The Rev. Richard R. Fernandez, a minister in the United Church of Christ, was for 21 years the executive director of the Neighborhood Interfaith Movement, which brought together Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Unitarian congregations and faith institutions to build a more just and sensitive community in the Northwest and wider Philadelphia area. Previously, he served in the 1960s as the executive director of Clergy and Laity Concerned, a national peace organization in opposition to the Vietnam War. In that capacity he was a close associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
On January 17, 2010, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, Rev. Fernandez was invited to preach at Tabernacle United Church in Philadelphia, the congregation of which the Fernandez family have been members for over forty years. Rev. Fernandez writes of how the sermon below came into being: “Early in the week I was having a hard time trying to figure out what new ‘thing’ I could say about Dr. King and the importance of his life and message for our time. Then, somewhat mysteriously, I received a ‘letter’ from Dr. King that was addressed directly to the church I have belonged to all these years. I was saved! All I had to do was stand up and read this letter….”
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Beginning this month, food insecure Israelis will have a new powerhouse organization working to meet their needs, when the country’s two leading hunger relief efforts, Table to Table and Leket: the Israel Food Bank, merge to create Leket Israel. The new entity will consolidate and simplify charitable food distribution to agencies serving the hungry and function as a “one-stop shop” for food manufacturers, retailers and food service companies to donate their surplus products. The name Leket Israel encapsulates the biblical concept of collecting food from across Israel for the benefit of those in need.
Table to Table was founded in 2003 to rescue and redirect excess food that would otherwise be destroyed. In a short time, it became Israel’s umbrella organization for donations of surplus food. Leket: The Israel Food Bank was founded in 2007 in response to a survey that reported 22% of Israeli citizens suffered from food insecurity. Leket’s mission has been to provide a systematic national response to the problem by operating an effective and professionally managed food bank. The food bank has adopted best practices from the international community of food banks, led by the Global FoodBanking Network (GFN), which supports food banks and food bank networks where they exist and works collaboratively to create them in communities where they are needed.
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Francesca Lewis is a freelance journalist living in London, with graduate degrees from Cambridge University in history and London School of Economics in international political theory and international relations. She wrote this opinion piece for JSPAN. We invite our readers to add their comments. Click here to send us your thoughts on the case.
The British Supreme Court’s decision – to rule that the admissions policy of a publicly funded Jewish school in north London amounted to racial discrimination – was an embarrassment. This is not because the judgment was right or wrong, but because this issue could have and should have been resolved within the Jewish community, and to air the dirty laundry of an admissions dispute in Britain’s highest court was graceless. It revealed deep-seated divides at the heart of a Jewish community that feels under threat by well-concealed prejudice, and so should be more united. Furthermore, at the heart of the case is a question that no court should have to answer: what is a Jew, and what defines “Jewishness?”
Much has been made of Shlomo Sand’s recent book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” in which he alleges that the ‘ethnic’ element of Jewish-ness, the matrilineal nature of the religion, was a nineteenth-century Zionist invention. His thesis might be largely irrelevant – as an historian, I struggle to recall any ethno- nationalist group that did not create for themselves a foundational myth in the nineteenth century - but the impact of this thinking directly relates to this case. For the Supreme Court, a Jew is someone who practices the religious rites of the Judaic faith – keeps kosher and Shabbat, goes to synagogue - but whose parents might well be Mormons. While accepting that this definition is flawed, this was a racial discrimination case that came down to blood vs. faith. The court had no choice but to rule against a policy that was based on blood.
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by Stewart Weintraub, JSPAN secretary and general counsel
JSPAN Opposes Religious Intolerance by National High School Mock Trial Championship Board of Directors
High School Mock Trial is an extracurricular activity of relatively recent development and it is growing every year. Today high schools throughout the United States sponsor mock trial teams which compete locally, state wide and nationally. Participation as part of a mock trial team requires a tremendous amount of preparation, skill, and dedication by those students who are competing, and it is looked upon with distinction by institutions of higher learning.
The culmination of the competition is the National High School Mock Trial Championship (“Championship Competition”) which has become a prestigious event where state mock trial champions from throughout the United States gather to compete for the right to be called the National Champions, the best in the United States.
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By Ted Mann
ZOA’s Morton Klein and Daniel Mandel ignore history in claiming that the Oslo Accords failed because of Israel’s “concessionary policy that ignored continuing Palestinian rejection of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and support for terrorist violence against it.” (Jewish Exponent, Dec. 10, “Time to Put the Squeeze on Palestinian Aid”).
Those accords were signed on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, and five months later Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Arabs praying in the Machpela in Hebron. Notwithstanding that massacre, the Oslo peace process went forward and with even greater speed; Israel withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, elections were held for a Palestinian Council, and the Palestinian self-governing authority was extended to other parts of the West Bank. In October 1994 Morocco became the third Arab state (after Egypt in March 1979), and Jordan in January 1994, with diplomatic ties to Israel.
Negotiations on the final status issues — Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and borders — were to begin in May 1996, two-and-a-half years after the accords were signed and to continue thereafter for a period of three more years, in order to allow sufficient time for mutual animosities to heal and to create the mutual trust required for two former enemies to live in such close proximity in peace. But on Nov. 4, 1995, another Orthodox Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. It would soon be clear that with his death, the Oslo Accords died too. Read the rest of this entry »
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By Burt Siegel
The most important development in American intergroup relations of the decade may be that many people born in this decade will think very little about the very term. For them relations will exist among individuals but not groups.
To older generations, the sense of being a member of an identifiable people remains strong. Of course, being part of a community identified by race, nationality or faith has often led to xenophobia and a belief in one’s own group’s superiority. And we all know that being a member of a minority group, even one that has suffered from majority prejudice, is no prophylactic against harboring those identical feelings about someone else. Yet it is in the United States, a nation thought by many Europeans to be more racist than they, that such sensibilities seem to be dying.
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On December 2, 2009, JSPAN urged the Pennsylvania legislature to pass legislation to legalize the use of marijuana for medical purposes. The testimony was offered in support of H.B. 1393, The Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act, which had been introduced on April 29, 2009 by State Rep. Mark Cohen (D-Phila, Majority Caucus Chair).
“This bill is about a better quality of life for Pennsylvania’s patients. It’s about compassion and it’s about science,” said Ruth Damsker, a member of JSPAN’s Board of Directors and a former Commissioner of Montgomery County.
Joining Damsker before the State House Health and Human Services Committee to support JSPAN’s position were members Rabbi Eric Cytryn, spiritual leader of Beth El Temple of Central Pennsylvania, and Dr. Howard Swidler, an Easton, PA emergency physician with a background in pharmacology.
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A.B. Yehoshua is one of Israel’s most celebrated authors and one of its most articulate moral voices. The comments below are excerpted from an article he recently wrote for Americans for Peace Now and Israel’s Peace Now movement (Shalom Achshav). Both groups lead the way in opposing settlement activity and in conducting a consistent public campaign, in Israel as well as in the United States, against settlements.
We have come a long way since my friends and I laid the foundations of Peace Now in 1978.
It would seem that our ideas and yours won in the Israeli and global arenas. Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the staunchest opponents of dividing the biblical land of Israel into two states, said recently that he is ready to accept a demilitarized Palestinian state next to Israel. By doing so, Netanyahu joined other Israeli prime ministers who came from the right, such as Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, who opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, only to change their position later.
But let’s not fool ourselves. Despite such statements, the path leading to the actual creation of a Palestinian state is still long. In fact, the path leading to the de facto creation of a bi- national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea - a single state inhabited by two peoples - is much shorter.
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On December 3, 2009 the Jewish Council for Public Affairs published the following article, as part of its ongoing series entitled “Confronting Poverty.”
Over the past year much of the country, including the national media and our politicians, has been primarily focused on the economic crisis. But a crisis of a different kind is taking place in America’s schools. Students are dropping out at record rates, untrained teachers are placed in failing schools, parents are absent from parent-teacher meetings, and America’s youth is falling farther and farther behind their contemporaries in other countries.
A low-quality education is a frequent predictor that an individual will live in poverty, go through periods of unemployment, or enter the criminal justice system. Improving our public education system is essential to alleviating poverty in the United States.
Recent studies indicate that six out of ten public school 4th graders cannot do math at grade level. About two-thirds of 4th graders cannot read at grade level. However these statistics don’t reflect the disproportionate impact for minority communities. More than 80% of black and Hispanic 4th graders cannot read at grade level compared to 58% of their white peers.
According to the Children’s Defense Fund, policies focused singularly on “zero tolerance” often have the effect of encouraging suspensions and ultimately drop-outs. Again, these policies have a disproportionate impact on minority communities, particularly black, Hispanic, and American Indian students.
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It’s really a minor that’s become a major. But try telling your children, or grandchildren, Chanukah is just a minor holiday. Why is Chanukah considered a minor holiday? For starters, the story is not found in the Torah, or even in our Bible. And there is no masechet or book of the Talmud dedicated to this holiday or its laws and traditions. In fact, in the entire Talmud, there is only half a page dedicated to any discussion about this holiday.
You may know as well that the earliest versions of the story of Chanukah are found in the Apocrypha, in the Books of First and Second Maccabees, books ironically which were preserved, not by the Jewish community, but by the Church, and were written most likely in Greek. The word apocrypha itself means obscure or hidden away. The story can be found as well in the early church’s Greek and Latin bibles, but not in ours.
It is ironic that the story of Chanukah is preserved in Greek, as the major issue of this holiday is the pressure of hellinization, of the in-roads made by Greek and Macedonian culture into the world of ancient Jerusalem. In many ways, the true story of Chanukah is the story of an internal Jewish war and struggle—a struggle we still grapple with today. How can we live both in the modern world, and affirm all that is good about modernity and shape and fashion our Jewish identity at the same time? (For a great read about this true story of Chanukah, see Harry Olitzky’s wonderful essay ”Chanukah: What Really Happened,” published in Moment Magazine, December 1984).
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On Wednesday, November 11, 2009, the Israel Policy Forum held a conference call where Israeli Member of the Knesset Shaul Mofaz discussed his recently announced peace initiative proposal. Under the Mofaz Plan, a permanent Palestinian State would be created immediately but with provisional borders that would include all of Gaza and 60% of the West Bank territory in which 99% of the West Bank Palestinian population lives. The Israeli government would provide assurances that the Palestinian State ultimately would include nearly all of the West Bank territory. And, the Israeli and Palestinian governments would enter into negotiations to address all Final Status issues, including permanent borders, Palestinian refugees, and Jerusalem. (http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/blog/mofazproposesimmediatepalestinianstate).
In his initial remarks, MK Mofaz briefly described his background and experience, emphasized his belief in peace, and pointed out the failure of all previous negotiating efforts to achieve results. Citing extensive national security analysis, MK Mofaz explained the need for urgency because “time [is] not on our side.” MK Mofaz pointed out that Iran is gaining in strength, notably in its development of nuclear weapons and in its support for Hezbollah and Hamas. MK Mofaz also pointed out that the Palestinian dialogue is heading toward a one-state solution, which is not in Israel=s favor. MK Mofaz explained that Israel=s primary interest is in maintaining a “Jewish and democratic state.”
MK Mofaz then described his peace plan in somewhat more detail as a two-phase process, the first phase of which would be the immediate creation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza. The second phase would be a process of continuing negotiation and dialogue to resolve outstanding issues such as establishing permanent borders, providing for security of Israel, addressing the issue of Palestinian refugees and their right of return, and the status of Jerusalem. The immediate establishment of a Palestinian State, he stated, would create a change in attitude that would enable the parties to reach agreement on the outstanding issues that has not been possible to date.
MK Mofaz concluded his initial remarks by pointing out three essential requirements for his plan to succeed: the need for a clear statement by the Palestinians to end the conflict, the need to create a mechanism for mediating future disputes, and the need for an Israeli public referendum approving the resolution of Final Status issues before implementation of an agreement. MK Mofaz described his two-stage plan as “the best way to achieve an agreement with the Palestinians” and noted one additional requirement for success: the need for the United States to back and approve this plan. MK Mofaz believed that a final agreement could be reached in about four to six years.
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by Burt Siegel, JSPAN Board member
Most of us have, at one time or another, struggled with what has sometimes been called the “Christmas dilemma”, meaning: what is a Jew supposed to do about Christmas? As late as the 1950s, a surprisingly high number of even endogenous Jewish households had Christmas trees. (Sometimes, in an attempt at embarrassed humor they were referred to as “Chanukah bushes.”) Today, other than in religiously mixed households, that phenomenon is rare.
Nor do very many Jewish children still get visits from Santa. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I must admit that he did make one stop at my house in 1948 or ‘49. My older sister, killjoy that she was, pointed out that it would have been physically impossible for him to have made it to every house, even in a place as small as Bayonne, NJ, from sundown to sunrise. To be honest, by the age of 5 or 6, I had figured this out myself. I didn’t tell my parents though, because I didn’t want to kill a good thing, but for some reason, Santa never made a repeat appearance.
More observant families, for the most part, even prevented their children from trick or treating, or dressing up in a costume on Halloween. When my oldest daughter was in a Jewish day school in the 1970s, she was told that she had to ignore Halloween because it was a Christian holiday. This led to her to tell a bewildered Christian playmate that she couldn’t go around the neighborhood collecting candy with her because the holiday had “something to do with Jesus.” Of course fundamentalist Christians don’t let their children participate in the Halloween merriment either, because the holiday is “pagan.” As my Bubbie would say, “go figure.”
Thanksgiving was always a free pass, I thought. We could really throw ourselves into this one without a modicum of guilt. While I know that none of the Jewish kids I grew up with in the late ’40s and early ’50s would have been comfortable playing wise men in the PS # 3 school play, ( we even had a baby Jesus,) being chosen to be a Pilgrim was real “yicchus.” I never got that part though; I played an Indian, an inferior role in those pre-PC days.
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How do American Jews speak English? Who uses Hebrew and Yiddish words and New York regional features? When using Hebrew words, who prefers Israeli pronunciations and who prefers Ashkenazic ones? Which Yiddish-origin features do some non-Jews use?
Two researchers from Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion have begun to answer these questions. Linguist Sarah Bunin Benor, assistant professor of contemporary Jewish studies and sociologist Steven M. Cohen, research professor of Jewish social policy have released the results of a large-scale survey of Jews and non-Jews in the United States.
The online survey began in the summer of 2008 with an e-mail invitation to about 600 people, and within 6 weeks, over 40,000 people around the world had participated. For the analysis, the researchers limited the sample to native English speakers who grew up and currently live in the United States: 25,179 Jews and 4,874 non-Jews.
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Book review by David Broida, JSPAN Board member
Everyone knows about illegal immigration, and everyone comes into contact with illegal immigrants. You see them at the quick stop store, working on lawns of estates large and small, cleaning your office building after hours, working in the kitchens of the restaurants you frequent, standing on corners looking for work, in the Home Depot parking lot. Mostly, though, you don’t know them personally, especially if you don’t speak Spanish.
But even if we don’t know immigrants, legal or otherwise, everyone has a personal family story of immigration. In my case, my grandfather, in his native Galicia, in Dynow, was just one step ahead of the Polish army recruiter, who wanted him for a 25-year enlistment. After his mother shooed him into a back room, and shortly after the recruiter had left, he quickly made plans at age 18 to come to America, where he would meet up in 1902 with his brother, who had followed the same plot line two years previously . My grandfather, coming to America legally, had all the breaks and accrued all the advantages of the “Goldene Medina” (the golden country). Lucky me!
In her spellbinding new book, Just Like Us, Helen Thorpe, a freelance writer who has written magazine stories for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Observer, among other publications, tackles a modern day immigration story, in which she befriends and follows four immigrant high school girls in Denver through graduation and college. Two are legal, Clara and Elissa,the lucky ones, with Social Security numbers, green cards, and eventually citizenship for one. The other two are not so fortunate. Marisela and Yadira can’t get driver’s licenses, fly on airplanes, get Social Security cards, get jobs legally, open bank accounts, get government-sponsored financial aid for college, or get to the quick stop and back without fear of being caught and deported. Health care is another important divide. They are far away from their extended families in Mexico, unable to cross the border to visit, as their legal counterparts do. In Yadira’s case, she becomes separated from her mother, who has returned to Mexico rather than face jail in the United States.
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On October 7, in the very first week of its new term, The United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Salazar v. Buono, a “church-state” case so significant that JSPAN as well as other national Jewish organizations filed amicus curiae (for those of our readers who have forgotten their high school Latin, “friend of the Court”) briefs. Judah Labovitz, Ted Mann and Jeffrey Pasek, three of the brief’s four authors (Barry Ungar being the fourth), travelled to Washington to hear the arguments.
In the last term, JSPAN filed an amicus brief in the Summum church-state case. Ted and Jeff attended that argument and the side we supported ultimately prevailed. But this time there were two new faces: the new junior Justice, Sonia Sotomajor, and the new Solicitor General of the United States, Elana Kagan, who argued the case for the government (the wrong side in our view, but that’s her job).
In the piece below, Judah Labovitz describes the facts in the case and, at the end, explains why it is so difficult to predict how it will turn out, and why it is of special importance to the Jewish community.
On October 7, 2009, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of Salazar v. Buono, in which JSPAN had filed an amicus brief in support of Frank Buono. Mr. Buono, a retired Park Service employee and practicing Catholic, brought suit challenging the presence of a Latin Cross atop Sunrise Rock, government owned property in the Mojave National Preserve, as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The cross had been erected by a VFW post as a memorial to members of the Armed Forces who lost their lives in the First World War, and a plaque below the cross so stated.
After the suit was started but not yet decided, Congress sought to preserve the cross by designating it as a National Monument and authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to spend up to $10,000 to restore the cross and the plaque.
In its initial opinion, the District Court concluded that Mr. Buono, who had altered his conduct in his visits to the Preserve to avoid encountering the cross, had standing to maintain the action and that the presence of the cross on federal land violated the Establishment Clause. The court therefore entered an injunction prohibiting the government from “permitting” the cross to be displayed on Sunrise Rock. Read the rest of this entry »
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