I heard DeRay McKesson at the Anti-Racism Book Festival in 2019 . McKesson radiates the kind of charisma that comes when one is fully comfortable in their own skin. He was charming and witty and passionate and committed. I knew his name from his work as a part of the Movement for Black Lives, and as a one-time candidate for Mayor of Baltimore, but that brief session in Washington DC last year was the first time I’d heard him speak. His gift with language and metaphor was cle

I am not a rabbi. This fact should not surprise anyone. If I were a rabbi, my sermon this week might sound something like this: His name was George Floyd. The whole world has watched the cruel treatment Mr. Floyd received at the hands of men who wore a uniform issued by a city government. The world watched, and we were horrified, outraged, saddened, terrified, sickened. (The exact emotional response changes depending on the person reacting and the moment.) Protests in respons

Image Source: Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (2005). Adapted: Ellen Tuzzolo (2016); Mary Julia Cooksey Cordero (@jewelspewels) (2019); The Conscious Kid (2020) This is an essay that has been forming in my brain over the past several weeks. It started with the revelations of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder and then the heartbreaking case of Breonna Taylor. Then came Amy Cooper’s weaponization of her whiteness against Christian Cooper in Central Park, followed closely by

In May of 2019, I attended the annual meeting of the American Alliance of Museums in New Orleans. One of the keynote speakers was Mitch Landrieu, the city’s mayor. To be honest, I don’t remember much of what he spoke about, but I must have been impressed, because I bought his book, In the Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History . I finally got around to reading it. The book is part memoir, part manifesto. Landrieu’s purposes is supposedly to recount the exp

Though the homepage of this blog only lists a single title under the “Reading Now” heading, in reality, I am often working my way through more than one book at a time. Especially right now in the midst of quarantine, I have been turning to the page as my way out of the house. While I was reading D. Watkins’ We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America , I have also been making my way through Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience by John H Falk. As often

About 2 years ago, I took a course from the curriculum of the Florence Melton School entitled “Jews in America: Insiders and Outsiders.” I was excited to take the course to deepen my understanding of Jews as “insiders and outsiders,” a notion that had strongly emerged during my work on the future core exhibit of the JMM . Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the course. The shortcomings are best illustrated by a disagreement I had with the instructor about Al Jolson. This “te

I decided to read The Lines Between Us after I heard Lawrence Lanahan talk about his research on housing policy in Baltimore at Chizuk Amuno Congregation. Several years ago, I read Not in My Neighborhood by Antero Pietilo, which Lanahan identifies as a precursor to his book. In the past year, I read the Color of Law , by Richard Rothstein. All three of these books work together to provide a powerful picture of de jure , i.e. intentional, and enforced by government, segregat

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend a talk entitled “Jewish Community, Race, and Who Counts” by Ilana Kaufman, Executive Director of the Jews of Color Field Building Initiative . Kaufman convincingly led her audience through an exploration of some of the obstacles, indignities, and microagressions facing Jews of color like herself. She wove together stories from her own history, statistics (20% of families identifying as Jewish in America are multi-racial), Torah, and oth

In January 2019, I resolved to work out more. Not because I wanted to lose weight or to train for an event, but because I feel better--physically and emotionally--when I am exercising regularly. I decided to aim for 3 or 4 times a week, but I committed to never skipping a week. Because it is the 21st century, I enlisted an app to assist me. Fast forward to today, January 2020, and I am proud to say that I am on a 54 week streak of exercise. (The image is my app's confirmation

A fellow congregant and leader at BHC and I are trying to launch a Civic Engagement Campaign. The two of us want to see a better, more equitable society in which everyone's voice is heard. We think others want that, too, and so we thought this would be an opportunity to not only engage in some good old fashioned voter registration, voter education and get-out-the-vote activities, it would also be a chance to create or nurture relationships between individuals and institutions

The reading discussion group is on a hiatus. In the interim a few thoughts from me. In my first year of graduate school, one of the required readings in my religious studies core class was a book by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. I don’t remember much about what I learned in that class (it was about 18 years ago, after all), but one concept of Geertz’s really stuck with me. Geertz observes that the goal of religion in the realm of suffering is not to reduce suffering, but t

Professor Ibram X. Kendi really opened my thinking about racism and my own antiracism with his impressive, thorough and National-Book-Award-winning book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. (If you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s long, and it’s worth every minute.) Ever since I read the book last year, I’ve been following Dr. Kendi’s writing. He is a prolific thinker and an active commentator. When I saw that he wrote an op-

I first read How Studying Talmud Helped Me Understand Racism in America at a legislative kick-off for Jews United for Justice in January. On initial reading I felt it was just a new way to say ideas I was already familiar with, namely intention does not equal impact. But the more I processed this essay, the more I realized Avi Killip is actually saying something more nuanced. Killip overlays categories of injury from the Talmud onto racism. These categories were articulated

The Maryland General Assembly is interesting three pieces of "emergency legislation" in response to the disturbing crime statistics in Baltimore. Unfortunately, instead of addressing the root causes of the violence, and providing funding and resources for violence interruption (like SafeStreets Baltimore or Baltimore Ceasefire ) or fixing the broken school funding situation or providing more opportunities for our young people, this legislation seeks to put more people behin

For the December reading selection at BHC, I decided to focus on a few poems rather than a single article. I’ve been procrastinating writing this wrap-up because I haven’t written about poetry since my first year of college—more than twenty years ago. In short, bear with me as I walk you through these titles. The 6 poems selected ended up falling neatly into three pairs. I wish I could tell you I planned it that way from the beginning, but the truth is I got lucky. I select

On September 1st of this year, the New York Times published an op-Ed signed by four Christian clergy. " Waiting for a Perfect Protest? " Is a modern-day reprise of Martin Luther King Jr's " Letter From Birmingham Jail. " In King's "Letter," King calls out the hypocrisy of his fellow clergy--those who criticized King's work for being 'unwise and untimely,' In it, King notes "you deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your

Over the past several weeks, more than one of my regular discussion participants has suggested we read poetry together. Intrigued by the idea, I have selected six poems for your consideration for our December reading discussion group at BHC. Some of these are very recent, some not so new. Please find the selections below, in no particular order: • Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes • Still I Rise by Maya Angelou • from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman sta

Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism by Eric K. Ward published in the Summer 2017 issue of Public Eye magazine. Over the past year, as antisemitic speech and acts grew in frequency and viciousness, I found myself in an uncomfortable position. As a committed Jew endeavoring to be an equally committed antiracist, I found myself struggling to hold both the reality of White privilege and the reality of antisemitism at the same time. I am fully and comp

I am really affected by scenes of violence. I can’t watch fictional depictions of violent acts. I get too upset. It stays with me for days and weeks, surfacing at inopportune times. And so, I naturally have tended to avoid watching viral videos of people being killed. I didn’t watch the Walter Scott video (the man who was shot while running away from officers back in April 2015). I chose my comfort when confronted with these digital witnesses. Always. In the past few days, t

When I visited NMAAHC (see here for a little about the visit), I took some time to shop the gift store. Browsing the offerings, one (giant) book caught my eye. More than 500 pages long, an impressively thick volume, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, bears a subtitle that is hard to resist for me: “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” It also bears the seal of a National Book Award Winner. And so, intimidated by the length but intrigued by the titl