I started the day with the same sense of hope and anticipation as loved ones who were marching across the country. As fate would have it, I was putting the finishing touches on a 1,000-piece Wonder Woman puzzle our family had been toiling on for weeks.
I am a feminist woman raising two strong girls with my feminist husband. We planned to march in support of all women, especially those of us who are victims of sexual harassment and abuse — a seemingly endless list, as recent, horrific reports underscore. We gathered signs and other march accouterments and piled into the car with friends. With a shared excitement, we made our way along beautiful Lake Merritt toward the march dais on a gorgeous, sunny day. A perfect setting to raise our collective voice and — as one community — tell our Congress, our president and the world that we will fight hateful and inhumane policies and behavior that are destroying lives. We will not be silent. We will be allies.
Unless, that is, you happen to believe that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination — one tiny sliver of land that is our indigenous home, pulsing with the heartbeats of our ancestors. In that case, you are not welcome and your ally credentials are revoked.
So went the message of one speaker.
Why would a march to elevate and empower women in this country have anything to do with the complicated and nuanced conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? If you are not familiar with Linda Sarsour, an organizer and founder of the National Women’s March, you might ask: How is it possible that you are not welcome as a Jew who claims a basic right enshrined in international law? Sarsour is, among other things, an unabashed anti-Israel extremist who seeks to delegitimize Israel. Her beliefs regarding an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with our government’s (and society’s) treatment of women have found some acceptance in the march messaging and ideology.
We arrived in time to hear what promised to be empowering speeches. Things started nicely, with slam poetry delivered by a powerful young woman among other inspiring words. Then Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, spoke. She caught my attention. You see, I work for the Anti-Defamation League, whose enduring century-plus mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and secure justice and fair treatment to all.” We have a dual mission because our extraordinary founders knew that you cannot have one without the other. I was prepared for her screed, “Zionism has no place in the women’s movement.” She followed that divisive statement — which necessarily meant my family and I were summarily banished — with several minutes of bombast and falsehoods impugning the State of Israel and anyone who supports its existence.
As a Jewish feminist committed to equality and working for an extraordinary Jewish civil rights organization — proudly partnering with the Muslim community, fighting for rights across religious, racial, gender and, yes, national boundaries — my family was struck with what felt like a bolt of lightning.
We heard many in the crowd cheer her piercing, offensive accusations and it became clear she accomplished her job. She misled people who did not fully understand her diatribe and its implications. Others undoubtedly understood and agreed. And some, ironically, were not moved to confront her bias. We became targets of hateful rhetoric, at a march targeting hateful rhetoric!
Last year, scrolling through march social media posts, I beamed with pride. This year, I am dejected and sad. Looking at photos from across the world, all I can think is “I wish that was here. I wish my children didn’t have to be the ‘other’ at an event that is supposed to be the ‘us.’”
My 14- and 9-year-old daughters’ takeaway: “What does Israel have to do with this march when not a single other country was attacked?” Great question.
It is surprising that you are surprised.
Hopefully your daughters learned who not to trust
Another Shiksa march against Jews their new slur for HEBE is ZIONIST when our Judean ancestors are the original RESISTORS who still PERSIST INSIST on our rights as Jews to EXIST by every means necessary.
Hamas Nazi Sarsour did not “found” the Women’s March she hijacked the real ReSiSters erasing Hillary Clinton. That BernoBitch forced her way in after Hillary voters were told by BernoPuppets that they would attack the women who voted for Hillary if they did not include Jew bashing Hamas Nazi.
NEVER AGAIN BY EVERY MEANS NECESSARY
Not even for Jews who agree with them. Leftist Jews are finding out that they are unwelcome at leftist events, simply because they are Jewish, no matter what beliefs they hold. At one event, Jews were told that they made others “uncomfortable.” Saraour is a Jew hater of the worst order, not to mention a liar. She supports terror and is in league with and funded by the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the PA. She is a supporter of sharia, which also makes her assumed role in the women’s movement hypocritical. She is using it as a platform for the Islamic agenda. You cannot wear a hijab, a symbol of oppression, and be a “feminist.” You cannot support sharia and be a “feminist.” Regressive “liberals” need to get that “Palestinians,” and Muslims, as a whole, are probably not the best coalition partners for them or for the Jewish community, or for the LGBTQ or feminist communities, and that they are not compatible with Western cultures in general. I wonder, though, where you are for the women who are actually oppressed, beaten, raped, live under sharia and honor killings or have their genitals mutilated? Oh, yeah, marching for rights you already have and for things that have not happened, based on the lies and hearsay of the lamestream media. Stupidest b.s. I’ve ever heard.
You make valid points, my dear. We’d like to engage with secular Muslim women who in turn wish to get along with Jewish Americans and are interested on upholding women’s rights – they exist in America – Sarsour just does not happen to be one of them (she’s a Bernie supporter and Farrakhan fan). Bernie’s outsider “Our Revolution” is trying to take over the Dem Party – we don’t intend to let them. We’re not interested in a lefty Tea Party as we all see how well that turned out.
Don’t imagine for half a second that we haven’t been pointing these issues out for many moons now.
Thank you for this article. It is all so challenging and complicated. At the SF march, I heard one mention from the stage about “Apartheid Israel” and a few signs indicating that sentiment. I was prepared for it and was sad to see it.
I, too, was at the Women’s March in Oakland. I marched with Livermore Indivisible and we had a seat front and center for the speakers. And when Kiswani spoke, I shouted back at her in fury. So I know at least one person protested the speaker. Here is a link to the open letter I sent to Women’s March Oakland: http://pmunro.net/main/an-open-letter-to-womens-march-oakland-organizers/, which I also copied to the JCRC (and should have also sent to ADL). I have yet to hear from them, but fully intend to follow up. And to be involved in planning for next year to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
Because I believe both that if I am not for myself, no one else will be (why should they be, if I don’t care enough to advocate and educate) and that if I am for myself alone, I am not fully human (Hillel says “what” for a reason). In both cases, withdrawing from society–as most of the commenters below suggest–is foolish and self-defeating.
Here is the coda: my fellow marchers asked me why I was so upset. They were not critical, simply uninformed and puzzled. So, paradoxically, Kiswani’s hateful words were the source of dialog and education on behalf of Israel.
Thank you, Patricia. Your words are encouraging.
I just learned that one of my closest friends is anti-Israel. I was quite stunned, she is no leftist – but where does she get all her information? KPFA.
I had the same problem with one of my friends. As far as I can tell, she got her info from a group at her church, as well as other friends. By the time I understood where she stood, she was unwilling to discuss the issue–didn’t want to be confused by the facts (and I mean that literally–she thought I knew too much). I chose to keep the long friendship, but it left a rift.
And the take-away: Jewish voices better be part of the conversation (and action) on the left before more of it gets colonized (and yes, I use that word advisedly) by Kiswani and others like her.
She gets it from white supremacists/Trumpers. Have you all not been paying attention to the neo-Nazi onslaught happening across the country?
Good for you. However, we should be focused on women’s rights and voting for those who uphold them. We’re not particularly interested in sticking our noses into complex foreign policy issues at the moment. BTW, Netanyahu backed antisemitic, women-hating Trump and his deranged GOP backers. We’ve seen enough. Not interested in engaging in religious wars. Focus on American women and our issues and make sure we have qualified people in office who will be able to tackle policies with reason and compassion. If this is turning into more infighting, no thank you.
Jews, you still haven’t learned and you continue to try anything to be liked. You’re nothing but “Kapo” Jews.
An old old lesson: when Jews abandon Torah belief and practice, and run after “movements” in the “outside” world, those very movements will turn on the Jews. Witness: Germany, the African American community( which is rife with anti-Semitism), Communism (remember how Russia treated its Jews), and now leftism in the United States, which is permeated with anti-Semites posing as social justice warriors and who no longer welcome Jews in their midst, and even, now, the Democratic party in the United States, to whom secular Jews proclaim fealty, is turning against Israel and their Jewish constituents.
What you felt at the Oakland march as an Israeli Zionist listening to a well respected Palestinian community leader is a similar uncomfortable (and important) feeling to what white women feel hearing from Black women in the US about their direct experience living under white supremacy. And the solution to the discomfort? Not to silence the oppressed as you suggest but instead, to take a deep look at the privileges you hold and what you are doing to actively dismantle them. Unfortunately you have chosen the wrong side of history on this one, Israeli policies are brutal, Palestine human rights abuses occur daily, and as Americans we are complicit by funding the atrocities and continuing land theft at a price tag of 10 million US tax dollars a day. Hopefully the discomfort your daughters felt will lead them to learning directly about the situation in Palestine, and like so many young Jews today, join the struggle for a Palestinian self determination, recognizing that true security and self determination for any people can’t be built off the suffering of another.
When between the wolves don’t bleat like a sheep
Of course, as I’m sure Rochelle knows quite well, the hatred that Lara Kiswani and Linda Sarsour foment is not in the purpose of “Palestinian self-determination”, but rather for ending Jewish self-determination. Like the rest of the BDS movement, they reject peace between the Jewish state and a future Arab state of Palestine, because what upsets them so is not the lack of a Palestinian Arab state but the existence of the indigenous Jewish one.
i am jewish and have immediate family in israel. But i see the point about fighting all oppression, and palestine is clearly being oppressed and you have to be completely fucking willfully blind and ignorant not to see that. We wouldn’t stand to live like that, walled in, cut off, no autonomy or sovereignty, for one. single. day. Not for one day. We’d too turn to whomever we thought could get us out of that situation, extremist or not.
You had the revelation that the Left is anti-Semitic. Wake up and smell the coffee. I do not have any regards for Women’s Movement, as it doesn’t have any meaning or real purpose. From the beginning, you were doomed to disappointment.
Regarding your “feminist husband” he is either pussy-whipped or an idiot. You lady are a real JAP. I am sorry for your husband!
Same thing happened at the beginning of the war on Iraq when my son attended an anti-war rally in San Francisco. People showed up in kafiyas, masks, flags of Israel with swastikas on them… turning an anti-Israel march in an Anti-Semitic one. The one good thing that came out of it – before that day my son refused to identify as a Jew – always saying he was Russian. When he returned home, he was thoroughly Jewish identified.
That sounds like A.N.S.W.E.R. at work.
Too bad that you chose to focus on ONE hate-filled speaker, instead of the many other speakers who spoke of unity, peace, and acceptance, and the 50,000+ women who were marching beside you and your daughters in unity and resistance. Why don’t you volunteer your time for next year’s Women’s March and have a say in which speakers are invited? Is a public k’vetch putting down the Oakland Women’s March helpful to the women’s resistance movement? Does it move things forward in a direction towards progress? No, it appears to be just k’vetching to like-minded k’vetchers.
Well, actually, that one speech DID make me feel unwelcome. I did overcome that feeling, but try this analogy: you come to my house for a celebration. All is well, until I walk up to you and slap you in the face. The celebration goes on. Afterward, someone says: why didn’t you just focus on the rest of the celebration?
How do you react?
I have, to date, received no reply to my letter. In that letter, I DID offer to help organize because I agree with you: don’t complain without being willing to help make a change. And I do hope and believe that the organizers made a mistake based on ignorance. It’s on the Jewish community to educate and participate.
When I go to civil rights events in Oakland, including the Women’s March, I tend to have a knot in my stomach because I know there will be some anti-Israel rhetoric. I still chose to attend the March and not let this subgroup speak for me. I felt it was important to show up as a liberal woman and to take my strongly feminist 14-year-old daughter and to show up for what WE believe. Maybe next year we’ll bring pro-Jewish/Israel signs to the march to make sure our voices are represented. Thank you for putting into words (and publishing) what I feel as a liberal Jew in Oakland!
Hi. I’m one of the organizers of the Women’s March Contra Costa and we were very sad to read this article. Many of the march organizers in Contra Costa, as well as leaders in the local resistance are Jewish and committed to social justice. We even had an interfaith shabbat service in the park prior to the march. We will certainly bring this up to the organizers of the march in Oakland and with statewide leadership. This is not one of the tenants of the Women’s March organization and very upsetting. If you would like to meet with us directly, please let us know. You can contact us at http://www.womensmarchcontracosta.org. Please know that we take this very seriously.
This was the second edition of the “Women’s March”. The first took place the day after the inauguration. It was, explicitly, a protest against the outcome of our presidential election.
When in China and Ukraine people come into the streets to demand the right to choose their leaders, our press calls those “pro-democracy protests”. Here in the US, where we’ve had that right for 240 years, we now get this “Women’s March” protesting *against* popular sovereignty. The “Women’s March” is thus an *antidemocracy* protest.
Israel being the Middle East’s only democracy, it’s natural that a group which organizes antidemocracy protests would be hostile to Israel too.
Drumpf was put into office by the gerrymandered Electoral College, with the largest popular electoral loss in U.S. history. It is not antidemocracy to protest this. Even if he had been elected by a popular majority (like, say, Nixon), it is not antidemocracy to protest.
There’s more than one view of what justice requires, likewise “equality” (which, unlike justice, isn’t even something you’ll find in the Torah). How can you know that the Women’s March’s take on “justice” is the same as the Torah’s?
The “left” in this country is not of one mind on this. The organizational hierarchy behind many rallies in the Bay Area is basically A.N.S.W.E.R., and they do not prevail nationwide. They are also not representative of peace and social justice activism even in the Bay Area, and have only served to drive people away from events like this.
Rather than take this as an indictment of the “left,” ask the more relevant question: who does this divisiveness serve?
Dear Shaun,
Answer:: the Israel-Palestine conflict has absolutely nothing to do with women’s rights in America or elsewhere. Sarsour and her cohorts intend to distract us. I mean, I read that she literally had to have permission from her husband to attend university and to work (not my idea of a feminism). Not to mention, these organizers are Bernie Sanders supporters (Our Revolution) and cohorts of Farrakhan’s (not a good look for people who want to bridge the gap between races and religions in America).
That much has been clear since the after the first March. We do, however, need to connect with other women (and supportive men) who are actually concerned about women’s issues, both social and economic, organize ourselves, get out the vote, provide one another with moral support, march ourselves to the polls in 2018 and beyond – and never ever become complacent again.