The attack on Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery stunned me. My family, and most Jews I know in St. Louis, have family members buried there. On top of a third wave of bomb threats against of Jewish Community Centers, the times in which we live seem horrific.
Right now, people are afraid to send their kids to school or after-school programs because of the potential threats to their safety.
People are worried that their kids might not come home from school.
We worry that the government is run by white supremacists and that it does not care about your safety or your property.
How many more times will our ancestors’ graves be desecrated? Will we not be able to find our forebearers?
And what is to come?
Is it possible the Jews will be forced to attend second-rate segregated schools with fewer resources?
Will there be a disproportionate number of Jews incarcerated or facing the criminal justice system?
Is it possible that there will be state-sanctioned murder of Jews as they go about their daily business?
For those of us who are Jewish, many of these questions are becoming a reality, but for many groups, these fears are all too real. All of these theoretical possibilities are part of the lived experience of African Americans, Muslims and most immigrants in the United States. We know about the disproportionate killings of black folks from law enforcement, i.e. the state. In St. Louis, we also know that living in adjacent zip codes can mean a difference of ten years of life expectancy, and usually those zip codes are the difference between black and white neighborhoods.
As soon as Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery was vandalized, the mainstream Muslim community put out a call. They raised significant money and came in person to help do work. The mainstream Jewish community in St. Louis has never raised any money for the Muslim community. In fact, after the Ferguson uprising, the mainstream Jewish community only condemned the rioting. Two and a half years later, there are still no appreciable changes to daily life for African Americans in the St. Louis region.
The reactions within the Jewish community to the larger world continue to surprise me. In December, I went to an exhibition at the New Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Through art, it demonstrated that past trauma endured by our ancestors is visible in their descendants today. I believe that. That trauma is visible in us, in black folks, in Muslims, and in everyone whose ancestors and contemporaries live in fear of a discriminatory system.
My lived and learned history of the Jews in the United States reflects a drive towards justice, not towards insularity and support for the status quo. Jews were over-represented among white folks in the civil rights movement, and, including my grandfather, as socialists within the labor movement.
Many of us as Jews in the United States have a fair amount of privilege. We disproportionately are middle and upper-middle class, and the vast majority of us pass for white. Maybe because of our privileges, we are forgetting that history. The time is now to revisit and relearn it. We must now recognize that we are all under threat, not just from white supremacy, but from a corporate system determined to extract every once of wealth from poor and working folks and transfer it upwards to the rich. Wealth is sometimes about money, but it is also about extraction of natural resources from the ground, creating an existential threat to the planet. Trump’s cabinet is a toxic stew of hedge fund owners, bankers and oil executives, all of whom are conspiring to create a system to enrich themselves and their cronies, while drilling and mining anywhere they can. For Exxon and the State Department, the fear of climate change is mitigated by the knowledge that the melted Arctic ice creates more room for oil exploration.
A narrow approach towards stanching anti-Semitism might make a few of us more safe, or help us move into large “sanctuary” cities. But justice and sustainability is much more. This experience of our vulnerability gives us the chance to reflect and think about the world we want to shape, and the tikkun olam, the healing of the world, we need to achieve it.
We are all under attack, Jews, Muslims, women, people of color. Our liberation is bound together. Imagine a world where our schools were not only safe, but where everyone had the right not only to a basic education but to a world-class one, with new science equipment, small class sizes and specialized instruction for kids with special needs? What if every woman had the right to make the reproductive health decisions she needed to make for her body, and for her chosen family? And while we are talking about liberation, why stop dreaming? What if we guaranteed every family an income so they could meet their basic needs. We would still ask people to do some hours every week for the common good, picking up trash, caring for the elderly, but each one of us would have a lot less work, and more time to spend with creative pursuits and our families. And speaking of that guaranteed income, why not combine it with guaranteed housing for all? We do not know which struggles will lead to which changes, or which changes snowball into other changes. However, we have both an opportunity and an obligation to do good. As Rabbi Tarfon in the famous lessons from the ancestors said, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.”
As we live through the fifth wave of bomb threats on Jewish institutions, we realize we are in both a unique and terrifying moment. As scared as so many people are, we are taking to the streets like never before. With so many of us organized, and understanding our shared struggle like never before, let us take advantage of the moment, and struggle together to build the world in which we want to live.
The Splits 