ELI Talks: Rabbi Dan Horwitz

A selection from An Undoing World
by Tony Kushner (Pulitzer Prize winning playwright)

Copper-plated, nailed together, buffeted by ocean weather Stands the Queen of Exiles and our mother she may be Hollow-breasted broken-hearted watching for her dear departed For her children cast upon the sea

At her back the great idyllic land of jus'ce
For exilic peoples ponders making jus'ce private property Darling never dream another woman might
Have been your mother
Someday you may be a refugee

A refugee, who's running from the wars Hiding from the fire-bombs they've hurled; Eternally a stranger out-of-doors Desperate in this undoing world

Mother for your derelicted
Children from your womb evicted
Grant us shelter harbor solace safety
Let us in!
Let us tell you where we traveled
How our hopes our lives unraveled
How unwelcome everywhere we've been

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.”

Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 2588 (U.S. 2015)

Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow (2010)

“In the age of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. . . Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of food stamps and other benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.

In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000. . .

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America. “These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates . . . This is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders.”