Every Rose Has Nothing To Fear – A poem for Parsha Shoftim

There was a time when people in Hollywood had the moral clarity to also defend Jews who were in danger half a world away. My family’s freedom is the direct result of that solidarity.

Most voters don’t care about Gaza, and — despite all the alarmist predictions — the Gaza conflict had no impact on the presidential election.

The more we teach our children to love Judaism, the deeper the roots they will have as they grow in this melting pot of a world. 

We are reaching a powder keg moment in the Five Boroughs—a period never before imagined in a city so widely identified with its Jewish population.

After all these decades following the Holocaust, after “Never Again” became the moral promise of the civilized world, are we really heading back toward this kind of discrimination? 

At Sarah Lawrence, a national newspaper agreed to shield a professor’s identity because they feared what their own institution might do if they were named defending Jewish students. That is the climate, in a single fact.