Philadelphia Peace Walk 6.8.25

Good Afternoon, friends.

Earlier this week I had lunch with Renate who is here from Germany. After a little shmoozing, Renate got right down to business.

Do you call yourself a Zionist? Anti-Zionist?

Do you use the word genocide about Gaza? Ethnic cleansing?

How do you define antisemitism ?

What do you plan to say about these questions at our Peace Walk?

I told Renate that although I have many thoughts about her questions, most in flux, I wasn’t going to talk about any of them on Sunday.

This is a time of crisis for the Palestinian people, for the Jewish people, for American democracy. It is a time when hope is in short supply. What we need right now, I believe, is better stories, true ones that serve as beacons toward the world we hope to see. As we know, “We become the stories we tell.” We need to tell good ones.

Today, four stories:.

Story one: While researching a book on the Bund , writer Molly Crabapple, discovered a cable sent by Jewish Bundists from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 .

Prime Minister Winston Churchill:

Underground Jewish Labor Movement in Poland in tragic days of annihilation of the entire Jewish population by German conquerors considers it her sacred duty to share the request of freedom loving elements throughout the world to release Mohandas Gandhi from prison in India.

We need to tell stories of solidarity, even in vulnerable times.

Story Two: Some of you probably remember this one from

from the mid sixties. During the riots in Black urban neighborhoods, someone wrote “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral.” Someone also said, “America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned.”

As you know, these two comments were not posted by oppositional “friends” on FB. They were written by the same person, the Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. And he repeated both multiple times to Black and white audiences.

We need to tell stories that puncture binaries. Yes, violence against Jews is bad; yes, we need to name the violence to which it is responding . Never either/or. Always both/and. As King would have said , “Palestinians and Jews are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Story Number 3 is about a contemporary of King living in South Africa. I learned from Panjak Mishra, a Hindu-British journalist in his book “The World after Gaza.” about Ahmed Kathrada, a Muslim of Indian descent and one of Nelson Mandela’s closest confidants. He was arrested in 1963. While on Robben Island he read and reread a smuggled copy of The Diary of Anne Frank and copied into his notebook the passages that most inspired him. A Muslim victim of racial colonialism and a terrified Jewish girl in Amsterdam were in conversation!

We need to tell stories that replace the Oppression Olympics with empathy.

My last story is just a week old.

On June 4th, a congresswoman asked the House to rise for a moment of silence for Sarah Milgrim and her partner Yaron Lischinsky who were killed the previous week. The congresswoman was Sharice Davids, an enrolled member of the Ho Chunk nation , the second native american elected to Congress,the first LGBT representative from the state of Kansas.

When we were growing up, we could not have imagined Sharice Davids, nor Iman Jodeh, Colorado's first Muslim state lawmaker, the child of Palestinian immigrants, who came to the JCC event in Boulder last week to express her sympathy to the Jewish community there.

In the midst of all that is wrong with our country today, we need to tell stories that remind us of what is good.

Here is my hope for us in this time of crisis.

That we cultivate what Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory”.

That we embrace together with love King’s inevitable “single garment of destiny”

That we seek out and retell life giving stories.

Thank you all for being here and doing just that.