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REFORM MOVEMENT LEADERS SUPPORT IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES TO THE UNITED STATES

02 Sunday Feb 2025

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January 20, 2025

For decades, the Reform Jewish movement has advocated for immigration policies that are compassionate and just, reflecting the United States’ status as a nation founded and strengthened by immigrants and as a nation of laws with borders that must be secure. We now speak strongly against the policies and Executive Orders issued by President Trump that demonize immigrants, seek to end birthright citizenship, target immigrants for mass deportation, make synagogues newly vulnerable to immigration enforcement actions, and cut off vital funding for essential refugee resettlement work – including that which helps fund HIAS, the nation’s oldest refugee resettlement agency, founded by the Jewish community and serving people of all faiths.  

Like most Americans, Jewish Americans are an immigrant community. Today, more than a century after the largest waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, we recall that anti-immigrant legislation passed in the 1920s discriminatorily limited legal immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and prohibited most European Jews from finding refuge on American shores during the Nazi Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of people who sought but could not find refuge here met their end in Hitler’s gas chambers and crematoria. This terrible history reinforces the lessons of the Torah, which commands us thirty-six times to be mindful of the plight of the stranger, for we were strangers in Egypt.  

Reform Jewish congregations, rabbis, cantors, and educators have long been engaged in the holy work of welcoming and resettling immigrants and refugees—Jews escaping antisemitism and limited opportunity in Eastern Europe, Vietnamese and Cuban people freeing oppressive regimes, refuseniks from the former Soviet Union, and many more. Today, our communities are diligently involved in resettlement of refugees whose lives are endangered by their having served with the United States Armed Forces in Afghanistan and others fleeing war-torn nations such as Syria and Ukraine. Reform communities along the southern border are deeply engaged in relief work with those who have recently arrived in the United States. Some Reform communities have declared themselves to be sanctuaries for those facing deportation and we are deeply opposed to the rescission of the policy that protected houses of worship from immigration enforcement actions. 

The demonization of immigrants as criminals must stop. Mass roundups of immigrants, or those perceived to be immigrants, and deportation without due process must halt. Funding to refugee resettlement agencies must be restored. Efforts to eliminate the Constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship must cease. Houses of worship must again be able to fulfill their prophetic mandate without fear of ICE raids. Asylum seekers must be allowed the right to plead their case. Migrants who were previously approved to enter the U.S. must have that approval reinstated. And it is time for Congress and the Trump administration to work together to achieve immigration reform that upholds our status as a nation of immigrants, meets the needs of businesses and employers, and ensures the nation’s security and future well-being.  

Reform communities and their leaders will continue this work, inspired by our Jewish history, biblical teachings, and the Constitution’s commitment to the free exercise of religion.  

Union for Reform Judaism 
Central Conference of American Rabbis 
American Conference of Cantors 
Early Childhood Educators of Reform Judaism
Men of Reform Judaism 
National Association for Temple Administration
Program and Engagement Professionals of Reform Judaism
Women of Reform Judaism 
Women’s Rabbinic Network

Rekindling Hope in the Trump Era

28 Tuesday Jan 2025

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As Trump barrels forward dismembering and destroying long-held liberal American norms and democratic traditions and values that have been hard-fought for and legislated since the Civil War, it would be easy to become despondent and turn away from the political process. As a student of human nature, nothing that’s happening now really surprises me. Nor does anything Trump has done or will do mean that America is entering a long period of regression and the beginning of a generation of demagoguery. David French put it well last week on The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller that we still have agency to resist Trump’s demagoguery:

“The courage, compassion, and resistance against Trump combined with some of the natural consequences of Trump’s erratic and incompetent nature mean that there will be a real opportunity to turn the page from Trump. He will give us that opportunity. The question is will those who are opposed to Trump have our act together well enough to seize the opportunity… One of the things Trump has benefited from is sometimes a corrupt and incompetent opposition. … He’s at a high watermark now. Often there’s a period of extreme triumphalism after elections, but we’ve seen this flip-flop-flip-flop of power many times. The Trump folks are deluding themselves that they are on the ascendancy [that will last for decades].”

My sons often tell me that I’m a pie-in-the-sky idealist ignoring the corrupt reality into which America has been sliding. I understand their perspective and, in truth, agree that American society has massive problems. But, I believe that hope is very different from optimism. Hope is not an attitude that denies a very bad reality. I wrote about the difference between hope and optimism at some length in my Memoir (From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi – publ. 2024). There I argued:

“Hope keeps us grounded in the here and now as a commandment of the heart in the face of uncertainty, a vision that enables a better future, based on trust and supportive of purpose, enabling us to live in an enhanced present of constructive waiting. Our keeping focus on the kind of world we want to inhabit, while doing everything possible to prepare ourselves for the fulfillment of that vision and dream, inspires not only hope but renewed energy, a sense of purpose and an optimistic attitude. Each of us has the capacity to inspire hope through our deeds despite obstacles in our way. There are so many examples of how one individual changed the course of history. All great social movements started with an individual whose will and hope thrust him/her forward to do great deeds.”

I offer here, as well, a few words published last week by Psychology Professor Dr. Kendra Thomas (“Hope Is Not the Same as Optimism, a Psychologist Explains” (January 25, 2025):

“Long-term hope is not about looking on the bright side. It is a mindset that helps people endure challenges, tackle them head-on and keep their eyes on the goal… What makes hope a virtue is not its ability to promote happiness and success but its commitment to a greater good beyond the self. …[Hope is] an unwavering focus on striving for a better future, often unglued from expectations of personal success… Hope is not a positive expectation but a moral commitment. … Hope doesn’t expect a quick improvement, yet it wards off paralysis… Hope plays the long game: … it manifests in hardship and is refined in adversity. Hope enables communities to march for justice and democracy even while tasting the danger of dictatorship, apartheid or oligarchy.”

The Trump Administration buttressed by a sycophantic majority in Congress and a majority of state houses presents formidable obstacles to human rights, democracy, justice and the virtues of compassion and humility. Some of his excesses in Executive Orders, however, are beginning to be challenged by the courts and even by corporations (see Dan Rather’s Substack piece today – January 28), by Democrats in Congress, states, cities and neighborhoods. Political pundits and members of the Democratic Party are starting to think out loud about what went wrong in the 2024 elections and what must be done going forward politically before elections this year and in 2026.

Edmund Burke reminds that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” 

Biden, Trump, the Politics of Revenge and Blanket Pardons

24 Tuesday Dec 2024

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I have listened to both sides of the argument (legal and moral) about whether Joe Biden should issue blanket pardons to all office holders, journalists, and everyone else that Trump and his revenge-retribution sycophantic machine expects to target, including such American heroes as Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, the entire January 6 Congressional Commission, many journalists and traditional media organizations such as MSNBC, ABC etc. etc. etc.

For the sake of our democracy, free speech, freedom of the press, and the personal well-being of the targets of Trump’s sickening promises and campaign, I hope that President Biden will issue across the board pardons to the above before he leaves office to spare these good Americans so targeted the expected enormous financial expense that defending oneself will be required, their physical safety, and their good names.

American democracy has its flaws, to be sure, but our national aspirations are built upon freedom of speech, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and generally our constitutional order and democratic institutions and norms and should not be sullied by the likes of Trump any more than possible. President Biden can stop some of Trump’s awful blood-letting before he leaves office.

If you have access to President Biden and/or to your Senators and Congressional Representatives, please use whatever influence and agency you have to try and compel President Biden to issue these pardons before it is too late.

The negativity and unethical basis of revenge that lurks in the dark side of the human character has been commented upon by many over the centuries. Here are a few thoughts worth considering:

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” -Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

“Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind… Revenge is sweeter than life itself. So think fools.” -Decimus Junius Juvenalis, known in English as Juvenal (b. 55 C.E.)

“Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.” -Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

“Little, vicious minds abound with anger and revenge, and are incapable of feeling the pleasure of forgiving their enemies.” -Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

What Trump’s Plans for Eliminating the Department of Education Means for America and American Politics

17 Sunday Nov 2024

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“America has split, and flipped, by education levels. Democrats have largely lost the working-class voters who elected Barack Obama, and college-educated professionals are shifting away from the Republican Party.”

So reports Axios (by Erica Pandey – November 11, 2024) on the percentage of Americans who voted for Donald Trump who do not have college degrees and the percentage of Americans for Kamala Harris who do.

By the numbers: College graduates made up 43% of the electorate, and 55% voted for Vice President Harris, per exit polls.

  • 56% of voters without degrees voted for President-elect Trump.
  • The states below that level are almost all reliably red, and the states above it are almost all reliably blue.
  • And several of the states that hover right around the middle are closely watched battlegrounds.

See Axios article – https://www.axios.com/2024/11/07/college-degree-voters-split-harris-trump

As Trump prepares to eliminate the Department of Education, it becomes clear what his and the right wing’s attempt to dumb-down America mean generally and specifically on matters of race and gender – namely, to keep America divided between red and blue states and to sway swing states into red states in order to create a permanent right-wing red state dominated federal government.

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, explains in her “Letters to an American” the history, purpose and specifics of funding that the Department of Education provides for K-12 students. Controlling what and how students learn and don’t learn by allowing states alone to set the standards for public education serves the extreme right wing of the MAGA Republican Party that relies on voters with less education to elect its state and federal leadership.

I can only hope that after 4 years of the Trump presidency that the next president (should he/she be a Democrat) will reestablish the Department of Education, federal funding of K-12 schools for a variety of important purposes, and the open and inclusive values that are the mission of thhe the Department.

Here is Dr. Richardson’s piece from yesterday (November 16, 2024):

“One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do.

The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the Covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/11/12/trump-close-education-department-proposal-explained/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/11/15/trump-abolishing-education-department-may-hurt-students-with-disabilities/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/26/home-schooling-vs-public-school-poll/
https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/evangelical-homeschooling-and-the-development-of-family-values
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936225974/the-legacy-of-education-secretary-betsy-devos

Click to access full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf

Moms for Liberty Is Waging War on LGBTQ and Race-Inclusive Books
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/4/6/23673209/trans-students-sports-participation-biden-title-ix/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0162

Click to access a-nation-at-risk-report.pdf

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/nation-risk-and-re-segregation-schools

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Addressing a Case of Anxiety

27 Sunday Oct 2024

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The polls are making me crazy. I know I’m not alone. I’ve written in this blog about my incredulity that so many millions of Americans continue to support Donald Trump and that current Republican office holders who can’t stand Trump refuse out of cowardice to say so publicly.

Many have sought to explain Trump’s appeal, including Ezra Klein most recently in a thoughtful verbal essay a week ago on his podcast and, following that, by an in-depth interview with NYT’s journalist Maggie Haberman who, among journalists, knows Trump better than most. It ought to be clear to everyone by now who he is, the danger he poses to our democratic institutions, and who Kamala Harris is too.

Understanding that no candidate for public office is without his/her flaws and weaknesses, Kamala Harris has hers as well, though for middle-left Democrats she has shown herself to be a strong, honest, empathic, smart, pragmatic, experienced, competent, and charismatic leader based in broad liberal democratic values, supportive of the US Constitution and rule of law, and of America’s traditional place in the international order.

Given Donald Trump’s enormous weaknesses as a candidate and as a man and his utter lack of empathy, I’ve struggled to understand why he remains so competitive in the polls. In any former election before the so-called “Trump Era,” his behavior and character would have been disqualifying for the presidency.

David Plouffe, Kamala Harris’ Senior Advisor, explained that since September, nothing substantial has changed in the polls. Harris and Trump are historically close and Harris’ lead in the key swing states is within the margins of error. Plouffe and others say, however, that we would rather be us than Trump, that Kamala is a far better candidate with better policies that positively will impact the economy and the lives of more Americans, and will preserve the United States’ role internationally. Harris also has a far better ground-game and has more money than Trump to make her case.

James Carville wrote an opinion piece in the NY Times last week in which he argued why he is certain that Kamala Harris will win the election just as the historian Allan Lichtman has argued since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in July.

This past week on the MSNBC Podcast How to Win 2024 with former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Steele sought to allay the anxiety that so many of us Democrats feel (we are a nervous bunch, to be sure). He explained that the polls are being skewed by the deliberate infusion of hundreds of MAGA leaning polls to jack up the confidence of Trump supporters that can drive his base to the polls and lay the groundwork for Trump’s denial of the results if/when he loses the election.

Steele’s argument calmed me down a bit, as well as the recent revelations of General John Kelly in his NYT’s interview with Mike Schmidt, and the news that 200 former Republican office holders and members of past Republican administrations are voting for Kamala Harris. And then there are all the celebrity endorsers such as Beyoncé’s appearance with Kamala in Houston, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Michelle and Barak Obama’s barnstorming in swing states, a plethora of strong cutting-edge Harris ads flooding social media, and Harris and Walz appearing everywhere in interviews and rallies.

It’s difficult, nevertheless, not knowing how this election will turn out given the enormous stakes. That’s the source of my anxiety and fear. I’ve tried to contain my anxiety by distracting myself with other things, in remembering that turn-out and only the final poll (i.e. the vote) matters, and that the advantages are with the Harris-Walz campaign.

Here are a few thoughts by others that have helped me address my fear and anxiety in these final days. I hope they might help those of you who feel as I do as November 5th approaches:

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie, no relation to Andrew Carnegie, (1888-1955)

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.” -Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

“Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.” -Mary Doria Russell, science-fiction writer (b. 1950)

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” -Jodi Picoult, American novelist (b. 1966)

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” -Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Remember to vote and be sure everyone you know votes – hopefully, for the Harris-Walz ticket. If you are willing and able to volunteer to get out the vote, go to Pod Save America’s non-partisan “Vote Save America PAC” at https://votesaveamerica.com/

PS – The Washington Post did a deep dive into policy preferences between Harris and Trump without identifying whose policies they were. The result was overwhelming support for Kamala Harris’ policies – see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/trump-harris-policy-quiz/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_ideas

Central Conference of American Rabbis Statement Condemning Donald Trump’s Dangerous Antisemitic Campaign Rhetoric

24 Tuesday Sep 2024

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Introductory Note:

The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) is the Reform Movement’s Rabbinic association of more than 2000 ordained Reform Rabbis who serve the Jewish people in a variety of positions worldwide. I have been a member of the CCAR since I was ordained by the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (the Reform movement’s rabbinic seminary) in New York in 1979. I am gratified by the following statement of condemnation of Donald Trump’s antisemitic rhetoric and I urge that this statement be disseminated widely not only to the Jewish people, but to all those who may be taken in by Trump’s outrageous statements about the role of Jews in American society today in our relationship to this American election and to the people and State of Israel.

This CCAR statement is limited to what Trump said most recently in relationship to the election and Jews and does not note past statements, such as his calling “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia when referring to Neo-Nazi demonstrators who carried torches and shouted outside a Reform synagogue “Jews will not replace us”. It also does not refer to Trump’s ongoing misogyny, racism and hostility to black and brown immigrants. Senator Rafael Warnock (d. Georgia) put it well when he noted in response to Trump’s antisemitic rhetoric on Sunday morning that there is so much hate in Trump’s heart that it constantly flows outward.

Note below that the CCAR does not take partisan political positions (as this statement says clearly), and when I served as the Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles and before that in congregations I served in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, I did not do so either because both Democrats and Republicans were/are members of my congregations and I respect those who think differently from me regardless of political affiliation. However, I made an exception one time in 40 years – in the 2016 presidential election in which I endorsed Hillary Clinton for president against Donald Trump because it was clear to me then that Trump’s hatred of large numbers of Americans based on race, gender, ethnicity, and religion and his threat to American democratic traditions and norms disqualified him from serving as President of the United States.

Here is the CCAR’s Statement.

September 23, 2024

The Central Conference of American Rabbis is grateful that both major candidates in the 2024 United States Presidential Election, Vice President Kamala Harris and Former President Donald Trump—together with their running mates—have taken strong stances in response to antisemitism. Antisemitism is a significant and growing problem in the United States, finding a welcome home at both the extreme right and left of the political spectrum.

At the same time, the Central Conference of American Rabbis strongly condemn Former President Trump’s repeated claims that Jewish Americans who vote for Vice President Harris would do so only because they suffer from mental illness and that American Jews would be to blame if Former President Trump did not prevail.[i]

The former claim fails to recognize that Jewish Americans, like all voters, have a variety of issues, both domestic and internal, which inform whom they will support this election. We also denounce the claim that Second Gentlemen Doug Emhoff is not a good Jew.[ii] Jews practice Judaism in a variety of ways and it is not the role of our leaders to judge and disparage how people practice their religion.

We are most troubled by the inflammatory claim that American Jews will be at fault if Former President Trump does not win the election. Falsely claiming that Jews, who represent less than 3% of Americans, will single handedly determine the winner of the election plays into age-old antisemitic lies about Jewish power. Former President Trump’s rhetoric relies on what Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt has called the “antisemitic conspiracy myth” that Jews enjoy disproportionate power and exercise outsized control in and beyond America.[iii] This dangerous rhetoric seeks to target the Jewish community at a time of heightened antisemitism. It is part of a disturbing pattern of Former President Trump attacking those who disagree with him.

It should go without saying that American Jews, no matter which party they support, are loyal Americans. While we condemn these baseless attacks, we also encourage all Jews to vote in the upcoming election and to support non-partisan get out the vote efforts. Our democracy depends on the participation of all citizens of our country. 

Rabbi Erica Asch, President
Rabbi Hara E. Person, Chief Executive
Central Conference of American Rabbis

Why Do So Many Millions Continue to Support Donald Trump?

13 Friday Sep 2024

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I’ve been baffled for years about why millions of Americans continue to support Donald Trump after his disastrous handling of the Covid epidemic, his 34 felony convictions, his 54 remaining indictments, his massive grift, his pathological lying, his central role in the only insurrection led by an American president against the United States government in our nation’s history, his 2 impeachments, his craven disrespect for soldiers and gold star families, his utter lack of virtue, his dark, dystopic, cynical, and pessimistic attitude about America, and his racism, misogyny and hatred against immigrants of color and anyone who critiques him.

Political thinkers, psychologists, constitutional scholars and lawyers, podcast and cable news commentators, and print journalists have offered all kinds of reasons for the fealty of so many millions of Americans who show ongoing support for arguably “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”  (General John Kelly – a 4-star general and one of Trump’s former Chiefs-of-staff).

Many of the reasons offered make some logical sense: he’s entertaining; his need for vengeance resonates with the life-experience of many of his fans who are angry like him and feel they’ve not benefited in the American dream; his role as a cult leader offers a sense of belonging for people on the margins of society; his tough-guy persona gives many a super-hero with whom to identify; the perception that he was good for the economy; the expansive reach of a myopic right-wing media bubble that reinforces his brand; the persuasive power of ‘don’t believe your eyes – believe me’ that enables people to stop thinking; the racism, misogyny and fear of the “other” many of his followers also feel; the support of evangelical Christians who like his right-wing judicial nominations and reversal of Roe v Wade; and the fact that there are so many life-long Republicans who just can’t imagine leaving their political and cultural “tribe” and supporting a Democrat.

All those reasons are compelling and likely true – but what else might be attracting some of Trump’s followers?

The renowned Swiss-Polish psychoanalyst and philosopher Alice Miller (1923-2010) may offer a measure of insight not only into Trump’s character, but the character of many of his followers. She wrote at length about why people and nations follow evil leaders in her two books: For Your Own Good – Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence and The Drama of the Gifted Child – The Search for the True Self.

In the Preface to For Your Own Good she explained:

“Since the end of World War II, I have been haunted by the question of what could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death and of how it could then be possible for millions of others to acclaim him and assist in carrying out this plan.”

Donald Trump is NOT Adolph Hitler and the MAGA right is not the Nazi party. However, Trump fits the profile of the leader that Dr. Miller described in her books.

She concluded that every act of cruelty, no matter how brutal and shocking, has traceable antecedents in its perpetrator’s past – most often from childhood. She cited and quoted from a mid-18th century German book on child-rearing by Johann Georg Sulzer who, in 1748, wrote in “An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children”:

“Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey…. It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”

Sulzer continued:

“I advise all those whose concern is the education of children to make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness [in the child] and to persist until they have reached their goal… by scolding and the rod [for the purpose of creating] obedient, docile and good children [from as early as] the child’s first year.”

Dr. Miller opines:

“Neuroses and psychoses are not direct consequences of actual frustrations but the expression of repressed traumata…” [the child] “…will experience feelings of anxiety, shame, insecurity, and helplessness, which may soon be forgotten, especially when the child finds a victim of his/her own… A child’s ever-growing discomfort at the loss of the pleasure he/she would have had if the child’s wishes had been granted, eventually find satisfaction only in revenge, i.e. in the comforting knowledge that one’s peers have been subjected to the same feeling of discomfort or pain. The more often the child experiences the comforting feeling of revenge, the more this becomes a need, which seeks satisfaction at every idle moment. In this stage, the child uses unruly behavior to inflict every possible unpleasantness, every conceivable annoyance on others only for the sake of alleviating the pain the child feels because his/her wishes are not fulfilled. This fault leads with logical consistency to the next; his/her fear of punishment awakens the need to tell lies, to be devious and deceitful…”

Does this sound familiar when thinking of Trump?

Dr. Miller concludes:

“When still in diapers, the child learns to knock at the gates of love with ‘obedience,’ and unfortunately often does not unlearn this ever after… all the requirements will have been met to enable a citizen to live in a dictatorship without minding it; he or she will even be able to feel a euphoric identification with it… In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of the child’s upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His/her ‘will’ is completely identified with that of the government.”

The psychoanalytic principle of “identification with the aggressor” – a defense against an over-powering and threatening adversary – is helpful in understanding why many of those who identify with Trump find such comfort in their doing so. He presents himself as the ultimate alpha male aggressor. Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, has written that when Donald was a child, he was a thin-skinned playground bully.

Trump loves dictators – Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán – and calls them “strong” and “smart.” One of Trump’s ex-wives said that he kept Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bed’s night stand. Marine Gen. John Kelly and Trump’s former Chief-of-Staff said that, as President, Trump complemented Hitler saying that “he did some good things” seeming to ignore the millions the Nazis murdered and the 400,000 Americans who died in WWII.

Was Trump beaten into submission by his hard-driving father? It is unclear. However, in a NYT’s article (July 28, 2020), Trump’s father Fred was described as

“…a disciplinarian who spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing his son’s career and taught him to either dominate or submit. In Fred Trump’s world, showing sadness or hurt was a sign of weakness. ‘The only thing that Trump ever cared about was ‘I’ve got to win. Teach me how to win,’ George White, a former classmate of Mr. Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who spent years around both father and son, said in an interview. Recalling Fred’s hard-driving influence, Mr. White said that Mr. Trump’s former school mentor, a World War II combat veteran named Theodore Dobias, once told him that ‘he had never seen a cadet whose father was harder on him than his father was on Donald Trump.’”

Mary Trump has written that Donald “suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.” Perhaps many of his followers also suffered childhood deprivations that drew them to the former president.

It remains to be seen how many of the millions of Trump’s followers will vote for him again on November 5th. It seems to me (anecdotally) that we are witnessing a significant enough abandonment of Trump by hundreds of former traditional Republican leaders from the Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. and Trump administrations who have come to the conclusion that Trump is corrupt and a significant security risk to the United States. As Kamala Harris has emerged as a strong, competent, experienced, and joyful Democratic standard bearer, the Cheney family and so many others recognize that she (despite their policy differences) will assure the continuation of American democracy, the rule of law and obeisance to the US Constitution.

How significant the number of Independent-leaning Republicans and Republicans will vote for Kamala is hard to say, but I’m optimistic not only because Trump represents the worst in the American spirit, but that Kamala Harris represents the best.

“Don’t Panic – We all have to understand the assignment” by Dan Rather

10 Tuesday Sep 2024

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I love Dan Rather. He has lived and been in the news business long enough to offer us wisdom and perspective. Here is today’s “Steady” newsletter in which he wisely counsels “Don’t Panic”:

“Waking up to The New York Times headline: ‘State of the Race: A Dead Heat With 8 Weeks to Go’ is at the very least sobering, but by no means conclusive. It may even be a good thing.

To my Steady friends, the name of our newsletter says it all. We need to stay steady. The 2024 presidential election was always going to be tick-tight. The Democrats were never going to ‘Walz’ into the White House (pun intended), though he helps. You know what else helps? Having motivated supporters. A close poll can do a lot to activate the bench sitters. There is no room for even an ounce of complacency between now and November 5.

Since Barack Obama’s huge victory in 2008, the American electorate has become more polarized and calcified than ever before. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 49% of registered voters are or lean Democrat, while 48% are or lean Republican. These numbers trend with what we have seen in the voting booth. In 2016, Donald Trump won by just 70,000 votes in the swing states that decided the election. In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory margin was even smaller. There is no reason to think 2024 will be any different in terms of winning margins.

Along with shrinking margins, the number of undecided voters making their choice during the last two weeks of the campaign has also decreased. Exit polls in 2016 put the number at 15%. In 2020, it was around 6%. At this point, with two months to go, about 15% are still undecided, of which three-quarters say they do have a preference. That leaves just 3% in the ‘don’t know’ category. In other words, a very small number of voters in swing states will decide this. If you truly “don’t know” at this point, we need to talk.

That is a lot of numbers to throw at you … but know that heading into the final stretch of the campaign, I’d rather be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump. She has more room to move the needle. He has barely any.

For one, an anti-MAGA majority exists, even in swing states. The 2022 midterm elections proved this. Traditionally, midterms break hard for the party not in power. There was every reason to believe that would be the case in November 2022, with inflation high and Biden’s popularity low. Ultimately, Republicans, who predicted a ‘red wave,’ made only modest gains and lost several key races. The reason: A majority of Americans were determined to stop MAGA. 

Two, love him or hate him, Trump is a known commodity. Need I remind you that he has been running for president for nine years? Harris is comparatively a blank slate. More than a quarter of voters told The New York Times they want to know more about her.Many in that block of voters are from groups Harris has made gains with: younger voters, voters of color, and independent votes. The poll showed these voters are more eager to hear about her plans for the future than they are to hear from Trump.

Three, the Harris/Walz campaign is better organized and more disciplined, and Harris is a better candidate — on paper and in real life. She has energy and is relatable. And her room for growth well outpaces his. Remember, it need only be a point or two. She has a plan that appeals to the center. Whereas Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any plan at all. At Tuesday night’s debate, Harris will have the opportunity to continue to tell her story and expand on her ideas for the country. By being herself, she can be the “normal” candidate. More voters may be looking for change, but change within the bounds of what has been considered normal.

The other day, our friends at Pod Save America reminded me of an adage attributed to Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. In a play on an election truism, he said a ‘race is within the margin of effort.’ 

Effort.

Maximum effort is what it will take to keep Trump out of the White House and save democracy as we have known it. Every door knocked, every phone called, every text sent, every dollar given, every hour volunteered can make a difference. So will registering to vote and getting to the polls.

In a close race, good luck favors those who care the most and work the hardest.”

My Postscript:

I believe that VP Kamala Harris will do well tonight on the debate stage. Her clarity of thought, her ability to communicate her policies (see her website), her depth of knowledge of and understanding of what Americans want and need, her commitment to the law and the democratic order here and internationally, her compassion, upbeat and joyful countenance, her capacity to think on her feet and respond appropriately and with dignity to Trump’s misogyny, racism and low-life vulgarity, and her well-defined moral compass will persuade enough undecided voters across the political and demographic spectra to be persuasive that she can indeed be a good and competent President consistent with the constitutional history of the United States.

As Nancy Pelosi liked to say: “Don’t agonize – organize.”

“The most flawed person I have every met in my life.” – General John Kelly

04 Thursday Jul 2024

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George Stephanopoulos has done America a great favor in publishing his readable and well-researched analysis of every American president’s use of the White House Situation Room (aka Sit Room) since it was established during the presidency of John F. Kennedy in Stephanopoulos’ The Situation Room – The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis (2024). To learn how other recent presidents (e.g. G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden) engaged fully with the Sit Room, American intelligence and military experts, and foreign policy crisis’s, I am filled with horror with what Trump did, did not do, and never learned to do as Commander in Chief. Stephanopoulos reveals Trump’s abject incompetence and the danger he poses to western civilization and America’s standing in the world.

As we now anxiously watch how the post-debate Biden crisis unfolds, wait for Stephanopoulos’ interview of Biden on Friday (July 5) and whatever other unscripted interviews the campaign arranges for Joe in the short term, and witness the precipitous loss of public and congressional support for Joe that may well compel him to step aside (despite his expressed intention to continue the campaign), the book reminds any objective reader again of Joe Biden’s personal, moral, intellectual, and presidential superiority over Donald Trump.

I quote below directly from Stephanopoulos’ research describing many insiders’ description of Trump’s lack of use of the Sit Room (pages 271-298) and his chaotic, thoughtless, ignorant, small-minded, egocentric, self-serving, and dangerous approach to foreign policy while President, and what we can certainly expect should he (God forbid) be re-elected in November.

Here is some of what Stephanopoulos wrote:

As Omarosa put it in an NBC interview: “This is a White House where everybody lies. The president lies to the American people. … Sarah Huckabee stands in front of the country and lies every single day.’’… Faith and trust were apparently in short supply in this White House… Almost nothing about it [Trump’s Sit Room] was normal… During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed.

Trump tore through and wore out his national security team: Four secretaries of defense. Four directors of national intelligence. Four White House chiefs of staff and five secretaries of Homeland Security. The most damning judgments of his competence and character come from those he appointed to these most sensitive positions [each of whom were key players in the Sit Room]. His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, famously told colleagues that Trump was a “f_ _ _ ing moron.” James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, described him as a threat to the Constitution ‘”who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try.” Fellow Marine general and White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “the most flawed person I have every met in my life.”

“He was the least disciplined, least organized human I ever met in my life,” Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert told me. No matter how hard his top aides and cabinet members tried, “None of them stopped him from constantly undermining us and making decisions outside the process.”

“Anybody with any sense-somebody like Mattis or Tillerson – they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,” Bossert recalls. “I mean, you couldn’t get Mattis into the White House. His view was “That’s a madman in a circular room screaming. And the less time I spend in there, the more time I can just go about my business.” In fact, Tillerson and Mattis began meeting regularly outside the White House in order to circumvent the President.

National Counter terrorism Center head Nick Rasmussen served for two years under Obama, followed by a year under Trump. The difference, he told me, was profound. “The tempo of the White House Situation Room meetings went way, way down in the Trump administration,” he recalls. “In the Obama years, I would have been to the White House three, four, five times a week” for meetings at all levels. “In the Trump administration, it could be weeks and weeks without any involvement or meetings.”

“I don’t think we got Trump into the Situation Room, in my year and a half there, more than four times,” Bossert told me. “He didn’t like that room. He didn’t like the idea that he had to go to it. He wanted everybody to come to him.”

Trump rarely sought out information from the Sit Room. He didn’t request reports, and he never called down with questions. I asked Bossert whether it was fair to say that for Trump, Fox News channel was as much a conduit of information as the Sit Room. “I don’t even think that’s in question,” he replied. “I think that’s one hundred percent accurate.” Then he told me something I’d never heard before.

“For a while, he didn’t want to see what the news channels were saying. He wanted to see what the chyrons were reading,” Bossert says. Chryons, of course, are the news briefs crawling across the bottom of the TV screen. “He wanted the chryons captured and printed… And so the Sit Room would do that. They would produce for him books of chryons prints” surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House.

Trump’s penchant for inviting random people into sensitive meetings led to some uncomfortable moments. Those who didn’t have clearances, but were reluctant to defy the president, would find themselves facing irritated intelligence officers. Classified briefings became fraught, with no one in the room comfortable except for Trump, who seemed happy to have his posse with him.

After Bossert had left the White House, he received a call one day from President Trump.

Bossert was in South Korea at the time, and both he and the President were using cell phones. “I said, ‘Sir, don’t even begin this conversation,’” Bossert recalls. “I’m in a foreign country where I’m connected to their network. There’s a hundred-percent chance your phone’s being listened to, and ninety percent chance mine’s being listened to in this country. Us together on this phone call, it’s a hundred thousand percent guaranteed that they‘re listening.”

Trump replied, “Okay, Tom. You tell them I’m sick and tired of them!” And then he went on with the conversation, completely ignoring the warning. You know, he just wouldn’t listen,” Bossert says, a sense of wonderment still in his voice.

And as much as Trump complained about leaks, he also used that phone to become, essentially, leaker in chief.

“I caught him doing it,” Bossert told me. “I was walking out of the room, and he picks up the phone before I’m out of earshot and starts talking to a reporter about what just happened. And I turned around and pointed right at him. ‘Who in the hell are you talking to?’” the President essentially shrugged, seemingly unbothered at being caught.

“He does it, so he assumed everybody was that way,” Bossert says. “His paranoia was in part because he assumes everyone else acts like he acts.”

…President Trump’s capriciousness drove [National Security Advisor John Bolton] particularly crazy. I asked him how different Situation Room meetings were under Trump than under the other presidents. “They were a disaster,” he told me. “He had no idea what the issues were. He never learned anything.” Bolton believes that Trump felt “out of his element. He was surrounded by people, every one of whom knew a lot more than he did. And so he liked to retreat to the Oval office.”

“He came in thinking that his personal relationship with foreign leaders would define the quality of bilateral relations,” recalls Bolton. “He’s still saying it today. ‘I had a good relationship with Putin … with Xi, or had a bromance with Kim Jung Un’ or whatever.”

You get the idea. Stephanopoulos continued with a description of Trump’s dangerous incompetence during the Covid epidemic, his refusal to wear a mask and his forbidding others in the White House to wear masks because he thought it made everyone appear weak, the impeachable telephone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky in which Trump tried to muscle Zelensky to give him dirt on Biden in exchange for already congressionally approved military equipment, Trump’s fixation on buying Greenland and making a trade for Puerto Rico after the island suffered a devastating hurricane (to get rid of the problem despite Puerto Ricans being citizens of the United States), and, of course, January 6.

The last chapter on Biden shows a fully engaged, informed, reflective, inquisitive, and decisive president who read in granular detail the briefing books presented to him by intelligence community experts, and based on all the information he had, informed by decades of his foreign policy experience as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Vice President, made reasoned decisions. Biden’s greatest failure was the American exit from Afghanistan. Stephanopoulos describes what happened there and why.

The book is a fascinating read, and for history lovers and those who want to understand what’s behind some of the most serious foreign policy crises’s in the last 65 years in every presidency, you won’t be disappointed.

The Philadelphia Inquirer May Have Offered us a Measure of Hope We Badly Need

01 Monday Jul 2024

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Last Thursday evening was devastating for anyone who loves and respects Joe Biden and for those millions of Americans and world leaders who fear another Trump presidency. I have found myself taking both sides of the argument about whether President Biden should step aside and open up the convention in August for another candidate to emerge, or to tough it out and presume that Joe and the Biden Campaign know what they are doing and are going on overdrive to take back the initiative with a full court press with Joe as the Democratic standard bearer.

Since last Thursday’s disaster, pundits across the spectrum have weighed in on what should happen next and what likely will happen next. The very best advice I have heard is for all of us to cool it for a week or so, take a deep breath, keep the panic at bay, let the dust settle, and wait to see what Joe and the campaign choose to do.

As one individual, I recognize that I have no power or influence to compel a decision one way or another anyway, and neither do any of us. Only Joe and Jill Biden and a few of his closest advisors know in their hearts whether he is capable of serving effectively as President or not. He knows what it takes to do so and he always, characteristically, has placed the best interests of the nation and the American people first. I have to assume that that is what he intends to do. It seems, so far, that Joe and those around him believe he can do the work of the presidency despite what happened at the debate. Certainly, if he does stay in the race and it remains a Biden-Trump contest, there ought to be no question about the choice. Not voting cannot be a third option. Too much is at stake for the country and western civilization.  

I am grateful this morning for the lead Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer that spelled out what is before us. Read it here To Serve His Country, Donald Trump Should Leave the Race