BRATTLEBORO-Near the end of the movie Golda, which was released for the 50th anniversary of the 1973 October War, or Yom Kippur War, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat ends the war by saying "Israel" for the first time - rather than "the Zionist entity" - giving recognition to the Jewish state.
Wars begin as well as end with words.
In our local newspapers, authors have begun to refer to Israel with terms such as "the Zionist project." Widely used in anti-Israel advocacy, this implies a rogue transience that delegitimizes Jewish existence in Israel. Such lack of recognition is the core of the past century of war. That failure to see the "other" goes both ways, failing to see Palestinians or Israelis, and their needs for security and dignity.
Southern Vermonters have worked for decades to build this mutual recognition. Palestinian and Israeli students have come to our towns, to programs at SIT and Jerusalem Peacebuilders, to learn how to see and speak to each other.
As a project of the Greater Falls Community Justice Center (GFCJC), based in Bellows Falls and Springfield, we have brought Afghani woman muralist Negina Azimi to paint murals with students in area schools. We focus on the theme of justice. In restorative style circles, students discuss what justice means...
I support Becca Balint in the primary race for Vermont's lone Congressional seat. We are lucky in Vermont to have better candidate choices than most states. Molly Gray has been wonderful interacting with students in my youth leadership programs, as was Kesha Ram, a former challenger. Still, at this...
With all the outstanding efforts by young teenage leaders this year on issues like gun violence and climate change, isn't it time we finally gave them a chance to vote? The students from Parkland, Fla., are the lead organizers on gun violence in the country, and 15-year old Swede Greta Thunberg is the top voice addressing climate change in the entire world right now. We should support the efforts of our local teens to vote and to become responsible citizens.
At the turn of the year, it is customary to acknowledge not only successes, but losses from the past year. Brattleboro suffered one loss that has not been clearly reckoned in our local press: the loss of students on the School for International Training (SIT) campus. Last January, SIT announced it would not admit an on-campus class of graduate students for this past fall 2018 semester, choosing to transition to low-residency, online, and internationally based programs. That has meant the...
We are shocked, and yet with eyes open cannot be surprised by the violence that has stricken the Jewish community of Pittsburgh. This hits every Jewish community close to home, and perhaps ours even closer: our former spiritual leader grew up in that same synagogue and had his bar mitzvah there at the age of 13. He knew someone killed in the shooting. While it's easy to assume that these sorts of horrors could not happen here, we have witnessed...
We are writing to express our dismay at the hateful and threatening message scrawled on the sidewalk in Brattleboro. The death threat, written in German, was a direct and clear connection to Nazism and the Holocaust. While the police hopes it was just a sick joke, it certainly coincides with a rise in anti-Semitic language and explicitly threatening actions across the United States in the past year - notably in Charlottesville and, as we see now, even here. This is...