“I surround myself with young idealistic people who believe that we can and must change the world…We also can’t lose sight of the fact that there are a lot of incredible organizers out there doing fantastic work. The question for me is how we older people can best support them. “
Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Carol Zoref’s novel Barren Island is the story of a long-forgotten factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s.
When we stand outside their doors on Mondays, we are saying: Orthodox Union, your constituency demands better.
When I was an undergrad, I sat on my Women’s Center Collective. We made decisions by consensus. All it took was one person to block something and it wouldn’t happen.… Read more »
The question is less about why the children are being separated from their adults and more about when this madness it stop and how soon will the children already wrenched from their parents be re-united with them
The salient point here is that the Trump/Sessions “zero tolerance” policy offends us to the very core of our humanity––as Jews, as women, as parents, but most importantly as people. It offers zero tolerance to the very nucleus of what makes us human.
But it is who we are: what the United States is doing to families and children, specifically families and children of color, by ripping them apart at the U.S. border is part and parcel of an ongoing history. It is horrific and unbearable and inhumane. But it is exactly what America is and continues to be.
When I try to speak or write about what’s happening at the border––the official policy of tearing away young children, some of them babies, from their asylum-seeking parents––my thoughts turn into an incoherent roar of grief, anger and impotence. I am reduced to a mass of unformed feelings.
