Nobody lives in the extremes.

For years we’ve been told who we are—from our media, our government, our classrooms, our communities, from the American zeitgeist that convinced us the world was ours by birthright. We’ve also been told who we are not—from other governments, our neighbors, our European forebears, our critics, from the collective voices of everyone else passing judgment from the cheap seats. After hearing both stories for decades, it’s difficult to know which parts are true. To separate the good from the bad. The lies from the truth.

Because really, what is truth?

Is America a land of abundance? Very much. Is it a land of waste? Absolutely.

Are Americans certain in our beliefs? Most definitely. Are we loud and boorish? Unfortunately, often.

Are we compassionate? Every day. Are we cruel? Every day.

Are we humble? Sometimes. Are we arrogant? God, yes.

Are we the promise? Or are we the contradiction? The dream? Or the warning?

The uncomfortable answer is that we are all of it. In recent years, our flaws have monopolized the conversation, so much so that I all but stopped defending my country against all, even unfair, criticism. I’m embarrassed, angry, despondent.

I find myself descending into a kind of impotent despair when I spend too much time online. More and more, I dread the thing I used to take pleasure in, wasting a few hours on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. I can’t do that now. It’s no longer fun; it can’t be.

Because the death toll inside ICE detention keeps climbing. The National Guard rolled into American cities against the governors’ wishes. The Department of Homeland Security has proposed shipping US citizens to a foreign prison. Birthright citizenship has been put on the chopping block by executive order. Peaceful protesters are gunned down by a government-sanctioned—let’s call it what it is—militia.

We are funding a genocide.

Enumerating every offense, embarrassment, betrayal, and assault perpetrated by my government and many of our citizens serves little purpose. We know our sins. So do you.

Which is why I was anxious when I learned we would be hosting the 2026 World Cup. So much could go wrong. More than overbooked lodging or culture clashes. There were other, graver fears: ICE officers abusing visitors, ugly or violent behavior (ours, not yours), the ignorant insults and social blunders of a self-righteous people.

But then you came, by the thousands. And the energy changed.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I teared up more than once watching video after video on TikTok of international football fans surprised, astonished, charmed by the very Americana that makes us a caricature: free refills, Costco, fast food culture, air conditioning, a flag everywhere and on everything, yellow school buses, Southern hospitality, the magic that is ranch dressing, the sheer size of it all. It’s difficult to describe the isolation and embarrassment of being the world’s pariah and completely understanding why we are so. We get it. Nobody cringes harder than Americans every time the United States shows up to something uninvited, imposes our culture someplace that’s already got its own, and polices everybody else’s affairs. Insist that we can do it better than anyone else can.

And then there are our more serious crimes. Crimes against humanity that no redemptive arc can span. My name is on those crimes. My name.

I read about Alligator Alcatraz and children, dead in custody. I see the videos of a Gaza that’s been obliterated, the rubble and destruction greater than in any war-torn city I’ve seen in history books. I bear witness to it all, and I feel like I might throw up. I never voted for this. I don’t want this.

So when I learned that we were hosting the World Cup this year, I was resigned to the fact that we were going to have another stain on our image. Americans don’t revere football the way you do. I envisioned visa denials en masse, ICE in riot gear, drunken violence. World Cup 2026 was bound to go down in history as the year FIFA made the biggest mistake in football history.

But then you came, from all over. And you brought your joy.

I will remember until the day I die the Tartan Army belting out “Take Me Home, Country Roads” at a Red Sox game. That was in Boston. And nowhere near West Virginia.

A German man’s childhood delight as he experienced Taco Bell, Waffle House, and NCAA stadiums.

Police officers playing keepie-uppies in the streets surrounded by throngs of football fans.

A Japanese man’s excited confession, “I don’t speak English— but… I’M EXCITED!”

A British couple nearly speechless after experiencing Southern hospitality in a small-town diner.

A Frenchman’s delighted confusion after being greeted on the street by a stranger.

Throngs of Vikings in Times Square about to launch a longship.

These and hundreds of stories litter social media, crowding out reports of what I have now been trained to expect—shootings, war, criminal pardons, innocent detentions, presidential irrationality, congressional turmoil, human rights violations, corruption—providing Americans a brief respite from the shame of it all. My response to this barrage of celebration and acceptance, not just of America and Americans but of all cultures and countries has been visceral. I’m not alone. Spend an hour on TikTok; you’ll see what I mean.

The joy will linger, at least for a while. It will resurface when someone reposts a memory from World Cup 2026. It will be kept alive through the many new friends we gained and memories we made. A fragile thread connecting us to a world that suddenly grew both larger and more intimate. And we get to keep that.

In about a week, the World Cup will end. You all will leave. And I guess—I guess we will return to our respective corners. The United States will remain under indictment. ICE agents are still separating families. The Supreme Court is still eroding our human rights.

We are still committing war crimes.

So thank you. For a little while, we remembered what it feels like to be proud.

Pax vobiscum,

Jennifer L. Wyman, New York

May 9, 2026

Summary

Written for educators, scholars, graduate students, and readers engaged in Holocaust education, genocide studies, history, ethics, religious studies, and political theory, This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today (‎iPub Cloud, 2026) treats teaching as a consequential act—one inseparable from the political realities in which it occurs. The volume challenges readers to reconsider what responsible Holocaust education demands now, and what it means to teach when historical memory itself is under strain.

Carol Rittner
John K. Roth
Marci Mazzarotto

Two people are alone in their bedroom. The door is closed. They are sharing themselves with each other — the most intimate, private version of who they are — in the one place the world is supposed to leave them alone. And then, without warning or invitation, someone bursts through the door. They are loud. They are furious. They begin cataloging everything wrong with what they see — the wrongness of the bodies, the wrongness of the love, the wrongness of the whole enterprise. They demand that it stop. They threaten. They legislate.

In this story, I want you to tell me: who is the pervert? Who is the threat? And whose rights are actually being violated?

Because here is the thing about that scenario — the intruder chose to be there. The couple did not invite them. The couple’s love affected the intruder exactly as much as it would have if the door had stayed closed, which is to say not at all. Whatever happened in that room had zero bearing on the intruder’s marriage, their business, their church, their children’s breakfast, or the price of eggs. And yet there they stand, apoplectic, certain that what they are witnessing is a crime against nature and that they, specifically, have been wronged by it.

How does a person arrive at that conviction? How do we, as a society, get to a place where the political agenda of the moment is organized almost entirely around the project of making other people’s private lives illegal? And the question that keeps me up at night, “Is there any way back?”

We Have Always Needed an “Other”

Let me offer two premises that I believe are true simultaneously, even though they sit uncomfortably next to each other.

The first: prejudice is not primarily about logic. It is about fear. Research in intergroup psychology identifies what scholars call “symbolic threats,” the fear that an out-group’s values or identity will challenge your own, as the most persistent and durable source of prejudice, forming what researchers describe as the “solid core” of hatred that tends to outlast every rational counterargument. This is not stupidity. It is a deeply human response to perceived threat, even when that threat is imaginary.

The second: that fear does not generate itself out of nothing. It is cultivated. Researchers describe radicalization as a process in which charismatic leaders and structured groups manipulate individuals through propaganda and indoctrination — shaping their beliefs and motivations to align with the group’s ideology. The fear comes first, yes, but someone hands it a target. Someone points at the bedroom door and says, “In there. That is what is destroying everything you love.”

Both things are true at once. The soil is human and ancient. The seeds have been deliberately planted.

We have always needed someone to blame. When the economy collapses, when the culture shifts faster than people can absorb, when the world stops resembling the one where someone grew up and felt safe, the psychological demand for a simple explanation becomes almost irresistible. Authoritarian leaders exploit this tendency by providing a convenient enemy — a group to blame for the turmoil. Through relentless propaganda, these groups are framed as threats to security, morality, or prosperity, and the emotional appeal of such narratives often overrides rational thought.

The targets change. The Jews. The Catholics. The Communists. The immigrants. The gay couple in the bedroom. The trans child at the water fountain. What remains consistent is the architecture: find a group that cannot easily defend itself, assign them responsibility for everything that frightens you, and build a movement around the project of making them smaller.

The Narcissistic Charismatic and the Cult of Identity

There is a specific type of leader who is very good at this. You have met them throughout history; you are meeting them again now. They are charismatic in the way that a fire is charismatic — warm and compelling until you are too close, and then consumed. Researchers who study cult dynamics identify two essential qualities: charisma, which draws people in, and authoritarianism, which keeps them there. Without charisma, the leader cannot recruit. Without authoritarianism, they cannot maintain control.

What makes these figures uniquely dangerous is not that they invent hatred — it is that they find hatred that already exists in the culture, give it a name, give it an enemy, and make belonging to the movement feel like love. The charismatic leader becomes central to followers’ identity; their accomplishments are mythologized, and when external information seems to challenge the leader, followers develop rationalizations to protect the leader’s special status — and, by extension, their own. To question the leader is to question yourself. To leave is to lose your tribe.

This is not a political observation. It is a psychological one, and it applies across the ideological spectrum wherever the formula appears: a charismatic figure, a frightened in-group, a designated “other,” and a steady supply of misinformation to keep the fear fresh.

The misinformation matters more than people realize. Social media platforms serve as entry points where extremist content, often disguised as news or humor, is widely accessible, strategically designed to manipulate vulnerable individuals. What used to require a preacher and a congregation now requires only an algorithm and a scroll. The bedroom door gets kicked in faster and with less effort than ever before, and the people doing the kicking have been told, repeatedly and convincingly, that they are the victims.

The Harm That Isn’t There

Let us be precise about the gay marriage example, because it is instructive.

Two people of the same sex get married. They exchange rings. They go home. They build a life. They pay taxes, mow a lawn, argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes, raise children, and grow old together. How, in any material sense, does this affect the straight Christian couple in the house across the street? Their marriage remains legal. Their church remains free to conduct its ceremonies as it sees fit. Their children are not recruited, converted, or in any way altered by the fact of their neighbors’ happiness. The fabric of their daily existence is unchanged.

And yet there are people who will fight, with genuine passion and real political energy, to make that marriage illegal again. Not because of harm — there is no harm. Because of what it represents. Because someone told them that the existence of that marriage is a symbolic threat to the meaning of their own, they believed it, and that belief has become their identity.

This is what makes the bedroom intruder such a clarifying image. The intrusion is the point. The intrusion reveals that what is actually being defended is not a right but a hierarchy — the comfort of knowing that some ways of loving count more than others, that some people’s private lives are subject to public approval. When you strip away the rhetoric, the “harm” being protected against is simply the knowledge that somewhere, a door is closed, and you are not in charge of what happens behind it.

There is another argument that gets hurled at the bedroom door regularly, and it deserves the same plain examination. The word is indoctrination — and it has become the preferred accusation of those who believe that LGBTQ+ visibility in schools, in media, in public life, is an act of recruitment. Let us be precise about what that word actually means. Indoctrination is the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs or doctrines uncritically, which requires, by definition, that the thing being taught is something the person would not otherwise arrive at on their own. Which raises an uncomfortable question for the argument: how exactly does one indoctrinate someone into the color of their eyes?

Because that is what we are actually talking about. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not elective courses. They are not ideologies adopted after sufficient exposure to the right curriculum. The research is unambiguous — being a member of the LGBTQ+ community is as written into the fiber of a person’s being as the curl in their hair or the particular shade of their skin. You can no more recruit someone into homosexuality than you can teach them to need oxygen. What schools and libraries and representation actually do, the thing that frightens the intruder so profoundly, is not create LGBTQ+ children. It is, let the ones who already exist know they are not alone. It tells a child who has been quietly bewildered by their own heart that there is a name for what they feel, and that the name is not shameful.

The indoctrination argument is not just flawed. It is precisely backward. The child sitting in a classroom being told that families only look one way, that love only counts in one configuration, that certain ways of being are unnatural or sinful — that child is being indoctrinated. The LGBTQ+ child reading a book that reflects their experience for the first time is simply being seen.

Can Hearts Change? The Evidence Is More Hopeful Than the Headlines

Here is where I want to be honest about how hard this is and what the research actually says.

You cannot argue someone out of a fear-based belief. Facts do not penetrate identity. If they did, we would have solved this already, because the facts about gay marriage, that it harms no one, have been available for decades. The people who oppose it know the facts. The facts are not the point.

What does work, as it turns out, is proximity. In a meta-analysis of 515 studies, researchers found that in 94% of cases, greater intergroup contact corresponded with lower levels of prejudice. The mechanism is not greater knowledge of the out-group. It is reduced anxiety and increased empathy that come from simply being in the same room as someone whose humanity you can no longer comfortably deny.

Put differently, you can dismiss a category. You cannot as easily dismiss a person who has looked you in the eye, made you laugh, helped you when you needed it, or trusted you with something real. Studies have found that heightened perspective-taking and empathy play a larger role in reducing prejudice than greater knowledge of the out-group, which means that storytelling, relationships, and shared experience are more powerful tools than argument.

This is not a comfortable conclusion for those of us who believe in the power of a well-made case. But it is also, if you sit with it, a quietly hopeful one. It means that every friendship across a line of difference is a small act of resistance against the architecture of othering. It means that the couple whose neighbors eventually attended their wedding, not because they were convinced by an argument but because they had dinner together first, are doing something that matters.

Researchers have found that even indirect contact helps — that simply knowing an in-group member who has a close relationship with an out-group member improves attitudes toward that out-group as a whole. Visibility, in other words, is not just a political act. It is a psychological one. Every LGBTQ+ person who has ever been the first one their colleague, cousin, or congregation member has knowingly known has changed more minds than a thousand op-eds or the pleas of this journalist.

When Enough Is Enough

So, back to the door.

The intruder in the bedroom is not evil, necessarily. They are frightened. They have been told, by someone they trust and who gives them a sense of belonging, that what is behind that door is the reason their world is falling apart. They have been handed a target for a fear that was already there, waiting. They have been made to feel that their love only means something if someone else’s doesn’t.

I understand that. I have spent considerable energy in this article trying to explain it, because I believe that understanding how hatred is manufactured is the first step toward dismantling it.

But I want to stop here and say something that the research does not say, because the research does not have a conscience — only data.

It is not the couple’s job.

It is not the responsibility of the people whose door just got kicked in to remain patient, to extend empathy, to make themselves small enough, unthreatening enough, and relatable enough that the intruder eventually comes around. The literature on intergroup contact is real, and it is hopeful, but it places an exhausting and fundamentally unjust burden on the shoulders of the people already carrying the most weight. We do not ask Black Americans to befriend their way out of systemic racism. We do not ask women to patiently educate their harassers into decency. And we should stop implying — however gently — that LGBTQ+ people owe anyone a tutorial on their own humanity.

There is a point at which “change hearts and minds” becomes a way of saying: keep tolerating this while we wait for the people harming you to feel differently about it. And that point was reached a long time ago.

So when is enough, enough?

Enough is when a child drives four hours across a state line to see a doctor who will treat them as a human being. Enough is when a teenager calculates whether it is safe to hold their partner’s hand in a parking lot. Enough is when a family relocates everything they know because their state legislature decided their child was a political inconvenience. Enough was, arguably, June 28, 1969, when the people who had been told to survive by hiding decided they were done remaining quiet.

The intruder in the bedroom is not owed empathy. The couple is owed a door that locks, and a government that stands outside it with them rather than handing the intruder the key.

Hearts can change. They do change. Proximity works, and story works, and time works, and the long arc of history suggests that the side of love has always, eventually, won. I believe that. But believing it does not require us to assign the labor of that change to the people being harmed by the delay.

The work of dismantling manufactured hatred belongs to the culture that manufactured it — to the educators and the politicians and the media figures and the institutions and the quiet bystanders who watched the door get kicked in and said nothing. It belongs to the straight allies who have the proximity to power that their LGBTQ+ neighbors do not. It belongs to every person who has ever privately disagreed with the intruder and publicly stayed silent because it was easier.

The couple in the bedroom did not create this problem. They should not have to solve it alone.

And this, all of this, is bigger than one bedroom door. This is what I know, as a blind older woman who has spent a lifetime being someone else’s “other.” The mechanisms of othering do not discriminate in their targets. They come for the gay couple and the trans child and the Black family and the brown immigrant and the woman who speaks too loudly and the disabled person who takes up too much space and the elderly person who is no longer considered useful. The architecture is the same. The fear is the same. The manufactured enemy is whoever is most convenient, most visible, most vulnerable in this particular moment.

Which means the coalition writes itself, if we are willing to see it.

Gay, female, disabled, Black, brown, every person who has ever been made to feel like an intrusion in their own life, like a problem to be managed, like a door that needs to be kicked in. We are not separate stories. We are the same story, told over and over with different names. And if we were to stand together — all of us, in all of our magnificent, inconvenient, unerasable variety — there are too many of us to be made to feel small again.

That is not optimism. That is arithmetic.

Here we are again.

On a sweltering June night in 1969, the kind of New York night where the heat comes up from the sidewalk and the air barely moves, police raided a bar called the Stonewall Inn. It was not the first time. It was not even unusual. Gay bars were raided as a matter of routine. Patrons were hauled outside, lined up on the street, sometimes arrested for the crime of existing in the same room as their neighbors, friends, and lovers. Most nights, it went according to script.

That night, it didn’t. Someone said enough. And then someone else agreed. And for six days, the streets outside the Stonewall Inn became the opening argument of a movement that has never stopped making its case.

Historians are careful to note that the shift Stonewall represented, if it represented one at all, was primarily a shift for white cisgender people — people of color, and those who did not conform to one gender identity, never had the luxury of hiding in the first place. The ones who threw the first bottles, bricks, and coins at the police that night were largely Black and brown, largely trans, largely drag queens, and largely the people most exhausted by the idea that hiding who they were and silencing those they loved was the best they could hope for. The movement they sparked was, in many ways, an announcement: we are not surviving quietly anymore.

Pride was born from an uprising. Not a parade. An uprising. That matters right now.

The Scope of What Is Happening

Let me tell you what 2025 looked like, not as a political argument but as a documented reality, because the numbers deserve to be said plainly.

The American Civil Liberties Union tracked more than 600 anti-transgender bills introduced at the state level in 2025 alone, a number that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. By the end of that year, 29 states had adopted at least one restrictive law, cutting into gender-affirming healthcare, school sports participation, bathroom access, or the simple dignity of a teacher using a student’s chosen name. This was not a wave; it was a decade-long, coordinated strategy that researchers describe as having steadily escalated since major court victories for LGBTQIA+ rights — as if every door the community walked through opened a room where someone was waiting to brick it shut again.

And in 2026, it accelerated. Hundreds of new bills in the first month. Legislation is under consideration in 43 states. Federal policy is being rewritten to define gender in ways that erase millions of Americans from official documents, surveys, and records — the same quiet bureaucratic erasure that let the AIDS epidemic spread unchecked. At the same time, the government looked at the dying and decided not to count them.

Some things change. The machinery of indifference runs remarkably consistent.

The Human Cost

Behind the legislative scorecards are children.

A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Human Behavior found a 72% increase in suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth following the passage of state-level anti-trans laws. Not correlated with it — following it, in the aftermath of it, as a direct response to being told by their state legislature that their care was illegal, their existence inconvenient, their identity a matter for public debate.

The Trevor Project found that 71% of LGBTQ youth — 86% of trans and nonbinary youth specifically — said state laws restricting LGBTQ rights had negatively impacted their mental health. Not mildly. Not abstractly. In ways they could name, date, and point to.

Human Rights Watch interviewed families across 19 states for a 2025 report. They documented children losing access to care overnight when clinics closed under legal pressure. Families made regular drives across state lines to see a doctor who would see them. Families who relocated entirely, pulling up roots from communities, school systems, and everything familiar, because staying felt like choosing danger. A 10-year-old girl named Lily was devastated when her family felt they had no choice but to leave. An 18-year-old who looked up at the people writing the laws and said, “They’re ruining people’s lives.”

We have heard this register before. We called it an epidemic. We called it a crisis. We called it a generation hollowed out by something that moved faster than anyone was willing to admit. The language then and now rhymes in ways that should make us uncomfortable.

The Uprising

And yet.

Here is the part of this story I want to live in for a moment, because it is the part that is easy to miss when the headlines are relentless: they are fighting back, and they are winning more than they are losing.

In 2025, in Florida — a state that has been on the front lines of this legislative assault for years — the community stopped every single anti-LGBTQ bill filed. Every one. Not because the bills weren’t introduced or because the lawmakers changed their minds. Because hundreds of volunteers showed up in person at the statehouse. Because thousands more flooded phones and inboxes with emails and calls. Because parents of transgender children sat in committee hearing rooms and testified, again and again, about what it means to watch your child be used as a political prop. One Republican senator, after hearing from those parents, raised concerns during the hearing. Another invited them to continue the conversation. The bill was never heard from again.

The Movement Advancement Project has tracked this pattern for fifteen years: advocates defeat an average of 92% of proposed anti-LGBTQ bills every year. Ninety-two percent. In the face of a strategy that has been building for a decade, that keeps introducing more bills, more broadly, in more states, the community has held the line on the vast majority of them. Not by being quiet. Not by hoping the politics would improve. By showing up.

This is not new behavior. This is who they have always been. When the government went silent during AIDS, and the media found its scapegoat, the community educated itself, cared for its own, filled the hospital rooms left vacant by family members, organized ACT UP to make the cost of ignorance impossible to ignore, and chased the legal mechanisms to get treatment funded. They have always done this. They have always known that survival is a group project.

What Pride Is

The first Pride was not a celebration. It was an anniversary marked with marching, one year after Stonewall, in cities across the country — people walking through streets that had not exactly invited them, saying: we are still here. The chant was simple, and it was enough: say it loud, gay is proud.

Pride in 2026 is the same argument, made louder by necessity. It is transgender youth sitting in the back of cars on long drives to states that will still see them. It is parents testifying in rooms that were not built to hear them. It is volunteers in statehouse hallways holding the line against legislation that would make their neighbors invisible. It is a community that has absorbed every wave of this — the raids, the epidemic, the silences, the backlash — and is still, stubbornly, extravagantly, defiantly here.

A dear friend once told me that Pride celebrates the strength of those who came before; it’s about fighting to be seen and a reminder that we can be out in public without feeling isolated or afraid. It’s not about changing everybody’s minds. It’s not about the antagonists at all; their opinions do not matter. It’s about what we have overcome, what we have sacrificed to be here, and knowing that, wherever we are headed, we are not alone.

Every generation has its Stonewall — its moment when someone says enough, and the people around them agree, and the world shifts a fraction of a degree toward the thing it was always supposed to be. The community that is fighting right now, in statehouses and school boards and hospital corridors and online and in the streets, is writing the chapter that someone, decades from now, will trace back to understand how we got through this.

And we will get through this. Because we have to. Because we always have. Because someone is saying “Enough”. And so many agree.

Sources

Library of Congress — Stonewall Era: https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/stonewall-era

Freedom for All Americans — From Stonewall to Today: https://freedomforallamericans.org/lgbtq-freedom-in-the-us/

National Geographic — How the Stonewall Rebellion Ignited the LGBTQ+ Movement: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/stonewall-uprising-ignited-modern-lgbtq-rights-movement

Williams Institute, UCLA — The Impact of 2025 Anti-Transgender Legislation on Youth (January 2026): https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/anti-trans-legislation-youth/

Prism Reports — Anti-Transgender Legislation Accelerates in Early 2026 (February 2026): https://prismreports.org/2026/02/09/anti-transgender-bills-2026/

Trans Legislation Tracker: https://translegislation.com/

The Trevor Project — New Poll Emphasizes Negative Impacts of Anti-LGBTQ Policies on LGBTQ Youth: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/new-poll-emphasizes-negative-impacts-of-anti-lgbtq-policies-on-lgbtq-youth/

Human Rights Watch — ‘They’re Ruining People’s Lives’: Bans on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Youth in the US (June 2025): https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/06/03/theyre-ruining-peoples-lives/bans-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-youth

Council for Relationships — LGBTQ Youth Mental Health Crisis (July 2025): https://councilforrelationships.org/lgbtq-youth-mental-health-gender-affirming-care/

Equality Florida — 2026 Resistance Report: https://eqfl.org/2026-Resistance-Report-final

To kick off Pride Month 2026, where should we start? The Stonewall Uprising against oppression and homophobia? On June 28, 1970, marking the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the inaugural Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Thousands of LGBT+ individuals gathered to honor the Stonewall legacy and advocate for equal rights. The community didn’t know what was coming in the next decade… yet they would prove again, sometimes with their lives, that supporting each other and fighting for survival takes perseverance and love in the face of hate.

Seersucker jammies and corduroy slacks were still around, but neon and lace worked their way into our wardrobes. Music transformed our world with a click of the channel, and video killed the radio star. Halloween meant we could stay out after the streetlights came on. Clown faces were thrown together from Mom’s makeup bag. Tissue paper witch-costumes had to be made to fit over puffy winter jackets. The generation of latchkey kids, Generation Y, then rebranded into Generation X; our formative years and young adulthood were full of mediocre politicians with a corrupt movie star to rule them all.

Or was it the other way around? We raised each other and thus didn’t know about the earlier generations’ unspoken rules, especially how to pretend everything was fine.

We were contrary while musically defining ourselves in misogynistic songs about hungry wolves on stripper poles, or something like that — and a musician starring on the Muppet Show, who wore bright flamboyant feathers and sang about musically gifted crocodiles, made us smile, clap, and dance. As long as no one pointed out the aberrant, it did not exist; we didn’t know we were doing it wrong. Many didn’t know we were supposed to hate everything “different.” We started paying attention to the humans behind the semitransparent curtains quietly hung over closet doorways. That beaded curtain sparkled, and the people behind it shone with their inner light; they made us dance, laugh, and escape our drab avocado and sepia-tinted world for a little while. We didn’t know how to feel, as indifference and fearmongering killed faster than the disease that became synonymous with the word “gay.”

In 1981, we started hearing whispers about otherwise healthy young men dying from rare illnesses that only affected the severely immune-compromised. People kept dying, and in 1982, we had a name for the epidemic: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS. That same year, the term “GRID,” Gay Related to Immunodeficiency, was used by the media, and the United States found its scapegoat. The only announcements from our government consisted of riding the scapegoat and confirming ignorance about how the disease was spread. Regan didn’t openly acknowledge the crisis until 1987. In testing or treatment, the CDC didn’t acknowledge how many women were infected until 1993.

In the government’s silence, the media pushed the narrative that the disease only affected homosexuals and drug users, so don’t worry about it coming to your suburban neighborhoods. Simultaneously, between the lines, a particular swath of the country whispered that it was a self-correcting problem. We were told it could be passed through saliva, using a public toilet seat, or something as simple as a hug. Ignorance was the norm, and we lost a cross-section of our generation, of all generations, even those hiding in starched and neatly folded, white-collared communities because the disease doesn’t choose who it infects. Diseases infect those who are vulnerable, in this case, as a blood-born pathogen, those exposed to blood, such as healthcare workers, care providers, men and women regardless of sexual orientation, and those receiving blood transfusions. However, the consequences of the societal lack of knowledge and longstanding prejudice allowed fear and violence to spread, which left LGTBQIA+ as threatened by hatred as it had been by the disease. Even against those odds, their response was to educate themselves and care for each other, protest the lack of support, chase legal means to address equality in medical care, and fight for the treatments used by everyone afflicted.

Throughout this turbulent period, alongside so many historically horrific times the community has faced, their response has been to educate themselves and care for each other, protest inequality, fight against mistreatment, and celebrate a love that benefits society. The tireless fight against insurmountable odds is one more point to take pride in, even as the prejudice flows in waves that rarely seem to ebb. In the words of this author’s dearest friend, “Pride is celebrating the strength of those who came before; it’s in fighting to be seen and a reminder that we can be out in public without isolation and fear. It’s not about changing everybody’s minds; it’s about what we have overcome, what we have sacrificed to be here, and how we now know that wherever we are headed, we are not alone.” Pride is love, support, and survival.

A poem and a painting, both titled “Deep Calm Under the Stormy Seas” by Jennifer Elam.

Early morning time of calm and reflection amidst…
amidst the raging, storms of polarization, wars, deadly earthquakes, fires, gnats,
across the world and next door, across the world, in my heart, and in my face.

Stand in the fire and not be burned; how is that done?
Radical hope, radical trust, radical faith, radical Love;
what do those callings mean in my daily life of decision making?

Stand in the fire of faith and persecution, AND discern;
set good boundaries, I hear. I thought I did.
Yet, the fires do burn sometimes; where is the salve?

Where is that elusive salve? Salve for my hurt body, my hurt soul,
my hurt all of me? I walk and feel the angels with me, I dance
and there are friends ready to play the music. I dance.

Creativity is the salve, co-creating with the divine,
co-creating with the angels with wings, the angels with hands, feet, voices,
co-creating with…co-creating is the salve…co-create with those who can hear.

Thank you for creating with me. Co-creating in community…
Safety, stable relationships, hearts and bodies working together, those are the salves.
Can we be salves with each other? I hope so.

Then the stormy seas can rest, and I can too, for a moment.
So grateful for a moment of deep calm under the stormy seas.

Featured photo credits: “Deep Calm Under the Stormy Seas” by Jennifer Elam

Have you ever come across a term that you had never heard before, and then it keeps showing up multiple times afterward? That happened to me with the term “gaslighting.” I heard it on a talk show, then I read an article that used the term, and not long after that, the movie with that title was playing on TCM. It appears to mean, say an untruth often enough, and people start to believe it.

For me that experience happened with the term kintsugi. It refers to the Japanese art of repairing (tsugi) broken pottery with lacquer and gold (kin) so that the repaired pottery has new-found beauty, sometimes beyond what it originally had. Once I heard about the practice, I subsequently ran across references to it a few other times. It’s wonderful to hear about something ancient that offers new insight into the human condition.

That pottery repair practice certainly provides material for meditation applied to human life, similar perhaps to the well-known quote from Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit about becoming “real.”

“It doesn’t happen all at once…You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.“

Years ago, I visited family of friends of mine in Taiwan. The host honored us by serving tea in a teapot that had been in her family for generations. The tea itself was also very old and rare. My first thought was, shouldn’t this pot be in a museum or kept untouched in a locked cabinet? Imagine if it broke while serving tea to a clumsy American such as myself! Then I realized that life doesn’t happen in museums and never-opened cabinets. Living, becoming real, always brings with it the danger of being broken. Kintsugi and The Velveteen Rabbit remind us that there is beauty in brokenness. The cracks and aching joints that come from giving ourselves to others, carrying around that helpless child all those years, and stepping out of our comfort zone to get involved when we would prefer to keep our distance, results in beauty beyond the pristine beauty of locked-away artifacts.

Traditional Christian theology says that “suffering is redemptive.” Jesus redeemed us through his suffering. I suggest a more accurate understanding is that Jesus gave himself out of love for others. That’s what was redemptive. Granted, his active care for others led to suffering; that’s the nature of life in the pursuit of becoming real. The central message of Christianity is that the love of God becomes real when it is poured out and broken. Those times when Jesus would have wanted to stay out of trouble, go off on his own, and mind his own business became redemptive because he put his life on the line instead. His giving of himself, which admittedly brought on suffering, gave a golden hue to his existence and to the brokenness of the world itself. Imagining God as a broken pot is not one that comes naturally. The cracks filled with gold are the tears, the emptying, the vulnerability, and the compassionate reaching out that results from getting involved and loving. That’s the “real” Christian God described in the bible and embodied most especially in the person of Jesus himself. We wouldn’t see the golden radiant beauty of God except for Christ on the cross.

Written for educators, scholars, graduate students, and readers engaged in Holocaust education, genocide studies, history, ethics, religious studies, and political theory, This Time: Teaching the Holocaust Today (‎iPub Cloud, 2026) treats teaching as a consequential act—one inseparable from the political realities in which it occurs. The volume challenges readers to reconsider what responsible Holocaust education demands now, and what it means to teach when historical memory itself is under strain.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/this-time-teaching-the-holocaust-today
https://carolrittner.com/
https://johnkroth.com/

A number of years ago, I hosted a young boy whose schoolwork I was to oversee. One night at 10:30 PM, he suddenly remembered he had to turn in a piece of writing the next day. I immediately moved into emergency mode and asked what the topic was. “It’s for social studies. We are supposed to write about how our family moved to Arizona.” This being the beginning of the semester, I assumed it was an activity aimed at the students getting to know one another better from the point of view of diversity.

“Very well,” I said. “Not hard. Just tell me why your parents decided to move here from Taiwan and how they did it. And we can go from there.” My ward remained silent, then said, “I think I’d better ask my friend about it.” My patience slipped a few notches. Too often, and this was by no means limited to this particular student, children are given no written explanation of assignments and must text classmates to figure out what exactly to do. They claim the teacher just assigned it verbally.

It turned out students were to write journal entries about how humans migrated from Asia across the ice bridge to North America, and then trekked all the way down to our state of Arizona. Well. One doesn’t need to be a history buff to know that humans dressing in animal skins and grunting for communication couldn’t possibly be writing journal entries.

This was during the years when the Department of Education clamped down on writing and ordered all teachers, regardless of the subject they taught, to make students write more. This particular social studies teacher was a veteran. I admire veterans, but not every teacher is trained to be a writing teacher, though even English Language Arts teachers are not much better.

I recalled years ago, when my eldest son got an assignment to write a journal of a child who was on the Mayflower describing the voyage to the Americas. The teacher may have thought it an interesting assignment, but not I. First of all, the English used in those days was very different from the English we use today, both in vocabulary and sentence structure. No fifth grader that I’ve ever met has been able to write in Old English. Secondly, even the way letters were penned was different. For example, an “s” was written like an “f.” Thirdly, the child would need to look up records of the weather on the Atlantic Ocean during those particular dates. Fourthly, the child would need to research the types of food that could be carried on long voyages or that was cooked by Puritans, the symptoms of possible diseases, etc. And so on.

As it was nearly 11:00 that night, I couldn’t possibly call the teacher to ask him to explain what exactly he wanted. I gritted my teeth and told my ward we had to do some research. Thank God for the internet. I found, to my great surprise, two interesting facts. First, that very week, some new findings had been published, pushing the date of the approximate arrivals of the first humans on North American soil from 13,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago. Secondly, this date would coincide with a meteor crashing into the northern part of Arizona, creating what is known today as Meteor Crater, a famous tourist landmark.

I discussed these excitedly with my ward, then decided that we could write the introduction and conclusion in the first person, then sit back as an observer and write the three body paragraphs in the third person. We then proceeded to research what flora and fauna (think foods) would have been available. It was well past midnight when the poor boy finally finished his draft. The next morning, as I drove him to school, I oversaw his editing. Because of all of this input, I waited impatiently for his grade to come in. Finally, I asked him about it a few days later.

“Oh,” he answered, pretending to be nonchalant, “I got a zero for that.” Then, seeing my stunned face, he added, “My friend, who just wrote a paragraph of journal entry got an A.”

Naturally, the next day, I confronted the teacher about this. With mild snark, he answered, “That’s because what he wrote was not the assignment.” He also insisted that he did write the assignment instructions… on the board.

Undeterred, I went to look for the principal. He was away at a meeting. May I see the vice-principal then? Too bad, also at the same meeting. Finally, I got to meet the director of curriculum. I laid out my concerns that such assignments not only disregarded historical truths and taught students to make up lies instead of seeking knowledge, but such grading did not reward their effort. I could understand an F, say a 50%, but not a zero. What rubrics did the teacher use?

The director of curriculum could barely keep a straight face during my long tirade. In the end, he nodded amicably and saw me off. I knew they all thought I wrote the assignment and wanted to have a grade that showed I did well. I must affirm here that I would never do my student’s homework. I can help research, explain, suggest, but the student does his own writing.

Nothing ever came of the meeting. On the other hand, my ward stopped trying hard to complete any homework or assignments. He had seen them for what they were: a waste of his time. His grades slipped accordingly, with no care whatsoever from his side.

If this sounds like I’m venting, well, it’s probably because I am. Does one wonder why American students barely score above world average in international studies? This is only one example from the myriad of reasons why our education system is failing. Both teachers and students worship the god of grades/scores rather that the fountain of knowledge. Parents make it worse by judging both teachers’ and students’ achievements using these same scores.

I do not expect much improvement until parents, students, and teachers all agree that acquiring knowledge is a main goal of going to school. Unfortunately, that is not what is currently happening. Teachers want to “cover the curriculum” while students want to socialize. Administrators want prestige and better pay, hoping the school won’t give them too many headaches. Parents want a baby-sitter to blame for their abdication of their natural duty of educator.

I realize this may be too broad a generalization. Or is it?

Featured image credit: Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

Here, I call on religious leaders and members to frame the state of healthcare in the United States within the context of their faith.

The horrific COVID pandemic exposed an ugly truth about our nation’s medical system.

The lethal plague shattered the quality of life for all Americans, but it also revealed an unfair, fractured health system that does not always provide equal access to effective medical services. The deadly pandemic underscored the urgent need for such high-quality universal health care.

It is an imperative that rests on three fundamental principles. First, as Americans, we envision ourselves as a decent and compassionate society rooted in profound religious beliefs about the sanctity of life. Second, given the special nature of health care, it is an absolute requirement to foster and protect human life, especially the young, the infirm, and the elderly. Finally, society’s obligation is based on the self-evident fact that a healthy population enhances the spiritual, economic, and political strength of a nation.

Religiously committed people must understand that universal access to health care is not a luxury; it is, rather, an essential component of a just society.

I well understand that a national commitment to universal health care involves enormous financial resources, extraordinarily talented people, and remarkable technology. COVID’s many victims taught us that excellent health care cannot be bought on the cheap or treated as a secondary national priority.

While we spend billions of dollars to protect American “national security,” what about American “health security?”

Religiously committed people need to be aware that several dangerous, often underreported, medical triages are currently taking place within our society that undermine our collective health and wellness. There is “age triage” in which the elderly (however that term is defined) are frequently discriminated against in gaining necessary health care access. The Biblical verse, “Do not cast me out in my old age …” (Psalm 71:9) is important in this context. Should age ever be a factor in gaining comprehensive health care?

“Economic triage” is also widely prevalent. Our religions teach us not to discriminate based on economic status. Unfortunately, the wealthy often receive preferential medical treatment. How should religious communities respond to this form of discriminatory triage?

And “gender triage” is also at work within our vast medical community. Men are generally given better treatment than women. Males are medically “studied” much more often than females. This is particularly true in cases of heart and respiratory diseases.

Leaders of our religious communities must recognize that access to quality medical care must be more than the ability to pay and understand we cannot settle for inadequate coverage that, while cheaper, is simply unacceptable in our affluent nation.

A universal health system in the United States must address the existing barriers—racial, social, geographic, cultural, ethnic, and religious—that prevent millions, particularly the poor, from accessing quality care. Health care isn’t a luxury; it’s a fundamental human right.

In the rush to adopt new medical treatments, especially experimental ones, the patient’s best interests can be overlooked or downplayed. This is deeply problematic, not just for practical reasons but also due to the fundamental belief that every person’s life is sacred.

A final point: health care discussions and decisions should prioritize the patient’s best interests over those of physicians, nurses, hospital staff, or administrators. Our primary focus must always be the individual patient.

Featured photo credits: Image by Fernando Zhiminaicela from Pixabay.

Many years ago, my brother Rich went off to a summer graduate program at Boston College. A few months later, he stopped off in Philly to see me with a woman he had met there. We chatted for a while, and then I suggested we go out to get something to eat. I told them that there was a Chinese and an Italian restaurant nearby. The two of them looked at each other, and the woman, Sharon, said, “We don’t like Chinese food.” I was taken aback. The simple, magical word “we” hit me like a lightning bolt. Here was my brother, whom I had shared a bed with growing up, with a woman I had never met, and after a few short months they were saying “we.” Some people never get to the point of experiencing “we” with one other person, let alone with friends or a community. What a blessing it is. Rich and Sharon married and continue to be “we” over forty years later.

It reminds me of the story of a saint we heard about in grade school, St. Damien of Molokai. He was a Belgian priest sent as a missionary to Hawaii. He took up residence on the island of Molokai, where people who had contracted leprosy, Hansen’s disease, were sent to fend for themselves. Damien established structures to make life more pleasant for these people and saw to it that they were treated with respect and even buried with dignity. He, of course, celebrated Mass with the sick, and during one Sunday service, he began his sermon with the words: “We lepers.” He had contracted the disease himself and was no longer an outsider helping them but was one of them. He had become a “we” with these people who were cast aside by the powers on the main island, who went to great lengths to keep their distance. Damien is recognized as a saint because he lived the Christian message, entering into the joys and suffering of others, and paid a price for it. His experience mirrors what Christians believe about Jesus, that, despite his divinity, he became one of us, even unto death.

The Christian God is trinitarian in nature—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In other words, the Christian God is a “we.” In Jesus, God is not separate from human beings but one of us. That divine presence remains in our midst even today as the Holy Spirit. Despite Jesus’s best efforts, it is hard for us to grasp this intimate connection we have with God. The second half of the Gospel according to John has Jesus very powerfully telling his friends that they are one with God and with one another. “You will know that I am one with the Father. You will know that you are one with me, and I am one with you,” and then, “I have told you these things while I am still with you. But the Holy Spirit will come and help you, because the Father will send the Spirit to take my place” (John 11: 20,25-26). Jesus is exhorting them to recognize the cosmic “we” with which he is intimately in touch through his connection to the Father and that is still present among us.

A discussion of the magic of experiencing we-ness must recognize that nearly half of American adults are not married, and that even being married is no guarantee of such an experience. To attain a sense of “we” with another is a great gift, a blessing from God and the work of human hands. It may or may not happen in a person’s life, married or not, but it is what we are designed to be. It is, in a sense, an art—the art of loving. Even fleeting moments of we-ness are holy. “We” can be a group of women who support one another and regularly gather for sharing stories, or older men who walk together and talk sports every Sunday, occasionally opening up about more personal matters. “We” is ultimately a profound longing we all have. St. Augustine tells us that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” We don’t exist merely as isolated objects; rather, we are always in relationship, and God is present whenever we open our hearts to another. In the words of philosopher Martin Buber, we are inherently not I-It but I-Thou. We can try to live otherwise, building physical and emotional walls as best we can, but we never succeed. That stranger across a crowded room always calls us, as the musical “South Pacific” reminds us.

We may not venture out into an unknown place, like my brother’s summer journey up north to Boston College, and come out of it with a breakthrough experience into we-ness. The Christian message is that all people are “we,” and the Christian vocation is to expand our realization of we-ness beyond those we are comfortable with. “We” is magic, but it is God’s work, the work of the Spirit, who works through us. Every encounter with another is an opportunity to experience that magic. To paraphrase a traditional Catholic hymn: Come, Holy Spirit, make our hearts ready to step outside of ourselves, to give and receive, to know the magic of “we.”

Editor’s Note: This blog was first published on Joe Stoutzenberger’s blog on January 2, 2026.

When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) opened its doors in Washington, DC, in April 1993, the era was one of optimism for liberal democracy. The Cold War had ended, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and there was a sense that the lessons of the Holocaust could serve as a “never again” bulwark for a more enlightened world. But as editors Carol Rittner and John K. Roth argue, that era has ended.

“The landscape has changed,” they write. “The darkening that characterizes ‘This Time’ is multifaceted. Its shadows include the continued, even expanding, resonance of the ‘big lie’—the claim that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen—and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. These events, and the political movements that sustain them, are not merely ‘politics as usual.’ They represent a fundamental challenge to the democratic institutions and values that Holocaust education has long sought to defend.”

For decades, Holocaust education in the United States often focused on the “other”—on a distant European past or on foreign dictatorships. It was taught with the implicit assumption that “it can’t happen here.” Rittner and Roth suggest that this assumption is no longer tenable. They point to the rise of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and a brand of authoritarianism that increasingly mirrors the early stages of the Weimar Republic’s collapse.

“Holocaust education,” they argue, “has often been a way for Americans to feel good about themselves by identifying with the liberators of the camps while ignoring the antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia in their own history. In ‘This Time,’ that luxury is gone. We must ask:

What does it mean to teach the Holocaust when the very people we are teaching are living in a society where the guardrails of democracy are being dismantled?

The editors challenge educators to move beyond the “sanitized” version of Holocaust history. They suggest that the “this time” of the book’s title refers to a moment of extreme urgency. “If we continue to teach the Holocaust as a closed chapter of history, we fail. ‘This time’ demands that we recognize the fragility of our own institutions. It requires us to look at the Nazi rise to power not as an inevitable march of monsters, but as a series of choices made by ordinary people in a democracy that failed to protect itself. When we see similar rhetoric—the dehumanization of immigrants, the attacks on the press, the calls for political retribution—used in our own public discourse, we can no longer remain neutral. Teaching the Holocaust today is a civic act of resistance against the rising tide of authoritarianism.”

In memory of Professor Leonard J. Swidler (1929–2026), we reflect on the life of a pioneering global theologian who spent over 50 years shaping the field of interfaith and interideological dialogue. A prolific author of more than 100 books, Swidler’s legacy is marked by his dedication to building bridges between different communities and his core belief that “all of our knowledge is interpreted” and “nobody knows everything about anything”.

A Legacy of Institutional Innovation

Swidler was not just a scholar but also a prolific founder of institutions that still promote his vision.

• iPub Global Connection: Co-founded with his sister, Sandi Billingslea, iPub was originally established to showcase his academic library but has since grown into a mission-driven publisher championing diverse voices. Swidler served as a senior advisor.

• The Dialogue Institute: Founded in 1978 to foster interreligious, intercultural, and international understanding.

• Journal of Ecumenical Studies: Co-founded in 1964 with his wife, Arlene Anderson Swidler, this journal became a primary vehicle for ecumenical research.

• Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC): Founded

  in 1980 to advocate for structural change and rights within Catholicism.

The “Dialogue Decalogue” and Practical Tools

Perhaps Swidler’s most practical contribution to humanity was The Dialogue Decalogue, a set of ten essential rules for interreligious and interideological dialogue. These principles shifted the aim of interaction from “defeating an opponent” to learning from the other so that each participant can change and grow. He emphasized that dialogue must occur between equals (par cum pari) and requires a “self-critical” attitude toward one’s own tradition.

He also championed the AIR method—Appreciative-Statements, I-Statements, and Reflective-Statements—as simple yet powerful linguistic tools to prevent dialogue from devolving into debate or misunderstanding.

Key Philosophical Pillars

Swidler’s work was anchored in several revolutionary concepts:

• Deep-Dialogue: A transformative way of thinking that goes beyond superficial interaction to engage the “Head, Hands, Heart, and Holy”.

• Towards a Global Ethic: He drafted the initial declaration for a global ethic, ratified at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, which identified the common ethical principles shared by all major religious and secular systems.

• Feminist Theology: A self-identified “modern Christian theologian,” Swidler famously argued that “Jesus was a feminist” and that women were the true founders of Christianity, challenging centuries of patriarchal interpretation.

• The Cosmic Dance of Dialogue: Swidler viewed dialogue not just as a human activity but as a “Cosmic Dance” embedded in the very structure of the universe, from the interaction of protons and electrons to the dynamic relationship between individual and society.

Personal and Academic Journey

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, to a Ukrainian Jewish father and an Irish-American Catholic mother, Swidler’s own family history embodied the diversity he would later study. He taught at Temple University for over half a century (1966–2022) and mentored a generation of scholars worldwide. In his final years, he even sought to translate his complex academic insights for younger generations, including his granddaughter, Willow, in the “Letters to Will” book series.

Professor Swidler’s life was a testament to his belief that the world is “too complicated for anyone to grasp alone” and that we can only approach “wholeness or holiness” through the help of “the other” in dialogue.

The 2023 film “Maestro” focuses on the life and career of Leonard Bernstein, America’s greatest musician of the 20th century. He was born on Aug. 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and when he died 72 years later, The New York Times called him a “Musical Monarch.”

And indeed, Leonard Bernstein, a man of extraordinary emotion and energy, was all that and more.

The world will forever remember his classic Broadway musicals, “West Side Story,” “On The Town,” “Wonderful Town” and “Candide.” Bernstein also composed music for the ballets “Fancy Free,” and “Dybbuk,” the Yiddish term for a tormented spirit that enters a person, and he wrote the music for the film “On The Waterfront.” Of course, Bernstein was a gifted pianist, a creator of classical music, an acclaimed educator, a political activist, and a world-class symphony orchestra conductor.

And then there was Bernstein’s faith, which was never easy to categorize.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the New York City Symphony in 1945. Photo by Fred Palumbo/World Telegram/LOC/Creative Commons

Bernstein always affirmed his strong Jewish heritage, which played a major role in his career. His mentor, Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky (who was himself Jewish), urged his young protégé to change his name to something “less Jewish sounding.” Legend has it that Koussevitzky suggested “Burns” as a more acceptable last name.

“I’ll do it as ‘Bernstein’ or not at all,” the composer replied. Bernstein always insisted the second syllable of his last name be pronounced “stein” and not “steen.” He wryly noted that no one calls the famous piano manufacturer “Steenway” instead of “Steinway.”

Bernstein felt an artistic and spiritual affinity for Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). And it’s easy to see why. Mahler, born into a Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was, like Bernstein, a passionate symphony conductor and a composer of highly personal musical compositions. And both men led turbulent, well-publicized private lives.

Because of embedded European antisemitism, Mahler was forced in 1897 to convert to Roman Catholicism to gain the coveted position as Vienna Court Opera music director, and in the years just before his death, Mahler was, like Bernstein, the music director of the New York Philharmonic. Happily, Bernstein never faced such an ugly choice to advance his career. Fifty years after Mahler’s tenure, Bernstein became the New York Philharmonic’s youngest music director in history and served in that position from 1958 until 1969.

As a deeply committed Jew, Bernstein was an ardent lifelong supporter of the state of Israel, and many of his works are rooted in his Jewish identity. His parents — immigrants who escaped the antisemitism of their native Ukraine — were members of Boston’s Congregation Mishkan Tefila.

In an article in the American Jewish Archives Journal, professor Ann Glazer Niren of Indiana University Southeast described the influence that the synagogue’s rabbi, cantor, and musical director had on young Leonard. The talented trio transmitted to Bernstein a love of the Hebrew language, knowledge of the rich Jewish musical tradition, and the importance of eloquent public speaking.

In 1943, the same year he gained national attention as a young conductor, Bernstein completed his Symphony No. 1, titled “Jeremiah.” The solemn work highlights a mezzo-soprano singing the biblical prophet’s lamentations in the original Hebrew. The symphony had its debut during World War II and was widely praised.

Bernstein’s third symphony, “Kaddish,” was completed in 1963 and focuses on the Jewish mourners’ prayer in Aramaic and Hebrew that affirms God with no mention of death. In it, Bernstein argues with God through powerful music and strong narration. Although “Kaddish” was composed before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the symphony’s premiere took place after the tragic shooting in Dallas. A grieving Bernstein dedicated it to JFK’s memory.

“Chichester Psalms,” composed in 1965, represents a more optimistic Bernstein. The dean of Britain’s Chichester Cathedral commissioned the work, and it is my favorite of Bernstein’s religious compositions.

Consisting of six Psalms, including the beloved 23^rd, the work is performed in Hebrew and features a boy soprano soloist. If I’m ever asked to choose the music I want to hear in heaven, “Chichester Psalms” would be one of my selections. In it, Bernstein has seemingly overcome his earlier religious doubt and angst.

In 1971, Jacqueline Kennedy, the slain president’s widow, asked Bernstein to compose a special piece to mark the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington. The result was “Mass,” the most complex and most controversial of Bernstein’s compositions.

Leonard Bernstein in a rehearsal of his “Mass” in 1971. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress/Creative Common

Roughly based on the Catholic liturgy, “Mass” requires a symphony orchestra, a jazz band, a dance troupe, a large adult choir, and an equally large children’s choir. Much of the work, including the use of Psalms, is in Latin, but, interestingly, two Jews — Stephen Schwartz (composer of “Godspell,” “Pippin” and “Wicked”) and Paul Simon — wrote some of the English text.

The composition is performed without an intermission for 110 minutes and when my wife Marcia and I attended a performance there was not a cough, sneeze or a single word spoken by the rapt sellout New York City audience.

“Mass,” Bernstein’s ultimate religious work, is the synthesis of the anger and lamentation of the “Jeremiah” and “Kaddish” symphonies combined with the faith of “Chichester Psalms,” and includes some “West Side Story” musical themes and other Bernstein compositions.

Did Bernstein, the multitalented Jewish musician, finally find God and faith? We will never know. But his two Jewish-based symphonies, “Chichester Psalms” and “Mass” reveal the multiple paths he chose in his long spiritual journey.

Rabbi James Rudin is a trailblazer in interfaith dialogue, a decorated religious leader, and a fearless advocate for understanding across cultural and spiritual divides. For over three decades, Rabbi Rudin served as the American Jewish Committee’s Interreligious Affairs Director, where he redefined what it meant to engage in religious diplomacy. Today, he remains a vital force as AJC’s Senior Interreligious Adviser and a member of its Board of Governors.

An influential voice in the classroom and synagogue, Rabbi Rudin is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion and Judaica at Saint Leo University and has taught at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Renaissance Academy.

Header image: EZRA & MASOUDA SASSOON and family, Baghdad, 1919. (photo credit: Sassoon family / The Jerusalem Post)

In 2010, during Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan’s tense Senate confirmation hearing, Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who supported her nomination, jokingly asked President Barack Obama’s nominee what she did on Christmas Day. It was a strange, even bizarre question because it had absolutely nothing to do with her judicial qualifications. But Kagan’s humorous reply completely disarmed her Senatorial opponents: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

But there is much more to the Jewish-Chinese connection than choosing food from column A or column B on a menu on December 25th.

In his fascinating book, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China (Penguin), Jonathan Kaufman tells the little-known history of how two remarkable Sephardic families became major economic and political forces in China.

Originally from Baghdad, the Sassoons and the Kadoories established rival commercial empires in Shanghai and Hong Kong during the 19th and 20th centuries. For more than 175 years, these families profited greatly in shipping, commodities, textiles, real estate, and selling recreational and medicinal opium to the Chinese. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, Jr, also profited from the Asian opium trade.

The Sassoons and the Kadoories were a vital part of “The Bund,” Shanghai’s multi-national pre-World War II global financial and cultural center, which operated as an independent enclave outside the political control or legal regulations of the Chinese authorities. That arrangement ended in 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, led by Communist leader Mao Zedong.

In the 1930s, the Sassoon and the Kadoorie families aided the 23,000 European Jewish refugees who found safe haven in Shanghai. Despite the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, these refugees, who were confined to a ghetto of one square mile, survived the Holocaust.

Among them were teenagers Michael Blumenthal, who would become U.S. Treasury Secretary in the Carter Administration, and Israeli diplomat Joseph Tekoa. Born in Shanghai in 1941, Laurence Tribe was a distinguished Harvard law professor.

Image: Victor Sassoon in his heyday in Shanghai, China / CREDIT: Sheldon Kirshner Journal

Victor Sassoon, the great-grandson of dynasty founder David Sassoon, was educated in England at Harrow and Cambridge. A rich playboy who raised racehorses, Victor built the landmark Art Deco Cathay Hotel in 1929. Victor fled his beloved Shanghai in 1948 as the Communists gained power, and he never returned.

The Kadoorie family owned the China Light and Power Company in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. They also constructed Hong Kong’s Peninsula and Repulse Bay hotels, which I visited several times when I was a US Air Force Chaplain stationed in Japan and Korea. And like their arch-rivals — the Sassoons — the Kadoories became enormously wealthy through shipping and real estate holdings.

The Cathay Hotel in Shanghai, which had hosted Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other celebrities of the 1930s, was expropriated by “Red China,” and it reopened only in recent years as a luxury hotel. Kaufman estimates that the large Kadoorie family, which has held together better than the quarrelling Sassoons, is today worth more than $11 billion dollars.

For nearly 200 years, the Sassoons and the Kadoories absorbed China’s culture as well as its tangled political and social history. China became an integral part of these families’ emotional DNA.

Although the two Jewish families helped shape modern China by establishing schools, philanthropies, synagogues, and businesses, they were also inextricably linked to British global imperialism.

An enigmatic conversation sums up the ambivalent relationship that still exists between the Sassoons and the Chinese. In 2013, James Sassoon, a British treasury official, traveled to Beijing and attempted to reclaim his family’s vast property holdings.

In a meeting with China’s finance minister Lou Jiwei, Sassoon said: “It is a shame China has not allowed… former owners to come back and reclaim their properties.”

Lou looked at him and broke into a smile. He switched to English and leaned forward: “Let’s let bygones be bygones.” Or, as they say in a language that is neither English, Hebrew or Chinese: Sic transit gloria mundi — Thus passes worldly glory.

Rabbi James Rudin, a prominent author, and public speaker, is an international leader in interreligious relations. He was a member of the American Jewish Committee’s professional staff for thirty-two years, serving as the organization’s Interreligious Affairs Director. Rabbi Rudin is currently the AJC’s Senior Interreligious Adviser. He is the author of The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, and Presidents and Why (Not) Me? Searching for God When We Suffer.

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Three extraordinary women from vastly different religious backgrounds changed our nation forever.

Indeed, one cannot understand social movements in America today without recognizing the trio’s achievements and the role religion played in their tumultuous histories. And like today’s social activists, they fought religious bigotry, police arrests while facing courtroom trials and constant threats of physical violence.

Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony’s (1820-1906) conviction that all people were equal under God was an inheritance from her upbringing in the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers.

A temperance campaigner and abolitionist in her early career, Anthony had by the late 1860s begun to focus on women’s rights. With her friend and fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association that later became the League of Women Voters.

In 1872, the 52-year-old Susan B. Anthony voted in her hometown of Rochester, New York. She was brought to trial for her “crime” and found guilty, but she refused to pay the $100 fine (about $2,000 in today’s dollars), and the prosecution dropped the case.

Anthony’s struggle for the ballot box was never easy in a male-dominated society that had curtailed women’s right to vote since our nation’s beginnings. But she had remarkable courage and an unshakable commitment to transform the role of women in society.

“We shall someday be heeded,” Anthony wrote. “Everybody will think (women’s suffrage) was always so … They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that (a woman) stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.”

In 1920, fourteen years after her death, the 19th Amendment was ratified, enshrining in the Constitution women’s right to vote.

Emma Goldman

Image credit: Wikipedia

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) also championed female empowerment for more than 50 years, as well as freedom of speech, the right to organize and a host of other unpopular causes. A fiery public orator, called “the most dangerous woman in America” by law enforcement officials and political leaders, Goldman was an anarchist who attracted large enthusiastic crowds wherever she spoke in America. She was a political “rock star” who always received wide press coverage.

She was born in antisemitic Tsarist-controlled Lithuania in 1869 and came with her Orthodox Jewish family to America when she was 16 years old. Beginning in her mid-20s, she was jailed repeatedly on charges ranging from incitement to riot to advocating birth control.

In 1917, as President Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I, promising to “make the world safe for democracy,” Goldman publicly denounced the president, who strongly supported racial segregation. She criticized the numerous Jim Crow laws of the time, the lack of women’s suffrage and the deeply embedded prejudice against ethnic, religious and racial minorities in the U.S.

“If America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy,” she declared, “she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up … and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?”

In December 1919, the U.S. government deported this dynamic one-woman human rights movement to Russia.

But even as she could not be silenced in the U.S., Goldman could not be silenced in the Soviet Union, the newly created “workers’ paradise.” She was highly critical of many aspects of the Communist Revolution.

In 1920, in a face-to-face meeting in Moscow with the Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, Goldman asked about fellow anarchists who, she had learned, were in prison and about a lack of press freedom. Lenin replied, “Free speech is, of course, a bourgeois notion.”

The fearless Goldman then questioned Lenin why the Communist elites were well-fed and well-clothed while she personally witnessed so much of the Russian population starving and ill-clothed. Lenin had no satisfactory answer.

For the next 20 years, Emma Goldman continued writing and speaking in Europe and Canada. After her death in Toronto in 1940, American officials allowed her to be buried in a Chicago-area cemetery.

Margaret Sanger

Image credit: Wikipedia

Margaret Sanger,(1879-1966) ten years younger than Goldman, was a trained nurse who demanded that a woman must be “… the mistress of her body.” A public health pioneer, she coined the term “birth control” and was a prominent leader in that movement.

Born into a large Roman Catholic family, Sanger purposely defied the church’s opposition to birth control in order to publicize her movement. In doing so, some historians say, she forced the church define its policy about contraception.

Sanger still remains controversial. Critics charge that she endorsed eugenics, a racist theory that in some versions favored the status of European people over all others.

But supporters praise her as a pioneering defender of women’s reproductive rights. She believed abortions, while sometimes justified, should generally be avoided, and contraception was the only way to prevent them.

Sanger wrote: “We hold that children should be (1) Conceived in love; (2) Born of the mother’s conscious desire; (3) And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health. Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.”

A significant part of Sanger’s legacy includes her founding of the Birth Control Federation of America that is better known today as the Planned Parenthood Federation.

In 1914, Sanger was arrested for disobeying the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned as “obscene and immoral” any advertisements or literature relating to contraception. Sanger fled to Britain to escape further prosecution. When the case against her was dropped, she returned to the U.S.

Back home, Sanger worked for women’s rights and safe birth control even as she faced public criticism and a later series of arrests. But, like Anthony and Goldman, she “persisted.”

These three women — a Quaker, a Jew and a Roman Catholic — were polarizing figures who were often propelled by their faith into history.

Though they attracted strong supporters and vigorous opponents, these remarkable activists continue to influence today’s multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-ethnic America.

This article was originally published in The Salt Lake City Tribune.

Rabbi James Rudin is a trailblazer in interfaith dialogue, a decorated religious leader, and a fearless advocate for understanding across cultural and spiritual divides. Born in Pittsburgh and raised in the charged political atmosphere of Alexandria, Virginia, he honed his intellect and competitive spirit at Wesleyan and George Washington University, where he graduated with academic distinction while making his mark on the wrestling mat, the track field, and in student government.

Ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Rabbi Rudin pursued truth and history through graduate studies at the University of Illinois. His contributions to faith and scholarship have earned him honorary doctorates from Saint Leo University, Saint Martin’s University, and his rabbinical alma mater.

In 2022, his extraordinary efforts were recognized globally when Pope Francis named him a Papal Knight of Saint Gregory—a rare honor for a Jewish leader and a testament to his groundbreaking work in building bridges between faiths.

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I picked up my four-year-old grandson Brendan from daycare one day, when autumn was in full bloom, and he remarked as we drove down a tree-lined street: “Grandpa, God paints the leaves, and God is very tall so that he can paint the leaves on the tippy-tops of the trees.” At first, I found his comments amusing. Then, giving it more thought, I realized that he was making a simple but profound theological statement. At the time, I was briefly tempted to use Brendan’s musings to lead into giving him a scientific explanation about why leaves change color, but then I realized that I didn’t understand it either! Brendan was making a theological observation, emerging from his poetic imagination rather than science. Hopefully, religions don’t reject science, but their mode of expression and language is based on shared stories and poetry.

For instance, Buddhism is based on the story of a prince who renounces his position to live as a wandering beggar. That story is an insightful commentary on the human quest for truth. When I was in Turkey, I visited a mosque complex where the entrance was so low that I had to bend down to enter the grounds. The Muslim guide explained that it reminded everyone, even royalty, to bow down before God, as all Muslims do when they prostrate themselves in prayer. The Christian story is somewhat different. It is based on the notion that God bows down, becoming little by entering into humanity’s fragility in the person of the infant Jesus, as Christians celebrate each Christmas.

Stories such as these make a statement about the human condition that scientists can’t explain, even though I imagine they stand in awe at the vastness of the universe and the intricacies of life on earth. Religions depend on a leap of faith, taking one step beyond science to acknowledge the mystery that we find ourselves in. The medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart was looking at the same reality that scientists see and said, “If the only prayer you ever said was thank you, that would be enough.” That’s the simple leap of faith religions suggest as a response to gazing at the stars at night and the sight of leaves breaking forth in autumnal splendor each fall. Prayer is called for, not just scientific explanations, and silent prayer is usually more fitting than words.

That same Brendan, now in college, traveled to Japan this summer and brought me back a painting he said reminded him of the two of us when he was a child. The painting is a simple depiction of a tall older man and a small boy, both with their hands behind their backs, looking up at a bird in a tree. I presume they were merely observing, not analyzing the bird, the tree, or their existence. They were simply present. The present moment is indeed a present, a gift from God. Poetry seeks to express in words that gift, as do religious stories. They move us to humble gratitude for the littleness that reveals a vastness behind each moment, more hinted at than rationally explained. Many psalms express in poetry the insight into God’s connection to the beauty around us:

“I see your handiwork in the heavens, the moon and stars you set in place…Lord our God, the whole world tells the greatness of your name” (Psalm 8).

Jesus told stories about tiny mustard seeds that work their magic to become fruitful bushes, and overlooked street people being invited to a luscious banquet. He was appealing to our poetic imagination. Life without poetry, without a sense of the grand story underlying the mundane, is mere survival. As Meister Eckhart reminds us: “We must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.” God’s story cannot be separated from the earth’s story, and our story, and the earth’s story cannot be separated from God’s. God paints the leaves.

Joseph Stoutzenberger spent fifty years in education. For over twenty-five years, he was a Professor of Religious Studies at Holy Family University in Philadelphia. He taught religious studies and served as Director of Campus Ministry at Manor College, Jenkintown, PA. He taught in the Catechist Preparation Program for the Diocese of Camden, NJ, and conducted workshops on parent-teen communication for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in religion from Temple University, as well as a master’s degree in religious education from Loyola University in Chicago. He has actively participated in interreligious dialogue activities, contributing to several books, including “Removing Anti-Judaism from the Pulpit” and “Interfaith Dialogue at the Grass Roots.” He serves on the board of the Pennsylvania Peace Islands Institute and has lectured on Catholic perspectives on the Hizmet movement.

He has written textbooks for Catholic high schools and books on world religions and spirituality for adults. He has authored or co-authored three books on St. Francis of Assisi, most recently on Francis and nature. He has written study guides on Ukrainian Catholicism for the Eparchy of St. Josaphat in Parma. Stoutzenberger resides in Erdenheim, PA, with his wife, Mary, and their numerous children and grandchildren.

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I am a descendant of immigrants who arrived in this land before it was a nation. My line begins in England with Thomas Wyman of Hertfordshire in the sixteenth century and crosses the Atlantic with John Wyman, one of the early English settlers of Massachusetts. Well before the Constitution, before the Republic, four generations of my family were already rooted in the land that would become the United States of America. If American birthright followed the law of primogeniture, this inheritance would answer first to the Native nations whom the expansion of settlers, including my own forebears, subjected to dispossession, devastation, and, in its most unsparing reality, genocide. Yet within that same logic of succession, my lineage stands among the earliest of those who came after, shaped by the founding of this country and bound to the consequences of what it became.

It is, by conventional American mythology, a clear pedigree. Early settlers. Revolutionary fighters. Union soldiers. Participants in the founding of a nation and in its preservation. From one perspective, it is the kind of ancestry that would satisfy those who obsess over blood, origin, and historical ownership.

Lieutenant John Wyman of Woburn, Massachusetts, born in 1743, stood among the Sons of Liberty who carried out the Boston Tea Party. He fought at Lexington and Concord, then at Bunker Hill, and continued through the Revolutionary War until he was promoted for meritorious service. He spent the rest of his life shaped by that conflict, a man of fierce temperament who resisted authority when he believed it unjust and never stopped recounting the revolution he helped ignite.

Nearly a century later, my ancestor Emory Wyman, born in 1834, fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, part of the generation that preserved the fragile nation created by men like John Wyman. After the war he worked as a teacher, builder, and farmer, and eventually served in the Nebraska legislature. He believed civic duty was not optional and introduced a bill advocating compulsory voting, insisting that participation in democracy was a mandate.

These men actively and aggressively championed the civil religion that is the American Dream. One fought in the founding violence of the United States. Another fought to preserve the Union when it nearly fractured. They lived inside the defining conflicts of their eras and helped shape the nation that exists today. It’s a peerage enough to make a Proud Boy jealous.

And yet, heritage is not destiny. Blood is not imprimatur.

Because the same lineage that could be described as deeply American also reveals the unfinished moral story of this country. The founding was not pure; the preservation not simple. The promise has never been fully realized. Each generation inherits both achievement and indictment.

I also live in a body that exposes another truth. I am a quadriplegic. In the calculus of certain modern policy agendas, people like me are reduced to cost, burden, liability, a life measured not in dignity but in dollars. In one narrative I descend from men who helped found and preserve this country. In another I am marked expendable. Such reasoning reflects a system willing to rank human value according to utility and expense. When a state begins to weigh the worth of its citizens this way, it drifts from its own declared principles and narrows the meaning of liberty itself.

So if this lineage means anything, it confers responsibility.

Responsibility to reject any ideology that reduces human worth to origin, purity, strength, or conformity. Responsibility to confront the distance between national myth and national reality. Responsibility to insist that the country live up to its own stated principle.

My sixth great-grandfather rebelled against imposed authority in the name of liberty. My third great-grandfather fought to preserve a nation built on that idea. If their legacy carries forward at all, it does not belong to exclusion, fear, or hierarchy but to the continuing demand that freedom must expand, not contract.

If I claim any inheritance from this history, I accept the burden of obligation.

We must be better.

The generation that founded this country did not agree on everything, but they agreed on one essential principle. Power must be restrained, not concentrated. They had lived under arbitrary whims of a distant monarch, surveillance, punishment without representation, and authority justified in the name of order and security. They called such rule tyranny. By their own words, they would recognize its return, and they would not praise it.

“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” so sayeth the Declaration of Independence

What is unfolding now—Christian hegemony, persecution of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the dehumanization of disabled persons, the elderly, the poor—is a betrayal to their words, immortalized in the country’s founding charter: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

Each generation carries the burden of turning inheritance into something better, shaping what is built through injustice into a future that yields meaning rather than futility. But the pattern persists. The religious oppression early settlers fled lives on in their descendants and in the systems they create. The liberty they demand they also deny to others. Hypocrisy runs through human history; what should disturb us is the ease with which it is embraced and celebrated now.

There are people today fleeing persecution, violence, and instability not unlike the conditions that once drove settlers across an ocean. They seek safety. They are met with persecution, violence. They are stripped of their humanity, justified in the language of patriotism and beneath a flag once lifted for freedom, now hanging in shame, a bitter parody of its own promise.

Symbols reveal their truth in how they are used. The flag was born as a sign of resistance to domination, a declaration that authority must answer to the governed. When it is raised to justify domination, its meaning is inverted.

There is a sad and familiar irony here. Those who proclaim themselves Christian yet wound “the least of these” repeat the very pattern Jesus condemned. It is pharisaic in the truest sense, loud in profession, empty in mercy. The crown of thorns was meant as mockery, a symbol of humiliation and false authority pressed onto his head. Yet the mockery did not erase him. In that act of scorn, the symbol meant to diminish instead revealed the truth it tried to deny. Power misused often exposes what it seeks to conceal.

The same pattern unfolds in our own symbols. A flag raised to proclaim freedom becomes, in the hands of those who deny dignity to others, an emblem stripped of its promise. Like the crown, the gesture of mockery turns back on itself. What is meant to justify exclusion instead exposes the contradiction between what is proclaimed and what is practiced.

The same question now confronts this country. Whether its symbols will remain instruments of exclusion, or whether the contradiction between principle and practice will force an accounting. Nations, like people, are measured by what they do when faced with their own reflection.

This inheritance calls us to a reckoning and to the judgment of history, from which there is no appeal.

Jennifer Wyman is an accomplished writer and editor with advanced degrees in English and Catholic Biblical Theology, extensive academic editor and curriculum-development experience, and a profound commitment to exploring the depths of faith, education, and the intricacies of spiritual dialogue. She is the author of Louisa’s Story: The Girl Who Found Her Superpower.

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New nonprofit founders, especially writers, educators, and community-minded creatives who want more diverse voices and better access, often feel the pull to start a nonprofit organization and then hit a hard question: how does a good cause become a real, measurable social change impact? Passion is common; clarity, structure, and trust are harder to build, and mission-driven organizations can lose momentum when the basics feel confusing or intimidating. The opportunity is bigger than paperwork or a name: it’s creating a mission that holds up under pressure and a plan that people can rally around. With the right foundation, community engagement strategies stop feeling like outreach and start feeling like belonging.

Set Up Your Nonprofit Legally and Lead It Well

Here’s how to turn intent into a real entity.

This process helps you register a nonprofit the right way, from state paperwork to IRS approval, so your mission can attract funding and public trust. For authors and readers committed to social-change publishing and diverse perspectives, a solid legal and leadership foundation keeps your programs focused on access, inclusion, and long-term credibility.

Step 1: Choose your structure and draft core rules

Start by deciding who you serve, what you do, and what “success” looks like in plain language. Then outline how your organization will run day-to-day by creating bylaws, since creating bylaws sets expectations for decision-making, meetings, and accountability.

Step 2: Write articles of incorporation that match your mission

Draft your articles to clearly state your charitable purpose, limits on private benefit, and what happens to assets if you close. This is where you protect the heart of your work, so your storytelling, education, and community programs stay aligned with public-benefit requirements.

Step 3: File your incorporation paperwork and lock in the details

Submit your articles to your state, confirm your official name, and keep stamped copies in a shared folder for your team. A checklist like file articles with AZ Corp. Comm. reinforces the idea that filing is not just administrative, it is your legal starting line.

Step 4: Build a governance setup your board can actually use

Choose initial officers, define board terms, and set a meeting rhythm that fits your capacity, such as monthly during launch and quarterly once stable. Keep roles simple and visible so board members can support equity-focused goals without confusion or overreach.

Step 5: Prepare and submit your 501(c)(3) application, then lead the rollout

Gather your narrative description of activities, a realistic first-year budget, and basic policies such as conflict of interest, then file your IRS application.

Nonprofits don’t usually stall because the mission is weak; they stall because the operating systems are. If you’re stepping into an executive director-style role, consider leveling up core management skills like budgeting, planning, team leadership, and execution. For some founders, that looks like mentorship and short courses; for others, it can mean formal education, such as earning an MBA, so tasks get delegated, timelines get met, and your mission moves from paperwork to practice.

Strong structure makes it easier to invite others in and deliver impact with consistency.

Build a Board and Volunteer Team People Trust

A nonprofit can be legally “set,” but it won’t be steady until the right people are sharing the load. These tips help you recruit with clarity, set healthy expectations, and build supporter engagement without draining your core leaders.

1. Write a one-page “yes/no” board role description: Before you recruit, spell out board member responsibilities in plain language: fiduciary oversight, attending meetings, voting, fundraising expectations, and committee work. Add your time estimate per month and 2–3 example tasks like “review the monthly financials” or “make 3 donor thank-you calls.” This protects your governance structure from becoming a vague “help when you can” arrangement.

2. Recruit for gaps, not vibes (use a simple skills matrix): Make a grid with 6–8 categories your nonprofit actually needs this year, finance, legal/compliance, program expertise, community relationships, marketing/storytelling, and lived experience connected to the mission. Then recruit intentionally: one person per gap, with a backup list of prospects. Good nonprofit board recruitment is less about big titles and more about people who can show up consistently.

3. Create a board development pipeline, not a one-time search: Set up a small committee focused on recruiting and onboarding, training, and ongoing support. A nominating and board development committee helps you avoid the classic cycle of “we found someone, now what do we do with them?” Build in simple education: a 30-minute orientation to bylaws, conflict-of-interest rules, and your decision-making process.

4. Run a 45-minute onboarding that makes people useful fast: Give every board member and key volunteer the same starter kit: mission and values, bylaws/high-level policies, your annual budget, and a one-page program overview. Assign a buddy for the first 60 days and ask the new person to own one small, visible responsibility quickly, like chairing a short committee meeting or drafting a partner outreach email. Early wins build confidence and retention.

5. Treat volunteers like a program, not a favor: Since 6 in 10 charities are struggling to recruit the volunteers necessary to support their operations, make your volunteer roles easy to say yes to. Offer “micro-volunteering” tasks (30–90 minutes) like packing kits, sensitivity-reading a flyer, or staffing a book table, plus clear start/end times. Confirm every shift in writing and include who they report to, so volunteers don’t accidentally create extra work.

6. Protect your leaders with boundaries and rhythms: Put two guardrails in place immediately: no one holds more than two key roles, and every recurring role has a backup. Add a short monthly check-in question, “What should we stop, start, continue?”, to catch burnout early. When your governance and budgeting are paired with realistic staffing assumptions, your mission stays credible, and your operations stay predictable enough to run on a simple checklist.

Steady Operations Checklist You Can Reuse Monthly

With your people plan in place: This checklist keeps your nonprofit running cleanly, and it gives authors a grounded, behind-the-scenes framework to write impact stories that respect community voices.

• Confirm required filings and due dates on one shared calendar

• Review bank activity weekly and categorize every transaction

• Reconcile accounts monthly and store receipts in one folder

• Track restricted funds separately and document every approved use

• Document program outputs monthly and capture one participant-informed insight

• Standardize intake, consent, and privacy steps for sensitive stories

• Set a weekly admin hour to batch email, approvals, and follow-ups

• Finish this once, then reuse it like a reset button.

Nonprofit Launch Questions, Answered

If you’re feeling stuck, these are the questions people ask first.

Q: What funding sources should a brand-new nonprofit start with?
A: Start with a simple mix: individual donors, small business sponsorships, and a modest recurring giving option. A clear one-page case for support plus a concrete first project makes it easier for people to say yes. Keep your budget lean until revenue becomes predictable.

Q: How do I handle grants when I’m new and don’t have a track record?
A: Look for small, local, and capacity-building grants that fund planning or pilot programs. Ask the funder what a “strong first-time applicant” looks like and request sample proposals or scoring rubrics. If you’re declined, treat feedback as your revision list, not a verdict.

Q: What IRS compliance steps trip up first-time founders the most?
A: The common trouble spots are mixing personal and nonprofit money, weak documentation, and late filings. Open a dedicated bank account, keep clean records of restricted gifts, and set reminders for every required deadline. When unsure, schedule one hour with a nonprofit CPA or legal clinic to confirm your setup.

Q: How can I engage donors without turning my community into a marketing prop?
A: Lead with consent, context, and shared credit, and let participants review quotes when safety or dignity is at stake. Report outcomes alongside what people say they want next, not just what looks inspiring. Donors stay when they trust your integrity and clarity.

Q: Why do people worry about fraud in nonprofits, and how do I build trust?
A: Some fears come from headlines, but fraud is less prevalent in nonprofits than in many other sectors. Build confidence with basic controls like two approvers for large payments, monthly reconciliation, and transparent reporting. Share the systems you use so supporters can see the guardrails.

Keep it simple, stay accountable, and take one practical step this week.

Turning Nonprofit Ideas Into Real, Local Community Impact

Starting a nonprofit can feel like balancing heart and paperwork, big needs, limited time, and plenty of “What if I mess this up?” moments. The steadier path is to lead with clarity, ask for help early, and treat compliance, funding, and relationships as learnable parts of the work. When that mindset sticks, nonprofit founder motivation holds through setbacks and the focus shifts from fear to community impact encouragement, one honest decision at a time. Small, steady steps build the kind of nonprofit that lasts. Choose one doable action this week: write your mission in one sentence and share it with a trusted person for feedback. That’s how empowerment through nonprofit work grows into social justice advocacy that strengthens real community connections.

The second-century sage Rabbi Eliezar said, “Repent one day before your death!” His students, somewhat perplexed asked, “But who knows that day?” He quickly responded, “One should repent today because tomorrow may not come.” (b. Shabbat 153a). Thus, he taught that every day provides us an opportunity to repent.

Repentance, teshuvah, in Hebrew, is more than an activity, it is a state of being, an attitude on life. It reaches beyond feeling regret for one’s mistakes and misdeeds and striving to be better. It is how we should drive along the highway of our lives. Teshuvah means watching the road, knowing the terrain, following the map, avoiding obstacles, avoiding detours and focusing on the destination. While sometimes we may make a wrong turn, teshuvah allows for course correction. Sadly, it does not, however, make up for lost time and missed opportunities.

Living in a state of teshuvah requires us to be present. We need to be aware of ourselves and alert to what is around us. Where we have been is a source of information, and where we can go, a source of inspiration. But teshuvah means being attentive to the here and now – the eternal present.

But we do not only live in moment. We live in time. Our lives are enriched by our memories. Our lives are guided by our dreams. Teshuvah allows us to enhance every moment, to evaluate our past and contemplate our future. But it does not change what has happened nor does it control what will be. It does not tell us the day we will die.

Even the righteous are blind to the future. Biblical prophets were not fortune tellers. As best, they offered options and suggested possible results. Teshuvah may hone our skills in dealing with what may occur but it does not protect us from the uncertainties and troubles life presents.

We all live with uncertainty. Rabbi Eliezar told his students, “Repent one day before your death!”. But our personal ethical state is not all that we need to be concerned about. We worry about our family, our community and our world. We may have the spiritual resources to handle life’s turbulence, but which of us wants to test them. The more grounded we are the more alert we are to the uncertainties of life and better able to plan for the unexpected and the inevitable. But even our best plans can be overturned. Life is uncertain and obscure.

Our sages were aware of our essential ignorance in matters closest to us – matters on the personal, familial, communal, and existential levels. In the Midrash (Genesis Rabba 65:17) we read that our sages taught:

“There are seven matters that are hidden from people: ‘[1] The day of [their] death; [2] the day of consolation; [3] the profundity of justice; [4] a person does not know through what he will profit; [5] a person does not know what is in the heart of another; [6] a person does not know what the woman is carrying in her pregnancy; and [7] when the evil empire will fall.”

In other words – we do not know when our lives will end, nor when we will be comforted in times of sorrow, nor when we will experience justice in the world, nor what are the best choices for ourselves and those we care for, nor another’s thoughts and feelings, nor the fate of our children, nor the time of redemption and liberation.

As the sages then proceed to support each of these claims with biblical verses, we get the sense that to them these matters are solely within the divine preview. But if only God knows, that matters little for us. We are still left in the dark. We still have to live with uncertainty. We do not know when we will die.

It is not that we are completely in the dark. We know that someday we will die. We understand that people can recover from grief. We sometimes find justice. We have a sense that life is risky. We can share our ideas and feelings with others. We can give our children our love. We can envision a better future. And with this bit of knowledge, we can peer, however dimly, into the darkness.

If the knowledge that someday we will die can cultivate a life enriched by teshuvah, “repentance through introspection”, what other spiritual qualities can we cultivate to address these other areas of uncertainty? Perhaps – For suffering, compassion? For risks, caution? For justice, righteousness? For others, openness? For children, nuture? For redemption, hope?

Despite our deepest wishes, we cannot get the clarity that we believe will remove the anxiety of not knowing what will be. Knowledge of the future and the secrets of living have not been revealed to us. Our sense of the Divine One is murky and elusive. Neither God nor the universe responds clearly and directly to our desires and our needs.

But, we have tools to navigate the darkness and find some clarity in our confounding world. Despite our ignorance, we are able to find wisdom. We can cultivate the spiritual resources that strengthen us as we deal with life’s challenges – both those we see as detrimental and, surprisingly, also those we may thank are beneficial. They do not provide us with bulletproof armor but with them, and particularly along with a community that cultivates them, we will make it through until the day we die and, hopefully, leave a legacy to guide others on life’s journey.

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