Why, as a woman and a Jew, I marched

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It was on the way home that I encountered a friend of a friend who berated me: “Give him a chance,” he said. “He’s only been president one day.”

I didn’t want to engage, and I didn’t want to argue with a stranger, so I declined to respond in any substantive way, just agreed to disagree. But these are some of the reasons why I chose to walk seven kilometres from my home to Queen’s Park, and then back again, on Shabbat, to participate – like so many other committed Jews – in a march of protest, solidarity and resistance.

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Give him a chance to what? Make good on his campaign promises to gut environmental protection, roll back gun control regulations and create an environment hostile to immigrants, women and minorities? To upset the world order by snubbing longtime allies and embracing longtime foes? To shake hands with groups that spout anti-Semitic, racist, Islamophobic and other hatreds?

Because even after only one day of his presidency, the new leader of the United States indeed began to make good on those promises, pulling back from the government’s previous commitment to protect the environment and wiping the White House website clean of references to climate change and links to scientific research about its progress. Instead, there is an elaborate promise to eliminate “burdensome regulations on our energy industry,” and an intent to “refocus” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on “protecting our air and water.”

Given the “America first” slogan blanketing all aspects of the new leadership’s policy, I think it’s a safe bet to understand the “our” to be, at best, a concern with America’s environmental conditions, not with planetary ones. Look out, Canadians, for what blows our way from the south.

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So, as a native New Yorker still answerable to U.S. taxation authorities and still privileged to vote to express my disagreement with that direction. I joined the march. I marched as a woman, in criticism of the degraded discourse about women that pervaded the campaign season, and in sympathy with the millions of women whose right to determine what happens to their bodies is being eroded – ironically enough – by a government that campaigned on lessening the intrusion of government.

And I marched as a Jew, remembering the proud Jewish engagement with civil rights in America and embracing the long Jewish tradition of seeking tzedek, of looking out for the powerless, poor and disenfranchised.

Less than two weeks separated the Women’s March on Washington, D.C, (and its solidarity marches in Toronto, elsewhere in Canada, Israel and around the world) from my return from the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. The MLA is the professional society representing the teaching of literatures and languages in universities. With more than 25,000 members, it’s one of the most important scholarly societies, and this year it faced an aggressive push to boycott Israeli academic institutions and those affiliated with them.

A group of MLA members successfully pushed back against the boycott resolution, which was roundly defeated. My sense is that those who voted down the resolution were persuaded by those of us who argued against it because, as colleagues, we work shoulder to shoulder with them on committees and projects, promoting values that we hold in common. These include concerns about the quality of higher education, the state of universities, the exploitation of part-time faculty, and other shared issues. Links of trust and portals of communication emerge from working together.

The recent protests against shameful policies advocated by the new leadership in the United States also come out of shared values. Already we see dialogue and co-operation among civic, ethnic, and religious communities that had experienced troubled relations with one another, but are banding together to resist the forces of bigotry and hate. I don’t think, that as Jews, we can afford to sit this one out