We met in July, when each morning’s news carries some new outrage or terror. Our service celebrated the wonder of berries, as is our July tradition, and also the power and urgent necessity of interdependence. As always, we took comfort in our familiar liturgies, such as our Blessing for Pursuing Justice, and in song, and in one another.

Download the liturgy here.
Music included:

For Torah study, we took up the issue being battled on social media about whether or not it is appropriate to use the terms “Concentration Camps” for the immigrant detention/deportation centers the US government is building. We looked at the history of other concentration camps in US history, and at the debate that erupted when an exhibit from the National Japanese American Museum called “America’s Concentration Camps” was invited to the museum on Ellis Island. Only months before it was to open there, the staff at Ellis wrote to director Karen Ishizuka to require that the name of the exhibit be changed, as they expected anger and push back from NYC Jewish institutions over the use of “concentration camp.” Elliott’s drash was that, while comparing current US policy to Nazi Germany could help some people understand how evil the policies are, it is more honest to understand that the US has ALWAYS had concentration camps, targeting different communities at different times, and that the Nazi government was influenced by US policies and ideas, such as eugenics. If we are to move forward from here, we have to give up the idea of a “pure or even workable US before Trump” and come to grips with the actual history of our country. What is happening now is not new, not a surprise, and not anything we collectively haven’t supported or tolerated before.

Listen to an NPR Code Switch episode about that museum debate here.

Read about Long Walks, “Benevolent Assimilation” in the Philippines, and other US concentration camps in this overview.

Think about the difference even in Nazi Germany between concentration camps and extermination camps. The latter were built as a final solution, only after all other ways of ridding themselves of undesirables were not working quickly enough.

While this quotation didn’t make the final cut for Torah study, it is vitally important to understanding where we are today to know that FDR, now held as a progressive role model, personally drove the rounding up and imprisoning of Japanese Americans:

Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese Americans was consistent with Roosevelt’s long-time racial views. During the 1920s, for example, he had written articles in the Macon Telegraph opposing white-Japanese intermarriage for fostering “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood” and praising California’s ban on land ownership by the first-generation Japanese. In 1936, while president, he privately wrote that, regarding contacts between Japanese sailors and the local Japanese American population in the event of war, “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans