Darfur Rally
General Anna makes a good point at the Darfur rally that in general, it’s not safe to make generalizations. It always drives me nuts when people describe a group I belong to with a subgroup.
For example, when I went to the Israel rally in DC a couple of years ago, a speaker stated that the Palestinians felt pain. A bunch of people booed. I was upset at them, but neither cheered nor made other noise. The news reported that the crowd booed the speaker. I just wished the speaker had given us something to cheer for so we could be heard, too. It made Jews look bad.
Live the Questions:
I have two rules for rallies that I’d like to introduce here, based on two unfortunate parts of the Darfur rally.
Rule One:
A rally speaker should check in with other consituencies before invoking them.One of the rabbis who spoke at the rally went on and on about the “historic Black-Jewish partnership for social justice,” and spoke as if there were an unbroken connection between Rabbi Heschel marching in 1965 and today. Now, I am extremely proud of the contributions Jews made to the civil rights movement as freedom riders, as voter-registration activists during the Summer of Freedom, as leaders who lent their voices to the struggle. However, we haven’t really stuck our necks out for the African-American community very much since then. So invoking the “historic Black-Jewish partnership for social justice” feels downright disrespectful.
