Is Union Theological Seminary's president, Serene Jones, a Cherokee?

Serene Jones is a well-regarded theologian: professor at Yale for 17 years, president of Union Theological Seminary for the last 12. She is considered “liberal” in her theology, a characterization which I find less than illuminating. Certainly she questions whether the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. That sounds like a less-than-conservative religious stance. She also treats racism as a sin, which seems to be a politically liberal view, but not theologically, considering Paul’s teachings in the Epistle to the Galatians and the statement in Genesis that we are created in the image of God. And her clear preference for the thinking of John Calvin marks a theological conservatism.

In her 2019 memoir, Call It Grace, Jones returns to a story she has told before, about her racist grandfather, Judge Dick Jones, and about the 1911 lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson in her family’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. She is horrified  by the possibility - perhaps probability - that her family members participated and by the certainty that they at least knew who did…and did nothing about it. But she also makes the claim, all-too-common among white Oklahomans, of Cherokee ancestry.  And I find it deeply disturbing.

Over the last year or so the whole country has been alerted to another Oklahoma-born Ivy League professor’s claim of Cherokee ancestry. President Trump made fun of Senator Elizabeth Warren for it; she doubled down with a DNA test while disclaiming tribal membership. If you insist on seeing issues like this through a partisan lens, that’s what you know. If you listen to Native voices you will have heard anger about her “pretendianism.” Oklahoma is rife with this because of the history of white people stealing Indigenous identity in order to steal tribal land. Angie Debo’s 1936 And Still the Waters Run is the classic account of the multiple forms this swindle took. David Grann’s 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon details the murders of whole families of Osages by white men who married in for their allotments.

Professor Jones’s story is more specific than Senator Warren’s vague story of a Cherokee ancestor. She identifies a great-grandfather - Judge Jones’s father, Redman Jones - as Cherokee. She even tells us in her memoir that Redman Jones was forced to change his race to white at statehood because Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws made it illegal for him to own land as a Cherokee.

Except Native land ownership in Oklahoma was not illegal.

Except Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws applied to Black people but not to Natives.

Except Okemah was located in the Creek Nation, not the Cherokee Nation.

Except it doesn’t take a professional genealogist to find reasons to doubt this story.

The Dawes Allotment Rolls were a comprehensive effort to identify every Native in Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma) before statehood and to issue each of them a parcel of land in order to break up collective ownership by the tribes. This is not the place for a discussion of the reasons for this policy, for the restrictions the legislation placed on immediate sale by the owners, or for the ways unscrupulous lawyers and speculators found to subvert those restrictions. It is enough to say that those rolls provide an early 20th Century census for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes so that people seeking membership today can show their relationship to those people as evidence. The Dawes Rolls are readily available online.

It takes a few seconds to discover that there was no Redman Jones in the Dawes Rolls.

Old US Census records are also readily available online. It takes a few seconds to discover that there was a Redman B. Jones living on Fourth Street in Okemah, Oklahoma at the time of the 1910 census. He was - as Professor Serene Jones says - identified as a white man, with a wife and four children. So is her story correct? Was Redman passing as white? Had his ancestors been forced out of the old Cherokee lands in the southeast on the Trail of Tears?

According to the census, Redman was born in Tennessee, as were his parents. So was his wife Dollie and her parents. So were three of his four children, all except the youngest, the two-year old, who was born in Oklahoma. I find this suggestive, not probative. It suggests that Redman Jones moved to Oklahoma right around the time of statehood and was not a member of a Cherokee family who had been living there since the 1830’s. But it leaves me room for doubt. Perhaps he reported all this to a census worker in order to buttress his claim of whiteness.

It takes a few more minutes to track Redman back to Coffee, Tennessee in the 1880 census, four years old and still white, with two white parents. Here his name is spelled Redmon, so is it the same person? Or is this just an easily-explainable coincidence? Well, if it is the latter then it is more than one coincidence. Back in Tennessee in 1880, four year-old Redmon’s father is named Carroll. In Oklahoma in 1910 Redman’s eight year-old son is also named Carroll. Toddler Redmon’s infant brother is named Alvah. Grown-up Redman has a son named… do I need to spell this out? Okay, his six year-old is also name Alvah.

All of us have family stories. And sometimes our oral history is more accurate than written records. I have spent too much time looking for people in archives who have clearly gone out of their way to make themselves invisible to the authorities. I know people who have trouble proving their identity because at the time of their birth nobody in authority thought it worth documenting. Grown men who played professional baseball with my father-in-law (who would be either 105 or 103 now if he were still with us, the records are unclear) reminisced with him about specific stories of their travels and games. But I find no evidence of him in the archives. I suspect he played under an alias because he was underage when he dropped out of college to play professionally. (14? 16?)

But Professor Jones’s story about her great-grandfather is no invisible in the archives. It is contradicted by them, which is a whole other story. Moreover, it fits a pattern of identity theft that was all too common. I do not blame her for believing what she was told as a child. We all do that. I don’t even blame her for carrying this story into adulthood. I do have some problems, though.

When Professor Jones left Yale for Union Theological Seminary in 2008 the Yale Daily News described her as a member of the Cherokee tribe and said this left Yale with only one Native faculty member to represent and counsel Native students. This is disturbing. It suggests that it wasn’t just her ancestors engaged in identity theft.

The public discussion of Senator Warren’s claims of Cherokee identity dates back at least to the 2012 Senate race when her opponent, Scott Brown, denounced (and mocked) her for it. Just as Yale listed Serene Jones as a Native member of their faculty, Elizabeth Warren was listed as a Native member of the Harvard faculty. By February of 2019, the difference between family story and tribal membership had reached a sufficient volume that Senator Warren issued a public apology for claiming to be Cherokee. She apologized earlier (although privately) to the Cherokee Nation. So why is Dr. Jones still making similar claims six months later in a summer 2019 Chautauqua interview with Krista Tippett that aired on the NPR show On Being in early December? Serene Jones is a theologian, not a historian of Native America. But one might imagine that the very high profile discussions of the very similar case of Elizabeth Warren would at least have triggered some curiosity. Well, that’s what I would imagine.

Moreover, as I noted above, Professor Jones has a lot to say about race, and about personal responsibility. She is curious about her ancestors’ part in the lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson. Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native identity? Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native land? Okemah, Oklahoma was founded in 1902 on the tribal allotments of Mahala and Nocus Fixico, members of the Muskogee Creek Nation. According to federal law, the absolute earliest date on which that land could have been transferred was 1906! (Had you ever wondered why white Oklahomans call themselves “sooners”?) The Fixicos were eventually awarded $50 per acre, but by the Department of the Interior, not by the town of Okemah.

I will just add that the lynching of the Nelson’s was memorialized by the creation of a souvenir picture postcard which was sold in the town of Okemah for years. I will add that the townspeople’s memory of that incident was of their fear that there would be violent retaliation by their Black neighbors. I will add that the word “townspeople” doesn’t require the modifier “white” because Okemah was a sundown town from the time of its founding. I will add that it was the county seat and that Black residents of the county had business in the courts and so a segregated hotel was built to accommodate them, but that it was dynamited in 1907 by - of course - “some persons, who have never been identified, under the cover of darkness.” Some things don’t change. 

We got out about half an hour before dawn this morning. Under the trees there wasn't much moonlight and the only way I could follow the trail was by memory. Prophet had a much easier time with it, but he was preoccupied with some other critters who were still out. Opossums? Raccoons? Coyotes? I have no idea. I just know he was following scent trails into the brush and doing a lot of barking. I also know that I couldn't read his body language because I couldn't see him.

Dawn is so different that dusk because the light is following your eyes' adjustment to the dark instead of the other way around. After the first ten minutes of feeling my way along I was able to walk with more confidence because I could see the rocks and the uneven surface. But I was also able to see the river and the Palisades on the other side. I often get to see the light traveling down the cliffs as the sun rises, even while our side is still in shadows, blocked by the Spuyten Duyvil-Riverdale ridge. This morning, though, I was seeing the cliffs lit more diffusely, by the entire brightening sky. I have no words to describe it, but it was riveting. I kept stopping just to look.

Prophet was still chasing around after those mysterious critters. I am always aware of his parallel sensory universe, in which the landmarks and objects of interest he notes overlap with mine but do not coincide. This morning it seemed as though the overlapping zone was much smaller than usual. We were attending to totally different things and were largely unaware - incapable of being aware - of what was interesting the other.

This dog is a gift. He gets me up and out every day. He gets me looking and thinking. He lifts my spirits. I try to do the same for him.

So the Twitter challenge was:

“if you like ‘the squad’ and hate bernie, please share why! i think saying it out loud will help you realize it’s at least a little silly. or maybe it’ll give the rest of us something to think about, who knows” 

Putting an answer in 240 characters really was tough. The people who responded with some version of “Bernie really had no position on #BlackLivesMatter” got two basic responses:

1. Bernie has gotten much better on that subject
2. Bernie’s programs will really benefit Black people

It is that second answer - invariably given by a white person - that I find so problematic and that I don’t think yields to a tweet-length rejoinder… unless it is calling that white someone out for being so certain they understand racism better than Black people do.

Socialism in America has historically stumbled on the issue of race. Last year at this time I suggested  that Bernie knows this and that it accounts for his move to Vermont half a century ago. I wrote:

In Vermont (95% white) he could talk about labor and capital without talking about race. Brooklyn, where Bernie grew up, is -- by contrast -- 36% white, 35% African American, 20% Latino and 12% Asian. Roughly half the people speak a language other than English when they are in their homes.

Those numbers actually understate the reality. In 1968 the African American population of Vermont was 0.2%. Even today it is only 1%, third lowest in the country after Idaho and Wyoming. But Bernie Sanders was not the first person who decided that his class analysis was clouded by discussion of race. He won’t be the last.

A century ago Eugene V. Debs ran for President of the United States on the Socialist Party line. He didn’t get out to campaign because he was locked up in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his opposition to World War 1. Debs was an opponent of racism in America and in the Socialist Party. He famously wrote: “The man who seeks to arouse prejudice among workingmen is not their friend. He who advises the white wage-worker to look down upon the black wage-worker is the enemy of both." 

There were explicit racists in the Socialist Party of Debs’s day. Victor Berger, the Socialist congressman from Milwaukee, was one. Kate Richards O’Hare, the Socialist candidate for Senator of Missouri was another. Debs said that this view was a “stench in the nostrils of honest men.”

It is important to note that this isn’t American exceptionalism. Throughout the imperialist countries there were people calling themselves “socialist” - leaders of Socialist Parties even - who believed in the “civilizing mission” of colonialism. That’s right, they claimed to be anticapitalist while demanding the wages of whiteness. One hundred years ago those countries were overwhelmingly white and so they could pretend to be parties of the “working class” as if the laboring people in the colonies were something else. Today these countries are home to millions of people from their former colonies and those who object are all open racists. But not here.

But what about the Debs camp? Surely in an era of open and violent disfranchisement, of forcible segregation, of frequent public lynching any socialist who believed in human equality would have spoken out against the structure of white supremacy? No. Here’s Debs himself again:

I have said and say again that, properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question—the working class struggle. Our position as Socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.” The capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colors, on the other side

Nothing about lynching. Nothing about phony literacy tests or poll taxes. Nothing about segregation. And it all sounds terribly familiar, too. When Bernie supporters say “He is pursuing social programs that would improve the lives of vast majority of black people” they are making the exact same point as Debs, that the class struggle is all we need.

But it just isn’t so. Ever since Trump’s election we have been hectored by pundits about a “white working class” as a rationale for shutting up about racist violence and atrocities against refugees at our southern border. These pundits claim to be personally opposed to racism and xenophobia, but they talk about the danger of antagonizing this "white working class." Here are my thoughts about that “class.” These people clearly believe that stopping the horrors of white supremacy is of secondary importance to… well, to whatever they think is primary. They are clearly willing to sacrifice the lives of people of color to some value that they hold more highly. This goes beyond white privilege to white supremacism.

The history of the United States shows a repeated unwillingness to include Black people, Natives, Mexican Americans and Asians when the government was supporting families and enterprises, whether that was with land in the 19th century or with farm products and jobs in the 20th. Instead, the courts supported robbery from them. The result is monstrous discrepancies in generational wealth. But people of color are asked to believe that this time will be different. 

I am in favor of Medicare for All.

I am in favor of extending free public education through college.

I am in favor of a $15 minimum wage.

I am in favor of a job guarantee, expanded Social Security and a Green New Deal.

But when racial justice is sixteenth on your platform and when most of the details deal with general economic and environmental issues, I question the depth of your understanding and commitment.

I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary. If we were having the 2020 primary today, I would likely vote for him again. But I am underenthusiastic. By contrast, I am very enthusiastic about Representatives Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez. They are outspoken and active in support of economic and environmental justice. They are also women. They are also Palestinian, Somali, African American and Puerto Rican. I don’t have to insist that they “marched with Dr. King” fifty-plus year’s ago or wonder whether they really understand American racism. They live it every day.

So I don’t “hate Bernie” but that’s why I prefer “the squad.” Maybe you can put that in 240 characters. I can’t.

Why are House Democrats attacking their brightest new stars?

The House Democratic leadership is now campaigning openly against first-term Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These women are already the subjects of daily death threats from Trump world. They have made climate change a campaign issue despite the best efforts of both Democrats and Republicans. They dragged public attention back to the concentration camps on the border after the press had moved on. 
But Nancy Pelosi says they have no following. There is a concerted push to get Ocasio-Cortez to fire her outspoken chief of staff, which is a transparent effort to “break” her. And leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus are bizarrely claiming that Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley and their camp are “targeting” Black Representatives.

Let’s fact check that last one: Pressley and Omar are Black. Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez challenged and defeated white members of the House Democratic leadership. In my district an ally of theirs, Jamal Bowman, (a Black middle-school principal) is challenging Eliot Engel, a sixteen-term white Representative. A leader of the Black caucus, Representative Lacy Clay is being challenged in the upcoming primary, by Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush.

Why the apparent distraction? Why fight one another instead of Donald Trump and the Republicans?

To career politicians, re-election is more important than anything. For election purposes Trump is a reliable foil for Democratic politicians; Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib, though, are an existential threat. Trump allows Democrats to avoid stating any political positions of their own. All they have to do is point at him and yell: “We’re not as bad as he is!” Meanwhile - just like the Republicans - they continue to fund their campaigns with donations from the fossil-fuel, pharmaceutical, private prison, and finance industries. They are handcuffed by those donors, unable to make any changes that would benefit us for fear of cutting off their income stream.

Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar have a different campaign finance model. They rely on small-dollar donations from regular people. They are free to take positions that would alienate corporate capitalists. They are also free to call for an end to the systematic legal bribery of our representatives that masquerades as “campaign contribution.”

Yesterday an anonymous Democratic leader told a reporter, “Nobody is afraid of those nerds.” This person was referring to Tlaib, Pressley, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez. (The irony of saying “nobody is afraid” under the cloak of anonymity seems to have escaped him or her.) But the boast begs the question: Should they be?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did successfully challenge Joe Crowley, a ten-term incumbent and the chair of the Democratic caucus.

Ayanna Pressley did successfully challenge ten-term incumbent Mike Capuano.

Those are not achievements to be overlooked, and establishment Democrats will not be overlooking challengers this time around, regardless of what this anonymous leader said. It remains to be seen whether Jamal Bowman can upset Eliot Engel. (I am hopeful.) It remains to be seen whether attorney Jessica Cisneros can upset eight-term Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar.

That is all far from the number-one story this weekend because President Trump has promised massive ICE kidnappings all across the United States. He isn’t satisfied with the concentration camps he already runs: separating families, holding desperate refugees in inhuman conditions that were attested to yesterday by Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Lindsay Graham. No, he wants to arrest thousands of current US residents, too. This requires all our attention.

But:

We won’t get a humane immigration policy just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We won’t get fair pharmaceutical prices just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We won’t get rational health care just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We won’t get a program to respond to runaway climate change just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

We certainly won’t end racial injustice or income inequality just by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

Tell me that the Republicans are worse and I will concede your point. But we are fighting for our children’s lives. Politicians who point at Orange Hitler and yell, “We’re not as bad as he is!” won’t save us. And if we don’t pay attention to elections up and down the ballot, replacing Orange Hitler won’t either.

Bad Faith Commentary on Ocasio-Cortez

I generally avoid reading the comments on widely-distributed public posts. The viciousness and stupidity that pop up so quickly are discouraging to me.

Some of it, though, is intentional trolling.

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez correctly named the concentration camps in which our government keeps asylum seekers. Suddenly actual antisemites were pretending deep concern that she was diminishing the horror of the Nazi holocaust. People who would rather see me dead wanted me to denounce AO-C because she said “concentration camp” without CBP gassing people to death en masse.

Now I see this same type of trolling in the comments on an Ocasio-Cortez fundraising post. She notes - accurately - that most Representatives have to spent the majority of their working hours phoning deep-pocket donors, begging for campaign contributions, instead of doing the people’s business, ie actually going to Congressional meetings. She explains that her ability to work on legislation and to skip the phone solicitations in her party’s call center is dependent on small-dollar online donations. She asks that the reader click a link to make one of those donations.

Most of the comments on this post were positive. It’s still Facebook so I have to wonder how many of these people think they are contributing when they reply with some equivalent of “You go, girl” instead of clicking the link and sending $5, but, oh well. It was the trolls that caught my eye.
The clever ones didn’t go directly for her and identify themselves as enemies. One angrily demanded to know why we shou politicians who spend all their time fundraising. When people pointed out that this was EXACTLY THE POINT of AO-C’s post, the troll just kept doubling down. I sincerely hope that nobody is that obtuse. She was intentionally creating a false equivalence between AO-C and establishment politicians at the same time as discouraging participation in the process.

Then there are the people complaining that she is fighting against Joe Biden instead of against Donald Trump. That is transparently false. So I ask, “Who is served by that lie?” The answer is: So many people. Establishment Democrats who don’t want to be accountable for their complicity with monopoly capitalism. Republicans who like seeing their adversaries fighting one another. Foreign adversaries (Russia) who work to disrupt out electoral process. Foreign allies (Israel) who work to obscure their reliance on US military support. The truth is that Representative Ocasio-Cortez has worked hard to support Speaker Pelosi despite her waffling on important issues like immigration, the climate crisis, and the lawless Trump Administration. So have Representatives Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley.

But the aim of trolls is not to challenge our biases. It’s not even to spread lies. The aim of trolls is to make us suspicious and cynical. The aim of trolls is to get us bickering with each other. The aim of trolls is to discourage us.

Don’t give in to trolls.

No Excuses

Six years ago my friend got a phone call from the highly-regarded, “no-excuses” charter school her son attended. He was scheduled to get on a plane the next day with his abuela to spend the summer visiting the country of her birth. The school, though, said that if he did not attend and pass summer school he would have to repeat sixth grade.

His mom canceled his flight. Grandma went without him. He attended summer school and passed. But in late August the school phoned again. This time they said that he would be promoted to seventh grade ONLY IF HE TRANSFERRED to another school!

Why were they so anxious to force him out? What was the character flaw that made him undesirable to that community?

Empathy.

His sin was empathy.

In “no-excuses” schools, children are supposed to keep their eyes on their teacher. When that teacher berates a classmate, the children are not supposed to look at their friend to see how they are taking it. Compliments? Likewise. The same with discussions that have personal subtexts for some kids. All this “focus” was beyond a boy who cared so deeply about his peers. His eyes strayed from his teachers. He checked in constantly with his classmates. He was repeatedly disciplined for it. Now the school administrators made it clear that they wanted him to leave.

He did.

He found a place in a public school downtown, one that values children, not data.

Friday was his graduation. Each senior was called up to receive their diploma by a teacher who knew them well and who said a few words about them. We heard about original research in neuroscience. We heard about leadership on the soccer pitch. We heard about musicianship and mathematical imagination and poetry. We did not hear about anybody’s GPA or their AP exam scores.

When my friend’s son was called to get his diploma his teacher choked up. He wept and said someday he hopes to have a son  with this boy’s empathy.

His empathy.

Six years after being virtually expelled from the first school for empathy, the entire student body of the second - along with their parents and teachers- applauded and roared their approval for him and for his empathy.

Which school would you prefer for your child? 

I know my answer.

More DNA Commerce!

AncestryDNA sent me an email today urging me to get the DNA of "my entire biological family" tested. Following the link I got a bold-face question: "How Many DNA Tests Does One Family Need?" along with a question to answer that question: "How many people are in your family?"

A couple of years ago my brother gave me a DNA test kit as a gift. This is a commercial transaction, not a scientific one; AncestryDNA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ancestry LLC, a for-profit entity based in Lehi, Utah. So what was exchanged in this transaction?

AncestryDNA got whatever money my brother gave them along with my entire genome to add to their database of 15 million people.

I got the earth-shattering news that I am an Ashkenazic Jew. (Irony alert: I may have always known that.)

Presumably there are some limits to people's curiosity about their ethnic origins and molecular genealogy companies are concerned about what those limits mean to their bottom lines. Presumably whatever schemes these companies have for monetizing our genomes can be better served with more data from more people. So it makes good sense to me that they would urge us to get tests done on every single member of our families: more short-term payments and more data in their proprietary data bases.

But what exactly are they selling me? Will I learn with scientific certainty that I have my uncle's eyes? (Irony alert: I may have always known that.) Will my brother be a member of a different ethnic group? Will I need to join a synagogue?

I do not want to belittle the benefits of DNA tests for curious adoptees. I don't share their experience and - for them - the more data out there the better. I do want to question the motives of for-profit molecular DNA companies. I do want to question their outsized scientific claims.

The Black Hills Are Not for Sale

I'm guessing that this incident took place in 1982, which means I was thirty-years old, a teacher for eight years, and in my fifth year at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx. The voice of Assistant Principal Irv Goldberg came over the PA, asking all Native American students to report immediately to his office. Kennedy was known as a multinational school. We had African American students, African Caribbean students, and African students. We had Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Ecuadorans. We had Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. We had Italians, Albanians, Irish, and Russians. Lots of Jewish Americans. Our students spoke forty languages. We had a Korean club and a Korean Christian Club. But we were not known for Native Americans. And in any case, why would Irv suddenly need the Native American kids in his office in the middle of the day.

My curiosity overcame me. Despite the fact that I was in the front of my classroom, actively teaching a class, I stuck my head out the door, spotted my colleague Kenny Kaplan, and asked him to cover me while I went downstairs to see what this was about. Irv seemed to know why I was there when I walked in. He explained that our annual ethnic survey -- a federal requirement -- had revealed the presence of five Native American teens. Now the Department of Education and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington wanted to know how we were supporting them. Irv was convinced that they didn't exist. He was convinced that they had appeared on the survey because some teachers made a mistake on the forms or added them in as another way of showing how they resented doing this paper work.

I wasn't so sure. In those days Kennedy had six thousand students. That is not a typo. I worked in a high school with six thousand students. When you get to those numbers even tiny percentages show up as actual living teenagers. Moreover, it it easy to see the ethnicities you expect to see. Ask Native people who move to New York how they become invisible, becoming Latinos or Asians in the eyes of the people in the street. They see what they expect. We once had a student teacher from New Jersey who complained of discomfort being the only white person in the classroom. Somehow he missed the five, tall, blonde Irish boys in the back row. He saw what he expected. Moreover, I had already been surprised a few years before to discover that a girl who I thought of as African American was also a White Mountain Apache.

So Irv and I waited: he to phone Washington and say it was a mistake, me to see what would happen next. Over the next few minutes the indigenous students of Kennedy arrived; not five of them, seventeen.

What did Mr. Goldberg want? they asked.

I wondered how he would answer this.

Irv started explaining about the Black Hills. If you are under sixty-years old now you may not have heard about United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980).  It has now been almost forty years since that decision and it is not much remembered outside of South Dakota, but it was a semi big deal back then. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had illegally seized the Black Hills from the Lakota tribes a hundred years before, in blatant violation of the terms of their treaty. The Black Hills are a natural wonder of water and trees in the arid plains with the added bonus of the Homestake Gold Mine which produced 43 million ounces of gold, or $57 billion dollars. They are holy ground for the Lakota (and the Cheyenne and Arapaho and others) for reasons I will not explore here. The Supreme Court valued the land at $17 million at the time of its seizure. They calculated the interest for 100 years at 5% and awarded over $100 million to the plaintiffs... who promptly refused to accept the money, saying "The Black Hills are not for sale." 

So Assistant Principal Goldberg took down the name and tribal affiliation of every student in his office. I remember Mohawks and Senecas, Navajos and Apaches, two Lakota, one Cherokee, but my memory may be shaky. He explained that they needed to register their own votes on this question: land or money. They took this very seriously. Nobody questioned why the opinion of a Mohawk from New York was required about a land case in South Dakota. One by one they said: our land is not for sale. The sole exception was an 11th-grade girl, the Cherokee. Irv said thanks and they left.

He and I began discussing the significance of what we had just seen and heard but we didn't get far because we were disturbed by angry teenagers in the hall. "How could you do that?" "What did your grandparents teach you?" We waited quietly, trying to hear.

A few moments later they all came back in, looking somber. The Cherokee girl asked if she could change her vote. Irv said he hadn't phoned it in yet. She told him the land was more important than the money.

It is two generations later, now, and I hear that there are young Lakota who are reconsidering this question. The value of the award passed a billion dollars in 2011. The Lakota are far from the major metropolitan areas and haven't cashed in on the casino boom. Their reservations are among the poorest places in America.  But every time I think about the Black Hills I remember those teens in the Bronx - also among the poorest places in America - who said "Our land is not for sale."

The Nostalgia of White Flight

My high school classmates were back on my Facebook feed this morning, whooping it up about our rebel youth. The last time I wrote about this they were obsessing about our antiwar activism and about a rather tasteless performance some of us engaged in for a high school "battle of the bands." This time they revived a conversation from two-and-a-half years ago, which was originally started by the news of the death of our attorney from a 1968 freedom-of-speech suit against our principal. That thread devolved into nostalgia about the humorous newspaper for which the editors were suspended, then reminiscences about favorite teachers, and -- finally, because that principal, many teachers, and lots of parents left Newark for the suburb we lived in -- idylls about both our home town and the Weequahic section that so many of them lived in before moving.

Yes. The nostalgia of white flight.

When Chris Christie declared his candidacy for Presidency of the United States, he did it in the gymnasium of our high school. He graduated ten years after we did. His speech was an encomium to white flight. He made it synonymous with the American dream, saying:

I'm here in Livingston because all those years ago, my mother and father became the first of either of their families to leave the city of Newark to come here and make this home for us.

He spoke about his dad working days in the Breyer's ice cream plant and attending Rutgers at night. He added:

My parents moved to Livingston and they moved to Livingston to make this part of their fulfillment of their dream. Of their version of the American dream. 

He didn't mention that this move came immediately after the Newark rebellion of 1967. He didn't have to. His audience understands that without even thinking.

Chris Christie's high school buddy is best-selling author Harlan Coben. Coben, too, was born in Newark. His parents, too, fled to Livingston. I have read only a few of his dozens of popular mysteries, but what they all had in common was Livingston-as-utopia.

When I look at my high school yearbook I see 625 (give or take) white faces. I remember a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl. In the class that followed me there were two (2!) African American students, the first ever to attend the school. This was no accident and I remember speaking about this intentional segregation at the time. I remember adult neighbors, angry at my dad for refusing to pledge never to sell to a non-white family. But I also know that my parents moved to that town. I know that they made that choice.

A lot of the classmates waxing sentimental about our youthful rebellions brag about their parents liberality and even leftism. Some of those parents were activists in the unions. Some of them were members of socialist organizations. But they all left Newark for all-white Livingston. They describe the Weequahic section of Newark in the forties and fifties (when it was the home of celebrated novelist Philip Roth) as "Jewish" and "liberal." Yet all these "liberals" and "leftists" fled for an all-white suburb. It begs the question what those words mean.

But I am not interested in interrogating our parents. I am not even interested in tarnishing our memories of them, so many already gone. I am interested in asking what kind of "liberal" are you in 2019 if you cannot see any of this? I know all of you oppose Trump. I know all of you oppose "hatred" and "racism." But we grew up in a place that institutionalized white supremacy by establishing itself as a separate municipality, with separate taxes for separate schools. So many dads of my childhood friends went to Newark every day to enrich themselves, some with liquor stores, some with real estate, some with less egregious forms of cockroach capitalism. So many moms of my childhood friends had "help": women who rode the bus from Newark everyday to work in the homes of essentially middle-class families, families who could afford to act like gentry because the women who cleaned for them were systematically denied other opportunities!

This is why I am so suspicious of people who think that socialism will solve other social problems, especially white supremacy. I don't believe you actually care about it. I don't believe you even see it.

Why do you call him Prophet?

Prophet at about 5 weeks

Prophet hadn't been living in our house four days before we noticed that his endless diarrhea required attention. Our vet, the gifted Dr. Angelo Rosado, did some imaging and diagnosed intussusception, a condition in which a section of the intestine folds into an adjacent section. He told us that he could do the surgery, but that there was a chance that the sections had fused together, in which case he would need to close Prophet up and send him to a specialist. His advice was that we just take Prophet directly to the specialist, and he recommended one in Brooklyn: 20 miles and (in the unlikely event of no traffic) 45 minutes away from our home in the Bronx.

Judy was resolute. But I never thought of myself as that person who provides expensive medical care to a pet. Moreover, we simply didn't have the money. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was something we had to do. Apparently the finance industry understands this very well, because a loan was not hard to secure.

Visiting hours at VERG

The surgeons, regular vets, and techs at the hospital were terrific, as Dr. Rosado told us. He had to stay there in Brooklyn for days of post-op observation, but we drove over daily to visit. It is hard to describe Prophet's excitement when he was brought into the examining rooms where we were allowed to hang out with him.  I knew - in a way - that we had bonded with him during our visits with him and his siblings before he was old enough to be weaned and leave his mom. I knew that we had become close during those first few days at home. But every day at the hospital he flew over and leaped into our arms. You don't think German Shepherds are lap dogs? I can tell you that Prophet was as a puppy. I can tell you that he still is today with so many of the people he loves... and that dog loves a bunch of people.

It took a long time to pay off that loan, but I never regretted it. We shared adventures in the White Mountains and in local parks, in lakes, rivers and in Long Island Sound. He had a habit of introducing himself to every new dog and every new pers

Crossing a stream on a log

on. He never started a fight and never backed down from one: with dogs (even multiple dogs), with skunks, with the local coyotes. He learned eventually to take my cues about whether we were going to say hi to people or chase wildlife.

So when he suddenly (suddenly!) turned up lame and Dr. Rosado diagnosed a rupture of his cruciate ligament I didn't hesitate about care, even though it meant another loan. I was relieved to learn this is typically a predisposition in dogs, not a sudden injury, like in people. Prophet doesn't play basketball, but he does have the habit of running down near-vertical rock faces. It also turned out the the insurance we purchased for him actually reimbursed us for part of the surgery. This time Dr. Rosado sent us to an orthopedist in New Jersey. (Only 17 miles and 30 minutes without traffic.) Again, the care was superb and the orthopedist had several surgical options, choosing the best one for Prophet's particular leg geometry.

Working out on the treadmill

What was a question for me was physical therapy. A close friend had recently had an ACL tear repaired and his PT was cut off by the insurance company as soon as they concluded that he could walk again. If he was getting shorted, what did it mean that we were providing this care for our dog? I swallowed that question and just concluded that I wouldn't broadcast the news all over Facebook. This time we had to go to the East Side of Manhattan, 12 miles, but usually forty-five minutes.

Cold laser treatment, with protective eyewear

Prophet loved physical therapy. He treated it as his personal day spa. I will back up here and say that he learned polite leash walking early on, but that he has never mastered it in the vicinity of his vet's office. As soon as we get nearby he begins tugging and lunging to get there to see all his friends: the vets, the techs, the receptionists. No amount of poking and prodding, shots or rectal thermometers, have ever discouraged his enthusiasm for that place or those people.

Rehab was different. He calmed down and blissed out immediately. He learned how to walk in the
underwater treadmill without any problem. (Peanut butter helped keep him focused) The cold laser seemed to be a heightened form of personal worship, like belly rubs or grooming.

Hiking by Eastchester Bay in the Bronx

And there was no question that it helped. I started to wonder whether I hadn't seen signs of the ligament tear before it actually ruptured, without fully understanding what I was seeing. He seemed stronger than ever. We were warned that about half of dogs with CL tears will develop one in the opposite leg within a year. I watched closely but didn't see anything. We were also warned that the surgical site itself is vulnerable to arthritis. We looked for that, too. But everything was good. The adventures resumed and continued.

I know that the lives of dogs are accelerated when compared with ours. I know that fact can be painful for us. Prophet's friends who have walked on are too many. When Harry, a boxer, passed, his owner left the neighborhood for good. When Doon died his owner stayed in his apartment for over a year. Blanca's human is still mourning quietly although she continues with her work. I didn't go directly to these dark thoughts when Prophet developed a wobble and a drag in his gait. I didn't think about this even when he turned around quickly and fell on his ass. I certainly didn't worry when he got an arthritis diagnosis and a prescription for anti-inflammatories.

But the meds didn't seem to help. And the radiologist said that his arthritis was too minor to account for the symptoms. And the vet said "degenerative myelopathy," a condition like Lou Gehrig's, a condition without a treatment, a condition that would lead to no hind leg control at all, then no body control at all. That's when I started imagining a future without my friend. Thats when my sun started to fade.

The vet said there was not much to be done. Reading suggested that physical therapy might slow the progress of Prophet's degeneration. So we went back to see the rehab vet. We borrowed money again. The specialist confirmed the diagnosis and performed a DNA test which was ambiguous. But the therapy? Well, the therapy helped a lot. And I don't mean by stopping the deterioration. Prophet has actually improved since we got the diagnosis in September. He is not cured. (There will be no cure.) But he can turn without falling, which he could not do when he first went to PT. He can jump into the car, with some hesitation, but without a full minute of thought. And the wobble in his step is occasional, not regular.

So I am glad we are getting him this therapy. He, of course, still loves it and loves the people who provide it. He loves the daily massage and passive range of motion exercises that I give him. But there is another piece.

Prophet is not worried. He doesn't obsess over what the future will bring. He walks out happily to each new day's adventure - wildlife, friends, rocks, creeks - without concern about how long he will be able to. I owe him the physical care we provide. But I also owe him the happiness he brings to me. I have to enjoy each day with him as much as he enjoys each day with me. And I am trying. That is why his name is Prophet. That is why he is our prophet.

The Federal Trough

My dad (z"l) was always cynical about people who claimed to be opposed to federal aid programs. He noticed that what they really opposed was federal aid to people other than themselves. He had a colorful way of describing this phenomenon, too. He said all of us are like pigs with our snouts in the federal trough. Once in a while, though, each of us picks our head up, looks around, and comments disgustedly, "What a bunch of pigs!"

I was reminded of this by a news item on the radio this morning. The President is headed to New Orleans to address a convention of Farm Bureaus as his government shutdown enters its fourth week. How does this affect farmers, who have been among his strong supporters?

• The US Department of Agriculture can't process loan subsidies that farmers use to finance their seed for the next planting. In many places, that should be two to three weeks away.
• The USDA is no longer sending out emergency checks for the losses farmers are suffering from the President's trade war with China.
• Nobody at the State Department is processing requests for H2A visas for temporary agricultural workers to enter the country.

It is not schadenfreude to notice that all of us are dependent on one another and that we negotiate our mutual needs through government. I can differ with the specifics of agricultural policy while still realizing that we need one if we want to eat. But it is important to note: People who pretend to support market-driven decisions and individualism really only believe in those things when it comes to others.

Fifty Summers Ago

Fifty years ago, the summer before my senior year of high school, I visited Eretz Yisrael with my Jewish youth group. I so looked forward to that trip. It was a kind of coming-of-age experience. After years of looking at the big kids, our leaders, wearing  keffiyehs and worshipping in big 72” x 54” tallitot, it was my turn. That was the summer of Woodstock, of Apollo 11, and of “Tommy” by The Who. I had no problem about having missed all that, because I was doing what I had dreamed of for so long. Even after all this time, my memories of that trip are still very strong. I also have the journal I kept to clarify how much of what I think I remember feeling actually came later.

For example I note an entry from our first morning waking up in Jerusalem after the late-night drive up into the Judaean Hills from Lod (now Ben Gurion) Airport. It is marked “Friday Morning, Ron Hotel.” A quick look at the calendar for 1969 tells me that this was the Fourth of July. I mention this just to convey how deeply I was immersed in what I imagined I was doing and how disconnected I was from everything else. And in that post I wrote about our arrival: “We sang and said Shehecheyanu [the prayer for something new and momentous]. Many wept.”

Jewish law proscribes writing on Shabbat, so it was Sunday, two days after our arrival in Jerusalem when I described my first Sabbath in Israel. I was already having internal conflicts. I wrote briefly about attending services at a Moroccan synagogue and the women ululating. I remember what they were celebrating, too, the entry of a 13-year old boy for his first aliyahto the Torah, his bar Mitzvah. I can still hear their trilling tsahalulim and I can still see them whipping hard candies at his head in his honor.

But then I describe my ambivalence about the guides and gift shops of the Arab Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. I was deeply uncomfortable about treating the Palestinians as some sort of tourist attraction. That thought doesn’t last long, because I was soon writing about what our own guides were directing us to see. They asked us to look at the Intercontinental Hotel on Har Ha-Zeitim (the Mount of Olives) which King Hussein of Jordan allowed to be built in the middle of a centuries-old Jewish cemetery. They pointed to the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem, leading into the Temple precinct, which was bricked up by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent to prevent a false Messiah from entering. But that isn’t what they told us. They told us that “the Arabs” closed the gate to prevent the arrival of the Messiah, with laughter, because the Messiah cannot be barred by bricks. Of course this is something that Suleiman, a devout Muslim (and a Turk, not an Arab) knew. But 17-year old me didn’t know that about Suleiman. I just knew what my beloved group leaders told me.

I say I loved them, and I did. Everywhere we went they turned into a celebration.  I wrote, “If there is one thing I love about our group, more than anything else, it is the way we liberate buses, streets, walls, rooms, whole cities with our singing and dancing.” And note that word: “liberation.” I will return to it. They kept us focused on the spirit of what we were doing. All over United Synagogue Youth (USY) the Hebrew word ruach (which can be understood as “wind” or “breath” or “soul”) is construed as “spirit,” as in “school spirit”; a kind of “rah-rah us”. But that summer, on that trip, it was always much deeper, much more… can I say “spiritual”?

One of my strongest memories of the summer was our visit to Ramat Golan. It is important to remind you here that Israel had seized the heights during the Six-Day War only two years earlier. Before that, we had heard about sporadic Syrian artillery shelling of the Huleh Valley and Kiryat Shemona. Our first stop was Kiryat Shemona, a community of mostly Yemeni Jews. They told us about the constant artillery drills their children had to practice and showed us the underground bunkers where they spent so much of their class time before the war.

Then we drove up the hill to the formerly Syrian side. Our counselors showed us how you could literally see the old boundary, as if you were looking at a map: brown on the Syrian side, green on the Israeli side. I remember thinking this was deeply significant at the moment, but because I didn’t write about it until later in the day, this observation is followed by the sarcastic note that it is “proof positive” of Syrian “laziness.” Why sarcastic? Because five minutes later we entered the Edenic orchards and fields of a Syrian village. And in another five minutes we saw the villagers themselves threshing wheat.  My journal has two more sarcastic comments about this display of “laziness.”

My journal continues to report – without comment – the experiences that were meant to reinforce our commitment to the narrative of Israeli and Jewish victimhood… this after the Six-Day War! And I say without comment because 17-year old me was clearly deeply moved and swallowing so much of this without question. I wrote about our visit to the crusader fortress in Akko where the British executed the Jewish Underground fighters, Dov Gruner and Shlomo Ben-Yosef. My journal for the day reports only, “Saw hanging room,” and I remember being unable to write any more because I was so deeply revulsed. There is a more flippant note about our walking through a minefield: “Don’t walk off the path!” wrote the boy I was. Reading this today, high-school-principal me is skeptical that anybody took us through an actual live minefield, but the message had its intended effect. That boy believed in the ubiquity of our enemies.

Except. Except. Except they kept on overplaying this message. The following day I was able to put my feelings while standing in that hanging room onto paper. I described the room, its overhead I-beam, its movable blocks-and-tackle, its iron trap doors on the floor under the feet of the condemned. I reported the flowers we lay on the doors and the Kaddish we prayed. “I imagined myself awakening in a cell with a red suit on and knew that I would cry then about dying… I saw several hands go instinctively to throats at the sight. It put me in a state of mind for the afternoon.”

That day we went immediately afterward to Lohamei ha-Getaot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, about six kilometers away from Akko Fortress. I don’t know what exhibits they have there today. At that time there were photos of concentration camps, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Vilna Ghetto. After walking through we had time to reflect alone or in small groups. I sat in a dusty field and listened to cocks crowing. Some of my friends described it afterward as sounding like the screams of the dying, which I found annoying. Here is a longer quote from the journal:

I thought of what I had seen. The ground seemed to drop from me. I remembered a picture of a laughing Nazi sergeant. I knocked him down, kicked him, broke open his belly, kicked him again. I almost fell down.

When we gathered again near the building our leaders told us that a Jew can only trust a Jew. They told us about a B’nai Brith survey (which I now believe to be apocryphal) that showed that in the event of a holocaust in the US, only 1% of Americans would actively help us, while 33% would actively persecute us, and another 33% wouldn’t care. This was all quite overwhelming and the only choices for me in that moment seemed to be to remain there in Israel or to return home and stockpile arms.

But as I began writing a letter home on the subject I had different feelings about it. I spoke to one of our counselors, a rabbinical student, and asked why they were poisoning our minds in this way. I wrote in my journal about how this all felt like every other emotional appeal that is made to get strangers to murder one another. And I described the fight they seemed to want to enlist us in as a genocidal race war. Yes, I did. Then, still desperately confused, I wrote: “I am absolutely unresolved as to the implications of all this but I am sure it is important.”

It was a couple of weeks later that we moved our base to a new kibbutz at Gush Etzion in the hills about 20 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem in the West Bank. I had no way of knowing that this place and these people were going to become the center of the settler movement and the militant Israeli right, although I suspect our leaders might have had some clues. For a week our hosts took us on daily hikes up and down the ridges, which I really enjoyed. The fact that they were always armed with Uzis just reinforced my feeling that we were doing something terribly important. And every single hike ended at a location with its own story about the Jewish settlements that were destroyed here during the 1947 war or the Palestinian uprising of 1929.  All of our hike leaders had lived in this area as children. Every year for nineteen years they had been taken to the border to look at an oak tree across the way in Jordan – the sole survivor of their former village – as a reminder of where their home had been. Now, they told us, they were home again.

Thursday of that week the idyll started to turn a little sour for me. We were having a great hike along the ancient Jerusalem aqueduct, starting at the spring of Ain Burak, in the village of Al-Khader. There were underground chambers, tunnels, a canal, a mulberry tree. I was having a beautiful day. Then, this:

The aqueduct went underground so we had to cross a field, a hillside field with terracing. We had to jump from a stone wall at one point. Rather than jumping, most kids were pushing off from a sitting position – not much good for the wall. As one girl went off she brought a section of underpinnings with her. I then took the task of standing there, directing people away from the damaged section, making them jump from a standing position, giving them a hand coming down. Then one big kid came along and just barged over the damaged section, completely destroying it. The Arab farmer who owned the field came running up angry. ‘Why couldn’t we walk through someone else’s fields?’ He’d been there for years. I started to repair the wall. The guy said he appreciated it, but we should go on. Lee [our rabbi] said alright. I felt and still feel incomplete not having repaired it.

That was what I wrote the day it happened. I can say the same thing today. I still feel incomplete for not repairing that man’s wall. 

There is only a little more to my journal. We spent the following week at a vocational high school near Petach Tikvah doing some work on the school, visiting some tacky tourist attractions and having group adventures. The best part was hanging out with the kids boarding at that school: playing hoops, playing guitar, exchanging stories. I kept thinking I should stay there for my senior year instead of going back to finish high school in New Jersey. After that week, the entries end. My memory tells me I must already have been ill with whatever it was that eventually landed me in a Jerusalem hospital with a very high fever. I have to guess that explains the absence of any more journaling.

But I remember the final day of our stay in Gush Etzion. We went to the city of Hebron to visit Me-arat Machpelah, the tomb of the patriarchs. There was another story, this time about the 1929 riots, during which dozens of Jews were killed. Our guides did not tell us about the hundreds of Jews whose lives were saved by their Arab neighbors. They told us that Hebron – home of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah – had been ethnically cleansed by that riot (although they used other words, that phrase not being in use yet.) And then they told us that Hebron was now once again a Jewish city; that several families had returned to Hebron. Would we care to visit their homes?

Would we? My heart soared! I suppose I imagined them living happily side-by-side with the Palestinians of the city.

I did not imagine that we would be going to the top of a hill outside town. I did not imagine that we would be passing through a barbed-wire fence. I did not imagine that we would be entering the compound of an Israeli police station. I did not imagine that we would be visiting a garden apartment inside that fence. I did not imagine that the returning Jews of Hebron lived in a colonial hill station.

Our hosts there were perfectly nice people, to us, at least. I think they gave us all cookies. I couldn’t know the subsequent history of the Jewish cantonment in Hebron, the curfews, the militarization, the stabbings and bombings. But it looked awful to me. I had been content to see the State of Israel as a project of liberation from British colonialism. I had been content to see the intercommunal violence between Israelis and Palestinians as an artifact of British divide-and-rule tactics. I had been content to see the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews as evidence that we could never be Nazis ourselves.

That day in Hebron was my first inkling that wewere the colonialists.

That day in Hebron was my first inkling that we were the Nazis.

The State of Israel has for decades utilized home demolitions against Palestinians both as a form of collective punishment and as a means of ethnic cleansing. Both are violations of international law. Just in the last few days, leading members of the governing party have insisted that the entire town of Khan el Ahmar will be bulldozed. The Jahalin of Khan el Ahmar first moved there because the Israeli government removed them from the Negev. They are accused of “building without permits” which is absolutely accurate, the government won’t give them any. I should add that you will search the US press in vain for the years-long struggle of the people of Khan el Ahmar to remain in their homes, both in the courts and through non-violent protest.

For a dozen years Israel, with the assistance of Egypt, has blockaded Gaza.  During those years Israel has also launched numerous, massive armed incursions into Gaza, each time killing hundreds as well as destroying schools, hospitals, and cultural centers. Last spring, Gazans organized giant protests against the blockade and the border barrier. Israel responded with military force, killing over 100 protesters and wounding over 13,000, including medical personnel tending to the wounded. The best known of these latter is Roujan al-Najjar. She was a twenty-year old medic who was shot to death by Israeli snipers. A New York Times investigationpublished two weeks ago suggests that they weren’t aiming at her in particular, but that they were aiming at the group of medics she was part of. That is a war crime. The IDF chose to respond to the case by fabricating a video claiming that she was intentionally acting as a human shield for armed militants. 

Israel has adopted the British colonial tactic of administrative detention, holding prisoners without charges and on secret evidence. They lock up an average of a Palestinian a day using this method. In one current case, 18-year old Anwar Makhtoob was arrested because of some old Facebook posts. The Army prosecutor told the judge that there were no grounds for a trial, but that he should be held nevertheless! As I write this, Anwar remains in administrative detention.

I grew up believing that Israel was not just a homeland for Jewish people, but that it was a shining beacon for all humanity. It took me a while to recognize that the profoundly-disturbing practices which I saw as flaws in its perfection were actually essential features of an ethnostate, roughly half of whose population are not admitted as citizens. It took me longer to be willing to say that in public. What I feel is shame. I am deeply ashamed. 

We Jews are heirs to millennia of thought and practice on ethics and morality. We have written countless volumes of literature on justice and right living. We have provided by our very existence a prophetic voice for humanity. I am ashamed that we will now be known for colonialism and cruelty, for abusing the bodies and souls of our brothers and sisters, the Palestinian people.

We have an obligation to speak. We are enjoined to by our Torah. Even before Moses received the Law we had the story of Cain and Abel in Bereishit (Genesis) 4.

מה עשית קול דמי אחיך צעקים אלי מן האדמה

“What have you done?” He said. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the Earth!”