Next Tuesday’s MARCH FOR ISRAEL—and Rally against Antisemitism—is bringing back memories from my adolescence, when my own political awakening first began.
December 6, 1987, was “Freedom Sunday,” a similar rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, opposite the site where in a previous generation the civil rights movement gathered to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., describe his Dream. A junior in high school, I was just figuring out about political action. Alongside posters of Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, and the New York Giants, my teenage bedroom had a large poster that read: GLASNOST FOR SOVIET JEWS!
“This is a political movement but not a partisan one; people of all persuasions will prove they can (still, in 2023) come together as one in the face of unmitigated evil.”
The movement to free Soviet Jews from their relentless persecution, imprisonments and exiles, and inability to emigrate had been around for twenty years. My classmates and I all “twinned” with Soviet Jews for our bar/bat mitzvahs: We included the names of Soviet Jewish 13 year-olds on our invitations, and reserved a seat on the bimah, saying, “This is for my Soviet Jewish twin who is prohibited by law from practicing Judaism.” At our suburban shul, we gathered together on Sunday mornings to make public phone calls to the Mendeleev boys—Karen Schwartz’s bat mitzvah twins—and to insist to the apparatchik on the other end that we would not forget them.
But the culmination was that rally in DC. Our synagogue chartered buses and headed for the capital, where we joined 250,000 others, carrying signs and chanting slogans and singing “Am Yisrael Chai” and “We are Leaving Mother Russia.”
The amazing thing about “Freedom Sunday” is that we won. Not long afterwards, Gorbachev began to thaw the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union—and Jews began to abandon Russia in massive numbers. Over 1 million left for Israel; over 300,000 came to America, and a quarter of a million went to Germany. And those who stayed were permitted to rediscover and renew Jewish life in Russia, which a century earlier had by far the largest Jewish population in the world.
It's for these reasons that the Soviet Jewry movement has been called “the most successful human rights movement in history.”
These things leave a mark on an impressionable teenager. That was the beginning of my political consciousness—of the power of a group of like-minded people in a democratic society to bring about change, and to support one another when the forces of evil seem to have the upper hand.
Now, this generation is being called to show up. Next Tuesday’s rally will take place on that same patch of land, steeped as it is in the history of justice and protest. And once again, we’ll be called upon to raise our voices against hatred, fascism, and antisemitism.
The stakes are higher than ever. Not just in Israel, where war is being waged against a satanic sort of evil—the perpetrators of murder, rape, and social media-enhanced beheadings; the kidnappers of 240 innocents between the ages of 5 and 85—but also against the closer-to-home evil that considers Hamas to be some sort of social justice movement, the hideous apologists for terrorism on social media and on the disgraced campuses of America’s colleges.
We will be the voices of decency, truth, and freedom. On November 14, we will demand in a single voice to bring the hostages home. We will let our Israeli friends and family know that they are not alone: that despite the echo chambers of hate online and on campus, the overwhelming majority of us stand with them against terrorism.
The assembly will include people from across the political spectrum, left and right; and will it cross the religious spectrum: orthodox, liberal, and secular. This is a political movement but not a partisan one; people of all persuasions will prove they can (still, in 2023) come together as one in the face of unmitigated evil.
There are moments when we are called to show up to lift our voices, to say no to hate, to call for moral clarity and truth—even at a time when truth seems to be a trampled-upon and degraded idea.
קְרָ֤א בְגָרוֹן֙ אַל־תַּחְשֹׂ֔ךְ כַּשּׁוֹפָ֖ר הָרֵ֣ם קוֹלֶ֑ךָ
Cry with a full throat without restraint!
Raise your voice like a shofar! (Isaiah 58:1)
Will I see you there? I hope so! (Now, I wonder if I can still find those old posters from my childhood…)