At around 2 pm this past Sunday, 20 year-old Daunte Wright, an African American man, drove through Brooklyn Center, MN, with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. A few miles from where Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, he was pulled over for the what the police said was an expired registration. Kim Potter, a long-serving …
NOTE: Today is Human Rights Day. I’m republishing this blog from Human Rights Day 2019 because its message bears repeating. Incidents of racialized violence in the US are as numerous as grains of sand, and in one of the specific categories I mentioned, anti-semitic incidents in the US, 2019 saw a record-breaking total of 2,107, …
Once in a while a book calls to me such that I need to ask you to read it—perhaps half a dozen books since I began this blog in 2013. Today, that book is Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. A friend urged me …
Alexandra Schwartz’s short, informative essay in the New Yorker—well, the title almost says it all: “The Tree of Life Shooting and the Return of Anti-Semitism to American Life.” Almost, but not quite. Please read it. Why? To glimpse the seemingly evergreen historical uses of antisemitism if you didn’t grow up like me, constantly reminded by …
I’m on my way home from Philadelphia and the annual meeting of The Shalom Center, where I have the privilege of serving as president. The organization has a long history of peace and justice activism, increasingly arcing toward peace and justice for the Earth, which is to say the healing of global scorching (as our …