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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: U.S. election

Small but important

Small but important

There were fears that, if Donald Trump lost the election last week, his supporters would riot. Fewer people thought the opposite would happen – either that Trump would win or that those who opposed him would riot.

Nightly protest marches after the election were largely peaceful, but some were not, notably in Portland, Ore. It would be informative to learn if any participants in these street rallies were among the 45% of Americans of voting age who didn’t bother to cast a ballot. It would be galling in the extreme to find that people who couldn’t take a few minutes to vote on Nov. 8 were spending hours on the following days marching against the results of an election in which they didn’t think it necessary to vote.

But something more predictable has happened as well. Given the tenor of Trump’s campaign, and the glee with which his victory was met by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, other white supremacists and those who go by the neologism alt-right, the Republican victory seems to have unleashed among some Americans a spurt of acting out. There have been countless recorded incidents of antisemitic, anti-black, anti-Muslim and anti-gay slurs, graffiti and even physical attacks. It was predictable that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would have an impact regardless of the election’s outcome, but the validation he received from more than 50 million Americans appears to have legitimized, or at the very least, inspired, some people to act out in antisocial, racist and violent ways.

In response, online articles, videos and infographics have been created demonstrating how to intervene and de-escalate a point of conflict. Also, a movement has emerged in which individuals demonstrate solidarity with individuals and groups who feel threatened.

A safety pin. A simple safety pin affixed to a garment is a new signal for people who may feel threatened in a situation – on a subway, in a classroom, at the mall, anywhere – that the person wearing a safety pin is a person who can be relied on for support.

It’s a small thing, but it isn’t. For an individual feeling threatened because they are identified as a target because of their ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, a tiny signal of solidarity, support and refuge could be a lifeline.

We are in Canada, of course, not in the United States. But we would be naïve to think that what happens there doesn’t impact the social fabric here. There is racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim bias, homophobia and other forms of bigotry under and at the surface here. The idea that we could provide a place of safety for individuals feeling threatened – or indeed that we could find ourselves looking for such a place – is as realistic for Canadians as it is for Americans.

Now that Remembrance Day has passed, we will remove our poppies, the symbol of respect for those who fought and died in the past for democratic and civil rights. Some of us, if we feel inclined, will replace it with a safety pin, evidence that we are committed to upholding these values today and in the future in whatever small but meaningful way we can.

Format ImagePosted on November 18, 2016November 15, 2016Author The Editorial BoardCategories From the JITags antisemitism, homophobia, racism, Trump, U.S. election

Sanders – both prophet and king?

Bernie Sanders is the first Jew (and first non-Christian) ever to win a presidential primary and be seriously considered as a candidate for the American presidency. Reactions from the Jewish community have been mixed and mostly pretty quiet.

Sanders is very familiar to Ashkenazi Jews like myself: he is basically our socialist uncle. His passionate denunciations, clear-eyed vision of injustice and chutzpah are heimish, almost nostalgic. The progressive Jewish community has seemed hesitant to throw its weight behind him, perhaps because until recently they saw him as unlikely to succeed. Or, maybe, there is a fear of jinxing him: “Shhh, they haven’t really realized he’s Jewish yet.” As Sarah Tuttle-Singer wrote last month in the Times of Israel, one of the great things about Sanders’ ascension is that his Jewishness has been so irrelevant to Americans. Meanwhile, big Jewish financiers, such as George Soros and Donald Sussman, have been backing Hillary Clinton, not Sanders.

So, what is Sanders’ relationship to Judaism? He seems comfortable with his Jewishness and appreciative both of what he finds valuable in the tradition and of Jewish customs. Despite some claims that Sanders has downplayed his Jewishness, J.J. Goldberg recently proved otherwise in a comprehensive analysis published in the Forward Feb. 26. In an article on chabad,org, Dovid Margolin spoke of Sanders’ fight for Chabad’s right to light a public menorah on public property in a key court case, which paved the way for the now-common practice. And Sanders declared the Rebbe’s birthday Education Day in Vermont with words of praise for the Rebbe’s work to universalize education, as well as praising Maimonides (it happened also to be Maimonides’ 850th birthday).

Sanders himself, when asked, has made it clear that he is not a religious Jew. When late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel asked Sanders last fall whether he believes in God, Sanders responded: “I am what I am … and what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.”

“Bernie’s Jewishness is not the Judaism of the shul but of the street,” said Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom. “It’s not the Judaism of rituals but of the ethical tenets of Judaism: about the holiness code and how you treat others. Bernie is Jewish in his kishkes.”

Sanders is relentless and consistent in his criticisms of the financial elite, his calls for a political system free of legal bribery, and his defence of education and the need for fair wages and medical care. He wants to free Americans from debt and modern slavery, and pull America away from militarism and hatred of the stranger. All of these themes echo in dozens of verses and laws structuring the political vision of the Torah and run deep in Jewish consciousness.

Sanders has called for tougher pressure on Israel to make concessions in peace talks and is known to take J Street seriously. On the other hand, he has defended Israel from attacks from the far left, saying it has a right to defend itself and must be able to establish its own security and long-term viability as a state. He has been among a handful of Senate regulars at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Recently, a video surfaced of Sanders giving a speech during the Gaza war in August 2014. Asked by an audience member about Israel’s shelling of Gaza, he agreed that too many civilians had died, but said Hamas had instigated the fighting by firing rockets at Israeli civilians and that Israel has a right to defend itself.

In Israel, Michael Oren has expressed concern about Sanders being overly critical of the Israeli government, while others, including Ravi Eitan, Dov Henin and Yoel Cohen Paran, have expressed a resonance with him, citing his social policies.

Clinton’s campaign has criticized Sanders for his pledge to “normalize” relations with Iran in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal. Sanders agrees that Iran is a “bad actor,” that it funds terrorism and human rights abuses and must not get the atomic bomb, and he has voted to condemn the behavior and rhetoric of the Iranian government several times. But, Sanders argues that normalization is likelier to create the conditions that would spur change. As he said in the last Democrat debate: “It is easy to talk to your friends. It is hard to talk to your enemies. I think we should do both.”

There is no question that ethics is central in Sanders’ mind. It is commonplace for him to make a point by citing a statistic about life in America and then ask rhetorically, “Is this right? Is this moral?”

The most common criticism leveled against Sanders is that he is unrealistic. In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggeman, a leading scholar of the Hebrew Bible, describes the prophets in words that could apply to Sanders: “The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined…. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger…. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

Sanders, of course, is trying to be king, as well. But the charges that he is not practical fail to adequately consider his decades of service as a senator and his time as an effective and popular mayor of Burlington. He was known both for idealistic stances and for taking care of the “nuts and bolts of the job,” as his former campaign manager Jim Schumacher stated. The real question is how Sanders would function in the presidency and with the Republicans in Congress. Time will tell whether we’ll have the chance to find out.

Matthew Gindin is a writer, lecturer and holistic therapist. As well as teaching holistic medicine, Gindin regularly lectures on topics in Jewish and world spirituality, and has a particular passion for making ancient wisdom traditions relevant in the modern world. His work has been featured on Elephant Journal, the Zen Site and Wisdom Pills, and he blogs at Talis in Wonderland (mgindin.wordpress.com) and Voices (hashkata.com).

Posted on March 4, 2016March 3, 2016Author Matthew GindinCategories Op-EdTags Clinton, Israel, Sanders, U.S. election
Election bid put into context

Election bid put into context

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders speaking at a town meeting at the Phoenix Convention Centre in Arizona in July 2015. While a Jewish American president would be a first, many other countries have had Jewish leaders. (photo from Flickr user Gage Skidmore via commons.wikimedia.org)

U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is the first Jew to win a presidential primary and, given that he is only one of two Democratic hopefuls in the race, there is the possibility of a Jewish president after this fall’s election.

But this milestone isn’t such a milestone when one looks around the world, and the United States – with its approximately seven-million-strong Jewish population (including children) – could be considered behind the curve. After all, Italy, France, New Zealand, Panama, Peru and Russia all have had multiple Jewish heads of state or heads of government in the past century or so. Such places as El Salvador, Honduras, Guyana, the Dominican Republic and Norway, with relatively few Jews, have all had Jewish heads of state.

We know some of the stories of antiquity, with Jewish leaders of lands other than Israel. The most famous are Joseph, as viceroy of Egypt; Moses, the prince of Egypt; and, in the fifth-century BCE, Queen Esther in Persia. Among others are:

  • In the early first century, Queen Julia Bernice II, married the Cilician king, Polemon II of Pontus.
  • Queen Shushandukht ruled Persia (and some of Mesopotamia) in the fifth century.
  • Beginning around the fourth century, Jewish kings and queens reigned in Ethiopia for about a millennia.
  • King Abu Karib ruled Yemen in the fifth century and, a hundred years later, King Dhu Nowas.
  • Queen Dahiya Kahina reigned in Algeria in the early eighth century.

In modernity, there are/were dozens of Jewish prime ministers, presidents and vice-presidents outside of Israel. As best as we can figure, with some latitude for converts, those born Jewish but raised in another religion, high-ranking officials that were a heartbeat (or two) from becoming head of state, and those who came close, there have been roughly three dozen Jewish leaders outside Israel, with about a dozen “almosts.”

Great Britain/United Kingdom

  1. Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister in 1868 and 1874-80 (converted to Anglicanism)
  2. Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, viceroy of India, 1921-26
  3. Almost: Ed Miliband, opposition leader of Great Britain, 2010-15; and Prime Minister David Cameron, elected in 2010, who in a speech to the Knesset, said his great-great-grandfather was a German Jew

Switzerland

  1. Ruth Dreifuss, president, 1999

France

  1. Leon Blum, prime minister, 1936-37, 1938, 1946-47
  2. René Mayer, prime minister, 1953
  3. Pierre Mendès France, prime minister, 1954-55
  4. Michel Debré, prime minister, 1959-62 (convert to Catholicism)
  5. Laurent Fabius, prime minister, 1984-86 (raised Roman Catholic)
  6. Nicolas Sarkozy, president, 2007-12 (born to a Jewish father)

Spain

  1. Juan Álvarez Mendizábal, prime minister, 1835-36 (raised Roman Catholic)

Italy

  1. Alessandro Fortis, prime minister, 1905-06
  2. Sidney Sonnino, prime minister, in 1906 and 1909-10 (raised Anglican)
  3. Luigi Luzzatti, prime minister, 1910-11

Eastern Europe

  1. Kurt Eisner, president of Bavaria, 1918-19
  2. Paul Hirsch, president of Prussia, 1918-20
  3. Zigfrids Anna Meierovics, prime minister of Latvia, 1921-24
  4. Petre Roman, prime minister of Romania, 1989-91 (raised Romanian Orthodox)
  5. Jan Fischer, prime minister of Czech Republic, 2009-10

Scandinavia

  1. Jo Benkow, president of Norway, 1985-93
  2. Dorrit Moussaieff, first lady of Iceland since she married President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson in 2003

Russia

  1. Yevgeny Primakov, prime minister of Russia, 1999
  2. Mikhail Fradkov, prime minister, 2004-07 (Russian Orthodox)

New Zealand

  1. Sir Julius Vogel, premier, 1873-76
  2. Sir Francis Bell, prime minister, 1925 (raised Anglican)
  3. John Key, prime minister since 2008

Africa

  1. Sir Roy Welensky, prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Zimbabwe), 1956-63 (raised Anglican)

Central/South America (one-offs)

  1. Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, president of the Dominican Republic, 1916
  2. Janet Jagan, president of Guyana, 1997-99
  3. Mike Eman, prime minister of Aruba since 2009
  4. Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela (raised Roman Catholic) since 2013

Honduras

  1. Juan Lindo y Zelaya, president of El Salvador, 1841-42; and president of Honduras, 1847-52 (raised Roman Catholic)
  2. Ricardo Maduro, president of Honduras, 2002-06 (raised Roman Catholic)

Panama

  1. Max Delvalle, president, for one week in April 1967, because the National Guard General did not approve of his succeeding his predecessor
  2. Eric Arturo Delvalle, president, 1985-88 (in 1988, he attempted to remove Manuel Noriega as the de facto military dictator, but instead Noriega overthrew him; Delvalle fled to the United States and died in Cleveland at age 78)

Peru

  1. Efraín Goldenberg Schreiber, prime minister, 1994-95
  2. Yehude Simon Munaro, prime minister, 2008-09
  3. Salomón Lerner Ghitis, prime minister, 2011

Costa Rica (almosts)

  1. Rebeca Grynspan Mayufis, vice-president of Costa Rica, 1994-98
  2. Saul Weisleder, president of Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly, 1997-98
  3. Luis Liberman Ginsburg, vice-president of Costa Rica, 2010-14 (the grandson of the first mohel of Costa Rica’s Jewish community)

North America (almosts)

  1. Barry Goldwater, GOP presidential candidate, 1964 (Jewish father)
  2. Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state (fourth in line of succession), 1973-77
  3. Madeleine Albright, as secretary of state, 1997-2001
  4. Joe Lieberman, 257 votes away from U.S. vice-president in 2000
  5. Eric Cantor, former speaker of the House (third in line to the presidency), 2011-14
  6. Herb Gray, deputy prime minister of Canada, 1997-2002 (Canada’s first Jewish federal cabinet minister, one of only a few conferred the title “right honorable” who were not prime ministers, and the longest continuously serving member of Parliament in Canadian history)

Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work can be found in more than 100 publications globally. His is managing editor of landmarkreport.com.

Format ImagePosted on March 4, 2016March 3, 2016Author Dave GordonCategories WorldTags politics, Sanders, U.S. election, world leaders
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