Mia Lasic-Ellis

Perhaps you heard about all the displacement and deaths from the flooding in Nepal and the earthquakes in Venezuela. It’s at times like these I expect us to spring into action. When the Canterbury region of New Zealand, where I studied abroad this past semester, was struck by devastating earthquakes in the early 2010s, solid whenua, the Māori word for earth, turned to flowing water. Statues of white colonial figures toppled from their plinths as if Earth Mother Papatūānuku had taken the problem of global imperialism into her own hands.

But out of the cataclysmic cacophony a new melody shone through: a tune of solidarity. People from all over contributed to the rebuilding effort, including over 11,000 students from Te Whare Wananga O Waitaha—the University of Canterbury. In other words, over half of the university’s student body came together to rebuild their city, to support their neighbors and to build a better and safer future. What makes Bowdoin students different?

Thinking of the current power struggles and catastrophes, I’m also reminded of an extensive history of Jewish solidarity. During the civil rights era, Jewish groups and publications stood up for the cause of advancing the rights of the marginalized. The magazine “Jewish Life,” now “Jewish Currents,” cited solidarity with people of color in their “common struggle against anti-Semitism, discrimination, lynching and Jim Crow” as a central mission in their cause (alongside “strengthening the ties of the Jewish people with labor”). In the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Jack Greenberg, a white Jewish man, stood with Thurgood Marshall, a Black man, in the fight to end U.S. segregation in public schools. Greenberg would go on to succeed Marshall as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; he would be the only one of the organization’s presidents who wasn’t Black.

During the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign, in which activists fighting to mobilize Black voters flowed into Mississippi, 400—500 of the roughly 1,000 out-of-state student volunteers were Jewish. In response to the movement, a young Black activist, James Chaney, and two Jewish volunteers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. The relationship between Black and Jewish people was certainly not one of perfect unison and in some cases was fraught with tension. Strain grew especially high as Black nationalism and Jewish nationalism (in the form of Zionism) began to take hold and shift focus away from solidarity and coalition building toward ethnic self-determination. (One can easily see how ethnocentric and separatist goals can and do harm coalition building and the growth of class consciousness.)

Solidarity, of course, is a core tenet of Jewish reality, whether it be codified in text or not. Sometimes it feels too obvious to point out the centrality of Gemilut Chassadim (Loving-Kindness) to Jewish life. The Torah commands us in Vayikra (Leviticus) to love not only our fellows but also strangers as ourselves, to recognize the humanity we share and to respect our equality b’tzelem Elohim (in the image of G-d). Jewish people have a history as strangers, certainly in the land of Egypt as the Torah reminds us, but also, since the diaspora, in all the lands we have found ourselves. We are all strangers in strange lands and, this being the case, solidarity, responsibility to one another, areyvut, is as much a commandment as it is a necessary defense strategy.

Solidarity has an important sister whose face should be identifiable in all the examples we’ve looked at so far: resistance in the face of oppression. Whether self-defensive resistance against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto or marching for the sanctity of our neighbors’ lives when racist governments deny rights to their citizenry, Jewish people are obligated to stand in solidarity AND resistance with all the oppressed people of the world, whether Jewish or not.

I’ve been told by Zionists in my family and community that my support for Israel should be unconditional and unquestioning; because Jews need to support Jews. The concept that Israel represents the Jewish people is silly on its own, but that we should stand blindly behind any body or system ignores our long history of solidarity and resistance. It also forgets a profoundly Jewish tendency—and obligation—to question everything.

Approaching Rosh Hashanah, we could speak of the Akedah, the ways Abraham failed G-d’s test by blindly listening to authority. We can look to the Oven of Akhnai and the centrality and reinterpretation of  “Lo bashamayim hi.” Or we can just look to the prominence and overrepresentation (relative to our demographics) of Jewish people in intellectual and social justice roles. Skepticism is our duty as Jewish people—this role cannot be forgotten when it comes to Israel. We owe it to our tyrannized cousins, as Isaiah said, to clothe the exposed and feed the starved—to stand in solidarity with the downtrodden and the exploited. This is the job of the Jew as it is the job of all people.

We are told as Bowdoin students that our goal here is to learn not what to think but how to think. In this way, Bowdoin students and Jewish people are alike.

To tell a Bowdoin student to sit quietly—when their tuition money is invested in weapons, in destruction of the environment and the destruction of lives—is to tell a Bear not to be a Bear.

To tell a Jewish person to stand behind any institution—in the face of murder, starvation and illegal settlement—is to tell a Jew not to be a Jew.

May your good deeds count as numerous as the seeds of the pomegranate.

— A tired and nevertheless ever awake Jew

Asher Feiles is a member of the Class of 2027.