds of thousands, and made millions homeless. Now Israel has squandered the sympathy it garnered after the Hamas attack by bombing the millions of Palestinians it holds captive behind walls and military checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Most of those who survive are now homeless, and many are starving.

Zionist Jews, and most Israelis, believe that this violence is justified because it’s the only way to destroy the criminal gang that is Hamas. Yet this policy is doomed to fail. Violence begets violence. Every time an Israeli bomb kills someone, Hamas can recruit more members from among the people who loved them. Zionists blame Hamas for all the destruction on both sides, just as the most extreme pro-Palestinians blame it entirely on Israel’s decades of oppression and occupation.

The truth is that there is plenty of blame to go around. So long as we find war acceptable, we all must share the blame for the loss of so many irreplaceable universes. I am grateful to IfNotNow for giving us a chance to start the new year by acknowledging our part in the ongoing crime of mass murder. May the year to come bring a ceasefire, and healing to all who suffer. We must make peace. If not now, then when?

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.

Harvard Protest, part 5

The campers take their tents down a week before graduation, or Commencement in Harvard-speak. They believe there has been a peaceful resolution to their protest: no harm, no foul. They remove the tents without fuss so the University can proceed to set up its formal events. In return, their suspensions will be reversed so the seniors can graduate, and the rest can return to campus in the fall. President Garber has promised leniency, or so they think.

But has the University negotiated in bad faith? Although Garber’s May 14 email promises to expedite the protesters’ disciplinary cases, and he says he will ask all the Harvard schools to begin the reinstatement process for those put on involuntary leave, he never explicitly promises that they will be reinstated. And they are not. Instead, the Administrative Board — the College disciplinary body — suspends five students and puts more than 20 others on probation for participating in the 20-day encampment. This means that 13 seniors will not get their diplomas, including several Rhodes Scholars.

More than 1100 undergraduates sign a petition urging the College to overturn the sanctions. A majority of the professors present at a May 20 meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences vote to overturn the sanctions, claiming that according to University statutes, the Administrative Board is “subject to the authority” of the Faculty. The next day, more than 500 faculty and staff sign an open letter asking for the sanctions to be reversed.

During the actual Commencement ceremony on May 23, more than 1,000 people stand up and walk out. Most walk across the Cambridge Common to the Harvard-Epworth Church for an alternative graduation ceremony.

At the formal ceremony, two student speakers go off-script to condemn the sanctions. The Senior English Address speaker, Shruthi Kumar, tells the audience she is “deeply disappointed by the intolerance for freedom of speech and the right to civil disobedience on campus.” But the Ad Board, led by College Dean Rakesh Khurana, refuses to change its decisions, and the University backs it up. Or perhaps the University sticks to its decisions and the Ad Board backs it up.

Harvard Yard has hosted protest encampments many times before. The most famous occurred in 1969, when the University called in city police to arrest students occupying University Hall to protest the Vietnam War. The brutality of those arrests prompted a University-wide student strike. In 1986, students built a “shantytown” protesting Harvard’s investments in apartheid South Africa. For three weeks in 2001, as part of the Living Wage campaign, students camped in around 100 tents in the Yard to support others occupying Massachusetts Hall, where the University President’s office is located. In 2011, tents went up for Occupy Harvard. In 2014 and 2015, students blockaded Mass Hall demanding divestment from fossil fuels. In 2016, they held a sit-in supporting a dining hall workers strike.

Since the 1969 catastrophe, aside from one arrest in 2014 and some three-week probations, no serious sanctions were imposed on such demonstrations until this protest. Protesters and their sympathizers call this unprecedented degree of punishment “the Palestine exception”.

On Friday, May 31, the University holds the last of its large end-of-year events, Alumni Day. Hundreds of alumni used to form a procession on Commencement Day and march before the graduating seniors, but since COVID, alumni get our own day, a week after the students have all gone home. It’s a little odd to have such a grand procession with hardly anyone in the audience, a parade with no bystanders. Alumni are seated as we march in, filling the front rows and leaving most of the back rows nearly empty.

A friend says someone asked him why the alumni are having such trouble getting themselves into line. He answered, “Because everyone wants to be in front.”

Tiny bright green aphids rain out of the trees onto a multitude of crimson hats and gray heads. People wave red plastic clappers and flags, hold giant helium balloons, and wear red headbands with glittery pompoms on top, as though they had never worried about microplastics. My friend calls the excess of shields, banners, top hats and tails “Anglophilia”; a royal wedding would not seem out of place.

Just before President Garber stands up to speak, there is a commotion onstage. A young woman pours a vial of gold glitter onto his head, shouting “For the baby monkeys!” She is a member of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), unaffiliated with the University. She is arrested for assault and battery, trespassing, and disturbing a public assembly. Her cause has no connection to the movement against the Gaza War, except that it is also a cry against captivity, cruelty, and needless killing. When he begins to speak, Garber graciously tells the audience “I could use a little glitter,” and reaffirms the University’s commitment to free speech.

After that incident, the incursion of a couple of dozen pro-Palestine demonstrators is a bit anticlimactic. They walk up and down the aisles with banners and posters, but do not attempt to get on stage. They get loud boos and a scattering of applause. Nobody makes a move against them as they leave the Yard. I wonder if this demonstration was negotiated with the administration in advance, or if the security guards and admins simply know this group well enough by now to trust its commitment to nonviolence.

I run to catch up with the protesters. They stand in front of the Science Center for a while handing out pamphlets about the Gaza war and why Harvard should divest. Then they disperse. Nothing else seems to be happening. More student demonstrations will have to wait for this fall.

I go back to the Yard to get the free lunch.

Harvard Protest, part 4

Yesterday, Mother’s Day Sunday, was the last move-out date for freshmen. Now the campus is eerily quiet. The only noise comes from riding lawn mowers, and a supporter of the protest – not obliged to follow its policies – who is standing outside the gates with a megaphone, shouting Free, free Palestine! He calls out the University for its complicity in war, fossil fuels, and Big Pharma. Spread out on the lawns near Johnston Gate are at least five very long scrolls of canvas with the names of the dead in Gaza.

The protesters have planted an olive tree outside Harvard Hall, surrounded by placards bearing photos of people killed in Gaza, their names and ages, and the phrase “Martyred by the IDF” (Israeli Defense Forces). The placards bearing photos, names, and ages of people martyred in the October 7 Hamas attack that were in this area last week are no longer in view.

All the campers but one are talking inside a gazebo-style tent with one wall covered by the sign “Harvard Jews for Palestine.” A supporter tells me they are taking a “wellness day”. They’re discussing what to do next. The University is sure to dismantle the camp before Commencement, Harvard-speak for Graduation, which is coming up in ten days.

I missed a lot of excitement on Saturday. There were marches and rallies as scheduled, with about 200 people attending. There were also unplanned events. Some marchers sat down in Peabody Street, blocking traffic for ten minutes. They spent two minutes in silent meditation.

During all that commotion, somebody broke the big padlock on the main gate into the Yard. Evidently they decided to open up the Yard to outsiders with a bolt cutter. This too was not something the group had agreed upon. Nobody managed to get in, however, before security people installed a wire lock to close the gate again.

Now, while the students talk in the gazebo, about a dozen faculty and staff supporters form a circle outside the camp perimeter. A camper wanders by on his way to the tent. “Cookies? There are cookies?” A supporter has baked them in quantity. “Everyone needs cookies,” she says, with authority, “all the time.”

A student tells the group that Saturday was supposed to be more like a party, with music and food. But somehow, he says, “the plan ended up shifting for reasons I don’t know.” I think of the Paul Simon song “Peace Like a River,” about anti-Vietnam War protests: “And I remember misinformation followed us like a plague. Nobody knew from time to time if the plans had changed.”

The student also says that there has been a lot of struggle within the encampment, a lot of dissension, which has been exhausting for them all to deal with. The protesters include both Jews and Palestinians. I imagine that some are pushing for compromise and some for more radical action. However they continue to co-exist peacefully and collaborate in running a clean, quiet, protocol-following camp.

I read a few Crimson articles on recent developments. Wednesday night, protest representatives met with College Dean Khurana and HU President Garber, among others. The University offered to hold further conversations with the protesters and let them avoid disciplinary action if they disbanded the camp, an offer they declined. They had offered a lower bar than divestment from Israel, such as the establishment of a center for Palestine studies, but they felt the University had not come close to meeting it.

Then Garber met with the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, to discuss anti-semitism. Greenblatt conflates anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, and praises Harvard for its unwillingness to entertain the protesters’ demands. Shortly after this meeting, the first round of 20 students were placed on involuntary leave. By now, more than 60 students are facing disciplinary action. The Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine Instagram page said this showed that Harvard had capitulated to outside agitators.

I sit in dappled shade with the faculty and staff group. One of them has made bookmarks with space for messages to the protesters. She says some could use a little “parental love,” since they’ve been having difficult conversations with their families. They’re stressed, unsurprisingly, and not sleeping well. A camper asks if anybody could help them charge some of their small generators. “We need power,” he says, to laughter.

Around 3:30, seven Harvard police and security guards circle and enter the camp, filming the students. One camper tells supporters on the steps, “They’re taking pictures without our consent. Hide your faces!” I don’t need to hide mine, so I smile and flash the peace sign.

I start to leave for the day, but then I hear a commotion outside the gates. It’s a pro-Israel demonstration; tonight is the start of Israel’s Independence Day. A wild-eyed man speaks to the small crowd through a megaphone. I learn later that this man is a Columbia Business School professor, Shai Davidai. He says, “What’s at stake here is American values, which are also Israeli values. Freedom, democracy, peace. Five US citizens are being held by Hamas, the same people that they [nodding toward the encampment] are cheering on.”

This is where I lose my self-control. I letter a sign on a leaf of my notebook: “Protest does NOT cheer on Hamas. We mourn all these needless deaths.” I stick it through the bars of the iron fence. Alex, from CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), holds a small Israeli flag in front of my sign, trying to hide it. He says I’m delusional. Some pro-Palestine protesters are standing on the curb, waving Palestinian flags and chanting. When the Israeli speaker starts to list names of Hamas victims, I wish they would stop chanting for a few minutes, but they probably don’t even hear what’s going on.

The pro-Israel group sings the Israeli and American national anthems. They wave Israeli and American flags. The speaker taunts the pro-Palestine group, which is chanting “USA, USA, how many kids did you kill today?” Why don’t you honor your own country’s flag, he asks. One student turns around and snaps a smart, ironic salute.

After the rally, Davidai speaks at length to a Crimson reporter, Frank Zhou. I hear him claim that Jews and Israelis are not safe around the encampment. I try to tell Frank that I have photos of a dozen pro-Israel demonstrators entering the middle of the camp, singing songs and chanting. Nobody bothered them. Frank seems distracted since Davidai does not stop talking at him. When his article appears in the Crimson, it reports what Davidai said, without investigating or refuting any of his claims. I certainly believe Jews have been experiencing anti-semitism on campus; unfortunately it is as endemic to our society as any other form of racism. The encampment, however, has not been practicing it.

When I go back to rest on the steps of University Hall with other camp supporters, a student comes over and delivers the gentlest possible rebuke, reminding us (not looking at me especially) not to engage with counter demonstrators. I am embarrassed. The students have shown tremendous discipline and self-restraint. I failed to show equal maturity, and egregiously violated camp protocol. I think most of them agree with what my sign said, but I had no right to speak for them.

Now I hear on the news that the students have agreed to dismantle their camp immediately, and the University has agreed to rescind their punishments. I feel proud of both the protesters and the University. Protests won’t end so long as the misery of Gaza continues. But Harvard and its students have managed to close this phase with a degree of dignity and mutual respect that few other universities have achieved. To this, I can only say, Shukran, and Mazel tov.

Harvard Protest part 3

Friday, May 10, is a cool, sunny day. Rising sophomores who lived in the Yard this year are carrying mattresses, couches, and huge cardboard boxes from their dorms. Parents have only 20 minutes to park in the Yard to receive them. The protest tents are not in the way, though so many gates are closed that there is some level of inconvenience for cars coming and going.

A few pro-Israel counter protesters play pop music on a radio very loudly, right next to the encampment, which is deep in discussion as usual. I don’t know why the music stops after a few minutes.

A protester asks friends on the steps of University Hall to help clean up the wet, dirty tarps on the “event space” next to the tents. Another remarks, laughing, “I haven’t had a shower in a week.”

People I knew from my campus labor union tell me that students who have been suspended or put on involuntary leave seem to have been chosen almost at random. They aren’t leaders or organizers, or even necessarily people who slept in the tents overnight. It’s more a matter of someone in the administration happening to see and recognize them, in spite of the masks or scarves many have been wearing.

Another press conference is scheduled for 2 pm. Most protesters go all the way around through the Science Center gates to get outside Johnston Gate where the press is gathering. I don’t want to walk that far, and I can’t hear the speakers anyway. Yard security and campus police are present, though not in great numbers; the tall bald guy who looks the most serious squats on his heels on a nearby path. The University’s president Garber comes out of Massachusetts Hall now and then, accompanied by a guard. I haven’t seen anyone else approach him.

Outside the gate, the crowd is chanting “Free free Palestine! Long live Palestine!” The Harvard protesters appear to have decided not to use the inflammatory chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or to call for an intifada, which means uprising or resistance.

I hear one woman, annoyed at not being allowed in, ask a guard about Askwith Hall, which is blocks away from the Yard at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is not happy with his answer, and says to her companion, “Okay, let’s go to the media.”

My union friends and a rainbow-haired woman from the Business School think Harvard is treating this protest more harshly than previous encampments. They call it “the Palestine exception.” A student worker wonders if they lose ID access to buildings because of the disciplinary process, will that be grievable through the union.

About 25 people attend a Muslim service in the “event space.” The young man leading the service often lapses into Arabic, but from what I can understand, he’s mostly talking about how we will return to the Creator after death. He talks about how many lives have been lost, and how many hospitals, homes, and schools turned to dust. He talks about “the dead earth” left behind, and “the will to destroy.” He says of the Israelis, “They built upon the imaginary [sic] that there was no one living in the land, that it was empty earth.”

The speaker says, “Somebody has taken the desires of their own heart as God,” taking for themselves the powers that should only belong to Allah. He notes that an Israeli real estate company is already trying to sell land for housing and luxury hotels in Gaza.

The most aggressive counter protester stands next to me. “Do you believe in this?” No, I say, I’m just listening. “You see they separate the women from the men.” So do orthodox Jews, I respond. “But this is 2024!” he says. Yes, I reply, and I don’t like it either, in any religion.

A helicopter hovers low overhead, evidently trying to disrupt the service. When the sermon ends and people bow and pray, I notice it sounds a lot like the davening during a Jewish service.

Supportive faculty and staff form a circle and hand out identifying pins, with the watermelon logo of these protests, and orange vests saying Faculty and Staff so they’re not taken for camp marshals. They expect the University to take the tents down soon, in the middle of the night.

A student who says he’s going to be “Ad Boarded” in a few minutes tells us about a supposedly secret meeting with President Garber. All the president did was tell the protesters how the endowment works. The student says 10 to 15 students were put on involuntary leave during the first raid this morning. Some never had their IDs checked at the protest, but most had been highly visible.

A student marshal in an orange vest speaks to a circle of others. “Don’t engage with police. Our job is to de-escalate.” She says some things I don’t understand. What is a stretchie, and how does it crack?

Later in the afternoon there’s a march and rally, attended by many more people than hang out in the camp. They go all around the Yard after surrounding Mass Hall for a while. I don’t go with them. I hate chants, and I’m tired.

A counter protester accuses one of the protesters of removing his sign from the foot of the John Harvard statue. “Not cool!” he says. A protester points out that the sign is still there; the wind blew it over. “You’re just not looking.” The wind has strengthened so that while workers try to lower the big American flag over the statue, it twists around the pole so they have to raise it, shake it, and try lowering it again several times before they get it down.

As I leave the Yard, I hear a brass band. Has somebody taken protest music to the next level? Then I spot a tuba over the head of a joyful line of people snaking down the Holyoke Street sidewalk, waving white kerchiefs. It’s not a protest. It’s a wedding. In the middle of all this difficulty and angst, life goes on.

Harvard Protest part 2

It’s Monday, May 6. At the Harvard Square T station, around 200 excited kids carrying signs, wearing kaffiyehs, or bearing small Palestinian flags are heading for a high school demonstration on Boston Commons. A girl with a megaphone reminds them, “This is NOT a confrontation. If you are approached by counter-protesters, DO NOT ENGAGE.”

The Yard entry gates are very busy. Parents are driving in to pick up freshmen who have finished final exams. Other students are rushing back and forth from their dorms to the libraries, or to take their finals. Students wait in line to get past the security personnel who are checking IDs. I thank Ali, a high-ranking member of the security staff, for their good work in keeping students safe. I’ve known him for years as sweet-tempered, friendly, but alert. He acknowledges the praise with a big smile.

The mood in the camp is much more tense than when I visited last week. Vague threats have been exchanged between the Administration and the protesters. Few campers are available to speak with the (Harvard-affiliated) public; most sit in a circle in the middle of the tents, deep in conversation for hours.

I walk the perimeter of the encampment with M, a small woman in a headscarf. I ask her if the camp would like more alumni to show up as protection, liaisons, or just moral support. She texts the organizers, but says she thinks they would appreciate it.

Students not involved with the protest are ignoring it. A few are playing frisbee in a roped-off area that only contains a few tents in one corner. I hear a girl say, “I’ve got a 20 page paper due tonight. I’d better stop putting it off.” It’s a lovely warm day. The temptation to put that paper off must be pretty severe.

Some protesters or supporters are sitting on the steps of University Hall. The doors at the top of the stairs have been locked since the protest started. I overhear a discussion of the legal ramifications of Harvard’s threatened actions. Some protesters can’t afford to lose their housing. One says she only spent three nights in the tents, worried about the consequences. There are rumors of hunger strikes.

Rakesh Khurana, the Dean of the College, won’t meet my eyes or talk with me, even though (or because) I worked for him for several years. I spot him talking with a well-dressed man in late middle age, though, or rather listening while the man speaks emphatically, gesturing toward the camp. Rakesh looks unhappy but meek, as though he’s being reprimanded by his superior. The man says “I walk through here several times a day and I’ve never seen any kind of disruption.” I wonder if the man is a professor, an alum, or a donor. Rakesh asks him, “Do you have a generous interpretation of what they’re doing?” I can’t hear his answer.

I have an unexpectedly pleasant conversation with Gid’on, the counter-demonstrator I walked rounds with last week. He says he’s a leftie on most issues. We talk about Venn diagrams of our opinions. We are both frustrated with the lack of real dialogue between moderates on both sides. I say, can’t we agree we all want the killing to stop? He says, maybe we argue and you raise three points. On the first, I’m secure in my opinion. On the second, I think, that’s interesting. The third is persuasive and I think, maybe I have to reconsider.

Gid’on is hopeful that there will be real campus discussions this fall. I suggest round tables where we can get past shouting “Nakba” and “Holocaust” at one another, where we can just talk. Gid’on says that would be a good name for a series: Let’s Just Talk. Since it’s Harvard, we’d need an acronym: LJT. We laugh and go our separate ways.

I eavesdrop on a young person in an Ironmaiden tee shirt, who I think is Israeli and trans, talking to a beautiful and sympathetic middle-aged woman. They tell her that the militarization of Israeli culture starts when kids are ten years old: chanting, marching, and singing patriotic songs. If Israelis refuse to serve in the army, it hurts their career chances. This person’s younger brother is in prison for defecting. Once his term is over he’ll go back on trial and get another 100 days. “He’ll end his puberty in prison.” His job was coordinating night-time raids on people’s homes. He soon found out he’d been lied to about what the soldiers were doing and why. “Israeli kids don’t imagine that they have counterparts on the other side of the fence. It’s all so absurd…” they say.

They go on: “If you’re forced to commit atrocities for your country, you find ways to justify it…Israel is basically a military outpost of the United States.” Their sister is a Major in aerial defense. “We disagree…I love my family, but they’ve been sold so hard on these lies…My father grew up in Toronto. His synagogue had molotov cocktails thrown through its windows.”

The camp liaisons are wearing pink vests. A passerby asks one what he can do to help. “Tell people we’re not being violent.”

M tells me there’s going to be a press conference at the Johnston Gate at 5pm. I head over there a few minutes early. Two chairs are set up near the unoccupied guardhouse, and I sit in one to rest my aging bones. I figure I’ll get up when asked, but nobody ever asks.

The press are already crowding outside the gate, photographers grimacing as they try to fit their lenses between the bars. One reporter calls out to me, “Would you open the gate?” Nope. I take a picture of them, which seems to amuse a few. “Are you with the Gazette?” one asks. “I’m not with anybody,” I say.

Now the counter-protesters show up. I agree with some of their (professionally printed) signs. “Free Israelis and Palestinians from Hamas terrorists.” If only. A reporter calls out, “Did Bill Ackman pay for those signs?” One responds, “No, George Soros. We scammed him.”

Someone outside the gates yells, “Shame on you! Are you Jewish? Shame on you for defending genocide!” This guy says he’s not Jewish, but he has friends whose parents survived the Warsaw ghetto.

When the pro-Palestinian protesters arrive, there is some jostling while the counter protesters try to hold their signs in front. Nobody goes as far as actual shoving. I see people trying to be courteous about sharing the space. A papermache missile that must be eight feet long reading “Paid for by Harvard” gets held over my head, with apologies. One girl stands on a guy’s shoulders and leans against the iron railings to hold up her Free Palestine sign.

I imagine what the reporters are seeing: photos of Israeli hostages and children killed in the Hamas raid; photos of starving Palestinian children. This jumble of imagery seems only appropriate. Why is it that we can’t mourn all this suffering together?

I leave the camp while a camp spokesperson is still addressing the press. I hear they will not take questions. Outside the gate, some policemen are hanging around. Asked if they’re Harvard police, they say, “No, we’re not as cool, but we try.” One mishears me and thinks I said something about ice cream. Another says that might help the situation, if everybody got some. I say, Good idea, let’s have a party and just talk! They laugh and tell me to stay safe.

Harvard Protest part 1

When I left Medford, it was a warm sunny day. In Harvard Square, it was chilly, damp, windy, and overcast. The mood of the encampment was equally gray. The students had just received a warning from the Ad Board that if they continued to camp outside University Hall they would face serious consequences. They were busy texting their family and friends, and possibly lawyers and media as well. I was there most of the afternoon from around noon until past 4 pm, and nobody was shouting, chanting, or using a bullhorn. There was one very interesting session on Palestinian textiles, especially the kaffiyeh and embroidery (tatreez), attended by half a dozen women.

If people are concerned about a kaffiyeh being draped over the John Harvard statue, I would remind them that it is an ancient Harvard custom for frat boys to piss on it.

I tried to respect the community norms. First I spoke with a nice young woman who was patrolling the perimeter of the camp, to find out with whom I should speak, as a friend of the camp and not a member of the media. She promised to find me a member of the outreach committee. Meanwhile I took photos, careful not to include anyone’s face.

The signs outside the tents were hardly combative. Demands were posted, for HU to disclose and divest from its investments in Israel, and to drop all charges against students for their activism. I doubt any of the protesters expect these demands to be met. Other signs said: While you read, Gaza bleeds; Nationalism is Chametz (Hebrew for food prohibited on Passover); No Justice, No Peace, Palestine will never walk alone; Harvard invests in Palestinian death; and a big banner saying Harvard Jews for Palestine.

As for the slogan “From the river to the sea,” it first appeared in the original charter of Israel’s Likud party, where it did not refer to a hoped-for multi-ethnic democracy.

I chatted up several people while I waited. I asked if any administrators had opened a dialogue with them; they said not yet, but they were trying to negotiate something.

The students are risking their academic careers, and probably the wrath of their parents. As always with student protests, they are among the University’s most thoughtful, serious, and conscientious affiliates. They have a lot to lose and nothing to gain, on a personal level. What is the administration afraid of? Losing Zionist donations; and losing even more face than it has since it bumped its first Black president over…not much. Looks like somebody could go out with a handheld mic and just let people talk.

Finally I got to speak with one of the organizers, a Palestinian freshman named Mahmoud. He and many others have been protesting since Israel began its crazy over-reaction to the brutal Hamas attack in October. He said “The administration doesn’t understand that repression fuels us to fight harder.” The community is committed to non-violence, he told me.

As I started to leave, a man approached the camp wearing a kippah and a scarf with Stars of David on it. The perimeter-walker I first met was tailing him, much to his annoyance. She wouldn’t talk to him, which he thought was rude; I agreed, but I pointed out she was probably following camp protocol, and the idea was certainly to protect both him and the protesters. I made four or five rounds of the camp with this guy and the very determined young woman. She had probably never been called rude in her life. She couldn’t talk to the guy; he refused to tell me anything about himself or his opinions since he thought she was recording him; so I talked to him. As usual in such discussions, we got nowhere, but we parted on friendly terms. I walked him out the library gate.

5.2.2024

An old colleague of mine was gracious enough to meet with me for half an hour yesterday. She’s a very sweet, thoughtful person, and we were glad to see each other again. I asked her if the administration had established any dialog with the protesters. She couldn’t tell me details but said there were talks going on quietly in the background. She told me some students were feeling a lot of pressure from both peers and outside forces, and were afraid to speak out. We agreed on the nature of the encampment – nonviolent, disciplined, and committed – and on the need for the students to come up with some achievable goals.

The protesters’ three current demands, set by the national movement, can and will not be met. The University certainly will not disclose, much less divest itself of, its investments in Israel. It still hasn’t divested from fossil fuels, and many of us have been working on that for decades. It took forever to divest from South Africa during Apartheid. The third demand, for amnesty for student activists, can’t be met before they even go through the disciplinary process.

So I went back to the camp to tell them the little I had gleaned from talking with my colleague.

The weather was warm and sunny, and the mood seemed lighter accordingly. My perimeter-walking friend told me everybody was happy I had talked (and talked) with the counter-protester on my first visit, since their camp has agreed not to engage with provocateurs.

I tried to convince a few protesters to have the group consider setting goals the University might actually meet. Maybe teach-ins, or listening sessions, or moderated debates could be small steps toward spreading their understanding of the war in Gaza and the history of Israel/Palestine in general. While we were talking, I noticed Dean Khurana on the outskirts of the camp. The students said he’d visited before but wouldn’t talk with them.

There are about 50 tents in the Yard, fewer than during the Living Wage campaign in 2001 but probably more than during Occupy Harvard in 2011. Like those encampments, this one is self-policing and keeps itself clean. Yesterday some clotheslines had been strung up between trees. Sleeping bags and coats were hung up to dry.

At this time, early afternoon, about a dozen counter-protesters showed up. I have to describe them as quite loud and aggressive. They marched right into the middle of the encampment, singing Hebrew songs, accompanied by a man with a guitar. Their signs quoted the very worst threats from Hamas (“October 7th was just the first time…”) and showed photos of some of the hostages. They stayed in the middle of the camp for around 15 or 20 minutes. The pro-Palestinian campers did not engage with them at all. While the singing and shouting was going on, the campers quietly rearranged the perimeter ropes so the Zionist group had its own little peninsula open to the paths.

The counter-protest moved out of the camp itself to the lawn outside Mass Hall, where it could be more easily seen and heard by the media outside the gates. One man shouted: “Jews on this campus will not be intimidated, and we will not be silent.” I noticed my walking buddy from Monday in the group, and waved to him; he smiled and waved back to me.

I overheard a counter-protester say “Stop them from using the name Harvard, it’s a violation of trademark rules. Call Meta.”

A man from CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, a decades-old pro-Israel group, told passersby that they had planted 1200 Israeli flags on the HLS campus. I didn’t go to see and can’t find any reports confirming this. He expected they would soon be taken out. He also told a Globe reporter hovering outside the gates that this encampment was an unprecedented disruption at Harvard. I joined their conversation to correct that statement. As for noise, the encampment schedule for some days lists about an hour at dinner time to “make noise for liberation.” I haven’t stayed late enough to determine just how much noise that comes to. Most of the time the camp seems extremely quiet.

The camp was treated to a show of more than 100 bare backsides late last night during the annual Primal Scream event. The Crimson asserts that the streaking was nonpartisan and nonpolitical. Nobody seems to object to the primal screaming.

Common Ground

My family was not religious, but we were always aware that we were Jews. Until I was 12, we were the only Jewish family in a Catholic neighborhood. Some families wouldn’t let their children play with us. My parents sent us to Hebrew School, to get in touch with our roots – as we say now. My brothers and I attended for two hours after public school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and for four hours on Sunday mornings. We learned, or at least they tried to teach us, Biblical and modern Hebrew, the five books of Moses and historical commentary, and customs and ceremonies. What they also taught us, though we didn’t realize it until much later, was Zionism.

I was born three years after the Holocaust killed all our relatives who didn’t leave Poland in time. We learned that even though the world knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, few nations would accept Jewish refugees. Even the USA forced ships full of them to return to Germany. When anti-semites came for the Jews, we could not depend on anyone else to help us.

So, we were taught, Israel was the only safe place for Jews. It was the promised land of milk and honey. God had made a covenant with us: if we obeyed His laws, we would thrive in this land. We were taught nothing about the people who had been living there during the 2,000 years in which most Jews were elsewhere.

Jews in Israel were turning the desert green, they taught us. Jews were no longer helpless victims of anti-semites; in Israel, we were armed warriors, defending our new-built oases from the jealous tribes around us. Like the Sabra cactus that symbolized the settlers, we would be tough on the outside while we stayed soft on the inside.

At the Passover seder every year, my family repeated the ancient words: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Not that we intended to go ourselves. But Israel was the refuge of last resort. When we heard news reports about Arab attacks on Israel, our rabbis urged us to send money so that Israel could defend itself – for all our sakes.

The propaganda was thorough and relentless. Over time, support for Israel became as much an article of faith as the existence of God – and for many Jews, more worthy of our belief. Any Jew who dared to question Israel’s behavior was damned as a traitor to our people.

While we were learning about the Holocaust and Arab attacks on Jewish settlements, Palestinians were learning about the forced expulsion of 750,000 Arab residents from Israel after WWII – the Nakba – and the theft of Arab land and often violent repression of Arab residents ever since. Nobody taught American Jews about the Nakba. Nobody taught Palestinians about the Holocaust. The two peoples were deliberately blinded to each other’s suffering.

Now it should be no surprise to anyone that these two damaged, exploited, disrespected peoples, abandoned by the rest of the world after it trapped them together, have learned to identify themselves as bitter enemies, each willing to fight to the death to eliminate the other from their contested land.

One side shouts Holocaust. The other shouts Nakba. Both have long lists of atrocities to shout thereafter. Amid the shouting, who is listening? Who is able to see that everyone on both sides is the walking wounded?

It is heartening that today, in many demonstrations calling for a permanent ceasefire, progressive Jewish organizations are taking a leading role. At least some American Jews are finally waking up to our share of responsibility for the current disaster in Gaza. We have allowed ourselves to be silenced, while news of Israeli brutality sifted down to us past the censors. We have allowed too many of our so-called spiritual leaders to shame us out of fellow-feeling for Palestinians. We have continued to support an apartheid state that has segregated and oppressed Arabs just as Jews were segregated and oppressed in Eastern Europe long before the Nazis came to power. And we have sent untold millions of dollars, and urged the American government to send almost four billion dollars a year, to arm a country that always seems to meet violence with much greater violence.

Jews and Palestinians have all been brainwashed. Lost in the fog of partisan information is the sense of common ground – the awareness that we humans must share a finite and vulnerable planet. We have been taught to believe that Israel, or Palestine, has a right to exist. What we must come to understand is that no country has a right to exist. Only people have that right. Countries are products of our imagination. People are real. Until we can learn to acknowledge the harm we have all done to others, and determine to live together in peace, none of us will be safe.

Next year, may we share Jerusalem.

People of Peace

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the species. The forces of greed and violence have driven us to despair. We know we must change how we live, but we don’t believe we can.

The forces of good have been scattered. We’re fighting on separate battlefields, although we face the same enemies. We have to join forces to win this war.

We need to make big changes. That means a revolution. But it can’t be a violent revolution. Violence isn’t change. Violence is the enemy we are fighting. If we fail to be nonviolent, we are playing the enemy’s game, and we will lose.

Most people are the walking wounded. We live in a brutal culture. A few have everything. The rest of us have to fight for the scraps. The rulers urge us against one another. They want us to fight amongst ourselves.

Israeli against Palestinian. Ukrainian against Russian. Black against white. Men against women. We who are all the same – brothers and sisters – are fighting one another instead of the forces of violence and greed.

It’s time for this species to wake up and get ourselves together. We have to learn to live together, to work together, if we’re going to figure out how this organism in which we are living cells – humanity – is going to survive.

Survival will mean working in coalition. Trying to understand each other. Breaking down barriers, not building them up. This is how we create a real revolution, the big change we need.

We people of peace must join together if peace and justice are ever to prevail.

Intersectionality

Sometimes, in our culture, it seems the individual is all that matters. Life is about me: my career, my wealth and status, my history. We talk about intersectionality, the many identities that make up one person. What about intersectionality among people, rather than within them? Isn’t that our most important circumstance, as a species?

Say one person is gay, male, white, urban, and Jewish. Another is straight, female, Asian, suburban, and Buddhist. According to what is usually meant by intersectionality, one might expect them to have little in common. But they both love dogs; they’re both poets; and they’re both passionate gardeners, though the guy’s plants are all in pots on his balcony. How different are they?

Ethnicity, gender, religion – these are aspects of the self that help us feel part of groups larger than our immediate friends and family. These aspects are endlessly fascinating. They take up most of our public discussion. Yet they represent a fraction of what a person actually is. More of our couple’s thoughts and daily activities are likely to concern their dogs, their poems, and their plants than any of the supposedly more significant aspects of their identities.

Ethnicity, gender, and religion are stories we tell ourselves. These histories are important and yet, to a degree, imaginary. They help make individuals what we are. But how have they come to outweigh other aspects so much that we sort ourselves into such narrow categories?

This sorting is far from accidental. A very few people have accumulated most of the economic and political power on this planet. So long as Black and white, male and female, Hindu and Muslim, are convinced we are significantly different, we can’t get ourselves together to challenge that power. One only has to look at Trump, Xi, Putin, Modi, or any other authoritarian to see that they deliberately foment enmity among ordinary people.

Imaginary boundaries keep us fighting one another, instead of taking charge of the planet, which the current culture is ruining for everybody. Preventing ordinary people from organizing is a short-sighted strategy on the part of elites, since their grandchildren as well as ours will have to inhabit this poisoned planet. But the elites, being human, are not good at taking the long view.

The internet gives us new opportunities to take down the walls we have built. Rapid and radical climate change gives this project new urgency. Online, people can identify with other dog lovers, poets, or gardeners. One’s ethnicity, gender, and religion can begin to appear less relevant in these circles. Old associations give way to new. Meanwhile, racist, ethnic, and anti-LGBTQ violence reinforces the old boundaries. Hate crimes are committed by people who depend on those boundaries for their whole identities. The increasing violence points to the degree that such people feel threatened. Whenever there is peace, the old boundaries erode.

The Black Lives Matter movement drew in white as well as Black people, not just in the US but globally. The (nearly all peaceful) demonstrations centered on the suffering experienced by Black people for no reason except that their skin color put them on the wrong side of an imaginary wall. Earlier, the Occupy movement also spread around the world. Wealth is another imaginary wall that causes great suffering to people on the wrong side of it. In addition, the environmental movement and the #MeToo movement are global or in the process of becoming so. All these movements indicate that at least some people are beginning to see ourselves as human first, with every other aspect of ourselves being less significant than that primary, leveling, identity.

Every human is clearly a unique world unto themselves. Every human is also 99.9% exactly like every other human. If we focus only on the individual, we just see the actions of one person, subject to chance, a sort of Brownian motion, like the movements of a particular molecule. If we’re interested in the larger movements of our species, we have to consider that most obvious and invisible thing: our culture.

The paradox of being human is that the essence of our personality provides a through-line in our lives; we carry that essence with us, like a smell or a sound that only we can produce. Yet we change constantly. Every day brings us new experiences, and every experience changes us, becomes part of who we are, whether or not we think about it or remember it.

Imagine if we could see the connections between us. Every meeting would form a line. More meetings would make a stronger line. There would be lines between clerk and customer, police and criminal, writer and reader. Instead of a universe of separate points, we would see a dense network in which no point existed in isolation. The loneliest individual, after all, would not have survived infancy if someone had not fed them and wiped their bottom.

This dense network of connection, though impalpable, is who we are. This is the reality of our species. Like the individual, humanity has through-lines. The constant is human nature. The flux is culture, which never stays the same, one day to the next.

We can’t change human nature. We can, however, change culture. Everything we say or do changes the culture, as well as everything we buy, or boycott, everything we listen to, argue with, dismiss or support. In such small increments, the body of humanity moves. In what direction are we moving? Tiny cells in the body of our species, we can hardly tell. All any of us can do is move in any way we are able toward peace, sustainability, and justice. And hope.

Quality of Life

We’ve been told it’s the things we have that make up our quality of life. That’s only part of the truth. We must have enough to eat and drink, and some place to get out of the weather. If we’re going to eat our food cooked, we need things to cook it in. Stuff does pile up around us; we’re messy, curious, greedy beasts like magpies or packrats, but we don’t have to make a virtue out of it.

Some things do make lives better, though they’re not usually the things advertisers are trying to sell us. Plumbing, for example, is a really good idea. Fashion is not only fun, it keeps clothing on everybody. The rich change clothes every season and their leavings filter out to everyone else.

Whatever we have, we can do without or make new, except for people. Only the people we’re close to are irreplaceable, our family and friends. We can lose a neighbor sometimes and go on all right, but it is devastating to lose a whole neighborhood.

Real quality of life depends on how we feel. If we’re healthy, and the people we love are healthy, and our household is peaceful, that’s worth any amount of money and any pile of stuff. If we’re suffering in mind or body, few things can comfort us.

Beautiful things soothe, please, and excite us, in the moments when we truly notice them. Art can improve our lives if we pay attention to it. Being in natural surroundings, where beauty continually renews and reinvents itself, comforts and sustains us. Many broken hearts have begun to heal in the woods and on rivers.

Community is precious. Fellowship is precious. That’s why a lot of people go to religious services. We get to feel kinship with the people around us. Community, fellowship, friendliness, peace: these provide real quality of life.

Networks of people are not material things. They are emotional and intellectual connections of shared experience. These invisible things, beyond what we can hold or measure, keep us alive.

The rest is landfill.

Atheist’s Bible: Apocalypse

The Four Horsemen appear on the news every day: war, disease, famine, environmental catastrophe. Gee, who could have seen this coming? Whoever wrote the Book of Revelation two thousand years ago, for one. None of these things are exactly new in human experience. Since humanity decided to base our civilization on greed instead of compassion, this has been an easy prophecy to make.

The thing about prophecy is that it’s meant to scare people into changing our behavior. If it works, the direst predictions won’t come true. The prophecy makes the threat of extinction both vivid and immediate. We already know that our current path is not survivable. We just think we can keep going a little while longer, in spite of the evidence. Addicts need to “hit bottom” before they quit doing whatever is killing them. Has our society hit bottom yet?

All our addictions – to drugs, to war, to fossil fuels, to accumulating stuff – stem from humanity’s central problem: how to keep from being ruled by the worst of us. The problem shows up in Putin’s aggression, Trump’s hatefulness, Big Oil’s continuing lies. The solution is not any single hero coming to save us. The solution is the best of us, working together.

Addicts endure going cold turkey through the love of friends and family, the encouragement of others in the same situation, and inner strength. The same things apply to all our addictions. If people can quit drinking, we can quit buying plastic junk. If one fragile, needy individual can stop smoking, this fragile, needy species can stop war.

Right now, the good guys are terribly disorganized. We’ve allowed ourselves to be separated by nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender identity. Even our do-gooder organizations are separated by the causes they support, as though peace and justice and environmental sustainability were not deeply interdependent.

National boundaries, financial wealth, and all the other barriers to our solidarity are products of human imagination. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is the furthest thing from imaginary. It will be the only reality if we remain divided behind those barriers instead of getting ourselves together.

Like it or not, this is our planet. It’s time we start owning it. Here’s another 2,000 year old prediction: the meek shall inherit the earth. If we do, it won’t be a moment too soon.

Adventures with Homeless People

The women were nervous when we entered the Statehouse. They had chatted excitedly all the way from the welfare motel in Everett, where two volunteers with vans had picked us up. But now the sight of the enormous gold dome, the series of broad granite steps, and the lofty, echoing marble entryway intimidated them into silence. I handed out the information packets we had written together. Before they split up to go to various legislators’ offices, I reminded them that they were the experts. They were here to educate their elected representatives about family homelessness.

I was here as a baby-walker for one mother who couldn’t keep her infant quiet while she was sitting still. He slept on my shoulder as I wandered the halls. I was also responsible for a four-year-old, antsy from months of confinement in one room, who darted around touching things but came when I called her. I consulted my hand-drawn map to find the offices where we had made appointments. Sometimes the doors were open, and I could see the women talking calmly to the men behind the desks. During our training sessions, I tried to build their confidence by assuring them that they had built-in advantages communicating with the reps, since they were women and the reps were, well, men.

At one point, the elevator doors opened near me and my small charges. In the elevator stood that redheaded scourge, Barbara Anderson, then head of Citizens for Limited Taxation, and her coterie of tall white men in suits. While the doors stayed open, I blurted: “You’re kicking families out of their housing! You’re hurting old people and sick people! Shame on you!” Everyone in the elevator looked over my head, stone-faced. The little girl asked me why I yelled at that woman. “She’s part of the reason you and your mom had to leave home, honey.”

This was an emergency situation, even for people whose whole lives were one long emergency. Massachusetts was planning to kick hundreds of families out of shelters and motels when the federal funds ran out, refusing to pick up the tab for their stays with state money. That deadline was approaching for many in the following week. These were women and children, and a few men, with absolutely nowhere else to go.

It was the late 1980s. Reagan was tough on poor people and all the programs ever designed to help them. I had been hired by an anti-poverty agency with the dregs of state and federal funding to organize people on welfare. People on welfare, I soon discovered, did not want to stick their heads up for fear of losing the little they had. They were happy to meet once a week and eat free doughnuts and complain about the system. They provided good support for one another. But they were not going to speak out in public and risk coming to the attention of the authorities, which could cut off their benefits for any reason at any time.

Families in the welfare motels, however, were facing eviction from their last housing option. They had nothing left to lose. They were angry, and scared, and they were ready to fight.

The welfare motels were terrible housing, but better than nothing. Several kids could be crowded into one room with their parent. There was mold; there was falling plaster; there was broken plumbing; there were cockroaches. The hotels would not allow hotplates so all their meals were cold. Children had no place to play, and often could not reach the schools in their home communities.

Parents were already traumatized. Some had suffered an accident or illness that made them unable to work for a time. They lost their jobs, then their housing. Some had gotten the short end of the stick in a divorce. One married her high school sweetheart and soon got pregnant. When the baby was born, her husband left her, disappearing with their car and all the money in their bank account. Some women had children with medical problems, and the only way to get health care for them was to leave their jobs and go on welfare. Many of these families had suffered actual eviction, where they watched as sheriff’s deputies carried their belongings out to the street.

The women told their stories to the legislators. They also dispelled some myths. Most people on welfare were white. Less than half of all families on welfare had access to any public or subsidized housing. The majority had worked full time until they no longer could, often because they couldn’t afford childcare and refused to leave their children alone. Some had worked part time, under the table, because every dime they admitted to making came out of their welfare check, which was about half what they needed to survive. Sooner or later they couldn’t make the rent. They and their children couch surfed with friends and family members until they got kicked out. Some had already lost a child to the foster care system because they had no safe place to stay.

We met up at the agreed-upon place and time. The women were exhausted. On the way home, they talked about the legislators’ reactions, or their lack of reaction. None of the legislators had known about the planned evictions until the women told them. Some of the moms said they had spoken with a reporter for a local news radio station, the only media person who responded to the press release I had sent to so many.

Back at the hotel, we all crammed into one room to watch the six o’clock news on tv. We were astounded to see the state welfare commissioner make a statement, in the midst of camera flashes and boom mics. The state had never planned to evict homeless families from the hotels, she said; that was all a misunderstanding.

In the motel room, there were screams and laughter and hugs and tears. These women were warriors. They were fighting a war against impossible odds. But today, on this battlefield, they had won.

Not the 99% but the 100%

Ants, zebras, monkeys, snakes: each member of a species looks and acts pretty much like all the rest. They can tell one another apart, but we can’t, unless we study them closely. The differences are tiny; the similarities, vast.

The same goes for humans: each one of us is unique, but we’re as alike as snowflakes. No person’s history, character, or appearance is the same as any other’s. These variations are endlessly fascinating. We need them; they are how we tell one another apart. But they form only a tiny fraction of what we really are.

Science tells us that all humans are almost exactly the same. Day to day, we ignore that knowledge, though it explains a great deal.

Why can a good actor portray a wide range of characters? Why, when we go to the movies, does the whole audience agree on who is the good guy and who is the villain? Why do we laugh and gasp in the same places? How can good novelists get us to understand people we’ve never met, and who in fact do not exist?

Because people are pretty much all the same: variations on the theme of being human. Shouldn’t we be talking about this theme and not only its variations?

Our dominant culture emphasizes the individual — one’s career, one’s wealth, one’s behavior — even though these things usually matter only to that individual and perhaps a few relatives and friends. We pay much less attention to our behavior as a species. Yet it’s our bad behavior as a species, not as individuals, that is endangering the future of humanity.

There’s a lot of talk lately about “transhumanism,” the attempt to transcend human limits. I believe that before we can transcend humanism, we must achieve it.

The problems that threaten human survival arise from our refusal to acknowledge our behavior as a species rather than as individuals. The only solutions to them are global — in other words, species-wide.

The internet is revolutionizing global communications, maybe not a moment too soon. Now people can communicate across the world in real time. You don’t have to be rich to do so; all you need is access to an online device. The barriers of personal appearance, location, and circumstance vanish, leaving only your words, and images (mostly) of your choice. Being online is as close to becoming a spirit — transcending material limitations — as we are likely to get.

Of course we use the internet mostly for sex and music. This is typical behavior for our species. Without regulation, we also use it for insulting one another, showing off, lying, and gossiping. Also standard. We form interest groups; we make friends as well as enemies; we come to the aid of people in trouble.

What we don’t do online, at least not yet, is run the planet.

Right now, humanity is poorly organized for survival. So long as we primarily identify as members of subgroups like nations, religions, or ethnicities, we will find it hard to deal with problems that pertain to all those subgroups. Our organizations focus on issues specific to themselves and compete to place those issues above the rest. Even though, as individuals, most of us want to end hunger, war, and environmental devastation, our organizations have different priorities.

We are such a creative, adaptable species that we manage to live in every environment on earth, the deep sea, and outer space. The climate change our bad behavior has engendered is creating a new environment for us all. It’s impossible to predict whether, much less how, we will figure out how to survive this different world. If we survive, the global reach of the internet will have everything to do with it.

One thing is certain. However humanity re-organizes and adapts, everyone alive will be involved: not just the 1% global elite, or the 99% of us who do not have illusions of limitless power, but 100% of us. None of us stands alone. All of us need other people. Our individual lives will end one day. In the meantime, though it seems unlikely, don’t give up hope that humanity itself – our pattern, our theme, our weird and wonderful species – will find a way to endure.

Alice T4

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Tag Archives: solidarity

Strangers in a Strange Land

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Vietnam: Some Women We Met

Prayer for the New Age

Here Come the Clowns

What we do now

Day of Atonement 5785

I Believe in Magic

Harvard Protest, part 5

Harvard Protest, part 4

Harvard Protest part 3

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Common Ground

People of Peace

Intersectionality

Quality of Life

Atheist’s Bible: Apocalypse

Adventures with Homeless People

Not the 99% but the 100%