Each semester, the MassArt Ciné Culture (MACC) Screening Series brings to campus a diverse group of filmmakers and moving image artists for screenings, panel discussions, master classes, and performances.
Most Ciné Culture cinematheque screenings are held in MassArt’s Design and Media (DMC) Center Lecture Hall on Thursday evenings. Cinematheque screenings are now open to the MassArt community and the larger public, and are generally followed by discussions / Q+A sessions with the visiting filmmakers, in person or via Zoom livestream in the Lecture Hall.
The Fall 2023 installment of the Ciné Culture series is programmed and moderated by MassArt Film/Video Professor and Department Chair Tammy Dudman. For information, contact cine-culture@massart.edu.
The Ciné Culture series was established in 2018 by filmmaker and former MassArt Film/Video department professor Soon-Mi Yoo, and is made possible witht the support of MassArt’s Office of Academic Affairs.
A Note from Lynne
The only moment I have felt any hope since the intense conflict in Palestine/ Israel reignited in October whatsoever was during the screening of my film “States of UnBelonging” at the Ciné Culture screening at Mass College of Art on the exact day that the national Free Palestine student walk-out was called. The day felt both charged and appropriate, a day in which many people were apprehensive about coming together to talk about the violence and despair we were in and continue to witness in the Middle East. Yes, we were nervous but we decided to go forward in showing “States of UnBelonging”, a 2005 film that still sadly speaks to the incredible tensions in that part of the world.
To my, and I think our, surprise and relief, the conversation was deeply felt by what seemed like all 25 (I am guessing the number) of the students, faculty and members of the public. Here are a few reasons that I think things worked out so well:
I think that having invited and encouraged the Muslim students in the class to vocalize their own thoughts and experiences in a formal way gave them acknowledgement and stature from the very beginning.
Asking everyone to speak in an ordered and thoughtful way meant that people listened carefully and knew when they would be speaking based on the configuration of the seating. Once we did that, no one needed to speak up to be heard, and everyone added their own nuanced feelings.
In this way, those students who have not yet begun to engage with the current global turmoil seemed to feel more curious, more engaged, and more prone to carving out their own opinions and feelings in the future.
There was a sense that every thought mattered, whether you were an expert or a newcomer to the discussion.
I felt nourished by the experience of spending that evening in the Mass Art community. The students are so lucky to have the amazing faculty and staff support, caring about them in a profound and deeply meaningful way. As one of the Muslim students said that evening, he felt heard, and that is simply because people on that campus are listening and encouraging others to do the same.
Su Friedrich “How to Eventually Drag Your Private Life, Kicking and Screaming, Into the Public…After Passing a Few Roadblocks”
Free and open to the public. RSVP required.
Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Abigail Child, Peter Cramer & Jack Waters, Nick Dorsky, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. – Programmed by Lynne Sachs
“I will give the background story on the motivation, ideas and formal concerns surrounding the making of my films. You will also hear about the technical, aesthetic, financial, and emotional roadblocks that I’ve hit along the way to finishing them (or in some cases, dumping them). I will then show excerpts from some of the films that actually survived scrutiny. Time doesn’t allow for me to cover all 23 of my films, but I’ll talk about a good number of them along the way.” – Su Friedrich
Artist Biography
Su Friedrich is a fearless artist and a leader in the avant-garde filmmaking community. She started making movies in the late 1970s, and never looked back, creating a radical yet personal body of work that pushes us to think in a truly engaged way about our presence in a fraught and troubling world. Recognized by over 26 retrospectives worldwide, her short and feature-length films move from the personal to the political — from the subconscious, to family, to illness, to sexuality and desire, to urban real-estate inequities. Su Friedrich is constantly observing with her camera and her pen, facing the struggle of making work that never turns away from the pain, confusion and exaltation of living.
Lynne’s Intro
Tonight I present Su Friedrich.
The first film by Su that I ever saw was her 14 minute oneiric “Gently Down the Stream”. I could not believe what I saw. How could a movie be so intensely intertwined with a dream or with the subconscious? I was stunned, shaken in a way that pushed me to know that this was the medium I too would embrace with every bit of my being. It was not a choice, it was an inevitability.
I would like to read a few thoughts that Su herself wrote exactly 40 years ago on the night of the premiere of “Gently Down the Stream”.
“I was extremely nervous before the film. I was worried about what C and G would think, but secretly I felt as if I was about to surprise them with the film, as if the film’s strength wouldn’t be determined by their response to me, as if I had laid a trap for them, and was waiting to see if they’d fall into it, rather than that the film, and I, were waiting to become real as a result of their response. It’s one of those reversed cases of confusing hindsight, with the original feelings I had when making the film, so I guess it’s hind-blind-ness Does that seem weird? It does to me, and then I watch the film, clutching my sides with a secret smile on my face, embarrassed to show my cowboy-ish yippee and wow. For once, I was enjoying the film. I felt as if I made it for myself, that it was a gift to myself, that every choice was made completely for my pleasure, and yet yes, I also started feeling strange, as if it had its own determined, predetermined trajectory one that I couldn’t see before because I was making it and so it took me, forced me, dragged me headlong through the paces until the moment that I knew it was complete.”
This journey of doubt, of desire, of commitment and of exaltation is all that I have hoped to celebrate in this series of experimental lectures.
Many Generations Mourn the Loss of the Great Pearl Bowser
1931–2023
Pearl created an engaged and intellectually rigorous community
In 1989, Pearl Bowser was the programmer of the Flaherty Film Seminar. She invited me to be an artist at the seminar and to screen my film Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Reverend L.O. Taylor. Reverend Taylor was a filmmaker who shot from the inside out, a Black minister documenting his own Memphis community with his own Bolex 16mm camera and his own audio recording device. Of course, I was grateful to be part of the seminar with its focus on African Diaspora filmmakers. Over that week, Pearl subtly but emphatically created an engaged, intellectually rigorous community around the films and filmmakers that she had chosen to present. She invited author and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara to instigate conversations after the films, to take us as a group into a truly metaphysical dialogue on cinema. Pearl also asked film scholar and theorist Teshome Gabriel to facilitate some of the conversations. Twenty-seven years old at the time, I was grateful for his encouragement and guidance.
I remained in touch with Pearl over the years. Our last deep interaction happened in 2015 when film curator Josh Siegel programmed Sermons as part of his series Tributaries: Zora Neale Hurston and Other Chroniclers of the South at the Museum of Modern Art. Pearl and I made a date to go to a matinée together. What a joy it was for me to spend this time with her, in the light, of course, but just as much in the dark of the theater. For those of us with a passion for the moving image, these shared hours without words allow us to feel another kind of connection to each other and to the beyond.
Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal in a Queens market while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next. Inspired by Filipinx-American Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems.
Climate stickers, blockades, demonstrations and spray attacks. Is this law or crime? Does democracy need civil disobedience? “Investigation of a Flame” by Lynne Sachs documents an anti-war action by Catholic activists, the Catonsville Nine, against the Vietnam War – and interviews those involved about it thirty years after their action. The Frankfurt lawyer Samira Akarbian has just published her award-winning doctoral thesis on “Civil Disobedience as a Constitutional Interpretation”. We watch the film with her in the Kurbelkiste cinema and discuss civil disobedience today. Afterwards there will be Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” at the Münster Theater, which was inspired, among other things, by the action of the Catonsville Nine. Audience discussion following the performance.
This is the third event in Heaven, Hell, Happy End , the new series that accompanies musical theater productions. The deputy chairwoman of QueerBw, Lieutenant Colonel iG Anastasia Biefang, was a guest at the first event. At the second appointment we already had a conversation with the director Lynne Sachs about her film Investigation of a Flame.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs filmed her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her raw and eye-opening attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
“[A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.” – Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
Filmmaker Michael Gitlin will moderate a conversation with Lynne Sachs, after the film.
“A Line Break is Like a Cut: The Impulse for Disruption in Poetry and Experimental Film” Lynne Sachs The New School Graduate Program in Creative Writing Oct. 25, 2023
Organized by Margaret Rhee Assistant Professor of Writing Across Media and Chair of Arts Writing
Working with memoir text as lines of poetry, Using the 2nd person as the subject “how do you ….?” Gives some distance from the subject.
Film About a Father Who 74 min. 2020 a film by Lynne Sachs
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
Short Poetry Films by Lynne Sachs
Celebration of words and sounds of words in rhythm with images, not working with interpretation in anyway, no precise intersection, instead there is parallel reading. “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (Lynne Sachs, 4 1/2 min, unsplit 8mm to digital transfer, 2015) Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. NYC poet Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems. In response, she travels through 25 years of her 8 mm films.
Listening to poetry as action, playing with objects in response to words, working with someone else as performer who also interprets. “Girl is Presence” by Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer (4 min, HD Video, 2020) During the global pandemic, Sachs and Selcer collaborated remotely to create Girl is Presence, a rhythmic visual poem tinged by gender and violence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things. As the words build in tension, the scene becomes occult, ritualistic, and alchemical. Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/05/28/girl-is-presence-by-lynne-sachs-anne-lesley-selcer/ Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/412447077
Homage to Mayer’s home. My shooting and reading is entering Bernadette’s life experience. “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (Lynne Sachs, 3 min, 16mm, B&W, 2020) In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in a Queens neighborhood of New York City, she pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm. Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/11/02/visit-to-bernadette-mayers-childhood-home-2020/ Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/440075830
Poetry meets painting. I timeless image lands at a moment in history or a current event through the text. “Orange Glow” by Lynne Sachs and Laura Harrison(1 ½ min, HD Video, 2021) “Orange Glow” began in September 2020 as an exchange between two friends in two different cities who decided to come together in the making of a film. From her home in Chicago, Laura Harrison animated each stroke of a painting. She then sent her 90 second video to Lynne Sachs in Brooklyn. Horrified by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke at the time, Lynne interpreted Laura’s painting gestures with these thoughts in mind. She hit the play button of the video and began writing a poem in response to what she saw. Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/12/31/orange-glow/ Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/460167751
I wanted poetry to become language, like a mode of communication but sometimes also not. Place it in Queens. Place it in the pandemic. “Swerve” (7 min, HD Video, 2022) a film by Lynne Sachs with poetry by Paolo Javier A Queens market and playground become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five NYC performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2021/10/12/swerve-with-paolo-javier/ (trailer only) Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/629421455 (full film)
FILMS TO WATCH IN CLASS that DO NOT explicitly use language
This could be an installation or a performance with language used like the music as punctuation.
“Window Work” (9 min, video, color, 2000)
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Sometimes one hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets on a Baltimore summer night. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. These disparate sounds dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are gestural forms of memory, clues to childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These miniature image-objects represent snippets of an even earlier media technology — film. In contrast to the real time video image, they feel fleeting, ephemeral, imprecise.
Again the quotidian actually becomes pictures and words at the same time. If you look, you find poetry where you don’t expect it.
“A Year in Notes and Numbers” (4 min, HD Video, silent, 2018) A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone. Museum of the Moving Image, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires.
I used loud whispering and humming as poetry that moves across a generation, btwn a mom and her daughter. “Maya at 24”(4 min, 16mm to digital transfer, b&w, 2021) Lynne films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
How might we use poetry here? This is titled from a poem.
“She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes” 4 min., silent, 2023 A picture of parallels and swirls, two women touch with eyes closed, use cameras in motion, discover a holiday of optics.
“I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his (her) eye.” — From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Manners”
“E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo” (5 min, HD Video, B&W, 2021)
In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic “Zero for Conduct” in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.
Discuss how this connects to YEAR BY YEAR POEMS. Poetry on screen and voice. Who is reading?
“Tip of My Tongue” (80 min, HD Video, 2017)
To mark her 50th birthday, Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half-century, creating what Sachs calls ‘a collective distillation of our times.’ Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this. .
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Location: Pembroke Hall
Room: 305
Magic Lantern Cinema presents a screening of THE WASHING SOCIETY, a film by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs.
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? THE WASHING SOCIETY brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, THE WASHING SOCIETY investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Drawing on each other’s artistic practices, Sachs and Olesker present a stark yet poetic vision of those whose working lives often go unrecognized, turning a lens onto their hidden stories, which are often overlooked. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of THE WASHING SOCIETY through interviews and observational moments. With original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in THE WASHING SOCIETY creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
We will also screen other selected work by Sachs. After the screening, we will hold a panel conversation with the filmmakers and feminist activist Silvia Federici, whose work has inspired the filmmakers.
Lizzie Olesker is a playwright, dramaturg, and director. Her original works, exploring the hidden history and poetry of everyday experience, have been developed and seen at the Public Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, Ohio Theater, Invisible Dog, New Georges, and Cherry Lane Theater. Her recent collaborative, hybrid documentary film “The Washing Society” (2018) was shown at international festivals, BAM, the National Gallery, etc. and began as a site-specific performance in NYC neighborhood laundromats. She’s taught playwriting at the New School, Purchase, and NYU where she’s active with her adjunct faculty union, UAW Local 7902.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. Her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at MoMI (Museum of the Moving Image), Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, among others. In 2021, both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center gave her awards for her lifetime achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.
“I was naturally looking for connections across various films, be they thematic or stylistic and formal. The Washing Society, Fossil, Window Work, and Still Life with Woman and Four Objects all clearly reflect upon what in the first film you call “hidden labor.” This labor is of course gendered and raced in different ways. Formally—whether through closeup or still framing upon hands and limbs, through shadow and light, through match cuts—these films also seem to abstract or defamiliarize the bodies who perform such labor, as well as the tools and machines these bodies use or that sometimes replace such bodies. The affiliation between film, repetition, and labor of course has a long history in (experimental) cinema. But I like the way in which you describe in one of your emails what is effectively your contribution to this history: you attempt to capture “quotidian acts of labor as gestures in the devising of movement for the camera.”
Rewatching The Washing Society helped me consider other threads beyond these connections. One of the early shots in that film—one you repeat a few times—is of lint and hair, in soft focus, slowly being pulled apart. I am not sure if this was an intentional metaphor, but this image resonated with the tenuous yet material threads connecting different people that emerge throughout the film as you interview various workers, who are of different races and gender, and as these workers discuss the customers they service. The laundromat in this sense is a place through which disparate people of the city are materially interwoven, even if those connections are “hidden” or obfuscated through classed, gendered, and raced separations of labor. I wonder if these threads might offer a different way in which we might understand “intersectionality,” not only as the way in which (marginalized) identities overlap within a given person, but also as the material connections that weave across people as such in capitalist society. At one point in the film, this comes to the fore in a collage of multilingual voices that sound over shots in different laundromats.
The labor of women in Indonesia is geographically and temporally removed from the labor of laundromat workers in New York or from domestic labor in suburban homes, but how might we think across the material intersections and connections of these various people, or the ways in which we are all materially implicated in both neighborhood and global structures of hidden labor? How does cinema help (formally) represent these structures?”
Stephen Woo, PhD Candidate Department of Modern Culture and Media Brown University
In partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque | October 21, 2023, 3–5 PM
Join us for nine works by ten contemporary Bay Area filmmakers, a cross-section of the Bay Area’s ever-vibrant multi-generational community curated by Steve Polta, artistic director of San Francisco Cinematheque. These works present a compelling mix of contemplative landscape study, critiques of consumerism and media representation, poetic considerations of solitude and connection, and an abiding love for the physical and chemical charms of the filmic medium itself. Full program details, program notes, and artist bios available at sfcinematheque.org →
Curated by BAN9 Curatorial Counsel member Gina Basso, the ongoing BAN9 Film series will span the entirety of the exhibition, featuring acclaimed Bay Area filmmakers, collectives, and new media artists. Offerings will vary monthly, reflecting BAN9’s curatorial themes and diving into the breadth and depth of the Bay Area’s vibrant film scene by highlighting the local organizations and individuals who contribute to the shape and form of the region’s rich cinematic landscape.
Films
(sans)(image) (arc and Sophia Wang, 7 min, 2023, 16mm, black and white, sound)
Light Signal (Emily Chao, 11 min, 2022, 16mm screened as digital video, color, sound)
We are a group of Jewish American writers, artists and academics. We oppose what the Israeli government is doing with US assistance
President Joe Biden:
We are a group of Jewish American writers, artists and academics. Being Jewish means different things to all of us, but we all have at least one Jewish parent, which means we could move to Israel and qualify for Israeli citizenship.
We condemn attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians. We believe it is possible and in fact necessary to condemn Hamas’ actions and acknowledge the historical and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. We believe it is possible and necessary to condemn Hamas’ attack and take a stand against the collective punishment of Gazans that is unfolding and accelerating as we write.
Cutting off resources to more than 2 million people, demanding families flee their homes in the north, indiscriminately bombing a trapped population – these are war crimes and indefensible actions. And yet the United States government is offering “moral” and material support for the dehumanization and murder of innocent Gazans. We write to publicly declare our opposition to what the Israeli government is doing with American assistance. We call on the US government to seek an immediate ceasefire and to use our resources towards providing aid ensuring the safe return of hostages and building a diplomatic path towards peace.
As Jews, as Americans, we will be made to feel a sense of safety in our communities, and in the world, not by unequivocal US support for Israel, but by our government’s insistence on the universal human rights that so many of us take for granted.
