“We’re not asking for special treatment or an exemption from criticism. We just want to be treated like any other marginalized group — with dignity and kindness, and with the real promise to stand in solidarity with us even when that requires hard work.”
Source: Mirah Curzer, “Does Your Progressivism Include Jews? Or, How to Criticize Israel Without Being Anti-Semitic”
“The lesson I learned in Charlottesville was simple: when the racist- neo-Nazi- ‘alt-right’ gathers in your backyard, it is up to us to SHOW UP and make it known that they are not welcome. There is no room here to be passive. If we do not speak out and speak up now, the consequences can be even more devastating than what has already taken place.
Hineni– I am present. You should be too.”
Source: Shoshanna R. Schechter-Shaffin, “Charlottesville 2017: When the Nazis Come to Your Backyard – It is time to SHOW UP” (eJewish Philanthropy)
“Around our table sat Americans and Israelis; Ashkenazim and Mizrachim; secular, Orthodox, and just plain traditional Jews. We were all family. And so, despite its unconventional nature, I felt that our little reunion was a fitting way to spend Shabbat Tisha B’Av. In fact, it seemed like a glimpse of the World to Come, a time when all Jews unite as one people, with one heart.”
Source: Rebecca Klempner, “A Tisha B’Av Of Joy?” (Jew in the City)
“Furthermore, anyone who is a true student of the Middle East, including Jews (of which I count myself as one) who deeply empathize with the Palestinian narrative and yearn for a way for these two peoples to find the path to a compromise that honors multiple narratives and needs, knows that it is a gross simplification and distortion of both history and current affairs to present that situation as one in which the Palestinian people are the victims of the Israelis are aggressors. The reality is far more complex and involves international players who have manipulated the situation and not only the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
Source: Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz, “Intersectionality and the Limits of Ideology” (Rabbis Without Borders)
(Yes, I realize that an edit is needed. But I think you get the gist of what she’s saying.)
“He always offered me tea but never anything to eat, as though the onion and bread were part of a ritual reserved for him alone, a Jew from Lvov who had lost everything but the taste for bitterness and dry bread.”
Source: Dalia Rosenfeld’s “The Worlds We Think We Know,” in the short-story collection of the same title, which I am reading now.