Antisemitism increasing under Trumpziism lies

Chilling opinion echo by Dana Milbank published in The Washington Post: 

On the holiest night of the Jewish year earlier this month, my rabbi looked up from his Kol Nidre* sermon — a homily about protecting America’s liberal democracy — and posed a question that wasn’t in his prepared text: “How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room conversation where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?”

He was talking about the unthinkable: that Jews might need to flee the United States. In the congregation, many hands — most? — went up.

The fear of exile has become common as Jews see the unraveling rule of law, ascendant Christian nationalists and anti-Israel sentiments turning antisemitic on the far left. 

Wondering where Jews might move “is among the most frequently asked questions that I get,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

The sermon included a quotation from the Jewish scholar Michael Holzman: “For American Jews, the disappearance of liberal democracy would be a disaster. … We have flourished under the shelter of the principles behind the First Amendment, and we have been protected by the absolute belief in the rule of law. Without these, Jews, start packing suitcases.”

Incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault nearly tripled between 2015, and 2021, the ADL reports, and it says 2022, attacks are on pace with last year’s record level. This week was the fourth anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, which was followed by other synagogue attacks in 2019 and earlier this year. One in 4 U.S. Jews has experienced antisemitism in the past year.

Oven ready! Challah breads. Homemade challah, both before and after the Yom Kippur fast. (Thanks to my friend Robin.)

Now we have Kanye West, who is unleashing a torrent of filth on social media (“death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”), white supremacists applauding him (and giving Nazi salutes to Los Angeles motorists), Elon Musk’s Twitter preparing to welcome white supremacists, and the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee deploying antisemitism against his Jewish opponent.

The leader of the Republican Party, who remains the top presidential contender for 2024, reacted to Ye’s attacks on Jews by saying, “He was really nice to me.” Donald Trump compared Jews unfavorably to “our wonderful Evangelicals” and warned Jews to “get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late.”

The threat was the latest of many Trump claims that Jews have a dual loyalty and are not fully American. As usual, Republicans were mostly silent.

Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania was assaulted by a terrorist on October 27, 2018.

For Jews, just 2 percent of the population but the targets of 55 percent of reported religiously motivated hate crimes, the trend revives centuries-old fears.

This is not to compare Jewish victimhood to other groups that have had it much worse in this country; most Jews are White and benefit from associated privilege. But until the American experiment, Jews in the diaspora were marginalized, ghettoized, persecuted and eventually converted, exiled or killed. “As Jews, we know at some point the music stops,” Greenblatt said. “This is burned into the collective consciousness of every Jewish person.”

The United States has, until now, been different because of our constitutional protections for minority rights: our bedrock principles of equal treatment under law, free expression and free exercise of religion. Now, the MAGA crowd is attacking the very notion of minority rights. Ascendant Christian nationalists, with a sympathetic Supreme Court, are dismantling the separation between church and state. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), for example, calls the principle “junk that’s not in the Constitution” and claims “the church is supposed to direct the government.” Red states, again with an agreeable Supreme Court, are rolling back minority voting rights and decades of civil rights protections. And leading it all is Trump, threatening violence and going to “war with the rule of law,” as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) puts it.

Without these protections, there is no safety in the United States for Jews — or, really, for any of us. In a perverse sense, Trump’s MAGA movement shares the fear of becoming a persecuted minority. The whole notion of the bogus “great replacement” conspiracy belief is that some nefarious elite is scheming to import immigrants of color to marginalize White people.

In reality, it will be almost a quarter-century before White people are no longer a majority in this country — and they should remain a plurality well into the next century, at least. But if white nationalists truly fear becoming an oppressed minority, the best way to guard against that is to fortify minority rights. The rule of law protects us — all of us — from tyranny.

I admit I’ve thought about where my family might go if the worst happened here. But we’re not going anywhere. The only choice is to stay and fight for our liberal democracy. As my rabbi, Danny Zemel, put it on Kol Nidre: “If there is a Jewish message for our time, it is to support our great experiment with every fiber of our being.”

If it isn’t safe here in America, then it won’t be safe anywhere.

*A prayer sung in Jewish synagogues at the beginning of the service on the eve of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).

Sacred Space - Sacred World- published in the Jewish Herald Voice in Houston Texas

HOUSTON - Local Jewish and Catholic students organized a series of interfaith community service projects as an extension of learning about each other’s faith traditions.

Jewish Herald Voice a weekly community newspaper serving the Jewish community of Texas' Gulf Coast. It is headquartered in Upper Kirby, Houston. Established in 1908, it bills itself as the longest-running Jewish paper in the Southwest.

By Michael C. Duke JHV

High schoolers from The Emery/Weiner School, Strake Jesuit in Houston and St. Agnes Academy participated in a Catholic-Jewish Summit, Feb. 20-21, where they explored the theme of “scared space, sacred world.”

In addition to spending time on each other’s campuses, summit participants had the opportunity to visit St. Anne’s Catholic Church, Emanu El synagogue and Rothko Chapel. At the conclusion of the summit, representatives from each school agreed to host a community service project that would involve students from the other schools.

On March 9, Strake plans to host a community service project benefiting the Houston Food Bank. On March 22, St. Agnes will host a project at the Nehemiah Center**. EWS will host the third project, on March 29, at Aishel House.

The service projects represent the shared desire to put one’s faith into action, students said.

Throughout the two-day summit, participants shared different religious perspectives and found common ground among each other, they noted.

“Diversity is really important to me,” said Katelyn Needler, a St. Agnes 11th-grader who participated in the summit. “I want to get to know other people and listen to their stories.

“This summit offers a good way to ask questions in a safe space and get to know other people,” she told the JHV.

Samuel Hausman-Weiss is an EWS junior who was part of the student leadership team that helped plan this year’s summit as a follow-up to last year’s inaugural event. Both summits were sponsored by the Lowenstein Foundation*, with support from the Anti-Defamation League’s Southwest Regional office.

“Our theme this year is scared space, sacred world,” Hausman-Weiss told the JHV. “I want people to come away from this summit believing that their sacred space can go beyond their house of worship.

“We have the ability to expand the impact of our sacred space by engaging in community service,” he said.

Damian Barrientos is a junior at Strake who said the summit helped him appreciate both the differences and the similarities between Judaism and Catholicism. He said the summit led him to discover that the two faith traditions have more in common than he previously thought.

“Obviously, there are contrasts, but I’m interested in seeing different worldviews and how those lead people to action,” Barrientos told the JHV.

“I’m big on empathizing with other people,” he said. “I want to change the world for the better. I’ve met new friends, here, who share the same goal. These are people who can talk and do service projects together to help our communities.”

Anthony Kim, another Stake junior, helped answer questions that the Jewish students asked about his Catholic faith.

“We believe that Jesus was the primordial sacrament and that he was the final sacrifice to G-d,” explained Kim, in response to a question that asked why Catholics don’t follow all the rules of the “Old Testament.”

“We believe that Jesus perfected the rules of the Old Testament,” he said. “We still follow the rules of the 10 Commandments, but we’ve expanded upon that to target the individual sin.”

Stuart Dow, EWS’ head of school, helped the Catholic students understand why Jews in the Diaspora feel a special connection to the State of Israel.

“For Jews all over the world, the Land of Israel is a sacred space and a sacred place,” Dow said. “Why? Because it was part of the original covenant [between G-d and the Jewish people].

“A tremendous number of the commandments in the Torah can only be performed in the Land of Israel,” he said. “There’s a religious piece to it, and then it becomes a mindset. Whether you’re observant and really religious or not, Jews all over the world talk about and feel this connection to where it [Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood] all started.”

Joe Weinstein-Sears is EWS’ director of Jewish Life and teaches upper school history at Houston’s largest Jewish day school. He helped lead the summit and gave a primer on Judaism, explaining that Judaism, despite its diversity, can be summed up in three concepts: the oneness and centrality of G-d; the special covenant that G-d has with the Jewish people; and the value that Jewish people put on community.

Alexis Diaz-Waterman, an EWS junior, had the opportunity to share her journey toward embracing Judaism.

With parents who “weren’t religious at all,” Diaz-Waterman explained that she grew up “not really knowing what religion was.” As she got older, Diaz-Waterman began to search for religion, she noted. She attended classes on Catholicism and went to a Buddhist temple for a while. Around the same time, her mother began dating a Jewish man, who later became her step-father. That “introduction” to the Jewish community led her to enroll at EWS.

“The thing that I found in Judaism that really spoke to me was the community,” Diaz-Waterman said. “I feel like a lot of the traditions in Judaism are more set around the community and being there for each other, especially in times of hardship.”

Diaz-Waterman noted that her mother’s family is native American, but she learned that other side of her family tree has Jewish roots.

“I really felt close to people in my community, even though I was kind of new to the community,” she said. “I was just introduced to the Jewish community in sixth grade, but I met people who knew my grandparents and heard people talk about Jewish geography a lot.

“That closeness to my community is something that I really enjoy – knowing that I’ll always have that support, wherever I go,” Diaz-Waterman said.

Catholic students, like Katelyn Needler, said they want to expand that sense of support across different faith traditions.

Needler was one of several students who wore a blue ribbon at the summit.

“Since the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last year, I’ve worn this ribbon to show my support,” she told the JHV.

“At last year’s summit, I learned about the similarities between Catholics and Jews,” she said. “This year, I’ve been able to see the differences in those similarities – differences that we should respect and can use to build bridges of understanding.”

*Lowenstein Foundation Mission:

We seek to support organizations that provide transformational solutions to some of our most challenging issues in order to leave the world a better place for future generations.

**Nehemiah Center- A safe haven in which inner-city children are motivated, inspired and equipped to realize their God-given potential. Nehemiah Center provides a high-quality education for students while helping their families get the information and resources necessary to have stability in the home. Today. the Center works with over 500 vulnerable children and their working families annually.

Donald Trump's racism in the face of antisemitism - Michael Cohen statement

In the post 2018 Mid Term Election news conference, Donald Trump cruelly read a list of names of candidates who lost their elections. His horrendous lie about the #BlueWave was to claim that the candidates lost their elections because they did not "embrace him". He never mentioned the negative public response to the Hollywood Access tape, to the Trump "both sides" response about Charlottesville or the heinous massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Michael Cohen is talking about the racist "real  Donald Trump".

Donald Trump's inappropriate response to both the Charlottesville white supremicist assaults and his insensitivity to the burial of the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre are consistent with the racist he really is. In fact, Trump's Twitter handle is @realDonaldTrump and nearly all of the Tweets he writes are caustic.

Mourners gathered in Pittsburgh to honor and remember the victims of the harrowing attack on the Tree of Life synagogue. 

Reported by Emily Jane Fox in Vanity Fair's  The Hive

As he awaits sentencing, Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen says that he wants to clear his conscience and warn voters about what he sees as the president’s true nature.

Days earlier, while observing Shabbat, 11 Jews were murdered. Robert Bowers, the alleged suspect, later told a SWAT officer that he wanted all Jews to die. (Bowers has since pleaded not guilty.) 

The tragedy united thousands of Jews in Pittsburgh, who peacefully protested Donald Trump’s visit to the synagogue earlier this week. It also consumed a far larger constituency, which remained aghast that the alleged killer was motivated by fear fanned by the president of the United States.

Michael Cohen*, the president’s former lawyer (who plead guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, in the Robert Mueller investigation), was among those closely following the tragic story. 

Cohen is the son of a Holocaust survivor.

But, Cohen remained largely silent since the F.B.I. executed search warrants on his home, hotel room, and office this past spring. In August, he pleaded guilty to charges related to campaign-finance violations and tax fraud, and at the advice of counsel, he has not spoken publicly about his case or his relationship with the president ever since. Privately, he has been cooperating with investigators in the Southern District of New York, the special counsel’s office, and New York State. (He faces sentencing in the Southern District next month.) Yet Cohen wanted to express himself in the wake of the tragedy. Shortly after the sun rose on Tuesday, he tweeted, “In honor of those sadly being buried today resulting from #AntiSemitism #PittsburghSynagogueShooting, let’s follow the wisdom and thoughtful words of #RabbiJeffreyMyers ‘it can’t just be to say we need to stop hate. We need to do, we need to act to tone down rhetoric.’”

Like many, Cohen has observed the president’s scorched-earth campaign tactics as the midterm elections approach, and as the prospect of a Democratic House majority beckons, with its attendant promise of investigations and inquiries. 

He heard Trump’s constantly negative invocation of the migrant caravan moving through Central America; he’s noticed the president threaten to revoke birthright citizenship; he’s noted Trump’s tweet calling Florida’s African-American gubernatorial candidate, Andrew Gillum, a “thief,” without any evidence. 

He also watched Trump shirk responsibility after it was discovered that Bowers invoked the caravan in posts online ahead of the mass murder in Pittsburgh, and after one of his ardent supporters was charged last week with mailing pipe bombs to notable Democrats and other frequent Trumpian targets. (The suspect plans to plead not guilty.) On Twitter and during rallies, Trump has referred to the media as “the enemy of the people,”

blaming the free press for “the anger we see today in our society.”

That message rang hollow to those most familiar with the president and his language, including Cohen, who said he has spent the last several months quietly reflecting on his former boss and his own role in the Trump Organization. Amid the president’s recent tirades, Cohen has re-registered as a Democrat and urged people on Twitter to vote in the midterm elections, calling it possibly “the most important vote in our lifetime.” He said that events also activated within him an urge to reveal details from his tenure at the Trump Organization, during which he said the president privately uttered chilling, racist language in one-on-one conversations. On Tuesday, the day of the first funerals in Pittsburgh, he shared some of these memories.

Certainly, Cohen is aggrieved, and his credibility has been questioned by the president, his lawyers, and others. His allegations could inflame the very divisions that he’s said he wants to diffuse. Through the president’s public attacks against him, he stayed silent, as his lawyers advised, and he’s taken a risk in sharing these recollections on the record. When I asked him why he was coming forward now with such uncomfortable claims, Cohen was clear: he knew that the president’s private comments were worse than his public rhetoric, and he wanted to offer potential voters what he believed was evidence of Trump’s character and to do so in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

During our conversation, Cohen recalled a discussion at Trump Tower, following the then-candidate’s return from a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen had watched the rally on TV and noticed that the crowd was largely Caucasian. He offered this observation to his boss. “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’” (The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

This conversation, he noted, was reminiscent of an exchange that the two men had engaged in years earlier, after Nelson Mandela’s death. “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’” Cohen recalled, a statement that echoed the president’s alleged comments about African nations earlier this year. (White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (aka by MaineWriter - Morticia) denied those comments at the time. She added that “no one here is going to pretend like the president is always politically correct—he isn’t.” She subsequently noted that it was “one of the reasons the American people love him.” - uhh-ahh, although 56 % do not).

Cohen also recounted a conversation he had with Trump in the late 2000s, while they were traveling to Chicago for a Trump International Hotel board meeting. “We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” After the first few seasons of The Apprentice, Cohen recalled how he and Trump were discussing the reality show and past season winners. The conversation wended its way back to the show’s first season, which ended in a head-to-head between two contestants, Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson. “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’” (Jackson told me that he had heard that the president made such a comment. “My response to Trump is simple and Wakandan,” he said, referring to the fictional African country where Black Panther hails from. “‘Not today, colonizer!’”)

In retrospect, Cohen told me that he wishes he had quit the Trump Organization when he heard these offensive remarks. “I should have been a bigger person, and I should have left,” he said. He didn’t, he said, because he grew numb to the language and, in awe of the job, forgave his boss’s sins. 

Cohen, in fact, even defended the president publicly against charges of racism. Last year, he explicitly tweeted as much. 

Moreover, Cohen explained that he defended the president because he thought the magnitude of the office would eventually force him to be more judicious with his words. “I truly thought the office would change him,” he said. But it hasn’t, Cohen continued. In fact, he said, it has exacerbated his rhetoric.

Cohen’s claims would damage most presidents. Trump, however, survived the Access Hollywood tape in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

In fact, incredulously, Trump's supporters stayed with him after his jarring “both sides” comment regarding the racial violence in Charlottesville, and didn’t bend when Omarosa Manigault Newman accused him of using vile racial language after she left the White House. (Trump referred to her as “that dog” after her book came out.) When Trump portrayed Brett Kavanaugh as a man under siege, his poll numbers went up. Trump seems to perform best with his base when he appears like his back is up against the wall. For Cohen’s part, he said he is hoping that people bear his words in mind as they vote (...in 2018 and in the future).

*Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer, has reached a plea deal with prosecutors.

• He entered guilty pleas to five counts of tax evasion, one count of making a false statement to a bank, one count of making an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an illegal campaign finance contribution.
• Cohen is the focus of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York into whether he violated campaign-finance laws, committed bank fraud or wire fraud, engaged in illegal lobbying, or participated in other crimes.

Pittsburgh trauma surgeon: "Stop the Bleed" and "stop the need"

Matthew D. Neal, MD FACS
Roberta G. Simmons Assistant Professor of Surgery, University of Pittsburgh

I am a trauma surgeon who cared for many of the critically wounded victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. 

Tree of Life Synagogue trauma scene in Pittsburgh PA

As we raced to find the source of blood loss in one of the most severely injured patients, one of my trauma surgeon partners, a U.S. Army veteran of multiple tours, joined me in the operating room to assist.

His first comment upon seeing the injuries that we were managing struck me. He said he last saw such destruction from military weaponry when he was serving in Afghanistan.

Two doors down, a second badly injured patient arrived to the operating room with extensive injuries to multiple extremities from a burst of gunfire.

Although the patient’s blood pressure was perilously low, the bleeding had been stopped prior to surgery by tourniquets applied to the limbs. Additional victims arrived, again with potentially life- and limb-threatening injuries rendered by an assault rifle, but all had received lifesaving care even prior to arrival at the hospital.

Some of this is due to an approach called tactical emergency care, where specially trained teams of physicians and emergency medical service practitioners respond and provide care along with law enforcement. A brave team of providers entered Tree of Life under active fire, along with the SWAT team. The early identification of injured victims allowed for rapid transport from the scene to our trauma center, providing the opportunity to save lives that would have otherwise been lost.

While all of the patients who arrived at our trauma centers in Pittsburgh are alive today, the sense of accomplishment and pride associated with this is blunted and seemingly selfish in the face of the carnage that occurred. No one will say “it could have been worse,” because the magnitude of this massacre that impacted the world and my hometown of Pittsburgh is incomprehensible.

Nonetheless, many of the surviving victims who will live to amplify and strengthen the message of unity that emerged in the days that followed are alive because of the evolution of a system of pre-hospital care that has necessarily changed the way the lay public, law enforcement and emergency medical care respond to intentional mass injury events.

Stop the Bleed

In the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the “Stop the Bleed” program emerged as a way to empower the public to act as immediate responders. Dr. Lenworth Jacobs, a trauma surgeon at the Hartford Hospital, recognized that the skills and tools to stop bleeding could not help when confined to a hospital setting during a mass casualty or intentional mass injury event.

That’s because a person can bleed to death in as little as five minutes, and thus time is critical in bleeding control.

Jacobs led the effort to create Stop the Bleed, a program to enhance survivability after such events. It is an initiative of the American College of Surgeons and the Hartford Consensus, and it seeks to promote the message that anyone can save a life.

Supported by the White House, Stop the Bleed originated in October 2015 with the goal of making education on bleeding control as common as CPR training.

Stop the Bleed teaches basic bleeding control techniques and provides tools, such as wound packing and tourniquets, to the general public should they need to respond to life-threatening bleeding.

Pittsburgh had prepared for such an event

Having faced intentional mass injury events in the Pittsburgh region, both in schools and our own hospital system, our team of trauma surgeons immediately began to push this public health initiative.

Through generous philanthropic support by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a partnership with the Copeland Regional Trauma Council, we embarked upon the ambitious task of teaching Stop the Bleed throughout the region, with a goal of providing a tourniquet to every law enforcement officer and a bleeding control kit in every public school building.

We recognized that teachers and law enforcement are frequently the immediate responders to horrific events such as shootings, and we sought to empower those people with the tools and techniques to save a life. The program has grown rapidly in our region, with over 37,000 people trained, over 500 bleeding control kits distributed, and over 9,000 tourniquets provided to law enforcement officers, including the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police and the Pennsylvania State Police.

My trauma colleagues and I estimate that tourniquets applied by police officers and emergency medical services at the scene of the massacre at Tree of Life saved the lives of at least three victims.
Synagogue members in Squirrel Hill asked for training

Early in our regional initiative, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation recognized the critical importance of Stop the Bleed.

In a forward thinking and proactive manner, they supported the training of the Jewish community and purchased bleeding control kits for every synagogue in the city of Pittsburgh.

I vividly remember teaching the classes at synagogues in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I would lead every class with the disclaimer that we hoped this training would never be necessary but that the community needed to be prepared.

Finding that some members of the public were at times overwhelmed by the training, I would frequently take my 9-year-old son along with me. Volunteering his time to teach and understand the issues was a valuable lesson for him, but it also provided strong evidence that “everyone” can indeed save a life by having a young child expertly demonstrate the basic skills of bleeding control. My son taught with me in Squirrel Hill synagogues, and while he taught community members how to apply tourniquets, they taught him about their place of worship, their community and their faith.

When I finally returned home from the hospital the night of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I faced the challenge that all parents faced that day: how to explain what happened to my young child. With more resilience and poise than I could maintain, he asked me important questions. He asked me if this had happened where he had taught Stop the Bleed.

I said yes.

He asked me whether Stop the Bleed had helped people. I said yes.

He asked whether people had died. Through tears, I told him that many had.

And then the question to which I had no simple answer: “Daddy, why wasn’t Stop the Bleed enough to help them?”

Stop the need

The heroics of pre-hospital care and the efforts of our community to promote Stop the Bleed are extraordinary, but they are designed as a response to a series of public health crises that remain unaddressed. The number and magnitude of the wounds that we treated are irrefutably and indisputably the consequence of a weapon that, I believe, has no place in civilian life. 

Would the assailant have killed and maimed so many with a lesser weapon? Perhaps.

But as the first surgeon to lay hands on one of the victims of that horrible day, I submit to you with unabashed confidence that this was worse due to the use of a high-powered semi-automatic weapon. The dialogue about this issue often falls short on data, owing largely to the lack of dedicated federal funding for gun violence research.

Despite the rise in preventable deaths by firearms, the research into how and why remains largely unfunded. The complexities of understanding the role of mental illness, racism and religious prejudice in such events leave me with no easy answers to my son’s query.

However, I would submit that Stop the Bleed is an example of how we can start. This program mobilized trauma surgeons, largely warriors of reactive medicine, as champions of prevention. If we, as a community, can enact such a grassroots effort in public health to save lives, it is incumbent upon us to champion the next cause.

The unaddressed complexities of our modern public health epidemic in gun violence deserve the immediate and full attention of the medical community. Research from our trauma colleagues has shown that assault weapons bans save lives, and our professional organizations have provided position statements of varying strengths to support interventions to stop gun violence. The rally cries and calls to action occur after each of these events.

In days to weeks, Pittsburgh will be replaced by another location subjected to this horror. Another physician responder may write a similar piece. I have no answer as to how to make this time different.

What I know, however, is that as a basic public health initiative, Stop the Bleed has saved innumerable lives. If we can organize phase II of this remarkable response to attack even the smallest fraction of our modern epidemic, we can save more.

Please help me answer my son.

#March4OurLives

A Prayer for Pittsburgh - Christian Science Monitor

A prayer for Pittsburgh and for all the victims who suffered in the 

Tree of Life  Synagogue massacre.

Published in the Christian Science Monitor at this link

“Let all that now divides us remove and pass away,” urges the 

hymn in today’s column, which points to peace and unity, not 

division and hate, as normal and natural.

October 29, 2018

Now is the time approaching,

     By prophets long foretold,

When all shall dwell together,

     One Shepherd and one fold.

Now Jew and Gentile, meeting

     From many a distant shore,

Around one altar kneeling,

     One common Lord adore.

Let all that now divides us

     Remove and pass away,

Like shadows of the morning

     Before the blaze of day.

Let all that now unites us

     More sweet and lasting prove,

A closer bond of union,

     In a blest land of love.

– Jane Borthwick, “Christian Science Hymnal” (1932), No. 196

Antisemitism - lessons from history have *not* deterred the evil

By Ingrid Anderson: Update about antisemitism published in The Conversation an electronic newsletter where essays are made available in the public domain. 

Associate Director of Jewish Studies, Lecturer, Arts & Sciences Writing Program, Boston University

The shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. Eleven people were killed when the gunman burst in on the congregation’s morning worship service carrying an assault rifle and three handguns.

Read the names of the victims who were killed at this link here.

The suspect, Robert Bowers, is reported to be a frequent user of Gab, a social networking site that has becoming increasingly popular among white nationalists and other alt-right groups. He is alleged to have regularly reposted anti-Semitic slurs, expressed virulent anti-immigrant sentiments, called immigrants “invaders,” and claimed that Jews are “the enemy of white people.”

The magnitude of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre may be unprecedented, but it is only the latest in the series of hate crimes against Jews. In February 2017, more than 100 gravestones were vandalized at a cemetery outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and at another Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. Indeed, hate crimes have been on an increase against minority religions, people of color and immigrants. In the 10 days following the 2016 presidential election, nearly 900 hate-motivated incidents were reported, many on college campuses. Many of these incidents targeted Muslims, people of color and immigrants, along with Jews.

This outpouring of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment is reminiscent in many ways of the political climate during the years between the first and second world wars in the U.S. or the interwar period.

Star of David

America as the ‘melting pot’
In its early years, the United States maintained an “open door policy” that drew millions of immigrants from all religions to enter the country, including Jews. Between 1820 and 1880, over 9 million immigrants entered America.

As a Jewish studies scholar, I am all too aware that by the early 1880s, American nativists – people who believed that the “genetic stock” of Northern Europe was superior to that of Southern and Eastern Europe – began pushing for the exclusion of “foreigners,” whom they “viewed with deep suspicion.”

In fact, as scholar Barbara Bailin writes, most of the immigrants, who were from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, “were considered so different in composition, religion, and culture from earlier immigrants as to trigger a xenophobic reaction that served to generate more restrictive immigration laws.”

In August 1882, Congress responded to increasing concerns about America’s “open door” policy and passed the Immigration Act of 1882, which included a provision denying entry to “any convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself without becoming a public charge.”

However, enforcement was not strict, in part because immigration officers working at the points of entry were expected to implement these restrictions as they saw fit.

In fact, it was during the late 19th century that the American “melting pot” was born: Nearly 22 million immigrants from all over the world entered the U.S. between 1881 and 1914.

They included approximately 1,500,000 million European Jews hoping to escape the longstanding legally enforced anti-Semitism of many parts of the European continent, which limited where Jews could live, what kinds of universities they could attend and what kinds of professions they could hold.
Fear of Jews and immigrants

Nativists continued to rail against the demographic shifts and in particular took issue with the high numbers of Jews and Southern Italians entering the country.

These fears were eventually reflected in the makeup of Congress, since the electorate voted increasing numbers of nativist congresspeople into office who vowed to change immigration laws with their constituent’s anti-immigrant sentiments in mind.

Nativist and isolationist sentiment in America only increased, as Europe fell headlong into World War I, “the war to end all wars.” On Feb. 4, 1917, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which reversed America’s open door policy and denied entry to the majority of immigrants seeking entry. 

As a result, between 1918 and 1921, only 20,019 Jews were admitted into the U.S.

The 1924 Immigration Act tightened the borders further. It transferred the decision to admit or deny immigrants from the immigration officers at the port of entry to the Foreign Services Office, which issued visas after the completion of a lengthy application with supporting documentation.

The quotas established by the act also set strict limits on the number of new immigrants allowed after 1924. The number of Central and Eastern Europeans allowed to enter the U.S. was dramatically reduced.

The 1924 quotas provided visas to a mere 2 percent of each nationality already in the U.S by 1890. They excluded immigrants from Asia completely, except for immigrants from Japan and the Philippines. The stated fundamental purpose of this immigration act was to preserve the ideal of U.S. “homogeneity.”

Congress did not revise the act until 1952.

Why does this history matter?
The political climate of the interwar period has many similarities with the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic environment today.

President Trump’s platform is comprised in large part of strongly anti-immigrant rhetoric. A Pew Charitable Trust survey shows that as many as 66 percent of registered voters who supported Trump consider immigration a “very big problem,” while only 17 percent of Hillary Clinton’s supporters said the same.

Moreover, 59 percent of Trump supporters actively associate “unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal behavior.”

President Trump’s claims about the dangers posed by immigrants are not be supported by facts; but they do indicate increased isolationism, nativism and right-wing nationalism within the U.S. All over again, we see anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Semitism, going hand in hand.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 2, 2017.

The premonition of Charlottesville ~ echo from Jewish news in South Africa!

White Supremacist flag

Donald Trump and White Supremacist cults on notice. 

Charlottesville is an international metaphor for hate. This echo opinion was published in the Jewish Report, in Johannesburg, South Africa! Although it was written in August 2017, the message was prophetic in tone because it could also have been written on Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath), Saturday October 27, 2018, from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania's Tree of Life Synagogue.*

There are many aspects of the Charlottesville, Virginia rally that one can discuss. One thing that struck me was the sight of the Confederate flag side by side with the Nazi flag. 

Ghostly image - The KKK and neo-Nazis marching together.

These groups demonise “the other”.
by Michele Engelberg, Johannesburg | Aug 24, 2017

Jews and people of colour should realise that, when it comes to such closed-minded people like those who were with *Unite the Right* in Charlottesville, the distance between anti- Semitism and racism based on colour, is not far.

We have both suffered greatly in our histories at the hands of those who hate us, just because of what we are. Africans and Jews would do well to recognise this. We should work together to strengthen our ties… because we actually have a lot in common.

Jewish + African-Americans = work together to fight White Supremacists and Antisemitism!

*USAToday:  The Jewish congregants- reported by Marco della Cava and Elizabeth Weise:  They were together to celebrate life, but were met by death. Most never had a chance. Just before 10 a.m. Saturday, suspected gunman Robert Bowers, 46, burst into the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh and, yelling "All Jews must die," killed 11 before himself being wounded and taken into custody.

Victims who were murdered in the synagogue were:

• Joyce Fienberg, 75, of Oakland;
• Richard Gottfried, 65, of Ross;
• Rose Mallinger, 97, of Squirrel Hill;
• Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, of Edgewood;
• brothers Cecil Rosenthal, 59, of Squirrel Hill, and David Rosenthal, 54, of Squirrel Hill;
• married couple Bernice Simon, 84, of Wilkinsburg; Sylvan Simon, 86, of Wilkinsburg;
• Daniel Stein, 71, of Squirrel Hill;
• Melvin Wax, 88, of Squirrel Hill;
• Irving Younger, 69, of Mount Washington