Jews From The United States

"In the face of a widespread belief that domination is the most trustworthy answer to fear, I am fighting for both the freedom of Palestine and the souls of Jews."

"I am fighting for an end to the recycling of pain. I am fighting for my own deepest source of hope, the belief in human solidarity, in our ability to decide that we will expand our hearts and our sense of kinship to include each other and resist the urge to contract in fear, to huddle and bare our teeth and lash out. When I speak out for the humanity of Palestine I am defending the humanity of everyone, including all Jews. When I stand firmly against the hidden reservoirs of antisemitism that bubble up when the ruling class needs them to, when I tell my gentile friends not to get distracted from the white Christian male 1 percent, to stay the course and stay clear, I am standing for accuracy, for clarity, for revealing the structures of domination that crush our world, including the people of Palestine."

"In my grandmother's village, there was a three-cornered argument about what, if anything, would save the Jews. The Orthodox said it was in God's hands. The Zionists said only Jews could be counted on to stand by Jews, and we needed a defensible territory of our own where we called the shots. The communists and socialists and anarchists who slipped in and out of the shtetls, handing out precious pamphlets to be passed around and hidden, said only an alliance of all the working people can dismantle our oppression and everyone else's. As a boy, my father took part in that identical debate on the Boardwalk in Brooklyn. But after the Holocaust, after the Nazis destroyed so much of the world of European Jews, after the solidarity that existed was not enough, and the old Russian antisemitism that had been punished as a crime against socialism became a part of Soviet policy, after all that, the three-cornered debate went lopsided with despair, and now the Zionist minority of my father's childhood has grown to dominate all debate, aggressively silencing dissent."

"How can you own something that changes under your hands, that is so fully alive? Ecology undermines ownership."

"All historians have points of view. All of us use some process of selection by which we choose which stories we consider important and interesting. We do history from some perspective, within some particular worldview. Storytelling is not neutral. Curandera historians make this explicit, openly naming our partisanship, our intent to influence how people think."

"Jews fleeing the hardships of Christian Europe could have built something quite different in a place with centuries of coexistence, could have come as respectful migrants, to be neighbors, not conquerors. But whatever it could have been, what we have now is this devastation, which, along with everything else, is also bloody reenactment: the grandchildren of ghettoized Jews patrol the borders of Gaza and build walls, descendants of pogrom survivors carry out collective punishments and random executions, and Jews privileged by what they have built speak of "dirty Arabs" in the exact same tone of voice in which the Christians of Europe said "dirty Jews.""

"To me the choice seems difficult and clear: either we are committed to making a world in which all people are of value, everyone redeemable, or we surrender to the idea that some of us are truly better and more deserving of life than others, and once we open the door to that possibility, we cannot control it. If we are willing to say that some people don't matter, that some people are unaffordable for the planet, that some people's actions have placed them beyond the pale, then what forgiveness is there for any of us if we commit errors, even crimes? If we agree to accept limits on who is included in humanity, then we will become more and more like those we oppose."

"Only through mourning can we reconnect to the love in our lives and lose our fascination with the ones who harmed us."

"It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be."

"Just as the individual recovering from abuse must reconstruct the story of her undeserved suffering in a way that gives it new meaning, and herself a rebuilt and invulnerable sense of worth, the victims of collective abuse need ways to reconstruct history that restore a sense of our inherent value as human beings and immunize us against the elite mythology that our only worth is in our ability to make them rich."

"While the false memory theoreticians attempt to establish that pain is ahistoric and traumas leave no trace of themselves in our lives, the traumatized keep finding ways to insist that pain has documentable origins, that when someone is hit, it hurts, and that injuries leave scars."

"One of the first things a colonizing power, a new ruling class, or a repressive regime does is attack the sense of history of those they wish to dominate by attempting to take over and control their relationships to their own past...A strong sense of their own history among the dominated undermines the project of domination. It provides an alternative story, one in which oppression is the result of human behavior, of historical events and choices, and not natural law."

"Racism frames violence within communities of color as inherent to our identities because it denies the cumulative impact of genocide, slavery, lynching, and other forms of organized violence, enforced poverty and segregation, and the systematic denial of opportunities. It is only by recognizing the traumatic impact of oppression that we come to see that all violence, all dysfunction arises from historical causes. It was the identification of those sources that radicalized former street gangs, giving rise to powerful movements like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords."

"History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and how the ways in which we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs."

"The denial of our interrelatedness is killing this planet and too many of its people."

"One element of imperial history is that events tend to be seen as caused by extraordinary personalities acting on one another without showing us the social roots and contexts of those actions. For example, many of the great discoveries and inventions we are taught about in elementary and high school were being pursued by many people at once, but the individual who received the patent is described as a lone explorer rather than part of a group effort. Rosa Parks didn't "get tired" one day and start the Montgomery bus boycott. She was a trained organizer, and her role, as well as the time and place of the boycott, was the result of careful planning by a group of civil rights activists. Just as medicinal history must restore individuality to anonymous masses of people, it must also restore social context to individuals singled out as the actors of history."

"A fully just society in which human potential is never despised or thrown away is possible only if that invitation to a restoration of integrity and community is always open."

"Recovery from trauma requires creating and telling another story about the experience of violence and the nature of the participants, a story powerful enough to restore a sense of our own humanity to the abused."

"Memory, individual and collective, is one of the most important sites of social struggle. The "false memory" movement of the 1990s that sought to deny authority over memory to sexual abuse survivors; escalating attacks on teaching the history and literature of indigenous people and People of Color, that frame sharing any information about oppression or the cultures of the oppressed as violence against "Western civilization"; Holocaust denial that pretends the attempted Nazi genocide against primarily European Jews, Roma, lesbian, gay, and disabled people never took place; the bizarre pseudoscience of misogynist politicians claiming that pregnancy results only from consensual sex-these are all examples of the attempted erasure of collective memory and knowledge and represent backlashes against powerful popular movements attempting to wrest control of history from the ruling class."

"As in the case of the false memory movement, the privileged accuse the disempowered of oppressing them. Teaching the histories, cultures, and thought of the 99 percent violates the "freedom" of privileged white heterosexual men by forcing them to participate in a world in which their interests and perceptions are not the exclusive priority of everyone."

"Healing takes place in community, in the telling and the bearing witness, in the naming of trauma and in the grief and rage and defiance that follow."

"The work of identifying and removing the invasive and parasitic beliefs about each other that we have been deliberately infected with can be painful and mortifying, but it is also joyful beyond measure. When the fog is burned off, what remains is an illuminated social landscape, where the entire geology of our lives is laid bare. This is the landscape of solidarity, where no life is a distraction, where we move in and out of our necessary home spaces, continually expanding the area of the liberated commons, that world-in-creation where all of our identities simultaneously mean everything and nothing because every excuse for injustice is gone."

"The structures of unequal power are many-layered and complex in the ways they function in the world. But at its root, oppression is really quite simple. It's about looting. The rest is made up of the rules and institutions, rituals and agreements, mythologies, rationales and overt bullying by means of which small groups of people keep a firm grasp on way more than their share of the world's resources."

"I say solidarity is knowing the future is long and wide, with room for everyone on earth to enter. I say it's taking the long view of the job. (from "Letter To a Compañero")"

"I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole."

"You were my first grief. From the death of you, so intimate, so much an unexplained event of the universe, I made my first decision to live. (beginning of "Heart Of My Heart, Bone Of My Bone")"

"The foundational crime of this country is indigenous genocide."

"In a massive act of projection, they [slavers] often described the African people who did every stitch of their work for them as lazy; seriously believed that slaves needed European people to set them tasks and make them useful."

"Of every proposal for any kind of social action I ask whether it will increase the sum of human solidarity, because solidarity is the antidote to oppression, which always seeks to dehumanize and divide us."

"I remember that history is wide and deep, that there are many other lives being lived around me, and that generations stretch backward and forward from my moment in time. How I live my life right now extends the impact of ancestors and enriches the soil my descendants will plant their own lives in. Thinking this way makes the difficulties of the moment shrink against that grand background."

"She taught me to love the women: Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Virginia Woolf, and later we would trade the titles of new books on the phone: Doris Lessing, Agnes Smedley, Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker. (Introduction/Acknowledgements)"

"I am shaking with rage that I cannot stop what is being done. That it is being done in the name of protecting Jews. That there are those who will believe that it is in my interest as a Jew, that by being a Jew I have agreed to these acts committed in my name. A logjam of emotions, and beneath, an icy river of fear."

"consider the almost hallucinatory fantasies of wealthy members of Congress that teenage African-American welfare mothers, a small minority of the welfare-receiving population, and consuming a minuscule fraction of the public budget, are responsible for bankrupting the economy, growing rich at public expense by having babies in order to pad their AFDC checks. Excluded from decent employment and denied the most basic necessities so as not to slow down the astronomical rise in income of the top 10 percent, these young women are held publicly accountable for the pillaging of our common resources by the greedy."

"...injustice is traumatic. It does real damage to our bodies, our relationships, our emotions and intellects. We're all trying our best, hampered by millennia of PTSD."

"Each one of us is tipped low on some scales, higher on others; each one of us is arbitrarily robbed and rewarded, punished and privileged for attributes beyond our control. But the injustice of the robbery and punishment is far more obvious to us than the injustice of our unearned privileges and rewards."

"We cannot be owned. We cannot own each other. And there is no such thing as a particle of US soil."

"All of us have had failures of integrity. I believe part of what makes it so hard to consider perpetrators as part of our constituency is that we cannot bear to examine the ways we resemble them. Until we confront the moments when we have been co-opted, coerced or seduced into harming others, we will be vulnerable to defensive self-righteousness."

"It was hopeful to have a socialist with really good policies go as far as he did in this rigged process. The ideas his campaign put forth helped us imagine a different outcome, a world in which sensible, humane policies that support people and planet were the law of the land. I imagine that world every day. Bernie Sanders’s campaign made that easier. It changed the conversation. In different ways, so did Elizabeth Warren’s. And then it was over. But it’s the campaigning that’s over, not the conversation, and certainly not the fight for a different story, which is what all organizing is about."

"Profit is built on inequality, which is incompatible with sustainability."

"I believe that we have it in us to rise to this moment, to end the failed experiment of greed, restore the streams of our creative power, and establish a global culture of reciprocity and generosity as the beating heart of human life on earth."

"I have learned that suffering does not improve people, that slavery does not ennoble us for freedom, that oppression springs from oppression, echoing the twisted lessons we learn from our pain."

"Who could bear to hold privilege that meant the suffering and death of others if they had not been trained from early childhood to see these others as unreal and undeserving? Who would tolerate for even an hour the inhuman conditions imposed by the privileged if they had not been trained from early childhood to feel themselves not fully entitled to life?"

"Childhood is the one political condition, the one disenfranchised group through which all people pass. The one constituency of the oppressed in which all surviving members eventually stop being members and have the option of becoming administrators of the same conditions for new members."

"now it seems to me that Zionism asks too little, not too much! They have traded in that City of the vision for a cramped fortress tower, believing that Jews will always be persecuted, hunted. That most of humanity couldn't care less if it happened again. Would let it happen. Knowing some of humanity would even applaud. Believing there is no other way for Jews to survive. I want to shout it at them from the rooftops, to cry it out loud: you have never asked for enough! Zionism, at least as it's lived today, accepts anti-Semitism, says it's permanent in the world: As long as there are Jews, there will be Jew-haters, Jew-killers, so we'll build a wall of bodies around us and live behind it, a menace to our neighbors, trying to feel safe. I stand here and cry out to you: "Come out of the trenches! Ask for it all! I demand for myself, and my children who will also be Jews, and for you, too, my soldiering kin, a world where fortresses are unknown and unnecessary.""

"My personal medicine bag and tool kit have been gathered over a lifetime of activism. Here are the main ingredients...Cultivate Hope...Practice Consciousness Raising...Build Solidarity...Collectivize My Struggles...Connect with My Ecosystem"

"The first rule I remember learning was never to harm or deface a book. The second was never to cross a picket line. (Introduction/Acknowledgements)"

"The oppression of children is the wheel that keeps all other oppressions turning. Without it, misery would have to be imposed afresh on each new generation instead of being passed down like a hereditary illness. Children enter the world full of expectation and hope. They are not jaded. They are not cynical or resigned. They see clearly what custom has made invisible to us and are outraged by all injustices, no matter how small. It is through the agency of former children that the revolutionary potential of current children is held in check."

"I am holding out for a radical refusal to compromise on the possibility of any one of us to heal, make new moral choices, make amends, and reclaim kinship with those we have harmed. A justice that is truly restorative."

"we could be allies, the Arabs and we, two persecuted peoples rooted in the same land, the same customs, food, language. The task is the most difficult one, the most terrifying, the one requiring the most daring leap from the cliff of this present bloody moment."

"There is a place for righteous rage at the torturers and a place to demand accountability and hard work. But punishment is not a tool of liberation. It is the powerless exercise of violence by those who can think of nothing better. It is the refusal to acknowledge our kinship with those who hurt us. It is a laying down of our vision, and ultimately, if we cannot overcome the urge to punish, our vision, which is what truly distinguishes us from those we oppose, will die."