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Overcoming division: The friendship of Norman Mineta and Alan Simpson

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After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, approximately 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were transported to concentration camps, including one at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, where young Norman Mineta, a Boy Scout, was sent with his family.

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Exclusion manifests itself in peaceful, tolerant societies with important implications for our collective security.

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Meet the Amish 1 of 4 - First experience on an aeroplane

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Indian American youth at a Hindu summer camp in upstate NY learn about Hinduism, express a need for community, and show us what it takes to be a Hindu in America.

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American Jews - Create Meaning or Fade Away

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American Jews - Create Meaning or Fade Away

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Credit... Michela Buttignol

Nonfiction

Five new books touch on American Jewish identity and what will sustain it into the future.

Credit... Michela Buttignol

When a gunman slaughtered 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on a Shabbat morning last month, American Jews were left with a jumble of intense emotions: horror and fear, certainly, but also an old embattled feeling, centuries in the making. They were victims, in America, a country that has never seen even a hint of a pogrom. In their pain and worry, individual Jews had a rare chance to feel themselves part of a larger community - one that mourns together, gets angry together, imbued with a separate and unique identity, threatened yet resilient. And in this, victimhood offered an illusion.

For one thing, the violence of Pittsburgh is far from the everyday reality of American Jews. They live in a country that has offered them a great deal more love than it ever has hate. We're beyond mere tolerance. A recent Pew poll found that Americans felt "warmer" about Jews than any other religious group. There is an accumulated sense of comfort and acceptance that has persisted even with a president whose winks have emboldened thousands of internet trolls and hundreds of white men bearing tiki torches. The positive side of the ledger remains plentiful.

A shared sorrow may have provided the briefest taste of unity after Pittsburgh, but anti-Semitism is not what defines the experience of Jews in America today; assimilation is. To hear the professional worriers in the Jewish community, it's love, not hate, that poses the bigger existential challenge. A vast majority of Jews - 72 percent among the non-Orthodox - now marry outside the tribe. The infrastructure of Judaism, from the synagogue to the long-established liberal denominations, is being steadily abandoned. Almost a third of millennial Jews are so unidentified with Judaism they say they have no religion at all. And Israel, which once inspired, now alienates many, especially the young. Even the massacre in Pittsburgh, for those who knew where to look, offered hints of this demise. The average age of the victims, those mainstays who turned on the lights and made sure the grape juice and cookies were set up for the kiddush, was 74. Three congregations gathered in one synagogue that morning because of dwindling numbers.

Once the candlelight vigils are over, where is the solid ground for the future of American Jewish identity? It won't come from being victims - it shouldn't - and cultural and ethnic identity, the bagels and lox version, is disappearing fast. From where then? As a handful of new books make abundantly clear, there really is only one source left: the religion - Judaism itself, and its unique capacity for adaptation.

Reformers have been here before, in a radical moment of reinterpretation during the 19th century when a minuscule community numbering in the thousands ripped up received rituals and theology in order to adjust to the new reality of living in an open society. But it has been some time since American Jews have needed a dynamic religion to give them purpose. The 20th century brought the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel, two events that offered greater, world-historical, anchors of identity - the genocide creating an obligation to the murdered, and the Jewish state creating a homeland that offered dignity and pride.

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An alternative Passover Seder, "Unleavened," organized by a group of Broadway insiders. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Those anchors, weighty though they were, have now come unmoored. The last Holocaust survivor will most likely die within the next decade or two, and Israel, increasingly since 1967, is a thornbush. American Jews are now back to where they once were: on their own, as they haven't been in over a century, left to try to sustain themselves. The choice, according to Tal Keinan, the author of a new book to which I'll return, is stark and, to my mind, true: "Create meaning in Judaism or accept extinction."

The great transformation of American Judaism began in the early 19th century with younger religious dissidents who felt alienated from their own faith. "Almost no one understood the language," complained Abraham Moise, a congregant living in the 1820s in Charleston, S.C. - which, with 700 Jews, then had the largest Jewish population in the country. "Substance has yielded to form, the religion of the heart to the observance of unmeaning forms and ceremonies."

Within a few years, that Charleston congregation would split in two over the question of whether to add an organ to their synagogue. The reformers sought to imitate the practices of their Christian neighbors in order to make Judaism less alien to the dominant other - and to themselves. They no longer wanted to split their identity between the Americanized peddlers and podiatrists and businesspeople they had become in the outside world and the practitioners of an ancient religion in a dead tongue they turned into inside the synagogue. Soon English replaced Hebrew. Women and men sat together, sang hymns together, even in choirs. They abandoned as a relic anything stodgy or primitive-seeming. A few congregations even replaced the gnarled ram's horn blown on the high holidays with a shiny brass trumpet.

By midcentury, an influx of German Jews, including the first trained rabbis to arrive in America, brought some intellectual and theological heft to these reforms. They were emerging from the ferment of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, in which thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn searched for ways that Jews, freshly emancipated in Western Europe, could embrace the new secular gods of rationality and progress and nation. The key was to let go of 1,800 years of yearning and praying for a return to Zion, and instead root themselves more firmly where they lived. They should stop seeing themselves as a people apart - and certainly not a "chosen" one. Theirs would be a religion like any other.

For Jews in America, this made perfect sense. The reformers began excising the prayers for the messiah and a return to Palestine. One rabbi, dedicating the arrival of the organ at that Charleston congregation in 1841, made the shift away from the diasporic status quo very explicit: "This synagogue is our temple, this city is our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city and this land."

"Chosenness" would have new meaning and intention. Since Jews were no longer waiting for the messiah, they themselves would become "a messianic people designated by God to guide the world to its eventual redemption," as Steven R. Weisman writes in his thorough new history of this era, THE CHOSEN WARS: How Judaism Became an American Religion (Simon & Schuster, $30). American Jews would embrace a "high-priestly mission" to act as models of ethical behavior. Action in the world would define them.

By the 1880s, just as the boats loaded with Eastern European Jews were about to start arriving at Ellis Island (turning a community of 250,000 into four million within a few decades), Reform rabbis had profoundly redefined "what it is to be a Jew," Weisman writes, "and what the purpose of a Jew in America should be." When they gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce a statement crystallizing their beliefs, they went all in on America. ("We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.") Their role in this country would be to promote a social gospel, "to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society."

One hundred and thirty-three years later, this statement still expresses how a vast majority of American Jews think about what it means to be a Jew in this country. To be a Jew is to join the A.C.L.U., to travel to the border and act as a pro bono lawyer for immigrants, to join in the Women's March. It's the part of American Jewish identity that points with pride to the fact that Barack Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008 and beams at Ruth Bader Ginsburg's status as a liberal rock star.

The sociologist Jack Wertheimer dismisses this as "Golden Rule" Judaism in THE NEW AMERICAN JUDAISM: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today (Princeton University, $29.95), lamenting that as a form of religious practice - even with a faith that stresses deeds over beliefs - it represents a slide toward the empty and platitudinous: "A rich, complex and at times contradictory religious system has been reduced to a set of vague slogans - 'Justice, justice, shall you pursue,' 'Made in God's image,' 'Love the stranger' and 'Repair the world.'"

Wertheimer is harsh on this form of Judaism, seeing it as an easy, self-congratulatory way to slap a seal of tradition onto pre-existing liberalism. He's wrong to discount it as meaningless. Some of the most vibrant activity around synagogues every weekend has to do with food banking or raising funds for Syrian refugees. But I do share his assessment that as religious practice, this is pretty thin. It's not hard to imagine a day when American Jews stop thinking about their commitment to social justice as Jewishly inflected and see it instead as just that, a commitment to social justice. What then of the more thickly religious practices, the world of ritual and spirituality?

Most American Jews (the 90 percent who are not Orthodox but belong to one of the liberal branches of Reform or Conservative Judaism or are simply unaffiliated) are in a process of mixing and matching, practicing what Wertheimer calls a "cafeteria religion." "Picking and choosing only those morsels of Judaism that seem personally appealing is the new - and perhaps only - norm among Jews," he writes. It's what explains why the premier Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C., sponsors a Jewish Mindfulness Center, which includes meditation practices, healing services, yoga, Jewish mysticism classes and immersion in the mikvah (the ritual bath, previously an exclusively Orthodox practice). American Jews have not quite abandoned Judaism - according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2013, a majority still attend a Seder for Passover and fast on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; at weddings and funerals, people still want something Jewish - but they are being extremely idiosyncratic about it all, sucking out whatever spiritual and personal sustenance the tradition has to offer and spitting out the pits.

The affliction the sociologist Herbert Gans calls "terminal ethnic identity" is a condition of white ethnic groups like Jews and the Irish, who by the third generation of their family's existence in America would, as Gans predicted in a 1979 paper, view their heritage as "more of a leisure-time activity" (like, say, watching "Seinfeld"). By the seventh, "their secular cultures will be only a dim memory." A majority of American Jews in that 2013 Pew survey rated "humor" and "intellectual curiosity" much higher than community and religious practice as indicators of Jewishness. This would put them on the path to terminal. At this rate, American Jews are two or three generations away from being as Jewish as "Irish" people whose Irishness consists of drinking green beer on St. Patrick's Day.

If a revitalized form of Judaism is the counterweight to Gans's predictions, it will have to be much more expansive and inclusive than its current iteration. This is also the assessment of Robert Mnookin, a Harvard law professor, in THE JEWISH AMERICAN PARADOX: Embracing Choice in a Changing World (PublicAffairs, $28), a lucid legal brief of a book that proposes what would amount to a revolutionary (some would say heretical) revision.

It no longer makes sense, Mnookin thinks, to use matrilineal descent, or any descent really, to determine who is a Jew. If you feel yourself to be a Jew, you get to be one. "The 'chosen people' must become the 'choosing people,'" he writes. And it's a strategic move. Jews can't afford to be exclusive - leaving out children with only a Jewish father or a non-Jewish spouse. Why negate them while allowing membership to people who couldn't care less about it? He wants a "Big Tent": "Inside the Tent the table is set with a smorgasbord of Jewish values, music, food, traditions, rituals, spirituality, language, philanthropic causes and connections with Israel. At this table some will nibble; others will feast. But all will have options and none will be turned away." Within the tent, if some want to set up their own purity tests for inclusion in a subgroup, Mnookin is fine with that. But the entrance should be wide.

A push for inclusivity of this sort might even offset the impact of intermarriage. The increasingly high rate of Jews marrying non-Jews (coupled with a birthrate that, with the exception of the Orthodox, is relatively low) is spoken of by Jewish leaders in terms of dread usually reserved for global warming. If the trend continues, the next generation of children born to two Jewish parents will be less than 40 percent the size of the current generation. The generation after that will be 13 percent the size of today's. These are scary numbers for those holding onto the assumption that the future of the Jews is dependent on the number of Jewish babies born to two Jewish parents. But Mnookin thinks that by redefining Jewishness more openly you can actually net a higher number of people who could become invested in the religion. There is even some evidence to back this up. The recent Pew study showed that among respondents with one Jewish parent, millennials were more than twice as likely to identify as Jewish as those over 65. Growing up in a community that doesn't see you as lesser or ineligible might make a difference.

What about Israel? Is it really no longer capable of exerting a magnetic pull on the whole Jewish people? Not really. For hundreds of years of diaspora, Jews, scattered everywhere, had to negotiate between two impulses, universalism and particularism. They did so on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis, balancing their tribal needs with their desire to engage with the world at large. This dynamic has been replaced by a bipolar Jewish world with two centers of Jewish life, each basically representing opposed values. Israel's primary mission is the security of the Jewish people, and its government is beholden to an Orthodox establishment that narrowly defines Judaism (its leaders regularly denigrate Reform Jews, with one recently calling them "a group of clowns who stab the Holy Torah"). For their part, American Jews care primarily about the health and well-being of American society - issues like immigration or human rights or reproductive health. (Israel's actions, meanwhile, especially when it comes to the conflict with the Palestinians, are difficult to understand and often perceived as deeply immoral.)

This schism has impoverished all Jews. Tal Keinan's GOD IS IN THE CROWD: Twenty-First Century Judaism (Spiegel & Grau, $28) is a pox-on-both-houses indictment. Having grown up in a fully assimilated household in America and then moved to Israel to become a fighter pilot, Keinan became disenchanted with both places. He sees two poles of identity and outlook, unique and intransigent, that are destroying themselves by staying so far apart. What American Jews and Israelis need to recapture is the "Wisdom of the Crowd," his altogether too TED-talky phrase for the collective knowledge and decision-making that occurred during the diverse and dispersed period of Diaspora. Without "dogma from above," Keinan writes, the Diaspora "wrestled with its own moral governance. It reached conflicting conclusions and reconciled them over time, incorporating new projections and evolving realities, leaving its members to correct for the winds that prevailed in specific eras - and to choose their own destinations."

By way of getting American Jews to return to this "active struggle between Particularism and Universalism," Keinan offers a few ideas, like giving every Jew in the world a vote for the Israeli presidency, which would turn a largely symbolic post into one with the authority to settle all matters of Jewish identity (like who is eligible for citizenship in Israel - a power now in the hands of the prohibitive Orthodox rabbinate). This is an improbable solution to put it lightly, but it has a worthy aim: to shock American Judaism out of "complacency."

The killing in Pittsburgh made me stop and consider, for the first time in a long time, my own American Jewish identity, what it adds to my life. As much as I enjoyed the feeling of warmth that emanated from the havdala services that closed that miserable Shabbat last month, there was something sad about identity flaring just in these moments of defensiveness and grief. I want a Judaism that also offers positive sources of meaning, for the boundaries between sacred and profane that it creates to enhance and elevate my day-to-day existence in the modern world. And not just mine. I fear without this "added value," to be crass about it, my two young daughters won't have anything to hold onto.

I thought back to the most recent high holidays - a time of the year when my family and I, unaffiliated Jews that we are, end up nomadically wandering from congregation to congregation, always promising that next year we'll finally join somewhere, though we never do.

I attended one service at a Reform synagogue that looked, from the peeling paint, as if it had hit its high point sometime around 1955. The sanctuary itself resembled a theater and the service was performed from a stage, the cantor singing the entire operatic liturgy himself as the audience passively looked on, eyelids drooping, only perking up when a cello briefly joined in. The English prayer book helpfully offered up poems, including one by Robert Frost, which the rabbi read flatly for what seemed like perhaps the thousandth time.

The other experience was with a New Age-y, slightly neo-Hasidic, experimental, post-denominational congregation. There were half a dozen musicians, looking like a raggedy drum circle and including a Palestinian man with an oud (who at one point would offer a Muslim prayer in Arabic). The rabbi, wrapped in a prayer shawl, sometimes completely covering his head, Hasidic-style, used a direct and personal tone, tinged with a rhetoric of self-help. The service was participatory, as raucous as a megachurch. At one point, the rabbi asked anyone who had been "othered" over the past year to come up and participate. Under a canopy of prayer shawls, congregants stood with their arms around one another, swaying.

Between the music, the rabbi's accessible, emotional approach and the sense of engaged community, this second service was strangely more moving than any religious ceremony in recent memory (my daughters were riveted too). I say strangely, because it also felt completely ridiculous, a silly amalgam of plucked rituals and forced feeling. But the ridiculousness was, in its way, hopeful, and allowed me to tie together the two high holiday experiences. Because even though that Reform service - performative, decorous (a cello!), incorporating English - did nothing for me, it had also once seemed ridiculous. To a 19th-century Jew, it must have appeared preposterous - until it wasn't.

Daring ridiculousness may be American Judaism's most important survival tool, the willingness to reach deep and to search both within the tradition and outside it in order to make the religion feel alive. It's a benefit of being a people without a pope. In an essay, "Many Lights, Not One Light," included in a new collection, DEAR ZEALOTS: Letters From a Divided Land (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23), the Israeli novelist Amoz Oz praises this quality of Jewishness, the "anarchist core, the rebellious gene" that prompts constant interpretation, reinterpretation and counterinterpretation. "I regard blind obedience as a deviation from tradition even when it purports to be the embodiment of that tradition," Oz writes.

For Oz, Israel is the place where most of the ridiculousness - or, as he would put it, "curiosity and imagination" - has played out recently through the construction of a secular Hebrew culture. But what of America, a society for which reinvention is second nature? What better place to work out what Oz thinks is the central quandary facing Jews today: "Does our past belong to us, or we to it?"

American Jews surely know the correct answer to this question. For Oz, the Jewish imperative to remain fresh and relevant is summed up in a line from the Book of Lamentations, "Renew our days as of old." To which I'd only add: Or else.

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American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away (Published 2018)

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Nonfiction Five new books touch on American Jewish identity and what will sustain it into the future. Credit... Michela Buttignol When a gunman slaughtered 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on a Shabbat morning last month, American Jews were left with a jumble of intense emotions: horror and fear, certainly, but also an old embattled feeling, centuries in the making.

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It's a great time to be a pessimist. School shootings, ISIS, police brutality, changes in government, rapid climate change - who can avoid the feeling that the world is completely falling apart?

As troubling as recent headlines in the news may be, we shouldn't be discouraged. Humanity should use this opportunity to come together as a whole. All of the different genders, sexual orientations, genders, religions, ages and nationalities have one thing in common: we are all human.

Instead of criticizing each other for our differences, we can come together to have a more united, powerful and productive world. Achieving peace in society starts with you.

Pause on Judgement

Bringing people together means meeting people where they are. This is what therapists are trained to do. Instead of judging the person for being where they are, we should come into their space and relate to them as best as we can. You do not know what it is like to be in someone else's shoes, to have lived their life, or the situations they have been exposed to. For example, if you are someone who is an activist for women's rights you might struggle to not judge someone who is sexist. Instead of pushing them away, try to understand why they got that way or how their experiences may have shaped them into that mindset. When you can meet someone where they are without judgement, you can begin to see them as other humans instead of only seeing their differences. This is where amazing transformations begin and peace can form.

Look at a Wide Range of News Sources

Newsreaders are almost always going to perceive that they live in dangerous times. The media is constantly pushing out the most sensational, heartbreaking stories because it helps get the highest ratings. However, by looking at a wide range of news sources you will begin to notice that it isn't all bad. There are amazing stories every day of people coming together for ultimate acts of kindness. The news never comes out and says "this country didn't go to war today." They are always talking about the negatives that are happening. So despite so many amazing things in the world, it isn't always mentioned. Watching the news with a critical mind and researching stories will help us have an open-mind that is informed. Seeing many various news sources also gives us knowledge about other viewpoints we might not have known otherwise.

Seek to Understand Other Cultures and Viewpoints

One of the best ways to find peace with other people is by understanding their cultures and viewpoints. The saying that "knowledge is power" is so true! When we are knowledgeable about different ideas, philosophies, religions, etc. we are more likely to understand why those people think a certain way. This helps us to move past our differences and be more respectful of others. Learning about our differences can also be fun, too. You might learn something you can apply to your own life and use.

Understand You're Not Always Right

This might be one of the hardest things to overcome. Humans are predisposed to have a "me, me, me" mentality. This really hinders our ability to admit when we are wrong. When someone presents their own culture or viewpoint, we automatically think it is wrong simply because it's different from ours or what we know. Just because you were raised a certain way or believe a certain thing doesn't mean that it's right. It also doesn't mean that it's the only way. Sometimes, we have to look inward at our own biases if we want to overcome differences and find peace.

Differences Are Beneficial

If everyone was the same, there would be absolutely no progress in the world. It would be boring and static. Without growth, we could not be the society we are today. The experiences people go through in life lead them to do amazing and great things later on. Think about yourself for a moment. What life transitions did you go to that led you to where you are now? Could you have gotten to the same point if you were born in another country? How about if you were a different race? Probably not, because your life would be completely different. These differences in lifestyles are incredibly important for advancing society.

World peace seems so hard to achieve, but it really starts with the individual. Humans have to recognize that while others are different than them, they are still human. We have that original common bond that we should focus on. Instead of fighting each other for being different, we should unite and stand together as a human race.

Megan Bailey is a former Social Media Specialist and Content Producer for Beliefnet. She attended James Madison University where she received a degree in psychology.

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How We Can Overcome Division and Find Peace

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It's a great time to be a pessimist. School shootings, ISIS, police brutality, changes in government, rapid climate change - who can avoid the feeling that the world is completely falling apart? As troubling as recent headlines in the news may be, we shouldn't be discouraged.

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Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them

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Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them

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e are in the midst of a rapidly changing world. More than 300 million people are currently living outside their homelands. Ethno-nationalism is on the rise - from the Rohingya people forced out of Myanmar in what many are calling the world's latest genocide, to neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in an action President Trump pointedly refused to condemn.

Humans can only process a limited amount of change in a short period of time without experiencing anxiety. It's a natural human reaction - but how we respond to that anxiety is social.

Othering is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact

When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society - a process I call " Othering ". An alternative response is seeing the change in demographics as positive, and regarding the apparent other as enhancing our life and who we are. This is what I refer to as "belonging and bridging".

Othering is not about liking or disliking someone. It is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain identified group poses a threat to the favoured group. It is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact. Overwhelmingly, people don't "know" those that they are Othering.

So while today's global anxiety has been precipitated by globalisation, technology and a changing economy, demographics play a crucial role in the process of Othering. The attributes of who gets defined as Other differ from place to place, and can be based upon race, religion, nationality or language. It is not these attributes themselves that are the problem, of course, but how they are made salient, and how they are manipulated.

Rohingya refugees at a makeshift shelter after fleeing violence in Myanmar. Photograph: Rehman Asad / Barcroft Images

I am therefore particularly concerned with how Othering shows up in today's power structures: how it is used to divide and dehumanise groups, and capture and reshape government and institutions. For society's leaders and culture play an oversized role in helping us make sense of change - and so greatly affect our responses to anxiety.

In the United States, politicians used to engage in what scholar Ian Haney-Lopez calls "dog whistles" - they could make references to Others but only in a coded way; never saying "those Mexicans" or "those Muslims", for example. President Trump, however, has opened a space where people are emboldened to be more explicit. We now have not only our nation's leadership but many of our information networks amplifying these explicit calls to exclude and dehumanise.

The rhetoric and language coming from Trump has begun to both define and normalise Othering. This is a threat to all the things we value. When Mexicans can be called "rapists and drug dealers" in direct contradiction to the facts, it becomes a much easier step to call for their deportation, and for a literal wall to divide us.

The language being used by many national leaders not only activates people's anxiety and fear around a perceived Other, it creates new processes of exclusion and dehumanisation.

While it is common to focus only on economic changes to explain the rise of right-wing nationalists and Othering, the loss of economic power is not the only thing stirring anxiety around the globe. Sweden is experiencing a rise of group-based nationalism, yet its economy is not suffering. Trump voters included a large number of affluent whites, not just the poor or working class.

Conservative ​elites know how to strategically create and use fear of a perceived Other

It's not that the economy is unimportant, it's just that it doesn't tell the whole story. After a number of important civil rights victories in the US in the 1960s, the conservative elites strategised how to trade on smouldering white Southern resentment of these gains. With the Southern Strategy of stoking white resentment, they succeeded in remaking the Republican Party - ultimately moving government away from protecting people and towards protecting capital.

Conservative elites know how to strategically create and use fear of a perceived Other, by organising and manufacturing fear. When Nixon began using the term "law and order", his popularity was cemented among a certain base because he was appealing to a specific kind of conservative white fear: not primarily about jobs, but rather the changing social order. This was not precipitated by a specific economic downturn, yet the outcome of Nixon's strategy was the securing of an economy rigged for the rich.

People don't just figure out on their own that collectively they need to be afraid of another group. Leadership plays a critical role. Often people who have been living with one another for years are made to feel suddenly that those differences have become threatening.

Richard Nixon cemented his popularity by appealing to conservative fears about the changing social order. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images

The recent rhetoric around people who are undocumented in the US, many of whom have lived here for their whole lives, has created a culture of fear for millions, has demonised children, and has created suspicion and anger in communities where none had existed before.

A friend from the deep south tells the story of her father asking with all sincerity if he should turn in to the authorities a waiter at a restaurant he suspects doesn't have "papers". Five years ago, this concern wasn't even part of his consciousness, and the same waiter had been serving him for far longer than that. Who activated that concern? A demagogue understands the power of language and the deep ontological forces that are essential to how people experience their lives. It's not necessary that these demagogues believe what they say.

The stories we tell, and live, are not about facts but our values, fears and hopes - all of which, to a certain degree, are malleable. Our narratives don't just reflect them, they also shape them. While anxiety about change is natural, Othering is not. Othering is socially and culturally constructed.

So how do we respond to our collective anxiety today? Either we "bridge", reaching across to other groups and towards our inherent, shared humanity and connection, while recognising that we have differences; or we "break", pulling away from other groups and making it easier to tell and believe false stories of "us vs them", then supporting practices that dehumanise the "them".

Part of the solution to Othering must come from the stories we tell. As the world undergoes profound shifts, how do we build true societies of belonging? We can look to Canada as one positive example. While it still has its difficult issues, Canada has said to its multi-racial, multi-ethnic population, " Keep your identity ". Canadians have held on to their religious and ethnic backgrounds while they also connect with others. And the far right-wing in Canada has not cracked 10%.

If we are to combat the rising tide of extremism across the globe, we must actively create bridges across difference, and resist strategic exploitation of our collective anxiety. For when we bridge, we not only open up to others, we also open up to change in ourselves - and actively participate in co-creating a society to which we can all belong.

The opposite of Othering is not "saming", it is belonging. And belonging does not insist that we are all the same. It means we recognise and celebrate our differences, in a society where "we the people" includes all the people.

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Us vs them: the sinister techniques of 'Othering' - and how to avoid them

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e are in the midst of a rapidly changing world. More than 300 million people are currently living outside their homelands. Ethno-nationalism is on the rise - from the Rohingya people forced out of Myanmar in what many are calling the world's latest genocide, to neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in an action President Trump pointedly refused to condemn.

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A Life Apart: Introduction - 1/5 - POV | PBS

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When Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana Designers released its first collection of abayas and hijabs earlier this month, Forbes called it the company's "smartest move in years."

A growing number of Western fashion brands, including Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, and MANGO, are realizing that it's important to start catering to Muslim women.

Some Muslim women welcome these moves as signs that the fashion world is taking their needs into consideration. Fashion blogger Hassanah El-Yacoubi wrote that D&G's new line should be lauded because it aligns the company against Islamophobia.

But others are not very enthusiastic about the collection. Dina Torkia, a popular British fashion designer and blogger, is wondering what the fuss is about.

"I feel like I should be happy, ecstatic even, perhaps eternally grateful? That's what seems to be the general reaction to this news so far. But, I can't help but feel incredibly underwhelmed, possibly even a tiny bit insulted by the collection," she wrote in a blog post.

Torkia goes on to write that the abayas that D&G released seem too similar to the lacey, embroidered, traditional clothing that many Muslim women have grown up with. The kind of thing she could pick up at her local abaya store. As a designer herself, she doesn't see the aesthetic in this collection as anything new.

Muslim women have been designing and styling their own unique fashions for years -- experimenting with colors, patterns, and fabrics in incredibly creative ways.

Here are 15 women who were making waves in the Muslim fashion world long before D&G got in the game.

UPDATE: Feb. 2 -- This list has been updated to include @sagaleeyaa.

Religion Reporter, HuffPost

Fashion muslim Islam hijab muslim women

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15 Fashionable Muslim Women To Follow On Instagram

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When Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana Designers released its first collection of abayas and hijabs earlier this month, Forbes called it the company's "smartest move in years." A growing number of Western fashion brands, including Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, and MANGO, are realizing that it's important to start catering to Muslim women.

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By on .

RESISTING THE LURE OF "WHITENESS"

From the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents

TO DEFINE Jewish American identity is to invite disagreement. Each definition threatens to efface or minimize some aspect of the American Jewish experience that may be essential to someone else. Religious Jews, perhaps, can agree to a narrow definition: Jews are the people of the Jewish faith. But I'm one of the 32 percent of American Jews born after 1980 who identify, to use the recent Pew polls terminology, as "Jews without religion." For me, the search for a defined identity is complicated by the urge to ask, "To what extent do I even consider myself a Jew?"

My answer to that question is dependent on uncountable accidents of history. Because I was born to and raised by Jewish parents, I have always identified as Jewish. Because I spent one afternoon a week learning about shtetls, Ellis Island, and Sholem Aleichem, I identify as Jewish. Despite - or perhaps because of - this upbringing, religion has only had a slight influence on my understanding of myself as Jewish. This is not to say that I don't look forward to the Passover seder or enjoy the playfulness of Purim, but that their importance has always been communal and cultural rather than devotional.

My Jewish identity has always been tied to history: the history of the pogroms that drove my ancestors out of the Russian Empire; the humor and struggle that inspired the Chelm stories; the tragedy and promise of the American immigrant experience from sweatshops to assimilation. This history has always been a source of pride for me, animating my sense of social justice and of self.

That pride, however, is dependent upon experiences that are not my own. The Brooklyn in which I grew up was neither a shtetl nor a tenement, and to compare my experience growing up with that of my grandparents or parents is to understand the profound degree to which Jews have succeeded in assimilating. While my parents and grandparents were uninvited to parties and denied social recognition, my own experiences of Jewish alienation have been usually limited to awkward conversations about Israel and loneliness during the Christmas holiday.

In an interview given in 2008, Vivian Gornick, expanding on a point she made in an article on the literary achievements of Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow, argued that "What made them major was their gripe, the chip on their shoulders. The rage they felt at the world for keeping them out. That experience became a great metaphor. There is no hyphenated Jewish experience anymore . . . So there's nothing to talk about. There's really nothing to write about."

THE SUCCESS OF JEWS - in particular, secular Jews of European descent - seems, somewhat ironically, to have obviated the need for differentiating Jews from everyone else (or at least other white people). Perhaps, then, the success of assimilation has, as Gornick argues, erased the meaning being a secular Jew. Perhaps I am simply an American.

For Gornick, this means that there are no stories left to tell, at least none that center on Jewish identity. There is a presumption here that, as far as narrative interest goes, an identity is only interesting as long as it is a source of conflict, of otherness. As a literary theory, this is surprisingly simplistic for a critic of Gornick's depth - and, in her defense, I am likely extending her argument beyond what she meant to speak to. Still, her assertion is revealing for its presumptions about what constitutes Jewish (and American) identity.

There is, in fact, a persistent and not unreasonable assumption in progressive circles that personal identity is only worth naming as a site of otherness. There are often good intentions behind this assumption, insofar as people from poor, discriminated against, and occluded identities are most likely to profit from the proliferation and acceptance of positive representations of their "otherness." In the classic American "bootstrapping" narrative, there is even a sense that the more obstacles a person has overcome, the more worthy he or she is of success. Well intentioned as this is, it can lead to some unfortunate consequences.

Anyone who has worked with well-off high school students, for example, will likely have heard some form of the complaint that they have nothing to write about for their college admissions essay because their lives have been too easy, and that poor, queer, minority, or first-generation students are lucky because their lives fit the narrative elite colleges are looking for. (A variant of this is the false belief that affirmative action constitutes discrimination against white people.) "Otherness" is thus fetishized in ways that reinforce resentments and the status quo, rather than stirring people to fight against it.

Has "otherness" been bleached from Jewish identity in America? Is there "nothing to talk about" when it comes to being Jewish in the U.S.? Leaving aside the recent rise of antisemitic harassment of journalists on Twitter and the rise of the white nationalist "alt-right," whose idea of whiteness almost certainly excludes Jews, I don't think we can or should abandon secular Jewish identity or view it as something that has petered out in energy or relevance. In the Pew survey mentioned earlier, 73 percent of American Jews identified "remembering the Holocaust" as "essential to being Jewish," and 56 percent said the same about "working for justice/equality." Without reading too much into these numbers, it seems possible to infer that for a majority of American Jews, the memory of past oppression is an important part of how we identify as Jews, and keeps us on guard about how tenuous our assimilation can be.

Nevertheless, despite the emboldening of antisemites in the wake of Trump's election, it would be alarmist to say that our present situation has 20th-century analogues. On the whole, American Jews are more prosperous and educated than the average American, and have a disproportionate influence on public affairs. In the face of this success, however, it would be unfortunate if Jews began to forget their past - and not only because such cultural memory serves as a tool for self-preservation.

While it is impossible, based on the survey, to give a causal explanation for why 56 percent of Jews associate Jewish identity with working for social justice, it seems likely to me that this belief is tied to the memory of Jews suffering past injury and injustice. Perhaps, given my secular upbringing, I am underestimating the influence of tikkun olam, mitsves, and other religious impetuses for social justice work, but even then I would hesitate to isolate such religious ideas as ahistorical.

Historical memory has its pitfalls, however. Too often, Jews fall into the trap of using the struggles of previous generations to disdain the seeming failures of other minority groups, particularly African Americans, to achieve similar success. This argument disregards the very real differences in the types and severity of discriminatory obstacles faced by Jews and African Americans, even in the post-slavery era - notably the denial of GI Bill benefits in education, housing, and employment to blacks, as well as other discriminatory practices such as redlining, denial of the vote, and outright violence. The Jewish "bootstrapping" success of previous generations is often invoked to justify our own privilege, rather than as a point of empathy that might inspire us to use that privilege to work to overturn discrimination against others.

AN ALMOST-too-perfect example of this can be seen in an opinion piece published two years ago by a then Princeton freshman titled, "Why I'll Never Apologize for my White Male Privilege." The author, Tal Fortgang, claims that admonitions to "check your privilege" obscure the struggles of previous generations whose work has contributed to his own success. To illustrate this, Fortgang discusses his grandparents, who fled Nazi-occupied Poland, survived concentration camps, then came to America and succeeded in business despite the considerable difficulties of surviving in a new country. Fortgang concludes that we shouldn't call someone out for their privilege because "You don't know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are . . . You don't know whose father died defending your freedom. You don't know whose mother escaped oppression."

The essay mixes ignorance of racial privilege with the naive belief that opportunities for advancement are equally available to all, and makes several historically inaccurate assumptions about how race, ethnicity, and gender work in the United States. Knowingly or not, Fortgang's article uses a familiar rags-to-riches arc popular in American literature, best known through the Horatio Alger stories - although in this case, Abraham Cahan's David Levinsky might be more appropriate. As Fortgang writes:

Perhaps my privilege is that [my grandparents] came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will . . . Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.

Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for twenty-five years got up well before the crack of dawn . . . to earn that living."

Notwithstanding the horrors that Fortgang's grandparents survived and the achievements they secured, his attempt at irony misses the point. Consider the wide array of factors outside of his parents and grandparents' control that have made possible their success. Fortgang's grandparents likely entered the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which allowed 400,000 European refugees to enter the country between 1948 and 1950 (by contrast the U.S. took in less than 85,000 refugees in 2016). The post-war era was a period of unprecedented economic expansion and growth for the U.S., and one in which income inequality was fairly low (with the top 1 percent controlling about 10 percent of total income, compared to 20 percent in 2010, according to Thomas Piketty). This was also a time when the government invested heavily in education, and public institutions like City College were still tuition-free and integral to the economic mobility of working-class and middle-class New Yorkers, many of whom would have been denied access to more elite institutions because of discrimination.

Yet this lowering of class barriers to prosperity was not equally available to all. Even beyond the Jim Crow system of the South, African-Americans in the era of Fortgang's grandparents were legally excluded from neighborhoods, refused entry to jobs of authority, mocked in the media, and victimized by widespread racial violence. While Jews in post-war America were hardly free from antisemitic exclusion, in comparison with the deeply embedded racism faced by African Americans, Jews were privileged and the mystery of our comparative prosperity vanishes.

To a very real extent, the success of American Jews can be explained by their ability to make their "Jewishness" invisible and to pass for white. This is especially true for secular Jews, who, lacking clear ethnic signifiers like yarmulkes, peyes, head-wraps, and other religious garb, can easily vanish into the privilege of their skin color.

HERE I WANT to return to the question of secular Jewish identity. As I noted above, identity is always contextual, informed by accidents of history. None of us comes to self-understanding simply by force of will; as the philosopher Anthony Appiah has said, "it is in dialogue with other people's understandings of who I am that I develop a conception of my own identity . . . my identity is crucially constituted through concepts (and practices) made available to me by religion, society, school and state, and mediated to varying degrees by family."

However, while our identities are to a large degree predetermined by historical and cultural factors, how we interpret them is within our control. I may not be able to determine how the world sees me (whether that be Jewish, white, male, etc.), but I can shape the way I understand and express my identity. I do so with the belief that the history of Jewish oppression cannot simply be stories of wrongs done to the Jews; they must also shape how I, as a Jew, see my role in the world.

One option is to see this history simply as a call to self-defense. While recognizing the grim reality of Jewish oppression, I reject this interpretation as inadequate. For me, Jewish history gives insight and warning about the violent power that fear and intolerance can wreak - and what I conclude from this is that those of us lucky and privileged enough to have come of age in the 21st century, in this part of the world, must struggle for a better society and not countenance the oppression of other vulnerable peoples (even those who supposedly don't care for Jews). Simply because my own world is not my grandfather's, I know for a fact that change is possible, slow and difficult though it is.

To what extent do I consider myself a Jew? To the extent that I remember our history and our traditions, learn from them, and adapt them. This can mean incorporating simple gestures into old traditions, like adding an orange to the seder plate, or more radical actions in Jewish settings. It can mean learning and teaching Yiddish songs or passing on Jewish jokes to the next generation. There is something powerful in the act of claiming an ethnic identity: To call yourself Jewish means to stand in opposition to all those who would make you afraid to do so. And for this reason, I have never been able to separate my identity from my politics.
Michael Mirer is a writer and tutor living in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is trying to figure out what to do with his Master's degree.
My Jewishness has always been cosmopolitan, inspired as much by the works of writers like Henry Roth and Bernard Malamud as by the Books of Esther and Exodus. But it is the sense of social and economic justice that I've inherited that I most treasure. Because of this, I hold on to my Jewish identity, and will continue to do so - as a call to activism.

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By on . From the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents TO DEFINE Jewish American identity is to invite disagreement. Each definition threatens to efface or minimize some aspect of the American Jewish experience that may be essential to someone else. Religious Jews, perhaps, can agree to a narrow definition: Jews are the people of the Jewish faith.